Now, I wouldn't say that the trio section is suddenly revolutionary, but it is definitely wilder than the scherzo itself. In this way, it presages the last string cortex, in opus is a 127,130, and 135. Whatever has happened in the scherzo, the trio goes absolutely hog wild. I won't attempt to reproduce these trios on the piano as they would sound foolish, but give them a listen. They are wonderfully insane. 135 the insanest of the lot is probably a good place to start. In anyway, here is Opus 110's just slightly less insane trio. It's fairly bonkers, and I find that in texture as well it anticipate those quartets. It's not a quartet texture per say, but the hands are definitely evoking different instruments doing different things. The right-hand plays a darting and at one leaping figure which could be one of those crazy first violin lines. Meanwhile, the left-hand imitates the leap, but otherwise plays a far more measured figure like a cello playing Portal. Most of this trio like the scherzo unfolds with rhythmic regularity with seven of those skittish right hand bars, being answered by the two leaping bars, first right then left. Those bars are very much Beethoven in his belligerent mode which becomes even more the case when those two bars strangely unaccountably swell to five. Each one of those extra bars plays like an angry and slightly irrational person, banging his fist and saying no, no, no. Surprisingly common occurrence for someone who elsewhere wrote the loftiest and most sophisticated music imaginable, again, that's Beethoven. At any rate, this whole brief trio with its frequent outbursts and huge leaps has a kind of spontaneity vitality that feel more original and less formulaic than the scherzo itself. So oddly for a trio with so many bangs, it ends with a whimper, it has no conclusion instead simply petering out. Those four whispered repetitions of the trios first bar just come to a stop at which point the scherzo simply returns. It started as extreme as that wild non modulation in the first movement. In this case, the keys are not nearly so far apart from one another, but it's another instance of Beethoven not bothering with the transition. The trio is suddenly just gone, it was so brief well under a minute long that once it's over and we returned to the far sturdier music of the scherzo, it feels as if it never happened, it is truly evanescent. The scherzo upon its return is almost identical to how it was the first time around save for one little joke. In its final iteration, the opening idea is played with a ritardando. It's true that it was always soft, but now that it's slowing down losing steam, it takes on a new character. It seems far more pensive, unsure, and probably headed somewhere new, but no. It gets answered with the same brusque forte response that came every other time. I think that ritardando is correctly referred to as a red herring. When it comes, you think it's a plot twist, but it is ultimately revealed to be a detail with no significance beyond itself. This movement has a brief one phrase coda which refers to the trio in two oblique waves. First of all, just as the trio made prominent use of offbeats. In this Coda, all of the emphasis, most of the activity really comes on what should be the weak bars, one, two, one, two. That is the end of the piece, if end is even the word. It settles a bit surprisingly and a bit limply into the major, and then disappears into nothingness. The end of the trio and more so the end of the movement are really the only moment of ambiguity in what is otherwise an extremely straight ahead movement. This is the second time in this sonata that a movement finishes in a much more open-ended way than the rest of the movement would lead you to expect. As you'll see, this open-ended ambiguity has extraordinary consequences this time.
