Beethoven 250: Piano Sonata No. 16 (Stephen Kovacevich, 1994)

Cd cover art: Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840): Tageszeitenzyklus: Der Abend. 1821. Öl auf Leinwand. 22 cm x 30.5 cm. Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover. Photo: Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum. Please click to enlarge the photo!

 Beethoven: The Complete Works (80 CD). Warner Classics / © 2019 Parlophone Records Limited. Also available on Spotify etc. I bought my box set from Fuga at Helsinki Music Centre.
    Ludwig van Beethoven 1770–1827.
    Beethoven 250 / corona lockdown listening.

From: CD 21/80  Piano Sonatas Nos. 16–20
Stephen Kovacevich, 1994 (Nos. 16–18) and 1999 (Nos. 19–20)

Opus 31 Nr. 1: Klaviersonate Nr. 16 in G-Dur (1802)
    Erster Satz: Allegro vivace, G-Dur, 2/4 Takt, 325 Takte
    Zweiter Satz: Adagio grazioso, C-Dur, 9/8 Takt, 119 Takte
    Dritter Satz: Rondo, Allegretto, G-Dur, alla breve, 275 Takte

AA: Like Beethoven's piano sonata no. 6 and piano sonata no. 10, the piano sonata no. 16 is a comic number. Alfred Brendel in his essay "Must classical music be entirely serious?" (in Music Sounded Out, 1990) singled out this sonata and stated that "only the comic intent makes it plausible". He also quoted Jean Paul who claimed that comedy is "the sublime in reverse".

Edwin Fischer and András Schiff find in the Adagio grazioso movement a parody of Italian opera. Before them, Romain Rolland had found in the entire sonata an "imitation of Italian theatre" and in the Adagio grazioso an affinity with Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia. Rossini's opera was published 15 years after this sonata. Perhaps the earlier phase of Italian opera buffa, whose success overwhelmed Beethoven in Vienna, already displayed similar bel canto features.

Schiff in his Guardian lecture compares the middle movement with Verdi's "Va pensiero" and "Bella figlia dell'amore", composed 40–50 years later. The spirit of opera buffa, dramma lirico and melodramma seems to have been alive so much earlier that it is recognizable even in parody. If it is parody, is a good question. When an artist has a sense of humour, he does not take himself seriously even when he takes his subject seriously.

In the first movement the hands are struggling to play in unison. I am thinking about the horror movie The Hands of Orlac where a virtuoso pianist (Conrad Veidt) becomes a victim of a cruel accident, and a surgeon transplants a killer's hands on him. There is something jokingly mechanical in the movement, and I'm also reminded of the cuckoo motif favoured by many composers (also Beethoven later composed a "cuckoo sonata"), even J. E. Jonasson's earworm "Gökvalsen" ("The Cuckoo Waltz", 1918, most memorably used in the cinema by Akira Kurosawa in The Stray Dog).

The second movement is exaggerated and ornamental, like a "play within a play". I'm thinking about Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen, Jean Renoir's Madame Bovary where the protagonist visits a provincial opera to see Lucia di Lammermoor, and George Cukor's Little Women, made in the same year, where Jo March visits the same opera in old New York during the Civil War. The scenes are both amusing and touching.

The third movement, Rondo allegretto, starts with a breezy theme that has a fleeting resemblance with the famous Boccherini minuet (from his opus G 275) known to cinephiles from The Ladykillers and the music box of Two Rode Together. 

For Anton Rubinstein, this was Beethoven's weakest sonata, but probably he did not get the joke. It's about relaxation, flexing one's muscles, overcoming the horrible adversities that the composer was facing in these gloomy years. The composer refuses to get depressed and faces fate with a smile. The piece must be played with wit and panache, like Alfred Brendel, Emil Gilels, Daniel Barenboim and András Schiff have done.

The Beethoven Experience (BBC 2005)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/beethoven/index.shtml

Ludwig van Beethoven: Magnificent Master (2015)
https://web.archive.org/web/20151207110527fw_/http://www.raptusassociation.org/index.html

Beethoven's Piano Sonatas (2015)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150924084747/http://www.raptusassociation.org/sonindexe.html

http://digitalcollections.sjlibrary.org/cdm/search/searchterm/Portraits%20Beethoven%20Full%20figure/mode/exact/page/2

https://www.beethoven.de/en/archive/view/6559862288809984/Beethoven+playing

András Schiff's Guardian Lectures on Beethoven's piano sonatas
https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical/page/0,,1943867,00.html

Per Tengstrand
https://worldofbeethoven.com/overview-of-the-sonatas/

Bryce Morrison in Gramophone, February 2004
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/reviews/review?slug=beethoven-complete-piano-sonatas-10

Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 3 July 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/arts/music/beethoven-piano-sonatas.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Music   

Belcanto.ru: Beethoven
https://www.belcanto.ru/beethoven.html