Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770 – 1827): Piano Sonata in B Flat Major op 106, “Hammerklavier”
In middle age, Beethoven’s musical ideas were growing ever more expansive – rather like his pianos, in fact. He had a way of getting through the latter with almost indecent haste. His old friend and protégé Ferdinand Ries noted the composer’s penchant for accidentally damaging or breaking almost any object which came within his reach, as well as his habit of tipping inkwells into the strings of his pianos. “No furniture was safe from him; least of all a valuable piece,” Ries lamented. “All was over-turned, dirtied and destroyed. How he ever managed to shave himself is hard to understand, even making all allowance for the many cuts on his cheeks.”
But there was an upside to all this clumsiness: whenever Beethoven broke another piano, he would be offered an upgrade by some wealthy benefactor, usually of the latest model. Piano technology was developing fast in the early nineteenth century, in the relentless drive towards the more sonorous and powerful instruments familiar to us today. And when Beethoven was visited in the summer of 1817 by Thomas Broadwood, the head of an innovative piano-making firm in London, the latter took such pity on the impoverished looking composer that he organized the delivery of one of his finest instruments (a six-octave beast, with greater volume range than before, triple stringing and a couple of foot pedals) to Vienna at the next opportunity.
Here is a picture of it:
In an era long before Amazon, the mailing process was however far from straightforward, taking the best part of a year. By the time Beethoven’s new instrument had survived a sea voyage to Trieste and bumpy cart-ride across the Alps, the composer had already written three movements of a giant new piano sonata. “Here’s a sonata that will challenge pianists and that people will be able to play in 50 years,” Beethoven proclaimed to a publisher, while still slightly underselling the whole project.
Beethoven’s surge of creativity had come about after several unusually quiet years. The riches of his “middle” or “heroic” period – latterly including his Sixth, Seventh and Eighth symphonies, his Fifth Piano Concerto (“Emperor”) and several further masterful string quartets, trios and sonatas – had carried him up to his 42nd birthday. After that, time-consuming family issues and declining health had seen his output slow dramatically. Many thought the ailing, ageing composer had burned himself out. But the creative pause was nothing more than a classic case of reculer pour mieux sauter: many of Beethoven’s greatest and most extraordinary works still lay before him.
At a time when Gioachino Rossini could dash off a two and a half-hour opera in a fortnight, Beethoven would wrestle with his new, 45-minute piano sonata for almost eighteen months: slow going, even by his standards. But writing the work also appeared to help him through a major creative impasse. By the time he was finished, he had laid the ground for one final, superlative phase of composition.
The “Hammerklavier” Sonata* is a pinnacle of non-pictorial, absolute music (it was also a pinnacle of piano writing at the time). It is at once modernist, at times positively avant-garde in its intent, and yet has little in common with the new wave of Romantic sensibility then sweeping across Europe. Rather, the Hammerklavier digs deep into the previous century for its creative starting points. Though Classically structured, the music is full of Baroque side-tracks and involutions, while the considerable shadow of JS Bach falls across many of its pages.
*Its nickname “Hammerklavier” (“hammer-keyboard”, the German word for fortepiano) derives from the original title page of the work which Beethoven wrote in German (rather than the usual French or German): Große Sonate für das Hammerklavier. It was just in case anyone tried to play it on the harpsichord instead. Beethoven wrote exuberantly to his publisher: “The title is good, and can be sent to Guttenbrunn, to Tahiti, Calcutta, Pondicherry, and, what is more, to Greenland and North America!”
Many pianists rank it the most difficult of all Beethoven sonatas. And yet its technical difficulty is not the kind to be found in virtuosic flourishes, but rather in countless passages of delicate, complex part-writing and subtle inner-voicing. The music is also difficult in the sense that you have a good deal else to consider while you play it. By way of example is its formidable harmonic structure, where the old Classical rules of harmony, shaping a tonality around its tonic (I), dominant (V) and sub-dominant (IV) chords, are entirely discarded in favour of a series of inter-connecting tonalities always a minor or major third apart. Or to put it another way, whenever Beethoven wants to change key, he almost always shifts up or down three notes, to a degree that was highly unorthodox for the time.
And if that were not enough, there is a separate “light and shade” battle going on between the keys of B Flat Major and B Minor throughout the whole piece, the latter key representing a very dark tonality indeed in the composer’s mind. In each of the movements, B Minor makes a trenchant appearance at some stage, while at the end of the Scherzo the two keys battle for superiority in almost comical fashion.
