On Beethoven’s last sonatas
Of all the monuments which Beethoven (1770-1827) left behind him, none is more impressive than his series of thirty-two piano sonatas. They span almost the entirety of his compositional career. No two are alike. Nearly every one is a masterpiece. They exemplify that enormous expansion of the expressive power of music which is Beethoven’s central achievement and distinction. They are works in the first rank of importance within classical music, indisputably canonical – a truth Hans von Bülow captured by calling them the New Testament, the Old Testament in this taxonomy being the forty-eight preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
It is pointless to argue over precedence among the best of the best, but the final three sonatas of the sequence – Opp 109, 110 and 111 – exhibit a compression and spiritual depth for which they are especially venerated and cherished. Unlike some of the others, they need no nickname to keep them in the ears and minds of the listening public. The average classical concert involves about an hour and a half of music; in general, the audience would feel short-changed if it were sent home after a programme lasting just one hour, and with no encore. But in an established exception to the rule, many of the world’s great pianists give concerts which feature the last three Beethoven sonatas and nothing else. No one complains. An hour is ample, and there can be no better examples of the irrelevance of chronological time when listening to music. An encore after Op 111 would be not merely an error of taste but a basic misunderstanding.
The last sonatas were written towards the end of Beethoven’s life, in the years 1820-1822. These are therefore works belonging squarely within his so-called third period. The idea that the composer’s creative output was to be understood as falling into three distinct phases began to take root before his death and was adopted thereafter by influential early biographers such as Anton Schindler. As clichés go, it has worn pretty well. It also affords music-lovers the opportunity to argue about when exactly each chapter begins or ends, though the general consensus dates the final period as running from about 1816 until the last compositions of 1826.
The works of this decade followed an interval of relative fallowness which it is tempting to see as the composer’s preparation for a new mode of utterance. If one looks back to the vein of lyricism and melodic invention in the Op 96 violin sonata, the Archduke trio Op 97, or Beethoven’s most prolonged and explicit engagement with romantic love, the song-cycle An die ferne Geliebte Op 98 (actually from 1816, and so an exception to the tripartite division under consideration), a number of features may in comparison be treated as characteristic of the third period: the prevalence of unorthodox or experimental forms, an increased emphasis on counterpoint and fugue (born of the composer’s admiration for Handel as much as Bach), a preoccupation with and transformation of variation technique, the use of trills as a melodic or structural element, a greater tendency towards both extreme concision and great length, violent juxtapositions, a coarser or more disturbing cast to the humour.
More subjectively, there is an ever-greater allusiveness and inwardness, an increase in the power to express the sublime or unearthly. The music often feels more lonely, almost always more profound. Beethoven’s personal circumstances towards the end of his life – deafness, illnesses, family troubles involving his nephew – are too well-known to recap at any length, but they play their part in fashioning and understanding the musical output. A purist who argues that the life and the art are always to be kept separate has to contend with Beethoven’s own superscriptions and instructions in some of these late works. This is often confessional music, even if there is occasional difficulty in articulating what it is that is being confessed.
The last three sonatas were worked on at the same time. They therefore form a triptych, like Mozart’s final symphonies or the last Schubert piano sonatas. The younger Beethoven published groups of three substantial works (typically, as now, with one in the minor mode, two in the major) under the same opus number: the piano sonatas Op 2, Op 10 and Op 31 are cases in point. (He retained the practice up to the Razumovsky string quartets Op 59, though these are all massive works in their own right.) But despite their interconnectedness, Beethoven wanted each of his three final utterances in the genre, as he knew that they were, to stand alone. Thereafter, he did not lose interest in the piano; he would complete the great Diabelli variations Op 120 and write two sets of bagatelles; but as to the sonata he had exhausted the possibilities of the form.
The sonata in E Op 109 comes next after the gigantic Hammerklavier sonata in B flat Op 106. In order to listen to that behemoth, it is as if a new set of auditory equipment is required; as with the snake which has to detach its lower jaw in order to ingest a large item of prey, the existing mechanisms of musical attentiveness are simply insufficient. Now we move from huge length to the absolute economy of Op 109, but there is no loss of content or of depth. As ever with Beethoven, there are both contrasts and similarities with what has gone before. An earlier third-period sonata, Op 101, had appeared to start in mid-conversation; this one begins no less lyrically, as if the strings of an Aeolian harp were being moved by a light breeze. Yet context is everything, and it is a surprise to discover that the luminous harmonic progressions which unfurl over the opening eight bars are a literal restatement in a different key of the far less ambitious, indeed rather jolly finale of the Op 79 sonata (1809).
