Until recently it was believed that the Allegro and Adagio catalogued as Beethoven's WoO 51 were the first two movements of a short piano sonata. The Adagio was missing an end and had to be finished by Beethoven’s student Ferdinand Ries. The third movement was assumed to be lost.
In the Summer 2007 issue of the “Beethoven Journal,” a persuasive argument was made that Beethoven wrote the two WoO 51 pieces for a friend who had purchased a type of portable keyboard instrument called an orphica: klaus-martin-kopitz.de/Texte/Orphica.…
The range of the WoO 51 pieces is just four octaves, from C2 to C6, rather than the five octaves of the pianofortes that Beethoven normal wrote for. However, this four-octave range is not compatible with the four-octave orphica at the Metropolitan Museum: metmuseum.org/art/collection…
Tobias Koch's recording of the WoO 51 movements on an orphica is available on Spotify.
Beethoven: Complete Piano Pieces, Tobias Koch
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Two Movements for Orphica (WoO 51), 1797?
This recording on a clavichord is probably the closest thing to the sound of an orphica that is conveniently available on YouTube.
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Two Movements for Orphica (WoO 51, No. 1), 1797?
Often piano students focus on only one of the two movements. Here’s the Allegro played by a student at a music school in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Two Movements for Orphica (WoO 51, No. 2), 1797?
The Adagio is performed here by another young piano student. It doesn’t look like it, but she’s playing for an audience.
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Two Movements for Orphica (WoO 51, No. 1), 1797?
The Allegro performed on a pair of xylophones. And why not?