Beethoven in the Dark Night of the Soul

I knew that they were there, and I knew that everybody said they’re a majestic, a towering, a titanic achievement—but isn’t that a little off-putting? Besides, I’m really not much into piano music—I really prefer string chamber music and especially vocal music. So I’ve given the Beethoven piano sonatas a wide berth—which is to say I never listen to them.

Big mistake, because the third movement of the opus 109 sonata below is one of the most beautiful compositions Beethoven ever wrote. And what an astonishing performance!

This is late Beethoven, written at a period when the composer had abandoned all hope of marriage or a family, and after a disastrous affair with his nephew. He had money and fame, but his health was poor, and his hearing was going—if not already gone.

You’ll know the familiar stories: he conducted the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, and had to be turned around to see the cheers and applause of the audience; he burst into tears. He went off to Heiligenstadt to recuperate—or at least try to—and there wrote his famous Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he wrestles with whether to commit suicide. He engaged in a custody battle for his nephew against Johanna, the 9-year old’s mother; the case dragged on forever, and the nephew turned out to be a disappointment.

What I didn’t know was that Beethoven had a group of devoted friends, all of whom were writing to him in “conversation books,” of which there may have been 400 (his first biographer, Anton Schindler, may have destroyed some of them). At any rate, the books that remain are a treasure for historians and musicians alike.

Nor did I know that the famous strong-willed character was quite so strong; here’s Wikipedia again:

Sources show Beethoven's disdain for authority, and for social rank. He stopped performing at the piano if the audience chatted amongst themselves, or afforded him less than their full attention. At soirées, he refused to perform if suddenly called upon to do so. Eventually, after many confrontations, the Archduke Rudolph decreed that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.[89]

Right—good to know!

The conventional theory is that late Beethoven is difficult to listen to, and it’s true that Beethoven goes places no one else had gone. But in the last movement of this piano sonata, Beethoven does something that few composers can do: he writes the music of a man who has suffered, gone through the suffering, observes it dispassionately, and refuses to back down. If any music could be called transformative, it’s this.