Links Between Subsequent Beethoven Sonatas

For warm-up before practising, I often sight-read my way through complete sets of major piano works, to enhance literature knowledge and to appreciate well-known works in their wider context. Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas were a natural choice at an early stage. What struck me already then was that virtually every piece in the series of 32 seemed to strive to reinvent the concept of piano sonata completely. In his Piano Variations, e. g., also Beethoven is perfectly content with developing continually further the basic concept once found and proven successful, as are Mozart, Haydn, and Clementi in their Sonatas. In Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas, however, only revolution seems to be good enough for each and every piece.

Much later, I made an observation which seemed particularly telling to me: Several of the late Sonatas curiously seem to take off at exactly the point where the one before ended.

• Op 90 ends quite unusually in a beautifully calm mood and a steady movement in equal note values (semiquavers throughout). The first full beat of the main theme, occurring very often, and bar 276 for the last time, has a third G#/E, followed by B in the right, and an octave E–E in the left. Now, op 101 starts with exactly the same figure, in a calm, continuous quaver movement — although this sonata is in A Major, so the chord belongs to the dominant here and it takes two bars to reach the actual tonality.
• Op 101 ends with a sequence of brutally hammered, repeated full chords. So opens op 106. (Check the whole of Beethoven’s Sonatas for instances of repeated chords to make sure whether this is a significant similarity!)
• Op 109 ends with this beautiful chorale-like theme in three quarters, the melody of which starts in tonica, falling from the third to the root, and establishing the dominant in the second bar with another falling third. So opens op 110.

Since these Sonatas were neither written in close temporal sequence nor published together (except for op 109/110), I cannot but interpret this observation as betraying Beethoven’s determined will not to go back one single inch but to carry the concept of piano sonata as much forward as humanly possible. Whenever he tackled a new sonata, he was perfectly aware of what he had reached so far and took pains not to go any part of the way twice.

The two exceptions from the rule are the end of op 106 (which probably did not leave anything more to be said in its wider surroundings), and the latest Sonata, op 111, the first bars of which do not seem to refer in any way to op 110 end; in fact, they strike a distinctly archaic note, and the idea of opening a C Minor sonata with an Adagio introduction is, in his Sonatas, as old as op 13 (where in turn the overall structure is almost certainly borrowed from Clementi op 34 no 2). On the other hand, a closing variations movement is a feature taken from his most daring experiment, op 109 — two more reasons to think of op 111 as some sort of resumé summing up his Piano Sonata legacy.