♫ So, I’m going to go ahead and gloss over the recapitulation – the fact of the second theme being in the mediant the first time around does force Beethoven to go through some machinations to get it back on the tonic, but honestly, these are really exactly the same machinations he employed to accomplish the same thing in the Waldstein, so there’s no special need to dwell on it here. And like just about everything else in this movement, the machinations are played for laughs. Beethoven finds himself in the wrong key – Beethoven gets annoyed and irascible – Beethoven storms his way back to the tonic. This recapitulation is on message. One important difference between the exposition and the recapitulation is their respective endings. The exposition, remember, ended with Beethoven toggling between minor and major, and landing, highly atypically, on the minor. ♫ In the recapitulation, Beethoven flips the script, and the toggling ultimately lands not on g minor, but on the home key of G Major. ♫ The strange, eleventh-hour move to the minor in the exposition has been avoided in the recapitulation; all is well. Now this is significant, because it renders the coda that follows superfluous. If the recap had ended up in g minor, that would have been, let’s be honest, an impossible way for even this joke-y, thumbing-its-nose-in-the-rulebook to end. ♫ No, if that had somehow happened, a coda would have been a necessity. But winding up where we do, ♫ that could have been that. The fact that Beethoven instead decides to go absolutely hell-for-leather in a coda anyway is in line with the kind of humor he’s been displaying all movement long: it’s totally unnecessary, but stubborn people do all sorts of unnecessary things! In this coda, Beethoven initially dispenses with the stop-start, hands-not-together stuff, and goes directly to the mad, dog-chasing-his-own-tail jumping around the keyboard stuff. ♫ None of this is remotely new – it’s nearly identical to what happened towards the bottom of the first page of the piece – but somehow the fact that this out of control, run-un sentence is now redundant, unnecessary and unmotivated, makes it seem all the more manic. Now I’d like to point out, before getting into the latter part of this coda, that this entire, not so short coda features exactly two chords: V (and, technically, V7) ♫ and I. It’s rare for Beethoven to be this totally harmonically uninteresting. But in this coda, harmonic interest is beside the point. It’s all about amplifying those two types of obsessive, mock-angry music that Beethoven has been fixating on all movement long. First, as we just heard, those calisthenic sixteenths. And then, inevitably, the main preoccupation of the movement: the hands-can’t-get-it-together stuff. We start with one phrase of it, the hands mostly still at odds, with the synchronization between them coming only at the very end, as an afterthought. ♫ Then once again, just slightly varied, but the coordinated part still an afterthought. (PLAY.) And again, in miniature. ♫ And finally, well and truly fed up. ♫ And speaking of afterthoughts. ♫ I realize that I’ve already said this more than once, but there’s no better occasion than in the context of this sonata to repeat it: Beethoven’s sense of humor – sometimes sophisticated, but just as often rough-and-tumble – is an essential part of his musical profile. It is just as much a part of him as is his loftiness. This first movement of op. 31 no. 1 is really nothing more than a seven minute essay in poor coordination. It’s a joke that few – composers or comedians – would dare stretch that far, but in Beethoven’s ultra-resourceful hands, it never overstays its welcome.
