# The sad parts of Beethoven's 31st Piano Sonata



## Aurelian (Sep 9, 2011)

I see three possible reasons why he wrote such emotional music: difficulties with Karl; going totally, or near-totally deaf; romantic disappointment...or something else? What do you think?


----------



## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I think it's impossible to relate the mood of a particular piece of music to a composer's external life. (For instance, Michael Steinberg mentions how swimmingly Mahler's life was going when he wrote the Sixth.) Beethoven was always good at sad music. Neither of the sonatas on each side were particularly sad -- although all three were searching in their own way. Speculation is fine, but ultimately fruitless.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Aurelian said:


> I see three possible reasons why he wrote such emotional music: difficulties with Karl; going totally, or near-totally deaf; romantic disappointment...or something else? What do you think?


Why can't he just be exploring the expressive possibilities of music? I think it's a bit daft to think that because his music's sad, he was sad.

It's as silly as saying that when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, he was doing a lot of procrastinating!


----------



## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> Why can't he just be exploring the expressive possibilities of music? I think it's a bit daft to think that because his music's sad, he was sad.
> 
> It's as silly as saying that when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, he was doing a lot of procrastinating!


In exploring ' the expressive possibilities of music', if one feels a pervasive sadness in the music, it is not a stretch to suggest that it might reflect a sadness of the composer. Beethoven had a lot to be sad about dealing with his deafness, but also during this period of composing #31 he had been suffering from the symptoms of liver failure and rheumatism. Just because you don't care to suggest a possible connection, doesn't make it daft or silly that some else does.

Re: the Shakespeare analogy: non sequitur.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

DaveM said:


> In exploring ' the expressive possibilities of music', if one feels a pervasive sadness in the music, it is not a stretch to suggest that it might reflect a sadness of the composer. Beethoven had a lot to be sad about dealing with his deafness, but also during this period of composing #31 he had been suffering from the symptoms of liver failure and rheumatism. Just because you don't care to suggest a possible connection, doesn't make it daft or silly that some else does.
> 
> Re: the Shakespeare analogy: non sequitur.


Why is the Shakespeare example a non-sequitur?


----------



## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> Why is the Shakespeare example a non-sequitur?


res ipsa loquitur


----------



## lextune (Nov 25, 2016)

I like Schiff's ideas on this topic, I won't bother paraphrasing, but instead will post his lecture, and highly recommend it.


----------



## beetzart (Dec 30, 2009)

That passage in A flat minor after a genius restless recitative is one of the darkest passages in all of Beethoven's music.


----------



## golfer72 (Jan 27, 2018)

*Late sonatas*

I dont hear sadness in the late sonatas but more of a spirituality and a summing up of all that has come before


----------



## Josquin13 (Nov 7, 2017)

The emotionality in Beethoven is occasionally overdone due to overly romantic interpretations by musicians. There is a lot of improvisational fantasy in his music that can be turned into something more expressive and emotional than I believe he may have intended. Especially in the piano sonatas, due to the differences between the pianos that Beethoven knew and the greater resonance and loudness of a modern grand, which is a more clangorous & unwieldy instrument (& the bad influence of the excesses of the Romantic age). (The same is true for Liszt.)

However, the sadness is all his, and he is full of a wide range of human emotion in his music. You can't separate the composer from the human feelings that are expressed in his music. It isn't artifice. He isn't being fake. It's not a trick. There is nothing maudlin or overly sentimental about his music. As the poet Robert Frost said, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." If a composer or poet or painter doesn't feel something they are expressing in their art, they're dead inside, or not very talented. As Mozart said, "Music is love", and love is a human feeling, at least in part. Though of course there's a lot more to art and love than pure emotion.

Shakespeare is different in Hamlet because he is writing a character in a play, it's a story (which yes, is to a degree artifice), and the character of Hamlet is unlikely based upon himself, being that he knew more than one noble prince in his life, among his several patrons. However, he expresses a wide range of the most personal and immediate, intimate, & often white hot human emotions throughout his sonnets--grief, anger, frustration, lament, sorrow, contrition, shame, self-loathing, etc.--which are intensely autobiographical, despite what some of the more daft scholars want to believe today. 

There are undoubtedly similar, probable links between Beethoven's autobiography (in his letters, etc.) and his music, such as the music he composed around the time of his Heiligenstadt Testament, for example--a time when he contemplated suicide due to his encroaching deafness--which I believe can be heard in the opening movements of his 2nd Symphony. But of course these autobiographical links are harder to define and speak about with certainty in music (given its more abstract nature) than they are with Shakespeare's Sonnets, where the poet describes in actual words what he is feeling and going through in his troubled personal life. 

