DAILY DOSE of BEETHOVEN (November 17, 2020)
Beethoven's last three piano sonatas, Opus 109, 110, and 111, are the height of piano music. They transcend the instrument, and elevate it to a level of the sublime. All three of them will be performed during the Foundation's 24-hour Beethoven birthday celebration on December 16th (https://www.ffrcc.org/beethoven-forever). So, we will take the opportunity to give you an outline of these great works. Op 111 has been discussed previously (July 13 & 14, 2020 posts). So, let us approach Piano Sonata No. 31 in Ab Major, Op. 110.
On the most elementary level, the sonata examines a basic sequence of intervals. Look at the opening. Despite a beautiful melody, what leaps out at us is a sequence of rising fourths. Despite appearances, the essential movement is C, Ab-Db, Bb-Eb.
Ab to Db, and Bb to Eb are both fourths. A less audible fourth, C to F follows. That gives a series of fourths, ascending the Ab major scale, Ab Bb C. (See example 1). Try playing those simple notes on the piano or singing them along with the recording.
Later, Beethoven abstracts that same sequence of fourths into the subject of a fugue. The answer, as usual, begins a fifth above, at Eb. (See example 2)
While Mozart seized upon Bach's fugues powerfully, after his studies in 1782, Beethoven went even further, and integrated fugue into the modes of his own era, such as sonata form, rondo form, theme and variations, etc. Part of what made this work, was what you have just seen here, grasping the intervallic processes that underlie both the so-called classical, and baroque forms.
Inversion was a key property of Bach's music, and Beethoven makes that very clear here, by beginning the fugue again, but this time by inverted, descending fourths, D-A, C-G, B-F#, in a very different key, G major. Beethoven identifies it as the inversion of the first fugue, and at the same tempo, and gaining, "bit by bit, new life." (See example 3).
Well, that is a very neat formula, but does it really explain what is going on here?
Stay tuned!
Here’s a performance of the first movement of the Op. 110 by the great Rudolf Serkin: