Review Summary: Overshadowed yet Brilliant.
In late January 2011, after what must have been an utterly painstaking and fastidious two-week process, the chief music critic for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, published an article in which he revealed the top ten classical composers of all time. Admittedly an “absurd” task, Tommasini was drawn to the project as an intriguing mix between the year-end impulse to categorize, think of all the ‘Top ___ of 20__’ lists that swirl around social media around New Year’s, and by a Stuyvestant High School senior curious about why different musical tastes exist.
After J.S. Bach claimed the number one spot, Tommasini hit a wall. How should slots two and three be ordered.. Mozart and Beethoven, or Beethoven and Mozart.. Between the two of them, their outputs in instrumental music rival each other in a quite lovely manner. Yet, Mozart had an unparalleled career as an opera composer. Beethoven on the other hand, whose sole opera, Fidelio, was often ridiculed as tragically dense and quixotic, could never hope to achieve the same clout as a master musical librettist. For all intents and purposes, then, Mozart should obviously claim the higher slot. Yet, Tommasini awarded Beethoven as his number two.
After attending a Harvard Chamber Orchestra concert in the early 1980s, which featured works by the 1950s Neo-Classicist Walter Piston, the late 19th and early 20th century impressionist Claude Debussy, and Herr Ludwig van Beethoven himself, Tommasini was completely awestruck, “the Beethoven sounded like the most radical work in the program by far: unfathomable and amazing.” Thus, Beethoven claimed the no. 2 spot.
I reference all of this in order to lend clarity to Beethoven’s not widely known Sonata No.22 in F Major, Op. 54. Working against its favor is the fact that No. 22 is sandwiched in between the equally titanic, “Waldstein” and “Appassionata”. Only comprised of two movements, both the form and sonorities of No. 22, rival those giants in profundity. Movement one, for example, is not in sonata form, but in ABABA. Not to mention the uplifting sonorities of the A theme, Beethoven composed the first theme as a neatly bookended unit, no frills, no unresolved tension, and no need to look forward. The melody ventures no further from home than the front yard; each of its phrases are of the simplest harmonic progressions, and all end in the tonic.
Quite different in character, theme two looks back towards the days when polyphony plus counterpoint, rather than harmony plus melody, enjoyed preeminence in the music of Europe; theme two is basically a two-line melody underlined almost solely with octaves for emphasis. Yet, the polyphony of Op. 52 yields different results than the polyphony of Bach. Predating the miniatures of Brahms and Chopin by decades, satisfyingly complete, theme two ultimately is a mini character piece. Each line is a series of fast, non-stop, fortissimo, staccato triplets in 3/4. Buoyant and bouncing, theme two is reminiscent of a sinking balloon a child continuously volleyball sets back into the air until it ultimately settles softly back on the ground.
Back home, the repetition of theme A comes off as just that, repetition. Like the theme and variation form of the second movement of the “Appassionata”, aside from some light decoration, we have barely any development typical of sonata form. The same goes for the second iteration of the B theme. The only discernible difference is that now theme B is about one third of the original length. Back to the final iteration of the A theme, we have more florid decoration and some allusions to the buoyancy of the B theme, such as in the syncopation in measure 115, and the triplets that close out the piece from measures 137–149. In those same measures, we get the only drama written into the movement; an ostinato bass in triplets underlies the two beat cubes of the melody which ultimately swells into a shockingly fierce pounding of the diminished chord and then soothingly resolves back to the tonic that satisfyingly closes out the movement.
If the first movement is unique, the second is groundbreaking. Set in sonata form, this movement is unprecedented in two ways. First, is the nature of the movement, it is composed of a single theme. Even the most radical of sonatas were composed of at least two. Second, is the nature of the theme itself. The main line is a literally non-stop 16th note pattern that does not relent for even a single second. The movement begins with a series of F Major arpeggios that climb from left to right hand in four measures, and with each subsequent iteration the melody ascends and descends into the repeat. In the development, using the exact same thematic material, Beethoven introduces a number of increasingly distant modulations that ultimately introduces a syncopated single note motif too small to qualify as a bonafide theme. Further still is the introduction of what might be called the B theme, chromatic descending 8th notes neatly placed at the end of the relentless arpeggios. This material, however, is simply too diminutive to qualify as a theme. We are teased with a recapitulation when theme A returns in the tonic. However, the “B theme” quickly interrupts with a series of relentless modulations. Finally, Beethoven takes us to the coda which incorporates both theme A and the smaller motif working vigorously to a final fortissimo F Major.
Of Op. 54, famed musicologist Donald Tovey characterized Beethoven’s 22nd as childlike, or even-dog like. Tovey writes, “those who best understand children and dogs have the best chance of enjoying an adequate reading of this music; laughing with, but not at its animal spirits; [enjoying] its indefatigable pursuit of its game whether that be its own tail or something more remote and elusive.” Tovey speaks to what struck Tommasini that evening at the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. The nature of Op. 54 is so primal and so instinctive that its music fuses you with your primordial ancestors. There is little else I can think of, even for Beethoven, that possess the power to do the same.
