The Hammerklavier Sonata

Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106, ‘Hammerklavier’

Composed 1817-8, published 1819. Dedicated to Archduke Rudolf I. Allegro II. Scherzo: Assai vivace III. Adagio sostenuto IV. Introduzione: Largo – Fuga: Allegro risoluto

The Hammerklavier is a sonata set apart, not least because of its sheer scale and formidable reputation. It constitutes a monumental statement of belief in the power of the piano (and indeed of the pianist) to project a sustained and dramatic abstract musical argument. Like the Third and Ninth Symphonies, the Diabelli Variations, the Missa Solemnis and the String Quartet, Op. 131, here is a genuinely revolutionary work, generically unimaginable before its composition, an act therefore of profound creativity. It marks a qualitative, and not just a quantitative or evolutionary, development in the genre – so daunting that few pianists of the generation immediately following Beethoven took it into their repertoire. Its landmark status is now a fixture. It was the work both Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez explicitly signposted in piano sonatas composed in the 1940s, a time when the whole musical tradition was being radically questioned. The Hammerklavier has become a touchstone in the definition and re-definition of the genre. It was Beethoven’s first large-scale composition for a number of years, and the product of an extended gestation. After the formal experiments of the previous sonatas, Beethoven returns here to the four-movement scheme of his earliest sonatas. But if this, the grandest of all his sonatas, returns to a conventional formal landscape, it does so in very unconventional terms. It virtually overwhelms the very conventions on which it relies, not only by reason of scale, but also in the techniques that Beethoven applies. Analysts and critics have revelled in the large-scale connection of motivic material – an almost obsessive use of material descending by thirds – and a tonal strategy in which the tonic B-flat is challenged by B-natural over the course of the entire structure. Beethoven takes the performer and the listener to the peaks of his structural and rhetorical craft and does so in a manner which leaves no doubt as to his intention.

The four movements are very recognisable from the formal archetypes used in the earliest sonatas (aside from the fugal finale rather than the expected rondo or sonata form). But from the first note to the fugal finale, the work is impetuous. It launches itself with a leap in the left hand which propels the

music into the opening sonata-form Allegro. This is a movement written on the largest scale, containing a broad range of thematic and tonal material all closely argued, but the forward momentum never lets up. The second movement is the shortest and the clearest, with only the insertion of a duple-time Presto to disrupt the otherwise straightforward scherzo and trio form. But even this, the simplest of the movements, is transformed by its context and participates actively in the tonal dialogue of B-flat and B-natural. When the conclusion of the movement playfully juxtaposes the pitches B-flat and B-natural, it is one of many moments combining a sense of spontaneity with deep structural logic. While the surface energy levels subside in the Adagio sostenuto third movement, the structural logic is maintained. There is a continuing sense of the music being pushed to its very limits. This movement is enormous – as long as, or longer than, some of the earlier complete sonatas – and seems to anticipate the extended symphonic Adagios of the later 19th century. Again, although the movement is an extended independent structure, it participates in the thematic and tonal narratives of the sonata as a whole, part of an integrated multi-movement structure.

The Largo introduction to the fugal finale is one of the shortest sections in the whole sonata, but one that stunningly epitomises Beethoven’s creative accomplishment. Charles Rosen describes this passage as “one of the most astonishing in the history of music”, as Beethoven combines “the effect of almost uncontrolled improvisatory movement” with “a totally systematic structure”. This synthesis of improvisation and system, of logic and impetuosity, drives the fugal finale and characterises the whole extraordinary work.