♫ Don’t worry, I promise you. I won’t delve into each of this movement’s 187 bars in this manner! But some bars simply demand it, and that is one of them. Now that we are into the movement – a movement of such deep feeling that it is particularly hard to describe – let me go ahead and play the extended first theme. ♫ Let me try and identify some of the most important features of this theme, this extended lamentation – these features can at least be put into words, in a way that this music’s character just cannot. So, first of all, Beethoven asks for this whole opening theme to be played with the left pedal, the “una corda”, depressed. This movement has more – and more specific – left pedal markings than perhaps any other piece Beethoven wrote for the piano. Pianists are often guilty of seeing the words “una corda” and thinking it simply means “very soft”. In actuality, the left pedal does something much more specific and much more interesting. It shifts the piano’s mechanism so that instead of striking all three of a note’s strings, the hammer merely strikes one of them. This does not necessarily make for a soft sound – one can play loudly with the una corda depressed, or softly without it. What it does – and this was even more pronounced on the pianos of Beethoven’s era – is make the sound thin, stifled, distant. And that is a major contributor to the character of this opening theme. The feeling behind it is profound, intense – and suppressed. In that extraordinary Cavatina from the Quartet op. 130 – I keep coming back to that movement today, it seems – Beethoven uses the marking “beklemmt”, which literally means “stifled”, or “oppressed”. The Cavatina and the slow movement of the Hammerklavier have completely different characters, but still, I think this soft pedal marking is a Beethoven’s way of making the same “beklemmt” request in a slightly different way. And he is very precise with his use of the left pedal throughout the movement – there are moments where he asks the pianist to put it down, or take it off, for just one bar, and there is another instance where he asks the pianist to release it very gradually, so that the sounds develops an extra dimension only bit by bit. But here, at the movement’s outset, for the longest time, EVERYTHING is covered by a veil. On top of being distant, stifled, the other dominant quality of this opening theme is its austerity. In spite of the great depth of feeling, very little happens. It is harmonically stilted, with relatively few chords, and mostly the same few repeated again and again – there is one notable exception to this, which I’ll get to shortly. And the rhythm, too, has a stoic repetitiveness: when there is a variation within the bar, it's unfailingly Long-short, Long-short. The remaining half bars have either three equal notes, or no motion at all. This rhythm has a lulling effect on the listener. Like the harmony, and the use of the soft pedal, it has the effect of making the yearning in this music feel stifled, held back. So there is one more thing I need to discuss before moving on, and – as you may have already guessed – that is the way in which this music makes use of the Hammerklavier’s two main motivic ideas. First of all the thirds – this opening theme is absolutely suffused with them. As I already mentioned, the introductory bar is an unadorned rising third. ♫ And answering that, the first bar of the theme itself is two falling thirds. ♫ I won’t enumerate every single third in this opening section – suffice it to say, there are so many, they seem to be the in the music’s very genetic coding. But it's the presence of the other Hammerklavier’s other motivic idea – the half step – that is ultimately even more significant here. A moment ago, I said that this theme was extremely harmonically stable “for the most part” – that it was, generally speaking, a blanket of f sharp minor. Well, there is one great exception to that rule. ♫ From f sharp, to G. ♫ The appearances of B major and B minor in the midst of the Hammerklavier’s fast B flat major movements tend to herald a new character, a new kind of music. But the tonal – in every sense of the word – shift that takes place here is even more extreme. This G Major music is like a mirage – in the midst of the stoicism, the defeated feeling of this f sharp minor opening, the G Major brings a glimmer of hope. This G Major two bar phrase comes on no less than five occasions throughout this movement, and each time, that hope is extinguished, snuffed out. ♫ No, it cannot last. But this idyllic G Major music’s presence both ties this movement to the rest of the piece (by virtue of its half-step relationship to the movement’s home key) AND makes the return to the tragic reality all the more devastating, each time out. In this opening theme, which is otherwise so consistent in character, those G Major bars are like a dream state, a vision from beyond, before we are yanked back to coldest reality.
