[MUSIC] So, if the third movement was a mix of convention and innovation, in the last movement the scales are tipped decisively towards innovation. This movement's form and especially its mood are without real precedent. Here is the opening. [MUSIC] This goes far beyond Sturm und Drang, which was a big trend in German music and literature at the time. Because Sturm and Drang tended to be just a bit stylized. But this, this has a very genuine fury about it. That's a signature Beethoven quality. One you don't find in either Haydn or Mozart to anything like the famed degree. Beethoven can convey a sense of profound dissatisfaction with the world. He does this is so many of his great works throughout his life, and he does so here in Opus 2 Number 1. What makes it especially striking here is that Beethoven needs no time to work himself up into this lather. The high intensity is established from the very first bars. Contrast the finality of Mozart's most dramatic piano sonata, the C minor. [MUSIC] Now, not even the passage I ended with lives at the same level of intensity as the Beethoven. But even so, it takes Mozart quite some time to get there. Beethoven gives the impression of the rage simply being in his blood. Beethoven marks this movement prestissimo, which means as fast as possible, more or less. Once again, this is much more Haydn marking than the Mozart one. In fact, Mozart never once used it. And once again, Beethoven uses it in a way that's decidedly different from Haydn. Haydn's prestissimos tend to have an element of humor, or at least lightness. For Beethoven, the significance of the marking is that the listener should feel that there is no space. The urgency of the ideas being put forth means that dawdling is out of the question. Prestissimo doesn't mean as fast as is possible, but rather, verging on out of control. It's a marking Beethoven uses only occasionally, and when he does, he means business. The middle movement of Opus 109 from our fifth lecture is a similarly desperate prestissimo. This movement is also unconventional and even a bit enigmatic on a formal level. Really, it is a hybrid between a sonata form and a rondo. What comes first, what I just played, is really a straightforward sonata exposition with a first theme. [MUSIC] And the somewhat contrasting second theme. [MUSIC] And the end of the movement is beyond all argument of recapitulation, with all of the music restated, and the second theme restored to the tonic. [MUSIC] All of this would suggest that in between we should get a development. In other words, an exploration of the main themes of the exposition designed to take us back home to the tonic. But in fact, what happens is nothing of the sort. [MUSIC] And with those three chords, we leave the world of exposition entirely. The minor mode, the key, and most of all the urgency, these are all left behind, and what we get instead is an oasis. [MUSIC] What this is really is the central episode of a rondo, music which doesn't draw on what has already happened but, quite to the contrary, exists to provide contrast. I can't readily think of another example of this sort of amalgam of the two different forms. There is a form called sonata rondo which Beethoven used with some frequency, but that term describes a rondo with some slight alterations. Nothing to do with this peculiar hybrid. It's obviously daring of Beethoven to include a true formal experiment in one of his very first published works, but it's so beautifully managed. And the substance of the music is so strong, so compelling, that it sounds totally inevitable. That is part of the genius of Beethoven. His formal innovations were never just because. He gave each piece the form it needed. For example, in this case, he surely realized that the material in the exposition was so unrelenting, so insistent, that were it to form the basis of a development, it would simply become wearying. Instead, he gives the listener this wonderful pastoral theme, which is all the more wonderful for coming where it does within the piece. After what's come, we need it; the piece needs it. This is what I mean when I say that form is ultimately about emotion, and that analyzing musical form is about mapping out that emotion. So this oasis of calm arrives without warning, and it also ends without ceremony. When it does, there is this fantastic transitional passage where we are still in the central A flat major, and still mostly in low dynamics, but where the material comes straight form the opening, and the anxiety is immediately back along with it. [MUSIC] From that point on, there isn't even the slightest hint of the loveliness of the preceding section. He has dispensed with it, and we are back into the torrid world of the opening, right until the bitter end of the piece. [MUSIC] That is one of the defining features of the sonata. It is mostly black and white with very few shades of gray. The only thing about it that is ambiguous is it's relationship to the musical past, which it borrows from, and attempts to move beyond in equal measure. And therefore, it is both an amazing document of Beethoven's ambitions and priorities at the age of 24 and a ripsnorter of a sonata, brilliantly wrought and totally compelling.
