♫ Having said that, the first movement of this sonata is dominated by one joke, and that’s sort of the point: Beethoven likes his joke so much, he tells it over, and over, and over again. And lest you’re thinking this must be a pretty complex, sophisticated, multi-layered joke, well, it isn’t: the game here is that the two hands just can’t manage to play together. Time and time again – beginning with the literal first two notes of the piece – the right hand anticipates the left (and the downbeat), by one sixteenth note. ♫ First phrase of the piece; it’s happened TEN times already. The fact that the hands are so close to being together – they’re separated by just the one sixteenth note – only makes it sound more wrong. It’s like a string player playing just a little out of tune – missing by a little is sometimes much more jarring to the ear than missing by a mile! The other exacerbating factor is that it’s always the right hand coming before the left, not vice versa. There is actually a long tradition of pianists choosing to play the left hand slightly before the right – I’m talking about instances when they are written to be played together. This is a stylistic choice which goes in and out of vogue, and it’s a habit that some people rather like and others absolutely loathe; certainly it can easily be overdone and become a mannerism. But it has its uses: the piano’s attack is lightning fast, faster than just about any other instrument, separating the hands can help soften the harsh directness of the piano’s sound, and also mask the thinness of the upper register. At any rate, whatever one thinks of it, the left hand before the right is a thing that listeners are used to. Right before left? It just sounds OFF. And here in op. 31 no. 1’s first movement, that’s just the point. So, just in that first phrase, we get the dislocated, anticipatory right hand no fewer than 10 times. Times numbers eight, nine and ten are hammered out in mock outrage – enough is enough already! (PLAY.) And only then, do we get the corrected version. (PLAY.) So typical of this piece; the correct version is very modest – it’s the wrong one that is the screamer. The second phrase, interestingly, moves down a whole step, from G to F – (PLAY) a strange, atypical move in what is otherwise essentially a reiteration of the opening phrase. ♫ What’s REALLY interesting is that this is just what Beethoven does in the first two phrases of the Waldstein – ♫ C down to B flat, in that case. This is a detail – albeit a strange one – and the coincidence would not be worth noting if it were not for the fact that the two sonatas also share a much more significant harmonic oddity, the one I referred to and which I’ll be getting to soon! It suggests that op. 31 no. 1 was on Beethoven’s mind when he wrote the Waldstein, and that therefore the innovations in the earlier sonata, no matter how joke-y they are, matter. Certainly they mattered to him. So, if the opening phrases are defined by their fits and starts – even when the hands finally DO get together, it is for this series of clipped chords, ♫ which never develop, or form proper, uninterrupted phrases – the subsequent phrase not only gets going, it goes absolutely hog wild. ♫ So! We’ve gone from incomplete sentence fragments to a hysterical, unpunctuated run-on sentence, with nothing in between. Just as the stuttering of the opening is a joke, so too is the exaggerated length of this one --- the length, the constant motion, the fact that it keeps on going even though it’s doing nothing more than toggling back and forth between I and V over and over and over again. ♫ I-V-I-V-I-V-I-V-V-V-V-V-V! It’s like that person who keeps talking, and talking, increasingly manically, without having anything of any import to say.
