[music] So, onto the second movement. If this work is a constant back and forth between past and future, this is probably the movement that most leans towards the past. To that end, let me step away from Beethoven for a moment, and play for you the opening of the slow movement of Haydn’s wonderful C major Sonata: [music] And now, with that in your ears, the opening of the Beethoven: [music] Beyond just the shared tonality, F major, they are remarkably similar in character. One thing that strikes me about both movements is that even though the style is very florid and vocal, they both have a devout, even spiritual aspect – that’s a very hard balance to strike. This sort of spirituality becomes ever more apparent in Beethoven’s slow movements as time goes on, and on the evidence of those two examples, it seems clear that this is an aspect of Beethoven’s music which owes much to Haydn. I can’t think of any area of such broad similarity between Mozart and Beethoven. Beethoven will sometimes use a specific work of Mozart as a model: for example, Mozart’s A major Quartet was the source for the Beethoven Quintet Opus 18, Number 5, and Beethoven’s piano/wind quintet is clearly inspired by Mozart’s own piano/wind quintet. But these are cases of Beethoven borrowing a specific idea, a specific structure from Mozart – he never really used him as a model in terms of character or sonority. Even the choice of this movement’s tempo – adagio – betrays the connection to Haydn, as Haydn was far more likely to write adagio slow movements than was Mozart, who favored more flowing andantes and andantinos. Still, I’m not sure “adagio” means quite the same thing to Haydn as it does to Beethoven. The Italian “ad agio” means “at ease,” which does not necessarily mean slow – it could, conceivably, be more an indication of character than an indication of speed. And accordingly, I sometimes think Haydn’s adagios are meant to be calm, to be sure, but also reasonably flowing. For Beethoven, though, it seems clear that “adagio” is properly slow, very distinct from his “andantes” – andante being the Italian for “walking.” Late in life, Beethoven started to occasionally mark his music with his native German, sometimes in addition to the standard Italian, sometimes in its stead. The slow movement of the Sonata Opus 101 is marked “Langsam,” the German for slow; underneath, he writes “Adagio non troppo.” So “Langsam,” slow, equates to “not TOO adagio,” implying that a true adagio is a deeply slow tempo. Still, the adagio marking is yet more evidence that Haydn was a reference point here. However, I don’t think the relationship to Haydn is conscious in this case: it’s simply a matter of a certain constitutional similarity between the two composers. And what I can say for certain is that Beethoven’s slow movement is not specifically inspired by the Haydn slow movement I played the beginning of, however much it may resemble it. I say this with confidence because the theme of Beethoven’s sonata is actually lifted from his own C major Piano Quartet – a work without opus that he wrote a full decade earlier, when he was 14, long before Haydn wrote the C major Piano Sonata. It’s only the first four measures that are the same in the quartet and the sonata, but they are literally identical, except for a bit of window dressing provided by the three string players in the quartet. It’s interesting that Beethoven recognized that the piano quartet was worth revisiting because, forgive me, aside from that beautiful theme, the quartet’s slow movement has little to recommend it. Again, Beethoven is one of the greatest artists of all time, but he was no prodigy, and while at 14 he may have had the germ of a great idea, it is no more than a germ: he doesn’t know how to end the theme, which trails off awkwardly, and the movement altogether is numbingly repetitive. But 10 years later, Beethoven has developed all the skill he needs to incorporate this melodic kernel into a structure that is natural and seamless. It IS a slightly unusual structure, though. Musicologists sometimes say that this movement is in ternary – three-part – form, but I don’t think that’s quite right. To me, it sounds more like a four-part form – ABAB, which is often used for slow movements – but with the intrusion of an unrelated episode between the first A and the first B, which then never returns. [music] This excursion into D minor is significant, because the fact that the slow movement is in F major means that all four movements of this sonata have the same tonality – F, major or minor. Therefore, this brief foray into D minor provides a respite from the F “color” which we experience throughout the piece, more-or-less nonstop. This monochromatic thing is somewhat unusual for Beethoven: Beethoven wrote 13 sonatas with four movements, and this is only one of 4 in which no movement moves away from the home tonality. This is limiting, in a sense, since Beethoven was a great master of creating character through the sonority of a given key – he did this by locating slow movements in remote key areas, and also by inserting passages in surprising keys in the middle of a movement. In case you want to review, I discussed this in the lecture on Opus 7. I think it was Lecture number 2. This, incidentally, is another quality that comes from Haydn, who was much more daring in his choice of keys than Mozart was. Mozart almost invariably sticks to the dominant, subdominant or the relative major for his slow movements. At any rate, because the key is not at all exotic, and therefore not a significant source of character in this slow movement, Beethoven has to draw character from other sources. And this is where the slowness of the music becomes significant: there is no material in the first movement that provided any serenity – everything was driving and restless. The second movement, in total contrast, is all about serenity, and has an almost total absence of drama, which is unusual for Beethoven. Even early in life, Beethoven was deeply attuned to the way the movements of a large-scale work were in dialogue with one another, and the way in which they balanced each other out.