When considering the reasons for Beethoven's sadness, you need only consider the difficult circumstances of his life, all that he had to suffer and overcome--parents that couldn't adequately love him, a sadistic father that mercilessly beat him, troubled relations with various people, including siblings, a great deal of suffering from physical illness--including inflammatory bowel disease & raging tinnitus, etc., no wife, little love, the loss of his "immortal beloved"--the one great love of his life, loneliness, no human touch to bring him comfort, etc. etc. But what's remarkable about Beethoven is that he never stays down for long, he keeps fighting back through his grief, sorrow, anger, frustration, loneliness, personal loss, etc., trying to remain positive and prove victorious--such as with his 2nd Symphony, which has a surprisingly positive resolution, after starting in such a dark mood. Indeed Beethoven's mighty struggle between darkness and light, the duality inherent in his music, can be heard throughout his opus, as he repeatedly attempts to courageously triumph over his personal demons and combatants--in some ways by the very act of composing, by putting his exceedingly rare genius into musical form, & by the strength of his will to create. That's at the core of his music, I believe.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Josquin13 said:


> The emotionality in Beethoven is occasionally overdone due to overly romantic interpretations by musicians. There is a lot of improvisational fantasy in his music that can be turned into something more expressive and emotional than I believe he may have intended. Especially in the piano sonatas, due to the differences between the pianos that Beethoven knew and the greater resonance and loudness of a modern grand, which is a more clangorous & unwieldy instrument (& the bad influence of the excesses of the Romantic age). (The same is true for Liszt.)
> 
> However, the sadness is all his, and he is full of a wide range of human emotion in his music. You can't separate the composer from the human feelings that are expressed in his music. It isn't artifice. He isn't being fake. It's not a trick. There is nothing maudlin or overly sentimental about his music. As the poet Robert Frost said, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." If a composer or poet or painter doesn't feel something they are expressing in their art, they're dead inside, or not very talented. As Mozart said, "Music is love", and love is a human feeling, at least in part. Though of course there's a lot more to art and love than pure emotion.
> 
> ...


I think you're just begging the questions. When an author writes something he creates a voice, which need not be autobiographical. On that we're agreed I think. Why shouldn't exactly the same be true of a composer with his music? That Beethoven, in op 110, created a voice which may be interpreted as sad, but it is no more autobiographical than . . . I dunno . . . Erlkönig or A la recherche du temps perdu?


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

It's obvious to think that music, an expressive, emotional art, expresses feelings that the composer is going through. It may not be related to specific events, but generally to the artist's psyche. "Proof" such as the Mahler 6th example means little, since by temperament Mahler was an artist, and experienced life intensely.


And don't forget Mahler's use of banal tunes as "irony." Zip-Ah-Dee-Doo-Dah might be a very tragic tune, if used in the right context, as irony. Conversely, minor-key "tragic" tunes might be intended as humor.

"A rose is a rose is a rose…" God, that's tragic!


----------



## Josquin13 (Nov 7, 2017)

Mandryka--No, it need not be autobiographical (but it can be). Imagination is always a part of it, as are metaphors, symbols, allegory, etc.. And there is artifice and cleverness and skill in technique & narrative, I wouldn't argue against that. But I also think that Robert Frost & Mozart was absolutely right. Human feelings are at the heart of art--whether they are intensely autobiographical or not. For a composer to move an audience, he or she was most likely moved by the content themselves (at least initially), whether autobiographical or not. Like Handel, when he was witnessed emerging from his quarters in tears, having just composed his "Hallelujah" chorus in Messiah. Clearly, the composer was deeply moved, and most of us, in turn, are moved when we hear his magnificent chorus. There is a sense of mutual recognition & catharsis, which is part of the shared experience.


----------



## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

Aurelian said:


> I see three possible reasons why he wrote such emotional music: difficulties with Karl; going totally, or near-totally deaf; romantic disappointment...or something else? What do you think?


I don't find this music 'sad'. I hear anger and frustration, perhaps with the pain of existence, in I. In II, I hear ecstatic acceptance, as if God himself has revealed all of the wonders of the world, and suddenly there is a reason for all of the crap that we have to endure during or brief pass by on the Planet.
YMMV


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

"An artist must be able to assume many humors." -- L. van Beethoven


----------



## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

Beethoven's deafness, his inquisitive mind and his demanding demeanor combined to force him to explore the outer boundaries of music at the end of his life when Sonata 31 was written. This was the period when he created his most titanic compositions -- the Missa Solemnis, Symphony No. 9, string quartet No. 16 and the piano sonatas Nos. 28-32. The emotions Beethoven sought to locate musically in Sonata 31 are even more profoundly understood in the final sonata, No. 32. There the composer consistently forces the pianist to play at the edge of the right hand capability of the instrument and create a sound-world that is singular in its approach to defining, if not the afterlife, what is at the very edge of human existence. Beethoven regularly challenged the boundaries of the human voice and instruments during his lifetime; what goes on in the final movement of No. 32 is a time where the piano's multiple octaves simply were not sufficient for him to explain what he was trying to say musically. There has not been another composer that explored end of life questions quite the same way.


----------



## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Aurelian said:


> I see three possible reasons why he wrote such emotional music: difficulties with Karl; going totally, or near-totally deaf; romantic disappointment...or something else? What do you think?


Thoughtfulness and introspection are not necessarily a reflection of sadness or the literal troubling circumstances of his life. But there still seems to be something deeply personal, private and introspective here that's captured in the depth of this sonata, the motivations of which will likely only ever be understood by himself. In any event, it seems that he's not defeated and there's still a great deal of power and fire in him. Wonderful sonata!


----------