There follows an abrupt change of tempo and character as the composer, who employs here a vestigial sonata form, immediately presents a contrasting second subject – harmonically daring and improvisatory, but even more elusive in character than what precedes it. It is always hard to say what music means, but usually listeners can have recourse to metaphor – or at least say what associations or emotions it stirs in them. Not so here; without resorting to mere musicology, all one can assert is that this is music of exceptional purity. Beethoven condenses all that he needs to say in this opening movement into barely three minutes. In its coda, he offers a veiled solution, in the form of a soothing chorale, to the conundrum of the relation between the two ideas that have hitherto coexisted without apparent commonality.
Coming fast upon the heels of the final chord, the second movement takes even less time. It is a prestissimo (a rare marking for a Beethoven movement) in the tonic minor, where faint melodic hints of the first movement are wrapped in an angular and minatory whirlwind. Once more in a compressed sonata form, its development section explores the canonic and palindromic possibilities of the bass line of its first subject.
The weight of the sonata is carried by the much more extended final movement, a set of six widely contrasting variations on an air of heart-stopping beauty. Here as throughout the sonata, the interval of a third which permeated the Hammerklavier is once more omnipresent. The tempo is that of a sarabande, the theme redolent in spirit of the Goldberg Variations, as are the different tempi and textures adopted within the movement. (There is no documentary proof that Beethoven knew the earlier work, but it is hard to believe that the composer of the Diabelli variations was unaware of Bach’s vast precedent.)
This was not the first time that Beethoven had ended a work with a set of variations. Haydn and Mozart had sometimes done the same. What is new is the choice of a slow song-like subject, a device adopted twice in these last three sonatas. But Beethoven never did the same thing twice, and a touching aspect of the not wholly dissimilar finales of Op 109 and Op 111 is a comparison between the way in which he concludes them. In the former but not the latter case, after the ecstatic arpeggios and trills of the final variation which carry the listener to the very edge of the celestial, the music somehow carries within it the understanding that it must return to earth. There is a reluctant diminuendo and a Goldberg-style restatement of the theme then closes the circle. We hear almost the same music as opened the movement, yet it now sounds transformed. The philosopher says that one cannot step into the same river twice; when it comes to Op 111 the music will not make the attempt but instead continues its path skywards – leaving behind only the infinite possibilities of silence.
The A flat sonata Op 110 opens as quietly as the previous sonata ended, and some performers in concert proceed with a minimal gap (and no applause) between the two. The relatively straightforward organisation of the first two movements of Op 110 gives no foretaste of the structural and psychological complexities which follow. But there are subtleties embedded within the opening moderato cantabile molto espressivo. Most importantly, the fugue theme that will dominate the sonata’s second half is already on the page before us, concealed within the unpretentious first subject (and also in the final bars of the movement). As Philip Barford memorably says, experiencing this unifying link is a matter of the “positive use of the imagination, not passive absorption of programme notes” for “musical experience is a consciously directed waking dream, built up from the substance of inspired intuitions.” The understatement which characterises this movement is exemplified by its development section, which Charles Rosen calls “radically simple”. It is extraordinary to think that the composer who engendered the outsized struggle of the equivalent section in the Eroica first movement is here content with such undramatic self-effacement. The whole piece is suffused with the amabilità with which the composer instructs that it be played. As with Op 109, there is a sense in which the opening movements are preparatory, not entirely ends in themselves.
The humorous scherzo in F minor, full of contrary motions and syncopations, is built out of two German street songs; the trio is perhaps even more eccentric. The coda in the major dwindles to a soft F, which in a moment of transformation reveals itself as the dominant of B flat minor, the bleak key with which the third movement begins. Now and without warning, Beethoven presents a different world – of frozen melodic fragments and hushed recitatives; numerous minute changes of tempo show how much this passage must have meant to him. It leads on to an arioso dolente (a song of sorrow), the mere contours of which resemble the rambunctious scherzo, but in mood and substance looking back to the Passion music of Bach. In Adolf Bernhard Marx’s words, it is “the lament of a deeply wounded, orphaned heart”.
