[MUSIC]

Welcome back to what is, to my amazement,

already
the final week of exploring the Beethoven
piano sonatas.
I'm very happy that you've stayed with me up to this point
because the music that
we're going to look at this week is,
from many points of view, the most remarkable
of all.
Now I would like to think that four lectures in,
the question of why the
Beethoven sonatas matter,
as a body of music, would have answered itself,
at least to some extent.
But before we delve into the Late Period,
which can be quite a
disorienting experience, I thought it would be useful
to focus briefly on that question
directly.
Obviously, the quality of these works is
beyond all argument
in terms of mastery, in terms of their charisma, the
draw they have on the listener,
they are unsurpassed.
On top of that, and this hopefully has hit
home over the past several weeks,
the variety demonstrated in these
sonatas is just tremendous.
If there's any set of piano works that can
compete with the
Beethoven sonatas in terms of sheer quality,
it's surely the Mozart piano
concerti.
But while I would never be able to place
one over the other in terms of
their musical level, the Beethoven sonatas
are incomparably
more diverse in terms of style, of musical
language, of structure
everything except for pure emotional
content, really.
With the Mozart concerti, while each has
magnificient ideas, there is
a rough template in place which he rarely
veers too far from.
Beethoven did not really do templates.
But the issue is not simply one of
variety, but of evolution.
While Beethoven does sometimes careen
wildly from
sonata to sonata in terms of character,
there
is undoubtedly an overall direction in
terms of structure,
away from straight sonata forms, away from
the
absolute primacy of the tonic-dominant
relationship, away from
the normal passage of time, away from this

business of decreasing the heaviness as

the work progresses.
This is true not merely in the sonatas,
but throughout Beethoven's output.
It's just slightly more easily demonstrated through
the sonatas
because there are so very many of them [LAUGH]
32, compared with 16 quartets and just
nine symphonies.
When a point in his life is illustrated
by just one symphony, it's
a bit of a stretch to assume that it is
emblematic of something.
But, four or five sonatas written in
tandem,
or in one stretch, with similar concerns
and similar
solutions to the compositional problems
they pose, these can
be said to represent a step along a path.
Now, that path is a very dramatic one, and
most dramatic of
all is the moment, late in life, when
Beethoven steps off it altogether.
I really don't mean to diminish Mozart, of
all people, here.
His piano concerti were a huge inspirationto Beethoven, first of all
but they did not, through their content,
force later composers to reckon with them.
But given what Beethoven achieved, what he
left
behind, and what he moved towards,
it was not possible to write a piano
sonata in the 19th century,
or naturally the 20th, as if
these works had not been written.
They set the agenda and they established
which elements of the Classical style
and tonal system were still usable, and
which onesmanywere now obsolete.
Beethoven's achievement with the 32
sonatas ensured
that most great composers of the
subsequent generation
wanted to write their own,
while simultaneously making it almost
impossible
for them to succeed in the genre,
at least not without reinventing it almost
beyond recognition, beyond its own
definitions.
Beethoven was a huge inspiration, but at
the same time,
he was a hell of a problem for the
Romantic generation.
All right, enough with the generalities.
The work that we will be dealing with
today is the Sonata Opus 109,
the first of the final three which
were composed

almost concurrently in 1822,

conceived almost as a unit.
They have many connections, some
mysterious,
inexplicable, a few of them literal.
Over four lectures, we've discussed the
development
that has taken place in the Beethoven
sonata-writing up to this point, the
same developments we just reviewed a
moment ago.
But until now, despite that "New Paths" letter,
and despite some rather wild works,
the development has been
step-wise, incremental.
From Opus 2, Number 1, to Opus 90, there
have
been 28 sonatas representing nearly 20
years of Beethoven's life.
The development found in the late sonatas,
by contrast, is a leap.
This final trinity of sonatasalong with,
perhaps
to a lesser extent, the preceding two
sonatas,
Opus 101 and the enormous "Hammerklavier"
these represent a summation, the perfection of all the forms he has
been
grappling with his whole life, a
fulfillment after the
crisis years, a perfect balance that one
sees him
seeking in the experimental works Opus 90
through Opus 97:
the last Violin Sonata, the Serioso Quartet,
the Archduke Trio.
At the same time, these last sonatas
step
way into the unknown.
The music world is still trying to come to
grips with what Beethoven
achieves here and, in the last
string quartets also, written several
years later.
I'm hard-pressed to think of any other
works throughout
history that have had this same kind of an
effect.
It could be argued that Schoenberg, in
inventing serialism, threw out the
rule book as heedlessly, but plenty of
composers have simply ignored his work.
I mean, surely they are aware of it, but
their
rejection of it has been complete, and
composition has remained possible.
Coming to terms, though, to some very
limited extent, with late Beethoven is
one of the central tasks facing any
serious musician, like it or not.

Again, we have already discussed plenty of

impressive innovations
in the earlier sonatas, but they are
always explicable.
By contrast there are moments in these
last works that I simply do not
understand.
Take this harmonic progression, for
example, in
the first movement of the Sonata Opus 110.
[MUSIC]
Three measures to get from E major [MUSIC] to
A-flat [MUSIC]
four sharps to four flats, two keys which
do not even exist on the same map.
And midway through, there is a chord...
[MUSIC]
whose function I just cannot identify. [LAUGH]
It makes emotional sense in context, but
to
play it is to experience a kind of
delirium.
Incidentally, one possible explanation for
why we find ourselves
in E major in the middle of A-flat major
110:
That is the key of Opus 109.
Now don't misunderstand, these works can
and do stand alone.
But the more I know them, the more I think
that even if they were not meant
to be played together, they are the
product of one creative burst
and that these small links between them
are probably not accidental, and certainly
not coincidental.
A brief passage in the first movement of
Opus 109...
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reappears as the main theme of Opus 110's
slow movement.
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And the key relationship between all
three sonatas is fascinating.
We keep moving up a major third from E [MUSIC], to
A-flat [MUSIC], to C [MUSIC].
The next move up a third would take us
back to E [MUSIC], where we started.
Interestingly, this business of cycling
through major thirds is
something that Schubert would often do
within a work.
In fact, in the B-flat major trio, he
twice
first in the first movement, then again in
the second
presents the same material in each of
those specific keys,
E, A-flat, and C, one after
another.

It's impossible to know if this is in any way intentional,

but as we'll see later, it's just one instance of Schubert taking an idea
which is just a germ in Beethoven, and giving it full
expression.
Let's take a short break for a review
question.