Beethoven: Sonata No. 31 for Piano, in A-flat, Op. 110
Ames Town & Gown performers: Soyeon Kate Lee
Martha-Elle Tye Recital Hall, September 28, 2013
Notes by Karl E. Gwiasda
By 1818, Beethoven had turned completely deaf, or nearly so. In his aural isolation, he grew mistrustful and irritable, while his appearance and dress became ever more slovenly. Around 1821 or 1822, his strange manner alarmed the residents of a neighborhood into which he had wandered on one of his customary walks through Vienna. Someone called in the police, who arrested the shabby suspect as a vagrant despite his heated insistence that he was Beethoven. “No way,” the police in effect responded—until a music teacher named Herzog came to the station and confirmed that the “bum” was exactly whom he claimed to be. Upon being released, Beethoven went with Herzog, who gave him a room for the night and some decent clothes for the day. The incident did not surprise the Viennese elite, who were growing used to the bizarre behavior of the city’s most eminent composer. The poor fellow, they said, had become half-mad.
Among those supposedly in the know within Vienna’s musical circles, many conceded the pathetic fate that had befallen Beethoven. In 1821, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a leading music journal, reported to its readers that the composer was now “completely written out.” At the time, it did seem so.
Meanwhile, well aware of the buzz surrounding him, Beethoven assured his intimates that he was not at all crazy. Neither, he came to show, was he written out. Instead, within his mind and in his sketchbooks, he was working out compositions unlike any heard before. Over 1818 to 1823, he fashioned the Missa Solemnis, which he had originally intended for the ceremony elevating his patron, Archduke Rudolph, to a cardinal in 1820. From 1822 to 1824, he wrestled the Ninth symphony to its completion, taking out a few months to produce the Diabelli Variations. Finally, all through 1825 and 1826, he wrought his last major works, the five string quartets (plus the Grosse Fuge) that had a revolutionary effect upon music like that of the theory of relativity upon physics.
During the five years he was feared to be written out, he also produced his final three piano sonatas. On the manuscript for the second of those pieces, the Sonata in A-flat (Op. 110), he reported his having completed the work on Christmas Day 1821. The following month, however, he made some revisions of his score before sending it to his publisher.
The sonata opens with a lyrical movement marked Moderato cantabile, molto expressivo (“Moderately paced, singing, with much expression”). It is constructed upon a succession of themes or phrases that flow easily from one to the next. Midway and again near the end, the music rises in intensity, but in each case, the building excitement is kept from turning unrestrained. The movement closes reposefully.
Though marked simply Allegro molto (“Very fast”), the second movement is a rambunctious scherzo that incorporates two popular drinking songs of the day, “Our cat has had kittens” and “I’m a slob, you’re a slob.” The movement’s middle section (or “trio”) accelerates the energetic playfulness of the beginning and ending portions.
The scherzo is quickly followed by what may be considered as two movements, one slow and one fast, or as a single movement in three parts: recitative, air, and fugue. The music opens with a short and somber preface—the recitative—that ends in throbbing chords that signal the onset of the main body of the movement (or section), which is marked to be played Adagio, ma non troppo (“Slow, but not too much so”). The chords serve to underpin a doleful melody, stated in detached notes, that Beethoven identifies as Klagender Gesang (“Song of lament”). The lament ends in weary, softly played chords. After the briefest of pauses, the music shifts into the sonata’s concluding fugue.
In his last years, Beethoven became preoccupied with the fugue. He incorporated fugues into several of his final works, perhaps most notably in the “Great Fugue” that was originally written as the final movement for his B-flat quartet (Op. 130) but subsequently published independently. Much favored by composers of the Baroque period—by Bach, in particular—the fugue is an intricate composition in which a thematic subject (or voice) is introduced and then reiterated while also being joined by successively entering, additional answering or imitative voices, all the voices melding into a harmonious whole. Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736-1809), an influential theorist and also Beethoven’s teacher, regarded the fugue as the ideal means of conveying exalted or religious sentiment (see A. E. F. Dickinson, “Beethoven’s Early Fugal Style,” Musical Times [February 1955], p. 76). Beethoven seemingly came to agree. Indeed, a form in which multiplicity and diversity are held in harmonious union might understandably be taken as a fit emblem of the godhead.
The sonata’s fugue begins in a simple but stately manner. As the music reaches higher and higher, it steadily grows more confident until, unexpectedly, it tails off into a reprise of the throbbing chords from the Adagio. The lament reappears, this time with the notes no longer so widely spaced as they were previously. At the place of the lament’s return, Beethoven wrote in his score the words “exhausted” and “losing strength.” The section ends in knelling chords that grow steadily louder until the fugue once more resumes but with its subject now presented as an inversion of its earlier statement—i.e., where the interval between successive notes had previously descended, it now rises, and vice versa. Beethoven tellingly identifies the fugue’s resumption as “Coming to life again.” From here on, nothing any longer impedes the music’s progress towards its majestic and exultant conclusion.
Performances of Sonata No. 31 for Piano, in A-flat, Op. 110 all freely available on YouTube)