Yet hope is at hand in the form of the three-part fugue which follows; the smooth contours of its subject seem somehow to exorcise the preceding pain. There is nothing academic in this beautifully poetic counterpoint which lies so readily under the hands. It is created simply to console; in every register the peeling bells of its rising fourths press forward to the expected triumphant conclusion. But there is a twist – properly so-called, for this finale is nothing less than programme music, albeit of the most abstracted kind. After coming confidently to rest on a dominant seventh, the music sidesteps into the adjacent (and therefore remote) tonality of G minor, and we are shattered to find ourselves once more within the arioso, now marked ermattet (exhausted), and made even more pathetic than previously by the addition of breathless hesitations, as in the beklemmt (heavy-hearted) section of the cavatina in the Op 130 string quartet. It seems that the fugue, which has become almost a character in the drama taking place before the listener, has failed to achieve its goal, this time at least.
The bipolarity of this extraordinary movement then reasserts itself in the form of a crescendo of syncopated chords in G major, like an ever-stronger heartbeat, which lead to the reappearance of the fugue, but this time in inversion – upside down. Beethoven’s marking here “gradually coming back to life” is explicit, as in the slow movement of the Op 132 quartet, where in music expressly depicting gratitude and convalescence there is a passage marked “feeling new strength”. Fewer than twenty bars into this second fugue, however, the contours of the original fugal subject begin increasingly to weave themselves into the texture, both in augmentation and in diminution (lengthened and shortened). After the subject is doubly diminished, the music seems, as has been aptly said, to burst into flame, and the fugue burns itself out before our eyes. Instead, we are left with its jubilant subject and a torrent of accompanying semiquavers (recalling the first page of the whole sonata) on which the work rises in waves of boundless joyfulness to its conclusion, as if (in Alfred Brendel’s phrase) throwing off the chains of music itself.
Other Beethoven works travel from darkness to light, but there is something especially affecting in Op 110 about the absoluteness of the victory, won moreover in such an extraordinarily narrow span of time.
Beethoven’s last piano sonata in C minor Op 111 is in two movements only. There is nothing unusual about the two-movement form. His teacher Haydn composed several, and there are five preceding examples in Beethoven. Nor is there anything novel about such a work comprising a resolute opening movement in the minor followed by a more singing finale in the contrasting major. Op 90, composed as recently as 1814, observes just this scheme. But what was a merely aesthetic differentiation of character in the earlier work becomes here a matter of the profoundest philosophy. The elements of classical music are now exposed in fundamental terms. The argument of Op 111 at its most basic is reducible to two chords: a diminished seventh – a series of superimposed minor thirds – and a major triad. Here are question and answer; dissonance and harmony; conflict and resolution. And these in turn give rise to yet deeper meditations on the relationship between opposing values: how it is that concord is implied by and hidden within discord – that there is never just ‘either/or’ but always ‘both/and’.
Barford expresses a similar thought: “The two movements completely symbolise the two primary functions of the mind – dialectic and theory; or, to put it another way, analysis and thesis of conflicting elements on the one hand and the transcendence of all opposition on the other. From this point of view the sonata projects, in the abstract structure of musical thought, at once the inner conflict and tension of consciousness and the unmoving ground of that conflict in human experience. This unmoving background is really there all the time; but to know it intellectually is one thing and to experience it is another. The breakthrough to realisation – if only in brief moments throughout a lifetime – is the victory of consciousness over its own dialectical functions.”
This is why, whatever Beethoven’s intentions in the earliest sketches, Op 111 in its ultimate realisation not only needed no third movement but positively needed not to have one. The composer’s answer to Schindler’s uncomprehending question why he had not composed a finale (that he had no time) was clearly ironical. The pupil had failed to understand the coincidence of opposites – how the literal ‘incompleteness’ of the sonata illustrates its metaphysical wholeness. This was perfectly explained by Thomas Mann, whose novel Doktor Faustus contains perhaps the best piece of writing about music in all fiction. Mann explains how the close of the second movement is not just the end of this piano sonata but fulfils the destiny of the genre as a whole. So it proved: Schubert, Beethoven’s musical contemporary but treading a different path, wrote a few more sonatas in the handful of years which remained to him after Op 111 had been composed; there are early essays by Schumann and Brahms; Liszt’s sonata is sui generis, standing apart from the classical line of succession. None of these works, great as some of them are, qualifies the status of Beethoven’s Op 111 as the last word.
