Posts Tagged ‘sonata-allegro’

Mahler, Symphony No. 5, fifth movement

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

This movement has gone, over the last weeks, from being a piece that I’ve long admired to something of an analytic enigma.  Simply put, I am at odds to determine whether this “Rondo-Finale” is best considered as a rondo, a sonata-allegro or a fugue.

First, to the title, if that can be a clue for the analyst.  Does “Rondo-Finale” suggest “rondo-as-finale” or “rondo-then-finale?”  My hearing suggests that there is indeed a rondo here, and that it is followed by a lengthy coda, so that the second possibility seems stronger.  In this case, the coda could perhaps begin in m. 581, at a key change to A-flat major, far-removed from the home key of D major.  The melodic and motivic material is related to the rondo theme (mm. 24-55), but this late harmonic move away from the home key suggests a coda.

The music up to this point is highly suggestive of rondo technique, specifically of five-part rondo with its three statements of the rondo theme with interspersed refrains.  The second refrain (beginning in m. 167, the “C” of “ABACA”) is the longest, and is heavily reliant on developmental techniques, especially exploration of remote key areas and contrapuntal recombination of motivic material.

It is, however, the first refrain (beginning at m. 56, the “B” section) that is most striking.  It suggests a four-part fugal exposition, first with a running eighth-note subject, then with various countersubjects introduced over the eighty bars of this section before the return of the rondo theme.  The second refrain can then be cast as a continuation of the fugue.  At m. 273, the original fugue subject appears in counterpoint with one of the countersubjects.  This countersubject becomes the second subject of a double fugue that dominates much of the rest of the second refrain (development).  Contrapuntal technique abounds, with the inversion of the second subject appearing in the violins at m. 457.

The final entrance of the rondo theme appears in a highly modified form at m. 497, leading not back to the beginning, then, but toward the “finale” section of the movement.

There are also intimations here of sonata-allegro, or at least something along the lines of a hybrid sonata-rondo, as found in another wonderfully contrapuntal work, the finale of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet, Op. 44.  The first rondo and first refrain would correspond to a sonata exposition, the second rondo and second refrain to the development, and the last refrain and “finale” to the recapitulation and coda.

It is a fascinating feature of this movement that it not only is a highly compelling piece of music, but that it also embodies these three formal procedures .

A final issue with this symphony is its harmonic plan.  The home keys of the five movements are, in order, C-sharp minor, A minor, D major, F major and D major.  Mahler uses this narrative tonality in other places.  If Mahler had in mind a major-key finale to a minor-key symphony, in the manner of Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, perhaps he felt that the technical challenges involved in C-sharp major might be too much for his orchestra, given the already stiff demands of the music.  At any rate, it is also simply possible that Mahler is moving away from the single-key concept of a symphony.  The five movements appear appear to be held together from a motivic standpoint, rather than from harmonic consistency, but in a traditional sense, they are no more related than a suite of pieces extracted from an opera or ballet.  It is a testament to Mahler’s compositional technique that the piece feels completely unified without sharing a common key center.

Now on to the Sixth–four large movements, so two weeks each.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 5, first movement

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

What a piece!  Like the last movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, I find it difficult to think analytically about music of such moving emotion.  There are some questions I would love to be able to ask the composer, though.  What sort of funeral march is this?  For such grandiose, powerful music, who could possibly have died?  And then, as a funeral march, is it really effective?  True, there are no moments of levity, and I detect no hint of satire anywhere in the movement, but how can the solemnity of death be reconciled with what is, in a strange way, celebratory music?  Such questions are, of course, primarily aesthetic in nature, and I can’t answer them without living in Mahler’s time, and perhaps in Mahler’s life.  Throughout my study of Mahler’s music, I have striven to examine the music for its compositional attributes, and taken the music at face value, but such music as this cannot help but raise serious extra-musical questions.  I’ve been reading David Huron’s book Sweet Anticipation, in which he gives a valuable sentiment.  To paraphrase:  “Even if we are one day able to understand music, it will never cease to be beautiful.”

How many times did I hear this opening trumpet solo through practice room walls as an undergraduate?  My trombone teacher, Tony Chipurn, used to joke about the first round of trumpet auditions for the Cincinnati Symphony:  “ta-ta-ta–taaa,” “Thank you!”  But this music is no joke, not for even a moment, and this trumpet solo announces the key, the mood, the meter and the basic rhythm of the composition, all with just a few notes.  Those first four notes are that important, and a fine performance gives them direction.  It must not only state the notes, but provide the impetus for the rest of the symphony. 

