♫ So that’s the exposition. The development takes the movement’s main joke to a whole new madcap level. In the first phrase, one more set of disconnected hand gestures in piano leads to a set of outraged ones in forte. ♫ And then a second set of piano ones leads to a MUCH longer set of forte ones. ♫ Really, Beethoven is just screaming at us at this point, and there can be no question that the frustration is humorous – a show. We know what Beethoven’s real frustration, his intensity, sounds like – we’ve experienced them, hundreds of times. This is a game. As is the continuation. What we just heard was the hand stuttering, kicked up a notch; this now is the run-on sentence, squared, at least. ♫ So, that…passage… is not quite like the one near the beginning of the piece, because that one had no destination – it just kept going back and forth, tonic and dominant, until it exhausted itself. This time, it first goes through a very development-like series of modulations, ♫ before finally landing on the dominant. ♫ And even that doesn’t slow Beethoven down – in the mood for calisthenics, he goes for a couple more sprints up and down the piano, all outlining the dominant. ♫ All in all, this chain of sixteenth notes is absurdly long, taking the obsessive quality the chain of sixteenths in the exposition suggested and running with it. This leads to yet another passage expounding on joke number one – the running sixteenths being joke number two in this movement. This time, the sense of conflict created by the separation of the hands is given a new layer: the hands are no longer just rhythmically out of sync, but by the end of this passage, a harmonic and motivic clash between them has been introduced as well. ♫ The right hand, still always a sixteenth note early – it's consistently gimpy – keeps playing the dominant D, over and over again. But the left hand arpeggios, while mostly on that same dominant chord, they wind up on an e flat. ♫ So on top of the usual rhythmic clash, there is now also the gnash of the conflicting half step. ♫ It makes this moment in the piece – while still humorous – genuinely intense. (That might seem an unlikely combination, and I’d agree – not many composers could pull it off. It’s also a bit of foreshadowing of the slow movement, which manages, improbably, to be both a parody of an Italian opera and a representation of the real thing, simultaneously. But we’ll get there.) At any rate, in this slightly sinister battle between E flat and D, the d ultimately, inevitably gets the last word. ♫ This is again, just like in the Waldstein. It’s one thing to replace the dominant with the mediant in the exposition, for the second theme. But if you’re going to have a recap, you’ve got to have a V-I cadence. ♫ And so it is here: we need to land on the D, so that we can REALLY land on the G. ♫ I find this hilarious: the return brings the theme, which was initially soft and scurrying, into a triumphant forte – and the hands are STILL off-kilter! ♫ Beethoven is really just cracking himself up, here.
