Sonatas
“Beethoven’s work,” says Paul Bekker, “is based on the pianoforte; therein lie its roots and there it first bore perfect fruit.” Yet it is a curious paradox that he abandoned this phase of composition relatively early, producing the majority of his works for the keyboard before he was forty. A number of reasons might be cited for this—his growing deafness, the consequent impossibility of his public appearances as performing virtuoso, the circumstance that his intellect outgrew the expressive capacity of the piano, and the immense broadening and deepening of his creative faculties which demanded subtler and more ramified channels of expression. “The pianoforte is and always will be a disappointing instrument,” he said at one stage of his career. And he was distressed that his compositions for the piano exclusively always produced on him the most regrettable impression. “Oh! Beethoven, what an ass you were!” he exclaimed on one occasion when someone played him his own Variations in C minor.
Nevertheless, the tremendous series of thirty-two sonatas, which began, roughly speaking, in 1795 and continued more or less intermittently till 1822, are among his most moving, gracious, original, adventurous, and completely extraordinary achievements. They range all the way from the so-called “Pathétique,” “Pastoral,” and “Moonlight” to the “Waldstein,” the “Appassionata,” and the programmatic “Les Adieux, l’Absence et le Retour,” to the mighty series beginning in 1816 with the A major, opus 101, and culminating in the gigantic B flat, opus 106 (universally known as “for the Hammerklavier”), the extraordinarily imaginative ones in E major and A flat, opera 109 and 110, and the transcendent, Promethean C minor, opus 111. Within the cosmic limits of this stupendous succession there stretches a whole world of emotional experience and an incalculable diversity of invention. And we may as well mention here (though it was not composed till 1823) that prodigious set of Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by the publisher Diabelli, which has not its like in the whole range of Beethoven’s output. Looking back over the immense panorama of the composer’s piano works (including variations, bagatelles, and solo sonatas) stretching, let us say, from the awesome summits of the “Hammerklavier,” the C minor, and the “Diabelli” Variations backward to the comparative simplicities of the sonatas Opera 2, 22, 26, and 27 leaves one with the dizzy impression of surveying a whole Alpine panorama.