No sooner has the key been established than the rest of the brass and the strings come in with a contrasting harmony.  The trumpet has named the key as c-sharp minor, but the enormous chord in measure 13 is A major, opening the world of this music up.  The double-dotted rhythms in the trumpet are, again, crucial to the expression, and Mahler makes persistent use of dotted and double-dotted rhythms throughout this movement; it is these rhythms that give this funeral march its character, whether as the trumpet’s double-dotted solo rhythms, the strings’ later use of dotted-quarter plus eighth-note rhythms to present both primary and secondary melodic material or the underlying martial rhythm, seen for example in measures 14-16 in the strings and winds.

The dotted rhythm introduces the primary march theme at the anacrusis to m. 35.  This melody is introduced by violins and celli in unison–in a relatively weak register for the violins, but in a more lyrical register for the celli.  In m. 43, the theme is developed, with the second violins, and then the violas, joining the first violins.

At m. 61, the original trumpet solo returns, at the original pitch, but harmonized instead in the key of F-sharp minor, and harmonized instead of alone.  Instead of the parallel chord of D major, as would be expected from the opening passage, the goal of this passage is the tonic chord of the movement, C-sharp minor.  This allows a return of the first-theme material at measure 89, now harmonized by a countermelody based on the same dotted-rhythm material as nearly every other utterance in the symphony so far.

Mahler is nothing if not consistent.  After a modulatory passage that brings the music to Ab major, the dominant, a secondary theme enters at m. 121.   Based on the dotted-rhythm motive of the primary theme, this presentation in thirds is highly reminiscent of material from the third movement of the First Symphony, the contrasting theme of that funeral march.  How funeral-march-like is this piece after all?  Much of the resemblance and mood breaks down in this section, which leads into a developmental section, introduced by the trumpet solo material.

This development section, beginning in earnest at m. 155, is centered around a rhythmic motive that is a transformation of the dotted-note motive that formed the core of the melodic material up to this point.  This consists of a half-note tied to the first-note of a quarter-note triplet, followed by the other two notes of that triplet.   This cell is the basis of nearly every important melodic motive for the next hundred bars.

At measure 233, the trumpet solo returns, bringing back the material from the exposition.  Measure 278ff has a fascinating melodic treatment–beginning in solo trumpet and solo viola, and over the next few bars, adding instruments to become a near-tutti texture in bar 286, at which point, the texture thins to solo clarinet, oboe and flute.  As expected in a classic sonata-allegro, the second theme now returns in the tonic key (m. 295).  In teaching third-year Analysis, I emphasize the importance of understanding the modifications composers make to their transitions to reconcile the two competing key areas.  Here, Mahler significantly shortens the transition to allow the secondary theme to reappear in the tonic key rather than moving to the dominant.  The music is in D-flat major, an enharmonic spelling of the parallel major that allows the second theme to remain in its original mode.

In measure 316, the timpani enter with a reminder of the opening trumpet solo, moving to a secondary developmental section, placed interestingly late in the game, almost 4/5 of the way through the movement.  In this A-minor section, the dotted-note motive of the exposition and the triplet figure of the development are combined in a sequential passage that leads to a final climactic chord at m. 369.  At this point, the music now must descend from E-major, the dominant of this second development section, to G-sharp major, the dominant of the piece.  It reaches its goal not through functional phrasing, but through a typically Mahlerian chromatic descent, with a deceptive goal at m. 393, when coloristic chords seem to imply another move away from C-sharp, but land on F-sharp, explaining to the ear that this has all been coda material.  Mahler has placed developmental material in the coda, following in the footsteps of Beethoven. 

The coda itself is given a coda, featuring the return of the solo trumpet material from the opening.  Instead of the entire melody, we are merely reminded of it.  The movement ends with a flute flourish–a rare moment highlighting this instrument among the Mahler symphonies so far–followed by a menacing pizzicato in the low strings.