The maestoso introduction recalls the Pathétique sonata with an emphasis on diminished sevenths and dotted rhythms. It is the epitome of the unresolved. András Schiff has compared it with Dante’s Inferno (and in truth the whole movement has a Stygian character). A prolonged dominant pedal leads to the allegro con brio ed appassionato, which drives forward around the pervasive three-note cell of its first subject. The music is learned and contrapuntal, but there are also prolonged unison passages, percussive accents, enervated relaxations of the tempo. The more lyrical second subject in A flat is over in a breath. The equally compressed development contains a fugato on an augmented version of the first subject but is soon overwhelmed and pitches into an implacable recapitulation. Only the coda brings a true reduction in pressure. This feels like the product of exhaustion, but the very last chords in C major contain the possibility that the conflict of the first movement is not merely in contrast with but actually creates the beatific stillness of the second. Even so, the final strokes of the first movement are a world away from the opening chord of the second, albeit in the identical harmony. The way in which the preceding rage and bitterness are instantly dispelled by this single sound is a miracle.
As with Op 109, the final movement of Op 111 is a set of variations. The Journal für Literature, Kunst, Luxus und Modeof September 1823 described the theme as “simple, noble, tender and holy and uplifting as the comforting voice of an angel”. Yet there is also a relationship between this songlike arietta and the trivial composition by Diabelli which formed the basis of Beethoven’s massive set of variations, composed over the same period. As Brendel has written: “Beethoven’s arietta is not only in the same key as Diabelli’s ‘waltz’, but also shares certain motivic and structural features, while the characters of the two themes could not be more disparate. One can hear the arietta as yet another, more distant, offspring of the waltz, and marvel at the inspirational effect of the ‘cobbler’s patch’” – Beethoven’s dismissive description of Diabelli’s tune. So seamless is the overlap between the more timeless variations in the longer work and the always elevated mood of the second movement of Op 111 that either could be interpolated in the other.
The first three variations in the sonata are differing meditations on the sublime. They form a unit whose feature is ever-smaller note values. The dotted rhythms and syncopations of the third suggest paroxysms of exultation rather than, as is often (and disappointingly) proposed, some sort of prefiguration of jazz or boogie-woogie. The fourth variation continues the reduction in note lengths and demonstrates how quick notes do not necessarily equate to fast music; its sempre pianissimo triplets, now murmuring in the depths, now high in the spangled firmament, create a hypnotic stillness. There is then a passage where the music almost renounces forward motion, a cluster of trills, a short-lived excursus away from C major – the whole magical episode as it were a preparation for entry into the highest circle of paradise – and then the most rapturous homecoming to the tonic key and the last variation, in which the arietta is sung – like the slow movement of Op 132, a heiliger Dankgesang – over billowing triplets, and then over trills which illuminate the theme as if by starlight.
On the last two occasions when we hear the arietta (by now shortened to its initial phrase), a C sharp is inserted. The inclusion finally unites what has hitherto been kept separate: the first element in the tonic (C-G-G) and the second in the dominant (D-G-G) merge to become C-C♯-D-G-G and then, as time stops, C-C♯-D-G … This effect was wonderfully described by Mann as “the most moving, consolatory and reconciling thing in the world. It is like having one’s hair or cheek stroked, lovingly, understandingly, like a deep and silent farewell look. It blesses the listener with overpowering humanity and lies in parting so gently on the hearer’s heart as an eternal valediction that it brings tears to the eyes.”
The Op 109 finale returned to its starting-point, but the closing pages of Op 111 escape earth’s orbit for ever; the listener has to stay behind. Beethoven’s imagination voyages ever onwards, drawing closer and closer to “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”. Like Dante, he had been vouchsafed a vision of heaven, and after it there was nothing more to say.