[MUSIC] Now that we've dispensed with its lead-in, let's move on to Opus 78's main event, Opus 78. [LAUGH] As I said, it was a work that Beethoven loved and while I find that surprising, given that it's not exactly typical of him, I probably shouldn't. It is an extremely lovable work. The sonata is in two movements. After the two early, slight sonatas Opus 49, written in 1792--far earlier than that opus number would suggest--Beethoven abandoned the two-movement sonata for 12 years. He eventually returned to it on four separate occasions, and in each instance produced something special and unrepeatable. In addition to the work at hand, there is Opus 54, the whackadoodle among the 32 sonatas; Opus 90, a mysterious masterpiece which looks towards the future; and the final sonata, Opus 111, one of the great monuments of music. In the last two cases, the two movements are very much yin and yang, which seems to be a theme of this lecture. With the first movements providing tremendous stress and tension, and then the second movement's all catharsis. Opus 78, likewise, features two movements that aren't alike in any meaningful sense, but in this case, the first movement isn't conflicted. In fact, Opus 78 is just about as conflict-free as anything Beethoven wrote. I always use the first movement of Opus 78 as exhibit A whenever somebody suggests to me that Beethoven was not a great melodist. It's not just that its themes are so beautiful, but that he creates the feeling of eternal melody. Whereas in so many works, and not just by Beethoven, the bridge material between themes is, if not filler, then at least transitional, here, even the long strings of moving notes must be sung, not merely played. Here is the exposition. [MUSIC] That slow introduction, so profound, is the only slow music in the entire sonata. But even though it's a mere four measures long, it still manages to fill multiple important functions. First of all, in a work without a slow movement, it somehow, despite its extreme brevity and being placed incorrectly, manages to fill that role. In one simple phrase, it tells such a story with the rise and fall of its melodic line, the rigor of the dotted rhythm at the opening giving way to the improvised feel of the last bar, all of this taking place over a pedal point in the bass which makes the whole thing seem so grounded. With all that, really, anything more would feel almost superfluous. The other thing that this opening accomplishes so beautifully is that it serves as stage-setting for the rest of the movement. Now this is something that Mozart excelled at. I think, for example of his final piano concerto, K. 595, a work of breathtaking serenity, in which the opening theme... [MUSIC] is preceded by this one measure in the lower strings... [MUSIC] I once played this work with a conductor who said the entire emotional content of the work should be revealed to us before the theme arrived, with that single measure. And it's true. In that case, as with the Beethoven, the work could begin without this preamble. There's no formal necessity for it. But these extremely short introductions settle us, give us a sense of pre-understanding the work, which creates exactly the right atmosphere in which to listen to them. There is one other noteworthy aspect of this movement, and that is that the second half of the movement-- the development and recapitulation--is repeated. Now, in the early Classical days, this was the convention, but it slowly began to disappear. Mozart had already dispensed with the second repeat in his final piano sonata, K. 576. And Beethoven never repeats the second half of the first movement of the sonata, until this one--and this is already Sonata Number 24. I'm not a music historian, and this is not an area of expertise for me, but it seems to me that in the early days of the sonata form, perhaps both repeats were necessary simply to give the listener more of an opportunity to process the events of the music. But the more the sonata form became common, and therefore commonly understood, the more disruptive the second repeat began to seem. Think about it. The "second half" is where the main issue, the main problem of the movement-- finding a way back home to the tonic, and then finding a way to stay there--is sorted out. If, once it is sorted out, we are made to listen to it again, what does that do to our sense of the music as a dramatic narrative? Once we know how the story ends, what is meant to be holding our interest? Beethoven very definitely wants this second repeat to be observed. He even wrote what is called a "first ending," a short transitional passage to take us back. This brief first ending has a very discursive quality. [MUSIC] My feeling about this whenever I play it, is that the reason Beethoven composed it in this way is that he likes this music a