Where does this movement fall in relation to the opening movements of the four previous symphonies?  The First Symphony began with what seemed like the beginning of the world ex nihilo.  The Second has its own funeral march.  The Third Symphony’s enormous opening movement (“Part One”) dwarfs the rest of the piece, despite Mahler’s best efforts.  The Fourth Symphony opens with music that is tautly related to the rest of the piece.  But here, in the Fifth Symphony, is music that draws in the listener to the point that it simply doesn’t feel as long as its fifteen-minute duration.  This is, afterall, the goal of any composer– the suspension or at least the reordering of time.  A great composition, like a great movie, feels like an otherworldly experience while keeping the audience’s attention.  In this movement, Mahler has done this successfully.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 2, First Movement

Monday, September 14th, 2009

To the next piece, then.

In some ways, the Second feels much more like Mahler than the First–a focus more on motive than on theme, on counterpoint over homophony.  As well as Mahler seems to have opened up a world in the “Titan,” in “Resurrection,” we begin in that world, as though we have lived there all along.  Where the First grew slowly out of stillness, the Second begins on the dominant pitch as well, but begins with an agitated, urgent feeling–brought on by tremolo in the strings instead of harmonics.  Instead of the gently half-floating, half-falling fourths-based line in long notes, we here get an ascending, scale based line in short note values that propels us forward into the first movement.  We are in the thick of the piece before we realize it. 

This outburst in the low strings has something in common with much of the material of the movement–it acts like many a Bach fugal subject in that it outlines an octave which will later be filled by the voice in which it appears.   Again, as in Bach, the motive undergoes a type of fortspinnung, or spinning-out.  In general, a very different treatment than much of the material in the First symphony.

Beginning in bar 18, the woodwinds enter with another octave-filling melody, this also exposing the half-plus-dotted-quarter-plus-eighth rhythm that dominates much of the melodic material of the movement. 

At the first climax of the movement, bar 38-41, we see the third crucial motive of this movement, a contrapuntal device, if such can be a motive.  Two scales are placed in contrary motion.  To any student of tonal theory or 16th-century counterpoint, this compositional device may seem completely obvious–or simply correct writing–but compared to the language of the First Symphony, Mahler’s emphasis on scalar contrary motion is a defining characteristic.  The extensive use of pedal point in the earlier work is replaced here generally by a greater contrapuntal awareness and specifically by this device.

Rehearsal 3 has the music in B major, by direct modulation, with yet another octave-filling melody.  I have been pressuring myself to be more sparing–nay, frugal–with motivic and thematic material, where Mahler seems profligate in his introduction of new themes.  However, they are often at least partly related to each other, and, additionally, to craft a movement lasting nearly half an hour (in my Bernstein-NY Phil recording), much raw material is required. 

With the material exposed, at rehearsal 4, we have a return to the opening of the piece, but, curiously, without the very first C-B-C-D-Eb.  Rather, we hear the second “lick,” following which Mahler gets more quickly to business.  The end of a group of themes, then, now followed by a transition?  Or the repeat of an “exposition?”  A major question, since I am teaching Forms and Analysis this semester, is how well, if at all, Mahler conforms to the classical forms, sonata-allegro, in particular.  I have long felt that sonata-allegro form is but one way to achieve  the exposition-development-recapitulation plan of a musical composition; for the untrained listener, the satisfaction lies less in the return of the tonic than in the restatement of the beginning in some way; a melodic affirmation that the piece has come full circle.

At m. 97, the basses give an ostinato motive that bears striking resemblance to a similar moment in the First (the first movement).  While that melody had a rising contour, this one falls.  Mahler characterized this movement as being a funeral march for the hero of the “Titan,” and here is a very specific link between the two. 

A few measures earlier is the motive of the scales by contrary motion, appearing here in a transitional passage, but more often used in the run-up to a climactic moment.  The hero descends to the grave, and ascends to heaven simultaneously.  As Oscar Hammerstein wrote, “passions that thrill…are the passions that kill.”  Schopenauer, Wagner, Mahler, and fifty years later, Broadway.

Rehearsal 8, measure 129, gives a subsidiary motive, again filling an octave, but, rarely for this piece, from the top down instead of from the bottom up.   It feels a borrowing from Wagner’s Ring.  It creates a particularly Wagnerian moment later in the piece (before rehearsal 23, in a “recapitultion” or coda–I’m not sure which). 

