The 1st movement of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 2 is sunny and joyful, the 2nd movement full of romantic melancholy and heartache. The 3rd movement is marked “piacevole” (“peaceful”) and has a wonderful lyrically soaring passage near the end.
#Beethoven250 Day 104
Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Major (Opus 12, No. 2), 1797–98
Sayaka Shoji and Gianluca Cascioli perform in Suntory Hall in Tokyo.
In other 1798 news, in the autumn a volume of poetry was published entitled “Lyrical Ballads,” now considered the foundational text of English Romanticism. The authors were William Wordsworth (born in 1770, the same year as Beethoven) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
In an introductory “Advertisement,” William Wordsworth warned that readers “will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness” but the poems contain “a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . “And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.”
— William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” 1798