Ludwig van Beethoven – Cello Sonata #5 in D Major, Op. 102/2 (1815)

Well, it certainly sounds like late Beethoven.  It’s not as meaty as the late piano sonatas (1814-1822), or as profoundly bizarre and radical as the late string quartets (1823-1826), but its approach to form and mood has a lot in common with those pieces.  Some typical late-Beethoven gestures that appear in the piece:

• A moment of strange, mysterious quiet.  Specifically, in the second movement, where a lush, sensuous passage in D major is suddenly interrupted by a return to the movement’s spare opening, stripped down even further by the removal of the cello:  just simple, somber chords in D minor.

• The unexpected emergence of a long, lyrical melody over an off-kilter accompaniment texture.  Specifically, right after the passage I just described:  those simple, somber chords are offset by stately dotted-rhythm arpeggios in the cello, and eight bars later, those arpeggios are transferred to the right hand of the piano, while the left hand plays triplets.  The superimposition of rhythms gives the piano part an unsettled quality, while the cello melody floats above, undisturbed.

• A transitional passage that doesn’t clearly belong to one movement or another.  Specifically, the ascending scales, first in the cello and then in the piano, that anticipate the opening of the third movement.

• A fugue.  Specifically, the finale.  It’s an upbeat movement that reminds me somewhat of Handel (Beethoven’s favorite composer at the end of his life), but the bit where the scalar subject is reduced to isolated three-note interjections is pure Beethoven.

• Perhaps most importantly:  a first movement that just barely manages to fit within the boundaries of sonata form.  It’s not that it lacks a clear exposition, development and recapitulation, or that you can’t find first and second key areas;  it’s that it completely lacks the intense forward drive that had Beethoven had helped establish as the sonata-form norm a decade earlier.  The exposition keeps changing its mind about what it’s doing.  A dramatic opening piano flourish, a cadential formula, a decisive cello arpeggio — then a sudden shift and the music is quiet and lyrical, marked dolce.   Three bars later, the music becomes chromatic and bass-heavy, the texture reduced to almost nothing but parallel octaves;  then there’s an eruption of heroic contrapuntal music, but it’s cut off abruptly after only four bars.  Toward the end of the exposition, single bars of heroic march music are dropped into a passage that’s otherwise simple, lyrical and focused on triplets.  The development section refuses to push toward a retransition, preferring instead to spin its wheels, repeat itself, get stuck on particular harmonies and figures. And at the end of the movement, Beethoven suddenly interrupts himself, modulates from G major to Db major in a tense passage built over unceasing left-hand sixteenth note oscillation, and then gets back back by moving an entire chord up a semitone, without any voice-leading tricks to eliminate parallel fifths and octaves.

There are a few ways to perform a score like this.  You can play it with the character of a middle-period Beethoven piece and dramatize the contrasts, like Pierre Fournier and Wilhelm Kempff do;  the result is jerky and discombobulating, like an early Romantic John Zorn.   Or you can do what Adrian and Alfred Brendel do:   smooth everything into a lazy dream, like an early Romantic Debussy, so that the movement sounds not like a series of abruptly juxtaposed scenes but like someone reminiscing about times past, letting their thoughts wander from memory to memory.  My dad has been talking recently about how he feels like the late Beethoven quartets have the structure of thought, and I think you could say something similar about the first movement of this cello sonata.

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