The first (and only) time I heard this piece in concert, I was startled by Mahler’s use of doubled English horn and bass clarinet (m. 151ff), and have since stolen that scoring in my own piece for orchestra, Five Rhythmic Etudes.  What I did not remember is the return of the same material for trumpet and trombone, (mm. 262ff).  Again, one is struck by repetition.  A few years later, Schoenberg would attempt to banish repetition from his work, and we have been living to an extent under this stricture ever since (his one-act opera Erwartung contains almost no motivic repetition in more than forty-five minutes of music).  Is a large-scale work such as this dependent on repetition to be successful?  It is everywhere–on the beat level, the measure level, the phrase level and the sectional level, both exact and varied.

On a related matter, I’m fascinated by Mahler’s “preview technique.”  In the First Symphony, a large swath of the first movement reappears in the finale.  I’m fairly sure that the first movement is not previewing the last movement.  But in m. 270 of the present movement, the horns give a chorale melody that reappears nearly half an hour later in the finale.  It leads here to one of the very characteristic (in both rhythm and melody) themes of the first movement, where in the finale, it leads to the key melody of that movement.  This is not simply a compositional technique–mark that there is none of the craft here of a Bach contrapunctus–but rather a psychological device and a feeling of having been given a taste of things to come, a look into the ultimate direction of the piece, and since the subject of the first movement is death, and the subject of the last is, unabashedly, resurrection, we are here meant to understand that even in death there is life.

Measure 329 sees a final eruption of the opening material–more fully-scored, more determined than ever.  This leads to what feels like a recapitulation, and the major-key theme–first heard at rehearsal 3 in E major, now in A major (the key relation hearkens to sonata-allegro)–almost evaporates into the end of the movement.   Beginning in measure 384, Mahler introduces a shifting major-minor feeling that brings to mind the key motive of the Sixth Symphony–the instrumental piece most associated with death in Mahler’s catalog.  The piece could have ended with a whimper on a major note, but this rocking back and forth allows the funeral march to fade into the distance.  Are we left standing at the hero’s grave?  The music unravels amid reminders of the material it was made of, last tastes of the world we knew.

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Opus 111

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Here it is… the last one. 

Two big, beefy substantial movements.  Lutoslawski justified writing one-movement symphonies by saying that Brahms’ and Beethovens’ symphonies tended toward two big-idea statements per piece, presumably the first and last movements, although it is often possible that Beethoven is trying for three or four (perhaps in the Eroica).  It would be impossible to accuse Beethoven of overreaching his grasp in this case.  The two movements are well-balanced–a muscular, decisive sonata-allegro paired with an expansive set of variations. 

First things first–the proportions of the first movement are not especially large or striking–in my (G.Schirmer) edition, the development section scarcely lasts a page.  Once again, Beethoven is not the composer of long, overwhelming development sections the way we were all taught.  A glance at the score suggests that the proportional model for sonata-allegro is largely intact.   Why do we teach undergraduates that Beethoven’s development sections are overgrown?  My experience with the piano sonatas suggests that they are not.  On the other hand, motivic development technique often appears in unexpected places–codas, transitional sections, and within themes–places that in Haydn or Mozart would be simple or sequential repetition in Beethoven are more fully ornamented.  An example is the second theme of this movement.

I have to admire Beethoven’s approach to the start of the Allegro con brio.  It is almost as though it takes three (or more) attempts to get the theme going, and the full theme doesn’t appear until after a fairly extended attempt.   There is wonderful invertible counterpoint in the transitional thematic area, and the ubiquitous fugato in the development.  Beethoven struggled in his counterpoint lessons with Albrechtsberger, but they seem to have paid off in the end, as his command of these devices is perfect.  I taught 16th-century counterpoint last semester, and we didn’t make it to invertible counterpoint.  I think that the next time around, I will take the option in our textbook (Peter Schubert’s Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style) to introduce it from the beginning, because of its power as a developmental tool in any style.

Stylistically, I’m a bit at odds with this movement–it doesn’t reek of Beethoven’s “late” style in the way that other pieces do.  Admittedly, I haven’t read up on current musicological ideas about this piece, but it seems as though it would fit fairly well with the Waldstein, and lacks the scope of Hammerklavier.  Note–this in no way detracts from my astonishment with this piece and my awe at its compositional greatness.

The theme and variations is masterful as well, despite some very interesting notational choices.  The tone called for by the first few notes is wonderfully dark and rich.  Finally, Beethoven has stopped writing full triads in the bass staff, an activity I am constantly telling my students to avoid.  The more open chord positions he chooses in the theme are dark but not muddy.  Has this composer finally come to terms with the more resonant instruments that were starting to become available to him?  What does it mean that, despite his deafness, he was able to figure this out?  More importantly, what does it tell the contemporary composer who must assimilate much greater and more frequent changes in technology that Beethoven could have imagined?

