Beethoven: Sonata in A-flat Major, Op. 110

Gabriela Lena Frank, who was born with high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss and whose Sonata Andina I am performing, speculates that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) “encoded his deafness in his music.”  The palpable contrast in his late piano sonatas (including the Op. 110) between thick chords very low on the keyboard and thin melodies that are very high reminds Frank of how she was taught in a class for children with hearing loss to differentiate between rumbly drums and high-pitched whistles by their thick and thin vibrations.  She also attests to finding that her compositional ideas become more “introverted,” “intellectual,” or “spiritual” after she has not worn her hearing aids for a few days, all of which are characteristics that many scholars have identified in Beethoven’s late music.  Frank’s perspective based on her lived experience corroborates a theory of musicologist Joseph N. Straus that the phenomenon frequently labeled “late style” in music may in at least some cases be better identified as changes to a composer’s style that are associated with disability.  

Beethoven’s Opus 110 piano sonata is his second-to-last piano sonata, composed in 1821.  Beethoven not only had lost nearly all his hearing, but also was suffering from a litany of other health problems, including what recently published research has identified to be liver disease at least partly induced by hepatitis B.  The lyrical and dreamy first movement is in a variant of sonata-allegro form, a highly common form for opening movements of Classical-period sonatas.  The second movement is a boisterous scherzo and trio, which Beethoven preferred over the more traditional and slower-paced minuet and trio later in his life.  According to musicologist Martin Cooper (and demonstrated here by András Schiff) the melodic themes of the scherzo appear to come from two Austrian folksongs that were popular in Beethoven’s time: “Unsa Kätz häd Katz’ln g’habt” (“Our cat has had kittens”) and “Ich bin lüderlich, du bist lüderlich” (“I am a draggletail [i.e. dissolute, slatternly], you are a draggletail”), suggesting that Beethoven intended this movement to be humorous and even a bit crude.  

The third and last movement is in a unique form with its several sections labelled.  It blurs vocal and instrumental forms by making references to opera, suggesting that the movement tells a story, even perhaps portraying a protagonist.  (Soon after completing op. 110, Beethoven began writing his Ninth Symphony, in which the fusion of vocal and instrumental forms is realized literally through the addition of a choir to the orchestra.)  It begins with a slow introduction that transitions from the previous movement, followed by a “Recitativo” modeled upon the speech-like singing of operatic recitatives.  After this is an “Arioso dolente,” or sad aria, a more lyrical operatic song.  Then there is a “Fuga” or fugue, which is a form of imitative counterpoint that was particularly common in the Baroque period and which later became a standard contrapuntal exercise for students of composition.  The subject, or main melody, of the Fuga rises in fourths and happens to be a distillation of the opening theme of the sonata (source, p. 27):

The Fuga is followed by a return of the Arioso with the German instruction “Ermattet, klagend” (“Exhausted, lamenting”).  Then the Fuga comes back with the subject in inversion — that is, “upside down” — going down in fourths rather than up.  This alternation of an intensely melancholic song with a very formal and academic fugue juxtaposes two poles of a duality that I name in multiple ways: emotion and intellect, expressionism and formalism, the Dionysian and the Apollonian.  We see this duality articulated in a letter from Beethoven to violinist Karl Holz: “It is no great feat to write a fugue; I wrote dozens of them in my student-years. But imagination also asserts her claims, and now-a-days another, a genuine poetic element, must be blended with the antique form” (source).  Eventually, the inverted subject of the second fugue turns right-side-up and becomes a passionate, thickly textured melody with accompaniment, joining the theme of the Fuga and the form of the Arioso.  As someone who has long felt strongly the duality of reason and emotion and a need for them to be in balance within me (consider, for example, my double major in music and maths!), this fusion of the Dionysian and the Apollonian delights me, analytically and sensually.

I first learned this sonata at the very end of my first year of college, as a challenge to myself to learn and memorize a Beethoven sonata as fast as I could.  At the time, I selected that sonata because it seemed very philosophical.  I perceived the narrative of the third movement in particular as Beethoven not only expressing the anguish and despair he had at his hearing loss and poor health, but also striving to make meaning from his suffering as a multiply-disabled person in a society unkind to non-normative bodyminds.  My experiences since then, especially in regards to mental illness, have deepened my relationship with this work.  The emotional arc of the third movement resembles my own journey of repeatedly breaking down and climbing back up again.  I feel that I have grown psychologically with and through this sonata and will continue to do so; it is truly one of my favorite works that I have played.