The Omniscient Mussel

Beethoven Piano Sonata Op 54

Sonata in F major Op 54
In Tempo d’un Menuetto
Allegretto

With stories of his tantrums and grumpy demeanour in plentiful supply, it is difficult to imagine Beethoven ever cracking a smile or telling a joke. This sonata proves without at doubt that Beethoven’s sense of humour functioned perfectly well. Both Op 54 and Op 57 ‘Appassionata’ were written while Beethoven was holidaying in Baden outside of Vienna in 1804. By this point he was nearly deaf and had been sent to the country by his doctor to recover from treatment. The two pieces could not be more dissimilar.

In Op 54, Beethoven lampoons the style galant which was the popular salon style at the time. It had reached its zenith in the Prussian court of Frederick the Great nearly twenty years earlier but elements of the style remained in salon music all over Europe. The music was generally light and song-like, highly embellished and diligently avoided the use of counterpoint or other learned music. Beethoven doesn’t indulge in straight parody like Mozart did for his Musical Joke but rather chooses to disrupt convention in his own way.

The opening theme is delicate and pleasant and at once it appears that the stage is being prepared for a set of gentle variations. Just as the first variation is about to begin, the second theme bursts suddenly onto the scene in the form of a fortissimo canon. The inclusion of several, rather theatrical, szforzandi only serve to heighten the sense of ridiculousness. Is seems as if Beethoven was even poking fun at himself a little bit as sudden and extreme changes in dynamics are typical of his style. In the development the main theme is treated to extended trills, turns and gratuitous scale passages, which immediately bring to mind works by Clementi and Kuhlau.

While Beethoven manages to make nothing out of something in the first movement, he performs the opposite trick in the second and fashions five delightful minutes of music out of an F major scale, some running thirds and a few turns around the circle of fifths. The overall texture is quite delicate and aside from a few chords and the odd octave doubling, is in two parts throughout. Two-part writing is a common counterpoint exercise and although Beethoven never uses canon in this piece, it certainly sounds as if there very well could be. The texture becomes more muscular in the coda, which takes off as soon as it begins, nearly tripping over itself in its hurry to get to the final cadence.

On this day..

• New Blogs - 2010
• XKCD: Sesame Street - 2010
• Amadou And Miriam With The Beating Wing Orchestra - 2009