Op. 79, 1st Movement: Beethoven, Modest and Unbuttoned

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Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas Part 3

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Curtis Institute of Music

Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas Part 3

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Welcome to Part 3 of Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas! I'm delighted to launch another set of new lectures of this course as Part 3. As before, this class is meant for people of all levels of experience with Beethoven's music (including no experience at all!). Remember that you are able to watch the lectures as many times as you like, at whatever pace is comfortable for you. As I’ve done with the first two sets of Beethoven lectures, I look forward to meeting with students—online and in person, in various cities. The dates and locations will be posted in the Announcements and Events section, as part of the course content. So please remember to check back there for details. In these four new lectures, we will explore the following sonatas: • Sonata Op. 10, No. 1 • Sonata Op. 22 • Sonata Op. 31, No. 2 • Sonata Opp. 78, 79, 81a The Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation supports Curtis’s lifelong learning initiatives.

Из урока

opp. 78, 79 and 81a

Op. 78, 1st Movement: After a Long Pause, A Sonata Beethoven Loved7:01

Op. 78, 1st and 2nd Movements: Warmth and Humor3:37

Op. 79, 1st Movement: Beethoven, Modest and Unbuttoned4:05

Op. 79, 1st Movement: Phrase Lengths as a Source of Humor5:25

Op. 79, 2nd and 3rd Movements: Sonata Movements as Character Pieces9:33

Op. 81a: The Birth of Program Music for the Piano7:45

Op. 81a, 1st Movement: Le-Be-Wohl7:43

Op. 81a, 1st Movement: Extreme Economy of Gesture…6:22

Op. 81a, 1st Movement: …And a Return to Expansiveness5:31

Op. 81a, 2nd Movement: Conveying Absence through Harmonic Uncertainty9:46

Op. 81a, 3rd Movement: After Melancholy, Euphoriac11:37

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Jonathan Biss
Neubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies
Performance Faculty

The next of the 1809 sonatas is the G Major, Op. 79,

which I overlooked entirely back in the "crisis" lecture.

Poor op. 79: it is always being overlooked.

This is in a sense understandable, as it is undeniably a slender work.

It's sometimes referred to as a "Sonatina"; it is certainly the first Beethoven sonata

since the op. 14s, or probably even the op. 49s, written far earlier,

that could reasonably be given that designation.

Given that it’s on the modest end, it seems likely that Beethoven wrote op. 79

to use as a teaching piece.

Or perhaps he just needed a rest –remember, this was a particularly difficult point in

his life, and the relative modesty of op. 78 seemed to give him special pleasure.

Regardless of the reasons, op. 79 is less ambitious

than any sonata Beethoven had written for many years.

It’s very short, but that’s the least of it: there’s no effort to unify the movements,

to tell a big story or create a big arc, leading towards the end of the piece or otherwise.

It is, very unusually, more like a series of character pieces, particular the last two movements:

they paint their picture, and by the time they have done so,

they are pretty much over.

So, having minimized the op. 79, I’m now going to walk some of those statements back a bit.

It’s not a grand or ambitious sonata, but in comparison with the two op. 49 sonatas,

which truly are "simple" pieces, op. 79 is very highly characterized in each of its three

movements, and it’s not all that easy to play!

It takes a reasonable amount of dexterity and control, and to play it well,

you need to have a good handle on a wide range of styles.

So, the first movement – by a substantial margin, the biggest of the three –

is marked "Presto alla Tedesca".

"Presto" means very fast –it’s pretty rare for Beethoven to employ

this rather extreme marking for a first movement.

"Allegro" or some variant of allegro, is far more common.

As for "alla tedesca", it means "in the German style".

I find it highly amusing that Beethoven, a German,

even though he’d been living in Vienna for years,

is asking that his piece by played in the German style –

and that he asks in Italian!

But by 1809 there was not yet a precedent for marking movements

in German rather than Italian, and op. 79 was never going to be the piece

in which he broke with precedent.

At any rate, a tedesca is a dance in three – kind of a quick, modified waltz.

Beethoven used the "alla tedesca" marking once again in his Quartet Op. 130, in which

case he uses a slightly strange dynamic scheme to make this simple dance a bit quirky;

here, in op. 79, the simplicity suits his purposes well.

The motion is very natural and uninhibited,

and more or less constant.

(MUSIC)

That exposition is not entirely without quirks – there’s a hemiola right there

in the second phrase – but it hums along happily, which is kind of the point.

Nothing is supposed to disrupt its momentum, or its good spirits.

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