great deal, and he would like to hear it again, thank you very much. Toddler-like as this may seem, it became common practice for the Romantic composers. Schumann, for instance, loved to repeat his best themes over and over and over again. For Beethoven though, this is highly unusual. It suggests that for at least a moment, the structure of the music takes a backseat to the moment-to-moment beauty of the material. I suppose that in itself is evidence of how much affection Beethoven must have had for it, although again, it certainly makes it an outlier among his sonatas. I begin speaking about Opus 78's second movement with some trepidation, because the old rule is that a performer is never supposed to talk about a piece for longer than it takes to play it. The movement is about two-and-a-half minutes long, so consider me on the clock. This movement, along with the aforementioned Opus 31, Number 1, is probably the greatest example of Beethoven's humor, at least in the piano sonatas. Somehow it's not a quality frequently associated with him which is odd, because it is really one of his most essential ones. And this movement, honestly, is uproarious. Explaining a joke is always a risky proposition, so instead, here is the opening. [MUSIC] Everything about this opening is a joke. An accent can be many things in music, but it is almost always a stop, a disruptive force in a musical phrase. So starting a movement with a stop is a pretty interesting proposition. And then there's the dynamic markings-- the first phrase is divided into six parts: forte-piano-forte-piano, etc. It's like an Abbott and Costello routine. But the main source of the humor is the chord on which we begin. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but one of the immoveable conditions in a piece of music is that it is preceded by silence, and that the silence returns after it ends. Therefore, we expect the first moments of works to establish some ground rules, to give us a harmonic and rhythmic framework. Think for example of the first sonata we discussed in the course, Opus 7. [MUSIC] We instantly know the key, the meter, the tempo--everything critical. Now, how about Opus 28, which we discussed in the first ... in the last lecture. [MUSIC] The pedal point in the bass gives us a fairly good reference point, but the first full chord muddies the waters, and the key of D major isn't fully clarified until we are a few bars in. And the very quietly pulsating bass seems to want to give the impression that the work was in progress before it even began-- that the pulsation existed in nature, before we began to hear it. Now let's move onto the fantasy. [MUSIC] This is designed for maximum disorientation. The beginnings and ends of the two scales outline a diminished chord... [MUSIC] which is just about the most unsettled place we can be in tonal music. And the long silence after the scales, before we get any resolution, is meant to force us to live with our disorientation. So beginnings are important. We expect them to be stabilizing, clarifying, and when they are not, we feel unmoored. That is exactly what Beethoven does in this movement, although, again, here it is played for laughs. We start in the wrong place, even though the dominant seventh chord in the second bar... [MUSIC] makes us more-or-less know what the key is. But that knowledge is immediately frustrated, when the second phrase- within-a-phrase begins in an even more bizarre place. [MUSIC] Only finally at the tail-end of the first proper phrase, do we hit home. [MUSIC] And when we do, it only serves to launch us on this wonderfully absurd, almost cartoonish chase up and down the keyboard. There are other sources of humor in this movement, including a fantastic moment where he vacillates, with what I assume is mock anxiety, between major and minor. This is such a performance of "happy" and "sad" that when I play it I am always reminded of the Greek tragedy and comedy masks. But ultimately, Beethoven the obsessive wins out, and he ends with a piece, with the same joke he started
with. with the same joke he started with. [MUSIC] After this florid, elaborate, dominant chord [MUSIC] surely we must be ready to land on the tonic. But no, he keeps emphasizing this absurd augmented chord. [MUSIC] And when he finally gets to the tonic, it goes by in such a flash that you hardly hear it happen, hardly realize that the piece is over. It's nice to know that this little game gave Beethoven so much pleasure. It's much like the first movement of Opus 31, Number 1, where he is so inordinately amused by the opening--in which the hands can't manage to play together-- that he is still doing it when the movement comes to an end, six minutes later. When Beethoven decides to be funny, he simply cannot get over his own joke. Let's take a short break for a review question.
