BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 31 - Jonathan Biss

Like so many of Beethoven’s late works, the scope of Op. 110 expands as it progresses: the sonata begins with great beauty but no hint of the grandeur to come. The opening theme is marked “sanft” - like all the best German words, it is untranslatable, but somewhere near its core is “gentleness.” This gentleness, this softness of texture immediately opens the heart but conceals the enormous ambition of the journey we have just embarked on.
Beginning a work that aims for the infinite with such modesty feels fitting, for Op. 110 is altogether a sonata of paradoxes. While it conveys great generosity and contains some of the most sheerly beautiful music Beethoven ever wrote, it is a remarkably tight construction - less than 20 minutes long, with not a note wasted. That “sanft” opening theme - a very deliberate climb, each upward step followed by a smaller downward one - is not just the first movement’s main motive: pared down, it will become the subject of the fugal finale. The notes remain practically the same, but the emotional transformation will be enormous: from amabile, to philosophical, to utterly ecstatic.
If the first movement is somewhat compact, the second is dramatically so: barely two minutes from start to finish, this scherzo (in the “wrong” meter of 2/4) has a concentrated intensity that is equal parts controlled fury and slapstick - another paradox. The source material for this music is a pair of folk songs that Beethoven might well have heard in the beer halls he frequented: “Our cat has had kittens,” and - no joke - “I am slovenly; you are slovenly.” Beethoven’s lack of refinement or social graces is imprinted on this music. The elbows-out brusqueness is a reminder that Beethoven’s music is as much about the physical as it is about the metaphysical - that while he often seems superhuman, he remains awkwardly, painfully human.
In spite of the many wonders to be found in these first two movements, they are mere prelude to the finale, one of Beethoven’s most complex and most profound achievements. Nearly double the length of the first two movements combined, it is comprised of five sections with a wide range of musical forms, and conveying an even wider range of feeling: from total desolation to the euphoria that can come only in its wake.
This movement offers yet another paradox: In one sense, the music is backward-looking. Throughout, there are hidden and not-so-hidden connections to the (equally wondrous) Sonata Op. 109, written the previous year; in this sonata’s most desperately dark moment, it quotes its predecessor literally. But Beethoven doesn’t just refer to his own previous work: the forms he uses in the finale of Op. 110 - recitative, arioso, fugue - are all borrowed from Bach.
Perhaps “borrowed” is the wrong word. As Stravinsky said, “Bad composers borrow; great composers steal.” Beethoven’s forms might belong to Bach, but the content is sublimely, startlingly his own. Bach would not, in a recitative, have repeated the same note 27 (!) times in a row - a manic, pleading cry into the void. Bach wrote a great many tragic ariosos, but they do not contain massive crescendos, building and building to a climax that never comes, followed instead by a sudden retreat to piano - a musical representation of hope, snuffed out. And Bach is likely the greatest master of the fugue of his or any time, but his fugues are ends unto themselves. They do not expand, and seek, and strive, until they evolve into something else entirely - into outpourings of pure melody (pure spirit, really) at the extreme upper end of the piano, the accompanying left hand at the extreme lower end (because the piano was never, ever enough for Beethoven; the whole world was not enough for Beethoven). Bach is the template here, but the music is nothing but Beethoven. Beethoven, looking not to the past, but to the future - a future that, the last 50 years be damned, might yet be beautiful. (Extract from the full notes by Jonathan Biss)
Jonathan Biss, piano
Recorded live at the Victoria Concert Hall, Singapore, on 10 June 2023 at the 29th Singapore International Piano Festival.
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Loved listening to this interpretation. Thank you so, so much. 💕