Aug. 15, 2008
Both of the pieces on today’s program come from the period of Beethoven’s life when he was beginning to seriously lose his hearing, and both bear the sorts of titles you might expect of music written during this time. Certainly a sort of emotional unrest is evident in both pieces, but just as notable are the musical innovations at work here, as we hear Beethoven moving towards the sort of harmonic and structural creativity that would characterize his later works, in spite of his deafness. In the “Tempest” sonata Beethoven takes a very simple idea—an arpeggio—and transforms it into a sort of backbone for the piece, creating structure and cohesiveness. The use of motive was one of Beethoven’s trademarks. In the second piece Beethoven plays with both tonality and meter, two other areas of experimentation in his music.
