Eleven Bagatelles, Op.119 (1820-22)

No.3 in D major: à l’Allemande

No.4 in A major: Andante cantabile

No.5 in C minor: Risoluto

No.6 in G major: Andante - allegretto

No.7 in C major: Allegro ma non troppo

No.8 in C major: Moderato cantabile

No.9 in A minor: Vivace moderato

No.10 in A major: Allegramente

No.11 in B flat major: Andante ma non troppo

Beethoven was perhaps the first composer to realize that if a piece of music is short enough he can risk almost anything. With no long-term structure to worry about he can avoid symmetrical shapes, he can break up the continuity, he can afford to bewilder or even irritate the ear and he can digress into the most eccentric rhythmic and harmonic developments without getting lost. His contemporaries didn’t always appreciate his thinking in these matters, however. When he sent the eleven Bagatelles to C.F. Peters for publication in 1823 they were promptly returned to him with the advice that he ought to consider it beneath his dignity to waste his time on such trifles - which angered Beethoven not a little. He evidently did take the admonishment to heart, however, since in his next set of Bagatelles (published as Op.126 in 1825) he took care to compensate for their brevity by presenting them as a coherent cycle.

There is no inner connection between the eleven Bagatelles published as Op.119 by Clementi in London in 1823. Indeed, the last five of them had already been published in a piano tutor, the Wiener Pianoforteschule, in 1821 and the first five derive from sketches dating as far back as 1802. This disparity does not, of course, reduce the interest of the individual pieces. While No.1 in G minor is in fairly regular ternary form, with an extended reprise, No.2 in C major abandons its gruff dialogue between the two hands and disappears in delicate pianissimo arpeggios. No. 3 in D major is a good-natured country dance with an angry coda, anticipating the contrast between the almost placid No.4 in A major and the heavily emphatic No.5 in C minor. No.6 in G major is comparatively extended with an Andante introduction and a short cadenza preceding an impulsively unsteady Allegretto scherzo.

No.7 in C major, the first of those written for the Wiener Pianoforteschule, is a highly eccentric study in trills which goes completely off the rails over the low trill sustained over the last seven bars. If the beginner pianists of Vienna were puzzled by the extraordinary harmonic directions taken by No.8 in C major, there was compensation for them in the brilliant little waltz of No.9 in A minor, and if No.10 in A major seemed to be in too much of a hurry No.11 in B flat major offered a serene point of repose.