Beethoven 250: the last piano bagatelles: 6 Bagatelles Op. 126 (Piotr Anderszewski, 2008)

From: Ludwig van Beethoven: 6 Bagatellen: 6. Bagatelle: Andante amabile e con moto. From Jan Caeyers: Beethoven: A Life (2020). Caeyers discovers the final dedication and love confession to Josephine in Beethoven's last composition for the piano. Maynard Solomon has a different theory of the immortal beloved, but all can agree with Solomon when he says that "even at the end, the piano remained Beethoven's most intimate means of communicating with his inner self". Please do click on the image to enlarge it.

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 continued.

From: CD 26/80  Piano Bagatelles Opp. 33, 119, 126 + Other bagatelles.
Tracks 19–24: Piotr Anderszewski, 2008:

6 Bagatellen Op. 126 (1825)

1. Andante con moto in G, 3'07
2. Allegro in G minor, 2'44
3. Andante in E-flat, 3'15
4. Presto in B minor, 3'55
5. Quasi allegretto in G, 2'40
6. Presto, cut time then Andante amabile e con moto, E♭ major, 4'41

JAN CAEYERS: THE LAST PIANO BAGATELLES

" 'Bagatelles' can best be defined as 'musical aphorisms'. They are concise, pithy expressions of an original, highly personal, and often surprising character: profound wisdom in a nutshell. The concise format also puts more resources at the composer's disposal (remembering that a work's length should be inversely proportional to the quantity of musical material), allowing for the deployment of rhetorical devices such as antithesis, paradox, understatement, ambiguity, and irony. Beethoven was in his element and – after his work on the colossal Ninth Symphony – most likely glad of the opportunity for some lighthearted diversion on a smaller scale. "

" Yet despite his bagatelles' whimsical nature, and however experimental and unconventional their technique and frameworks, these dissociations belie an underlying logic. In this sense, the opus 126 bagatelles differ markedly from their opus 119 predecessors, which seem rather disjointed by comparison. The latter bear the stamp of their haphazard origin and create the impression that they are interchangeable or that their ordering is arbitrary. The opposite is true of the six bagatelles composed in 1824. Beethoven himself described them as a 'cycle,' with a rhetorical structure, a robust tonal progression, and a latent, "subthematic" cohesion that, while not perceived directly or audibly, is experienced subconsciously. "

" The circle was now fully complete. Almost half a century after receiving his first childhood spanking for daring to improvise at the keyboard, and decades since he had electrified audiences with his wild fantasies as a pianistic demigod, Beethoven could now finally surrender to the tantalizing pleasures of scintillating ideas and vivid imagination. Trusting in his highly developed intuition for structure and proportion and free from any desire for excess or vanity, Beethoven could finally give free rein to his musical ideas – a luxury that had cost him over one hundred opus numbers and a musician's lifetime. "

" To complete the cycle well and truly, one final remark. The sixth bagatelle, Beethoven's very last piano work, bears the telling tempo and character indication 'Andante amabile e con moto' and is based on the all too familiar motif from both the Andante favori and the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte. "

" Skeptics may dismiss this similarity as pure coincidence. But even so: what a beautiful one it is! "

From: Jan Caeyers : Beethoven : A Life (Beethoven : Een Biografie 2009, revised in 2020). Translated  in English by Brent Annable. University of California Press / Beethoven-Haus Bonn, 2020. pp. 466–467.

NB. AA: Each Beethoven biographer has a theory about the "Immortal Beloved", and Caeyers might come closest to the truth, examining all alternatives before proposing Josephine von Brunsvik in Chapter 45 "From the 'Immortal Beloved' to a 'Distant Beloved'. Caeyers also discusses Minona von Stackelberg (1813–1897), perhaps the daughter of Ludwig and Josephine. A tragic story anyway for everyone involved.