Sonatas Nos. 16–18, Op. 31, Nos. 1–3

“I must confess to you that I am living a miserable life,” Beethoven reported in a letter to a friend from 1801. Though only in his early 30s, his hearing had already deteriorated to the point that he had difficulty disguising his handicap around others. Beethoven was keenly aware of the cruel irony of being a deaf musician. To prevent the humiliating exposure of his ailment, he avoided social gatherings whenever possible—but this isolation caused him great suffering, which he movingly described in the Heiligenstadt Testament. The letter fluctuates between dramatic despair and bold determination, citing his calling to create art as the only force saving him from suicide.

In the same year that he penned the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven composed the Op. 31 set of three sonatas. The first in this set is one of the most playful and comic of Beethoven’s sonatas; its opening movement
( 1) begins with the right and left hands playing just out of sync, as if trying—in vain—to catch each other. As the syncopations and surprises accumulate, the movement begins to feel a bit like a musical version of slapstick comedy. The slow movement ( 2), which features an ornately embellished melody, is often interpreted as a parody of the fashionable bel canto opera arias of that period.

Shortly before composing the Op. 31 sonatas, Beethoven expressed his dissatisfaction with the works he had produced thus far, as well as a desire to embark on a new path in his future compositions. While the early piano sonatas were hardly devoid of innovation, the second of the Op. 31 sonatas (often called “The Tempest”) departs even further from the advancements of Beethoven’s early sonatas. The first movement begins with a dreamy broken chord ( 3) that is in neither the tonic key nor the tempo of the movement. The mystery of the opening soon gives way to gathering agitation and crashing storminess ( 4). The movement alternates with shocking suddenness between extremes of tempo and mood, and seems to prefigure later Romantic compositions in its mixture of dreamy evocativeness and unrestrained emotion. Though not as revolutionary as the previous sonata, the final sonata of the set is nonetheless a charming and virtuosic work.