Beethoven: Sonata Op.111 No.32 in C Minor (Uchida)

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• published: 29 Aug 2015
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Yes, okay, this praise is a little hackneyed, and there’s no shortage of wild-eyed gushing over this sonata, but this sonata is not just great but *profound* -- a staunchly (weirdly) unrepresentative apotheosis of the form. I’m not sure this sonata can be properly explained – as Wittgenstein said, mysteries are meant to be deepened, not explained, but I’ll try to point out some interesting features. In general, the sonata is strange because it’s in just two movements: the first a welter of surging darkness, the second sharply contrasting, but otherwise more or less beyond conventional description. No-one’s quite sure if Beethoven really meant to write a 3rd movement, but it’s true in any case that the sonata has a searching, hanging quality despite the straightforward dualism between the two movements (major/minor, fast/slow, harmonic agitation/harmonic stasis, angular/melodic, propulsive/static, terrestrial/divine.) The allegro: - The striking opening, about which probably more than enough has already been said. - The profusion of diminished 7ths in the introduction, which has no apparently structural answer (cf the Pathetique) even though it is mirrored (possibly) in the development at: 6:09 - If you listen to Romantic fugues, you’ll can’t help but keep thinking that the texture of the entire movement is extremely fugal (see esp 5:50). Properly speaking, the dramatic tremolo leads into a fugal theme that is never realised, instead turning into a free-form canon. The entire work is characterised by this sort of deliberate incompleteness: notice how disjointed the two main motives of the movement are, and how they never really seem to get off the ground. (Hence the description you’ll keep encountering when reading about this movement: “struggle”.) - Note how often Beethoven uses the dramatic device of placing the hands quite far apart when you wouldn’t expect this. For instance, if both hands are playing mirroring each other, they will be *two* octaves apart, so that there is an “unspoken” note between them (6:18, 6:56, 8:32). The arietta (theme and variations): - Something which almost everyone fails to notice is that this arietta begins on an upbeat. The melody proper does not begin with the C-G fall. Instead it begins E-F-D. (Try to keep this in mind as you go through the variations.) - That being said, for a set of variations, this entire 2nd movement is marked by rather exalted strangeness. - Consider the nature of the variations themselves. They do not wander into different keys. They do not change tempo (NB the “incorrect” time signatures, since Beethoven leaves out all the implied triplets). They contain no thematic transformation in the style of Liszt in his B minor sonata. They do not elaborate on portions on the theme (cf the Diabelli Variations). Instead, each variation is a model of structural minimalism (something totally weird to ascribe to Beethoven): it goes through the theme’s harmony exactly as first written, preserving the broad melodic contour, and all that changes is how much each beat is subdivided: each variation (roughly speaking) divides the beats in the previous variation into either 3 or 4. The extraordinary thing is how much the nature of the theme changes via this simple device: it starts out form something that’s serene in a rather static, glacial, quietly monumental sort of way (9:20), and then gains a berceuse-ish lilt (11:38), and then a bit of swing (13:58), and then erupts into ecstasy (15:56 - this sounds like boogie-woogie, and there’s nothing wrong with listening to it that way, but be aware that this rhythmic pattern is something that has grown naturally out of all that has come before, and that this is not supposed to sound light-hearted but brokenly propulsive, maybe even rapturous in a slightly painful way), and then becomes a set of muted pulses of colour (18:00, 19:16) strung within an ethereal halo (18:40, 19:56) – a whisper, really, that proves that major keys can do a lot more than be happy, and can in fact be very sad – and then becomes a heart-stoppingly generous, grateful chorale (23:30). - This very straightforward variation structure is interrupted at one point and one point only, and that moment is (like many of the moments of structural breakdown in Beethoven’s last sonatas) utterly gorgeous – listen for those tiny dissonances at the peak of the implied LH melody (20:41) – and then utterly devastating (22:07). It features the only modulation in the movement. - This is the basic thing about the movement: a simple, unpromising theme, developed via a simple, unpromising heuristic, producing something sublime. (I mean sublime not in the usual sense, but in the Shaftesbury + Burke sense – big enough to look unmade, unheroic, unpropelled by any sense of human craft or will, a bit scary.)