Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17 is the second of the three Opus 31 piano sonatas. Being the middle child in a minor key means that it has the job of exploring the more tragic and gloomier aspects of human experience in contrast to the sunnier outlooks of its two siblings.
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17 is nicknamed “The Tempest” because Anton Schindler wrote that Beethoven advised him to “Read Shakespeare’s Tempest” to understand the composition. But Beethoven scholars have learned not to trust Anton Schindler’s stories, and while there are certainly some tempestuous passages in the first movement of the sonata, Shakespeare’s “Tempest” is not about a storm.
It is the first movement of the Piano Sonata No. 17 that has generated the most commentary and controversy. Uncertainty pervades the opening: Although the movement is definitely in D minor, the first thing you hear is an A major arpeggio. The movement begins with a tempo of Largo for 1¾ measures, then Allegro for 3¼ measures, Adagio for 1 measure, and Largo for another 1¾ measures before settling into Allegro but not, of course, for the entire remainder of the movement. The theme is elusive.
#Beethoven250 Day 156
Piano Sonata No. 17 “Tempest” in D Minor (Opus 31, No. 2), 1802
What a great performance by Portuguese-Swiss pianist Maria João Pires! This is apparently in Paris in 2013. (The “Op. 32” in the title is incorrect.)
William Kinderman points out (in “Beethoven” p. 85) that a slow phrase on the unaccompanied right hand near the end of the first movement (7:08 in this video) bears a strong resemblance to the setting of the baritone recitative “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne” in the last movement of the 9th Symphony: “In a sense, Beethoven seized on and exploited this moment of internalization and reflection as embodied in the gesture of recitative in the sonata to provide a gateway to the utopian plane of the Ode to Joy as the basis for the choral finale of the Ninth.”
Carl Dahlhaus on the 1st movement of the Piano Sonata No. 17: “Beethoven does not expect his implied listener to resolve the paradoxes, but to recognize them as the formal idea of the movement. Anyone who feels confused by the sonata should not try to impose on it an unambiguous solution, which would be incorrect by virtue of being imposed; rather, the ambiguity should be perceived as an artistic factor — an attribute of the thing itself, not a failure of analysis. The very contradictions of the form constitute it’s artistic character.” (“Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to his Music,” p. 170)
“For some listeners,” Lewis Lockwood tells us, the 1st movement of the Piano Sonata No. 17 “evokes a Hegelian concept of ‘becoming,’ the emergence of a totality through complex elaborations of statement and counterstatement leading to an eventual synthesis.”
The second movement of the Piano Sonata No. 17 again begins with another arpeggiated chord, but what follows is a beautifully sparse Adagio cavatina that often seems to suspend time. A sunny second theme emerges unexpectedly but is soon hidden by the clouds.
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17 concludes with a perpetuum mobile whirlwind of virtually unrelenting 16th notes that through off-beat accents builds to wonderfully rapturous heights, but concludes in dramatically undramatic quiet.
#Beethoven250 Day 156
Piano Sonata No. 17 “Tempest” in D Minor (Opus 31, No. 2), 1802
Nozomi Nakagiri (@NozomiNakagiri) is wonderful in the International Edward Grieg Piano Competition held in the Grieg Museum in Bergen, Norway.
About the Piano Sonata No. 17, Charles Rosen observes: “All three movements of this sonata end quietly, as do all of the movements of the first sonata of this opus. It is astonishing how often Beethoven, compared to his contemporaries and predecessors, preferred a delicately soft ending to an emphatic final chord. These soft endings, however, are not modest, but more pretentious than the standard closures. They prolong the atmosphere beyond the final chord.” (“Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas,” p. 173)