♫ So, the da capo of the scherzo is, some light embellishment aside, a literal return, and so we’ll skip past it – I don’t want to exhaust you with this scherzo, given the enormity of what’s coming. Now, as you’ll remember, the close of the scherzo wasn’t very conclusive the first time around, and it isn’t any more so when it returns. ♫ And so, I think the listener does have the expectation of some kind of coda. But the coda we get is certainly not the coda we expected – whatever that might have been – and, in fact, it takes the movement in an entirely new direction, fundamentally changing its meaning. ♫ There it is: a direct, unembellished conflict between B flat and B. ♫ This movement had, until now, been blessedly free of that particular conflict, but here it is not just an element, but really the entire content of the music. And from that point on, it only grows more extreme. ♫ Now, the last b flats I played, ♫ are in fact spelled a sharp, not b flat. I don’t want to get into the weeds of this technical matter, but really what this notation means is that we are moving decisively out of the key of B flat Major, and into b major or b minor. ♫ It seems that in this particular battle between B flat and B, the b has been the improbable winner – improbable because the entire movement, prior to this coda, has been in a stable b flat major, without a single appearance of b major or minor! The b is the winner of the battle, but not the war. ♫ With this bonkers passage – at least as bonkers as the passage that preceded the return of the scherzo – B flat wrestles B to the ground and reasserts its supremacy. I think this passage is pretty much perfectly poised between mock fury and the real deal. The absurdism in it is pretty much undeniable, but so too is the genuine drama in the conflict between those two notes. In this way, the coda respects both the comic aspect of the scherzo, and the dialed-up-to-eleven intensity of the sonata as a whole. And with that, the movement just disappears. ♫ Just like that, the movement is in the past, gone. This last phrase, and the War of Bs that precedes it, shroud the ending of the scherzo in uncertainty. This final series of phrases adds layers of complex meaning to the scherzo that did not exist just moments earlier, and in the process sets the scene for the astonishing music that lies ahead.