There is a wonderful sort of rhythmic accelerando amongst these variations.  The theme gives a basic compound-triple approach with homophonic chords.   Variation 1 now has an event on every division of the beat, and events are happening (roughly) two to three times as often.  Variation 2 is simply not in the correct meter.  6/16 implies two beats to the measure, and there are clearly three.  3/8 would make sense, if it weren’t for the marked metric modulation (eighth=dotted eighth) and/or the alternating 16th-32nd-note pattern that makes up the highest rhythmic level (highest in the Schenkerian sense of “most-complex”).  What appear as accompanying 16ths or eighths should be dotted notes… or the alternating 16th-32nd patterns should be under sextuplets… or the patterns should be dotted-32nd-64th!  What a mess!  I can only assume that in later editions to which I don’t have access, some wise editor has made a decision that clears this up.  On my reference recording, Ashkenazy plays the first and second options, at least to my ear.  The editors of my edition, Hans von Bulow and Sigmund Lebert chose to only comment on the situation rather than rectify it.

In variation 3 is another meter signature that would make my students cringe–12/32, again, not reflective of the triple-meter feel of the music.  What a mess, but the musical intent is clear enough.  The final four measures of this variation are wonderful.

In my own work, I need to accomplish what Beethoven does in the fourth and fifth variations–that is, build larger sections of single textures.  I feel like I accomplished this in several recent pieces, notably in South Africa.  It is, again, the old adage I’ve often told myself of letting the music breathe.  I have great admiration for my friend David Morneau and his cultivation of the miniature, especially in his project 60×365, but I feel that I need to cultivate a different approach.  Yes, brevity is the soul of wit, but our world is deprived of the long view, the long term and patience to understand them.  Film may be our best hope–I know so few people who really listen to music, but nearly all Americans shell out for multi-hour long movies.  All the same, music that is longer than three minutes and that doesn’t make its meaning purely through language is, I am discovering now more than ever, my big project for the time being.  As a composer, I need to be able to write a single movement that lasts 20 minutes while still saying something.  I don’t know where the commission, or even the performers will come from for this, because for the time being I’m not in the class of composers who get that type of work.  When I entered graduate school in 2004, I was writing movements of one-to-two minutes’ length on a regular basis, and a five-minute one-movement instrumental piece was a stretch.  I discovered the tactic of creating larger pieces by writing transitions–my Martian Dances is a fantastic example of this, and my Homo sapiens trombonensis has a fantastia-like form that is exciting, but lacks rigor and cohesiveness.  Nothing ever comes back.  I learned how to let a piece breathe and expand to its true length rather than simply become a rush of ideas.  Beethoven’s sonatas–indeed, the sonata principle–require that I build on this even more.  I need, simply, the right commission now, because a twenty-minute unaccompanied trombone piece just doesn’t seem like a good idea.  A string quartet, or a piano sonata.  My latest completed piece, my Piano Trio that I just shipped off to its commissioner, runs almost ten minutes in a single movement.  I’m getting there… I’m getting there.

I began my journey through Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in November 2006 as a way to start a project that looked beyong the end of my graduate work, and I feel that I have done myself a great service–so much so that July 2009 marks the beginning of a new project on the Mahler symphonies.  I kicked around some different possibilities–Bach, Chopin, a single large work like the St. Matthew Passion or a Mozart opera, but it seems that Mahler is calling to me the most, so it will be half of a Mahler symphony each month until the end of 2010 (yes, I may decide to include other Mahler such as the 10th symphony or Das Lied von der Erde, but I’ll think about that later).   Please feel free to join me on that trip.

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Opus 110

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Here’s the May 2009 installment of my series of posts on the Beethoven Piano Sonatas.  This month is Sonata No. 31 in A-flat, Op. 110–next month will be the last month in the cycle, which means I will need a new analysis project–let me know if you want to start one with me and dialog on the compositional aspects of pieces from the standard repertoire.  I could, of course, spend another few years going back over the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, but there is so much great music out there that I’ve never even touched, that I feel like it would be better for me to move on.  So… I haven’t decided on my next project yet, but I do have some ideas… if one or more people were interested in working through some pieces with me, I would let them have some input in the decision.  I’ve considered the Mahler symphonies, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Beethoven’s string quartets, Chopin’s Preludes… let me know what you think!

