[MUSIC]

Now that we've dispensed with its lead-in,

let's move on to Opus 78's main event, Opus 78. [LAUGH]
As I said, it was a work that Beethoven
loved
and while I find that surprising, given that it's not
exactly typical of him, I probably
shouldn't.
It is an extremely lovable work.
The sonata is in two movements.
After the two early, slight sonatas Opus
49, written in 1792--far earlier than
that opus number would suggest--Beethoven
abandoned
the two-movement sonata for 12 years.
He eventually returned to it on four
separate occasions,
and in each instance produced something
special and unrepeatable.
In addition to the work at hand, there is
Opus 54, the whackadoodle among the 32
sonatas;
Opus 90, a mysterious masterpiece which
looks towards the future; and
the final sonata, Opus 111, one of the
great monuments of music.
In the last two cases, the two movements
are very much
yin and yang, which seems to be a theme of this lecture.
With the first movements providing
tremendous stress and
tension, and then the second movement's all
catharsis.
Opus 78, likewise, features two movements
that aren't alike in any
meaningful sense, but in this case, the
first movement isn't conflicted.
In fact, Opus 78 is just about as
conflict-free as anything Beethoven wrote.
I always use the first movement of Opus 78 as exhibit A whenever
somebody suggests to me that Beethoven was not a great
melodist.
It's not just that its themes are so
beautiful,
but that he creates the feeling of eternal
melody.
Whereas in so many works, and not just by
Beethoven, the bridge
material between themes is, if not
filler, then at least transitional,
here, even the long strings of moving
notes must be sung, not merely played.
Here is the exposition.
[MUSIC]
That slow introduction, so profound, is
the only slow music in the entire sonata.
But even though it's a mere four measures long,
it still manages to fill multiple
important functions.
First of all, in a work without a slow

movement,
it somehow, despite its extreme brevity
and being placed incorrectly,
manages to fill that role.
In one simple phrase, it tells such a story
with the rise and
fall of its melodic line, the rigor of the
dotted rhythm at
the opening giving way to the improvised
feel of the last bar,
all of this taking place over a pedal
point in the bass
which makes the whole thing
seem so grounded.
With all that, really, anything more would
feel almost superfluous.
The other thing that this opening
accomplishes so beautifully is that
it serves as stage-setting for the rest of
the movement.
Now this is something that Mozart excelled
at.
I think, for example of his final piano
concerto, K. 595,
a work of breathtaking serenity, in which
the opening theme...
[MUSIC]
is preceded by this one measure in the
lower strings...
[MUSIC]
I once played this work with a conductor
who said the entire emotional content of
the work should be revealed to us
before the theme arrived, with that single
measure.
And it's true.
In that case, as with the Beethoven, the
work could begin without this preamble.
There's no formal necessity for it.
But these extremely short introductions
settle us,
give us a sense of pre-understanding the
work,
which creates exactly the right atmosphere in which to listen to them.
There is one other noteworthy aspect of
this movement, and that is that
the second half of the movement-the development and recapitulation--is
repeated.
Now, in the early Classical days, this was
the convention, but it slowly began to
disappear.
Mozart had already dispensed with the
second
repeat in his final piano sonata, K. 576.
And Beethoven never repeats the second
half of the first movement
of the sonata, until this one--and
this is already Sonata Number 24.
I'm not a music historian, and this is not

an area
of expertise for me, but it seems to
me that
in the early days of the sonata form,
perhaps both repeats were
necessary simply to give the listener
more of an opportunity
to process the events of the music.
But the more the sonata form became
common, and therefore commonly understood,
the more disruptive the second repeat
began to seem.
Think about it.
The "second half" is where the main issue,
the main problem of the movement-finding a way back home to the tonic,
and
then finding a way to stay there--is sorted
out.
If, once it is sorted out, we are made to
listen to it again,
what does that do to our sense of the
music as a dramatic narrative?
Once we know how the story ends, what is
meant to be holding our interest?
Beethoven very definitely wants this
second repeat to be observed.
He even wrote what is called a "first ending," a short transitional passage to
take us back.
This brief first ending has a very
discursive quality.
[MUSIC]
My feeling about this whenever I play it,
is that the reason Beethoven composed it
in this way
is that he likes this music a great
deal,
and he would like to hear it again, thank you very much.
Toddler-like as this may seem, it
became common practice for the Romantic
composers.
Schumann, for instance, loved to repeat
his
best themes over and over and over again.
For Beethoven though, this is highly
unusual.
It suggests that for at least a moment, the structure of the
music takes a
backseat to the moment-to-moment beauty of
the material.
I suppose that in itself is evidence of
how much affection Beethoven must have
had for it, although again, it certainly
makes it an outlier among his sonatas.
I begin speaking about Opus 78's second
movement
with some trepidation, because the old
rule is that
a performer is never supposed to talk
about a

piece for longer than it takes to play it.