As the music-writing is often complex and polyphonic – particularly the fugato in the central section of the first movement and then the giant fugue which makes up the last movement – and Beethoven was none too careful with checking misprints at the proofing stages, a lot of disputed notes have crept into later editions which scholars fight over to this day. The same scholars also argue about the correct tempi. Another new toy which Beethoven acquired in 1817 was one of the earliest versions of a modern-day metronome, made by an inventor named Johann Nepomuk Mälzel*. Questions have since arisen about the accuracy of the device that Mälzel sent Beethoven, not least after the latter had dispatched a set of highly unsuitable, eccentrically quick tempo markings to his publisher, faithfully reproduced by many editors today. Perhaps the metronome had become as highly strung as its new owner.
*Mälzel’s other inventions would include tiny automatons performing on musical instruments and a mechanical, chess-playing Turk.
The Hammerklavier sonata is, above all, a vast emotional and spiritual odyssey. The eloquent grandeur of the first movement only thinly masks a monumental sense of struggle. While there is humour throughout the work, particularly in the whimsical second movement Scherzo, there is also at times an almost indescribable sadness. An early biographer of Beethoven wasn’t exaggerating by much when he described the slow third movement as “a mausoleum of the world’s collective suffering; the greatest piano adagio in the general literature. Immense lamentation, sitting on the ruins of all happiness.” Last but not least there is the near crazy exuberance of the final movement, with its colossal, almost unwieldy fugue. After initially “searching” for the fugue’s starting point (and once more evoking the ghost of Bach) Beethoven finally hits upon a manic theme, introduced by a striking trill and made up of fast semiquavers and chromatic passing notes. It is not entirely unlike something from the playbook of Anton Reicha (another old friend of Beethoven’s) – another uncannily early example of neo-classicism, of taking a seemingly outdated form and making it into something startlingly new. Even as Beethoven follows the dustiest old rules of presenting his fugal “subject” – backwards, upside-down, simultaneously in two different parts etc – at the same time his creative imagination has never seemed wilder. Much of it, the jarring dissonances, the angular trills, the tonality-puncturing chromaticism, sounds very un-1818 indeed. It would not be unusual to switch on halfway through this movement and think one was listening to an obscure Prokofiev sonata or a particularly freaky prelude by Shostakovich.
Beethoven would never hear the work performed. Indeed, he could only ever have heard it in his inner ear – both amazing and yet heart-breaking to contemplate. The sonata was considered almost unplayable when first published, and its first documented performance did not take place until 1836 when a young and fearless Franz Liszt unveiled it to a Parisian audience. Hector Berlioz, who was present, called it “a sublime poem that until this day was but the riddle of the sphinx for nearly all pianists… [Liszt] made comprehensible a work not yet comprehended”. Once audiences started to get over the shock of its scale and its novelty, they realised it was a work of profound and majestic beauty.
Later listeners, including philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, argued that the music was really a symphony in disguise. But Nietzsche, living in an age of cultural maximalism, was less able to comprehend the work as a symphony for piano alone*, even though the piece could hardly have worked any other way. It wasn’t only that if Beethoven had intended a work for orchestra he would surely have written one instead – there is also the manner in which the music reveals his ear for pianistic texture and sonority to be as fine-tuned and reliable as ever.
*Some indeed did try to orchestrate it as Nietzsche suggested, such as early twentieth century conductor, Felix Weingartner. But for all his instrumental skill, Weingartner does not improve the piece one jot, and his arrangement even dilutes the effect of the music in many places.
Beethoven’s late, great opus 106 is an almost unique work, one which has never really been repeated or equalled, even as it opened out so many new paths for large scale piano works in the decades ahead. Only two later romantic piano sonatas perhaps even rival it: Liszt’s B Minor from 1853, and Paul Dukas’ monumental effort in E Flat Minor from 1901.
It is also not a musical experience that can be rushed, for either listener or performer. As the celebrated Italian pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni once put it, a work like the Hammerklavier requires the attention of a lifetime.
Suggestions for Further Listening
The Hammerklavier was just one of five late piano sonatas composed by Beethoven – the others being in A Major op 101 (1816), E Major op 109 (1820), A Flat Major op 110 (1821) and C Minor op 111 (1822). Although the other four sonatas are much shorter and less symphonic in design, they are all just as superbly inventive, with many of the same neo-Baroque elements. Each contain four movements, with the first three (usually short) movements leading to a grand finale, made up either of a fugue or set of variations.
Despite declaring in a fit of grumpiness that the piano was an “unsatisfactory” instrument, Beethoven kept up a regular stream of works for the instrument over the last decade of his life. Aside from two sets of Bagatelles (1822 and 1824), there was also one of his crowning achievements, the magnificent 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli (1823), which many think stand alongside Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741) as the greatest set of variations ever written.