Blurring the Lines Between Fantasy and Sonata: Op. 27, No. 1

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Del curso dictado por Curtis Institute of Music

Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

484 calificaciones

Curtis Institute of Music

Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

484 calificaciones

Our relationship to Beethoven is a deep and paradoxical one. For many musicians, he represents a kind of holy grail: His music has an intensity, rigor, and profundity which keep us in its thrall, and it is perhaps unequalled in the interpretive, technical, and even spiritual challenges it poses to performers. At the same time, Beethoven’s music is casually familiar to millions of people who do not attend concerts or consider themselves musically inclined. Two hundred years after his death, he is everywhere in the culture, yet still represents its summit. This course takes an inside-out look at the 32 piano sonatas from the point of view of a performer. Each lecture will focus on one sonata and an aspect of Beethoven’s music exemplified by it. (These might include: the relationship between Beethoven the pianist and Beethoven the composer; the critical role improvisation plays in his highly structured music; his mixing of extremely refined music with rougher elements; and the often surprising ways in which the events of his life influenced his compositional process and the character of the music he was writing.) The course will feature some analysis and historical background, but its perspective is that of a player, not a musicologist. Its main aim is to explore and demystify the work of the performer, even while embracing the eternal mystery of Beethoven’s music itself. This season's Curtis courses are sponsored by Linda Richardson in loving memory of her husband, Dr. Paul Richardson. The Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation supports Curtis's lifelong learning initiatives.

De la lección

New Paths

Beethoven’s conception of the sonata was perpetually in flux, but the year 1801 is a particularly experimental one. The four sonatas Op. 26 through 28 (Nos. 14 through 17, chronologically) feature the most concrete innovations among the sonatas written up to that point, and are the focus of this lecture. There will be discussion of the relationship between the movements in a classical sonata, and the radical shift it begins to undergo at this point. We will also examine the ways in which these sonatas were influential to future generations of composers, which the earlier works, great as they are, were not. As a special feature for this lecture, a recording by a current Curtis student of the first movement of Op. 28 will be available on Curtis Performs.

Moving Beyond the Early Period8:33

Re-shaping the Sonata: Op. 2619:18

Blurring the Lines Between Fantasy and Sonata: Op. 27, No. 16:23

Psychological Extremity in Music: Op. 27, No.215:13

Subtlety and Innovation: Op. 289:18

Conoce a los instructores

Jonathan Biss
Neubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies
Performance Faculty

[MUSIC]

Again, Mozart did once write a piano sonata that was structurally a bit

off the wall, the so-called "Alla Turca" Sonata, K. 331.

But, he then went about his business as if this had never happened,

writing sonatas that followed the classical paradigm precisely.

For Beethoven, by contrast, Opus 26 proves to be just the beginning.

In fact, he immediately ups the ante with the two sonatas Opus 27.

Even the name of these works breaks ground:

Each is called "Sonata quasi una fantasia."

Now the notion of fantasy and sonata united is not entirely new.

But in the past, the idea was to present them as distinct works in a sequence,

their opposed natures being the very point of the exercise.

Mozart for example wrote a Fantasy and Sonata in C minor.

There's no hard evidence that he intended them to be

played together but they certainly seem like a perfect fit,

and many generations of pianists have programmed them that way.

But again, the success of the idea comes from the

searching, free-form, constantly unsettled fantasy giving way, almost resolving

even, to an extremely structured sonata.

It surely isn't an accident that the first movement of the sonata, which naturally

follows directly on the heels of the fantasy,

is really quite square in its phrase structure.

It is highly dramatic music, but mainly because of the character of its themes.

The construction of the movement is highly regular,

answering the questions that the fantasy poses.

It is chaos making way for order.

So, to have a work that is simultaneously fantasy

and a sonata surely seemed like a contradiction in terms.

The title makes really a bold statement which Beethoven

has clearly been leading up to with Opus 26--

that something other than sonata form and the standard succession

of movements can be the glue that holds a sonata together.

Again, this notion had an enormous impact on 19th-century composers.

The Schumann Fantasy, one of the really greatest piano

works of the Romantic generation, was originally titled Grand Sonata.

And indeed, given the way that it takes

large-scale forms and injects an amazing degree

of freedom and harmonic instability into them, one

could make an equally strong case for either title.

And what was Schumann's motivation in writing the fantasy?

It was to raise money to build the statue of, who else?

Beethoven.

The Schumann is a particularly useful example, but Mendelssohn also wrote a work

which is sometimes known as Fantasy, other times as the Scottish Sonata.

In fact, the list goes on and on.

And with Beethoven's Opus 27 sonatas, it really

isn't simply a question of a new title.

In form and in atmosphere, these pieces are utterly unlike

anything Beethoven had ever written or

really like anything he would write subsequently.

They're also notably unlike one another.

The man really didn't ever run out of ideas.

The first of the two sonatas is like Opus 26

in that none of its moments are in sonata form.

While the works are very different, that, in itself, is significant.

After 13 sonatas that each begin with a sonata allegro,

now he's 0 for 2.

It serves as confirmation that he really is going in a new direction.

But the real innovation in Opus 27 Number 1

is that there are no breaks between the movements.

Now, the variations first movement of Opus 26 was nearly without precedent,

and many features of it would have certainly raised Mozart's eyebrows.

But this is really unheard of.

And Beethoven uses other techniques to

further blur the boundaries between the movements.

The first movement itself is interrupted in the middle by

an unrelated idea and a drastically faster tempo.

This is the first time that Beethoven writes

a single sonata movement in more than one tempo,

excluding works with slow introductions--which is another story entirely.

The third movement doesn't resolve. It finishes on a trill on the dominant--

[MUSIC]

a half-cadence that needs the last movement to resolve it.

And just at the moment that the exuberant last movement seems headed for its climax,

it stops, again unresolved, and launches into an extended

quotation, a callback I'd say to the inward third movement.

This is doubly significant because the last movement

was already somehow the weightiest of the four.

Which the addition of the quotation it acquires

a gravity which the rest of the piece doesn't have.

And so, the re-balancing of the Beethoven sonata continues with this work.

But back to my original point.

Even without the literal linking of the movements, there are plenty of things

in this piece which confuse the listener as to where one ends and another begins.

Add to that the lack of space between movements, and you see that this is a work

which not only helps redefine the role of each movement within the sonata,

it suggests that the movements themselves cannot be truly separated out.

That is a radical notion.

To me Opus 27, Number 1 does feel more unified than Opus 26.

And not only because there's no silence in it to disturb the unity.

There is a sense of inevitability in the way the movements follow one another.

Whatever character is missing from one movement is invariably the central one in the next.

So the grace of the first movement is answered by the fidgetiness of the second,

is answered by the inwardness of the third,

and so on. But while the work is amazingly daring--

and I would not call it unsuccessful, by any means--

There is still a bit of self-consciousness in the experimentation.

One perceives it as, if not really a capital I "Idea," at least an experiment.

And, indeed, he never returned to it.

No subsequent sonata links all of the movements.

As Beethoven goes along, he finds less literal, but ultimately

more meaningful, ways of uniting the movements of his sonatas.

Still, this is really a marvelous piece, and

since, unfortunately I'm not going to play it,

because we have a limitation of time,

I really highly recommend that you give it a listen on your own time.

Let's take a short break for a review question.

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