The movement is about two-and-a-half
minutes long, so consider me on the clock.
This movement, along with the
aforementioned Opus 31, Number 1, is probably
the greatest example of Beethoven's humor,
at least in the piano sonatas.
Somehow it's not a quality frequently
associated with him which is odd, because it
is really one of his most essential ones.
And this movement, honestly, is uproarious.
Explaining a joke is always a risky proposition,
so instead, here is the
opening.
[MUSIC]
Everything about this opening is a joke.
An accent can be many things in music, but
it is
almost always a stop, a disruptive force
in a musical phrase.
So starting a movement with a stop is a
pretty interesting proposition.
And then there's the dynamic markings-the first phrase is divided into six
parts: forte-piano-forte-piano, etc.
It's like an Abbott and Costello routine.
But the main source of the humor is the chord on which we begin.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but
one of the
immoveable conditions in a piece of music is that it is
preceded by silence, and that the silence returns after it
ends.
Therefore, we expect the first moments of
works to establish
some ground rules, to give us a harmonic
and rhythmic framework.
Think for example of the first sonata we
discussed in the course, Opus 7.
[MUSIC]
We instantly know the key, the meter, the
tempo--everything critical.
Now, how about Opus 28, which we discussed
in the first ... in the last lecture.
[MUSIC]
The pedal point in the bass gives us a
fairly good reference point,
but the first full chord muddies the
waters, and the key of
D major isn't fully clarified until we are
a few bars in.
And the very quietly pulsating bass seems
to want to give
the impression that the work was in
progress before it even began-that the pulsation existed in nature,
before we began to hear it.
Now let's move onto the fantasy.
[MUSIC]
This is designed for maximum
disorientation.

The beginnings and ends of the two scales

outline a diminished chord...
[MUSIC]
which is just about the most unsettled
place we can be in tonal music.
And the long silence after the scales,
before we get any
resolution, is meant to force us to live
with our disorientation.
So beginnings are important.
We expect them to be stabilizing,
clarifying,
and when they are not, we feel unmoored.
That is exactly what Beethoven does in
this movement, although, again,
here it is played for laughs.
We start in the wrong place, even though
the dominant seventh chord in the second
bar...
[MUSIC]
makes us more-or-less know what the key
is.
But that knowledge is immediately
frustrated, when the second phrasewithin-a-phrase begins in an even more
bizarre place.
[MUSIC]
Only finally at the tail-end of the first
proper phrase, do we hit home.
[MUSIC]
And when we do, it only serves to launch us
on
this wonderfully absurd, almost cartoonish
chase up and down the keyboard.
There are other sources of humor in this
movement, including a fantastic moment
where he vacillates, with what I assume is
mock anxiety, between major and minor.
This is such a performance of "happy" and
"sad" that when I play it
I am always reminded of the Greek
tragedy and comedy masks.
But ultimately,
Beethoven the obsessive wins out, and he
ends with a piece, with the same joke he started
with.
with the same joke he started
with.
[MUSIC]
After this florid, elaborate, dominant
chord
[MUSIC]
surely we must be ready to land on the
tonic.
But no, he keeps emphasizing this absurd
augmented chord.
[MUSIC]
And when he finally gets to the tonic, it
goes by in such a
flash that you hardly hear it happen,

hardly realize that the piece is over.

It's nice to know that this little game
gave Beethoven so much pleasure.
It's much like the first movement of Opus
31, Number 1, where he is so
inordinately amused by the opening--in
which
the hands can't manage to play together-that he is still doing it when the movement comes to an end, six minutes
later.
When Beethoven decides to be funny, he simply cannot get over his
own joke.
Let's take a short break for a review
question.