Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 09/18/2013, uploaded on 04/16/2014

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

This work marks the start of Beethoven's "Late Period", when his music took a new direction toward a more personal realm of freedom and fantasy, and, despite the gradual degeneration of his hearing, he moved beyond the Classical tradition into the Romantic. The Sonata demonstrates most especially the contrapuntal challenges he set for himself during his final decade, based on his recent discovery of the music of Bach.

Beethoven himself described this sonata as “a series of impressions and reveries.”  Outwardly, Opus 101 manifests the four movements of a ‘typical’ Beethoven sonata, but in its details it becomes anything but ordinary. The gently-flowing melody of the pastoral opening movement unfolds without any marked contrasts. Its reverie is interrupted in the second movement by an exuberant march. The brief, improvisatory third movement is an elegiac adagio that leads--very uncharacteristically--into a restatement of the first few measures of the first movement. The boisterous finale is dominated by a complex fugue, which, as Beethoven himself joked, might have justified nicknaming the work "The Difficult-to-Play Sonata."      Masataka Goto

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.