(MUSIC) I won’t spend too much time on this recapitulation, because generally speaking, it's really very similar to the exposition. There are just a couple of items worth pointing out. As I’ve so often mentioned, the recapitulation of a sonata movement needs to differ from the exposition, so that the second theme can be restored to the home key. This does ultimately take place in the Waldstein, but first Beethoven feeds us a gigantic red herring. This, from the exposition... (MUSIC), becomes this (MUSIC). The drama of that strange, out-of-left-field A flat, combined with the fact that it has a fermata, stopping the accumulated momentum cold, makes us think that this surely is it, this is The Moment everything changes. But…no. (MUSIC) Within seconds, he’s taken us back to exactly where we were in the exposition – this was nothing more than a detour of several seconds. That’s such a wonderful feature of Beethoven. Even in a work of such high intensity, mystery and anxiety, he makes time to wink at his audience. He creates this surprise, this moment of high drama, and then moments later says, actually, never mind. As you were. It has nothing to do with moving the second theme back to C major, and thus has nothing to do with the structure or narrative arc of the piece. Of course, Beethoven does eventually need an event which moves forward the narrative arc of the piece, which takes this theme (MUSIC) out of its E major idyll and back into C major. And because that E major – the mediant, as you may have heard me mention by now – is so much more distant from C major than the standard G major dominant would be, getting this theme into our home key requires a bit of fancy footwork on Beethoven’s part. As a reminder, this is how the theme was approached in the exposition. (MUSIC) And now, here is how the narrative shifts in the recapitulation. (MUSIC) So, when we do reach the theme, it is this time indeed in a new key, but it’s still NOT C major, but rather A major. (MUSIC) Now, there is a certain airtight logic to this. In a normal sonata movement, moving the second theme from the dominant to the tonic involves a move down a fifth. To wit, from opus 2 no. 3 (MUSIC) becomes (MUSIC) Now, in moving this second theme from E major to A major – the submediant, but really, don’t trouble yourself too much about that – we’ve traveled down precisely the same fifth. (MUSIC) Unfortunately, given that we started somewhere out of the ordinary, having traveled down that standard fifth, we are still somewhere out of the ordinary: home base has not been reached. Beethoven’s solution to this problem is elegant and affecting. (MUSIC) The theme starts out in the “wrong” place, but with a bit of maneuvering so artfully managed that it doesn’t actually feel like a maneuver at all, it ends up just where it ought to be: in C Major. It was so artful, in fact, that you may have missed it, so let me play the second theme again, but recomposed so that it doesn't modulate, just as it didn’t in the exposition. (MUSIC) And now, again, the real version. (MUSIC) It’s really quite touching. The arrival of the second theme in the tonic is always a moment of “homecoming” in a sonata form, but it is triply so, here. First of all, because its tonality was so unusually distant when it first appeared. Secondly, because it never featured in the development, so we’ve been through many eventful minutes of music since we last heard it. And finally, because we don’t LAND on it in its home base key in the recapitulation: we start out still searching for C Major, and find it only at the last possible movement. So when that C Major arrives (MUSIC), that's probably the first moment in the entire piece where we feel able to exhale fully. And fittingly, once we do, Beethoven doesn’t abuse our trust any further: the recapitulation springs no further surprises, no more red herrings. It remains steadfastly in C Major, and proceeds to its jubilant conclusion in a way that is – perhaps for the first time in the piece – unambiguous both in terms of character and tonality.