On to the piece:  A study in contrast this one, and highly indicative of the “official” traits of Beethoven’s late style as it has been taught to me.  I’ll dive right in.

The first movement, if not in textbook sonata form, at least seems to reference it.  I’m not Donald Tovey, who looked for sonata form in every piece he ever analyzed (the last movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet is a Rondo with sonata aspects, not a straight sonata-allegro), but it seems reasonable to assert that Beethoven is working with thematic groups and a strong sense of motivic unity.  His use of core technique is somewhat fascinating, as it is built on a descending thirds sequence instead of the usual stepwise sequence.  I’m puzzled by the modulation to E major in what corresponds to the recapitulation.  This isn’t Beethoven opening up a window to another tonal world but rather knocking out a wall–a very unexpected place, although it makes sense that something different needs to happen where the exposition modulated to E-flat (the modulatory technique to E is an enharmonic respelling of a borrowed chord… IV becomes iv, which is vi in the new key; Beethoven gets out of that key by a fascinating use of common-tone technique and sequence).

To understand Beethoven’s use of sequence is often to gain understanding of his medium-scale structure (and in some cases, large scale, as in the “Spring” Sonata).  In Las Cruces last week, I spoke with Fred Bugbee about NMSU’s music theory track, and eventually the conversation came around to sequences.  One reason I’ve decided to part company with my current theory textbook, Kotska & Payne’s Tonal Harmony is that their treatment of sequences simply lacks body.  The new generation of theory textbooks is much more realistic about the use of sequence in tonal music, and, truthfully, it was teaching from Clendinning & Marvin’s The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis that really got across how important sequence is.  My study of Beethoven has only reinforced that.

The second movement, Allegro molto is diminutive in proportion, but as will all Beethoven’s scherzi, I am amazed at the sheer craft involved.  Every time I make the mistake of listening to a Classical or Romantic scherzo as merely a light, intermezzo sort of movement, I tend to realize that I’m not doing it justice.  With some composers, it’s an easier mistake to make than with others.  Much of Mendelssohn’s genius seems to lie in his scherzi, for example, while Dvorak has a tendency to revert to folk dances.  Nearly every time I look closely at a scherzo, however, I see a level of compositional craft that equals the outer movements.  It is as though composers were freed from the strictures of sonata-allegro or rondo (although most rondos have wonderfully original moments) and could pull out the tricks they worked on as students–canon, invertible counterpoint, rhythmic surprises, and the works.  What fun!  Beethoven doesn’t use contrapuntal tricks, but in this tiny scherzo, he gives us the most rhythmically ingenious and formally cogent plan of the piece.  Why should this tiny movement have a coda when the first movement has none?  I suspect it is more necessary here because we have heard the A-section twice, and the listener needs to have a fuller sense of closure than a simple cadence.

I could puzzle over the last movement for quite some time.  Here is Beethoven’s late-style interest in counterpoint (the fugue, complete with a second exposition in inversion), side-by-side with harmonic innovation (a common-tone diminished-seventh chord with a modulating function), and a confusion about rhythm and key signatures that simply doesn’t make sense at this point.  To wit:  for much of the piece, the key is A-flat minor, at least until the start of the fugue, but the expected seven-flat key signature never appears.  Instead, the movement begins in B-flat minor, shifts to E major and then is written in E-flat minor.  Are these key signatures simply flags of convenience?  At the same time, Beethoven indicates “Recitative,” and breaks out of the signified meter (common time).  How free is this meter?  And how, precisely, is the performer to understand the subsequent barlines?  The “Klagender Gesang” in 12/16 meter is another puzzling aspect–it is almost as though Beethoven is writing a fantasia, a written-out improvisation, at the end of which he launches into the fantastic three-voice fugue. 

Then this full-bodied G minor and G major review of earlier material–the “Klagender Gesang” in G-minor paralleling the A-flat minor section and the fugue (in inversion) in G-major (although we get only an exposition and a long episode).  At last, the retuirn (recapitulation?) of the fugue subject in the original key–part recapitulation, part coda, really. 

One more Beethoven sonata–I look forward to Ludwig’s valedictory effort in the genre.

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