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Essay by Michael Arnowitt, October 2020
A few days ago I posted about the unusually high density of events in the music Beethoven wrote near the end of his life, using the opening of his piano sonata 30 opus 109 as an example, where the second theme barges in without transition at only the ninth measure. Today I’ll post a few thoughts about the opening measures of Beethoven’s sonata 31 opus 110. The first five measures are pictured below.
The sonata begins with four measures in the texture of Beethoven’s string quartets (especially the beautiful rising inner voice in the third measure, which, if the piece were actually a string quartet, would be a viola line in its rich lower range. At the fifth measure Beethoven starts a melody in the right hand with a very Mozart-like simple accompaniment of even sixteenth notes in the left hand. Starting here, Beethoven avoids writing any low notes for a while, clearing out the bass pitch area and only writing music fairly high up on the piano, furthering the lighter Mozart-like tone of this new melody.
For the most part, composers avoid throwing too many crazy, unexpected events near the very beginning of a piece of music, because it’s poor audience psychology. The listener is just getting used to the general speed, meter, character, texture, tone-color, harmonic language, and key of the piece. It would add another degree of listening difficulty if a few seconds in the composer suddenly switched course in an extremely different direction. As a performer, for this reason it’s usually not a good choice to do much expressive rubato lingering when playing the first few measures of a piece, because the tempo and meter haven’t been established yet for the listener.
Of course, rules are made to be broken, and here Beethoven really goes off script by marking a fermata, a long and unmeasured hold, on a chord in only the fourth measure of the piece. In the printed music, the fermata is the bird’s eye symbol marked over the note which also has a trill indication (tr). This means the pianist alternates as quickly as possible between playing a D and an E, continuing this as long as they feel like because of the fermata, so the meter of three beats per measure is temporarily destroyed.
The fermata hold on a trill, particularly over this type of chord, is a reference to a moment at the end of what is called in music a cadenza. Cadenzas are usually found very near the end of a movement of a classical piano concerto with orchestra. In a cadenza, the orchestra rests in silence for several minutes while the piano soloist explores and develops the musical ideas of the movement, always ending on a trill in the right hand with a fermata. The hold gives the conductor a musical cue to ready the orchestra to come back in on the resolution of the long trill, and the two elements of the concerto, the small mass of the soloist, and the large mass of the orchestra, reunite and complete the movement with a short epilogue. If the concerto were in C major, the formula would be that the left hand would hold a chord of the G below middle C and the B and F above that note, while the right hand would trill between D and E in the soprano range for a long time. Finally, the piano soloist wraps up the trill by playing a “nachschlag” of C-D-C, with the orchestra re-entering on this final C.
The crazy part here is that normally this sort of cadenza trill and resolution would come at the end of a long first movement, not at the very beginning of the piece after only a few seconds. There has been no cadenza, yet we clearly here a trill over an accompanimental chord plus an extended nachschlag of eight ornamental notes, leading into the fifth measure. It’s all quite confusing: is Beethoven trying to signal the first four measures are some sort of highly compressed introduction, with the real melody now beginning at measure 5? But the music of the first measure sounds like a solid melody, not the sort of material that would be appropriate for a mere introduction.
As a pianist, I go back and forth on how to play this moment. The most obvious way to interpret the passage, which may well be best, is to blend the eight fast notes Beethoven writes out inbetween the held trill and the beginning of measure 5 to make a seamless continuity. In this approach these eight notes at the end of measure 4 become a super-long nachschlag connector at the end of the trill, functioning identically to the simpler two note CD nachschlag in my Mozart piano concerto example. You do a long trill and blend the following notes as if they are a continuation of the trill and it all joins into the beginning of the melody in measure 5 without any fuss.
However, I am playing around with a different interpretation, based on noticing that Beethoven asks for the three lower notes of the accompanying chord under the trill to cut off when the fermata ends in the middle of the measure. After the trill you should hear the right hand’s last eight notes at the end of the measure by themselves without the accompanying chord underneath. Beethoven could easily have written a full measure chord on measure 4 if he had wanted something completely similar to the standard piano concerto situation. The idea I’m considering is to come to a slight pause on the D-flat at the end of the fermata, cut off the three low notes of the chord, hear the D-flat just briefly by itself, and then start a phrase on the next note C that will be an upbeat gesture moving the music to the downbeat of the beginning of measure 5 and the entrance of the new melody.
Whatever I decide, it is a magical and surprising moment that as we have just gotten going with this soulful music Beethoven pauses, lingers, moves the music into timelessness briefly on the held vibrating trill, and then with this beautiful strand of meandering right hand notes suspended in the air with no bass notes supporting underneath, gently resumes the motion and on we go. It’s as if we are being gradually guided into the landscape of the piece. This is part of the way Beethoven created in this music he wrote at the end of his life a feeling of journey and odyssey, moving away from the more declarative and rhetorical style of the classical period and his earlier compositions. Those are my thoughts for today on this amazing music that continues to generate new thoughts on each return.