Sonata in A flat major Op.26 (1800–01)

Written at the start of a new century – it was sketched in 1800 and completed the following year – the Sonata in A flat major looks like the beginning of a new daparture. Seen together with the next in the series, the two sonatas published together as Op.27 and headed “quasi una fantasia” in each case, it looks even more like it. While Op.26 does not go as far in rejecting conventional expectations as its two successors, in its positive avoidance of sonata form it seems to be moving firmly in that direction. Certainly, its influence reached well into the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Sonata in A flar major is not, of course, the first work of its kind to begin with a theme and variations – Mozart’s Sonata in A major K331 is a familiar earlier example – but it is surely the first to make its slow movement a funeral march. Besides, Beethoven’s variation technique here represents an anticipation of Brahms rather than a reversion to Mozart. He does not, for the most part, embroider his theme (itself an anticipation of Schubert’s Impromptu in the same key D935 No.2) so much as reshape it. If the first, distinguished by its arpeggio flourish in every bar, is little more than decorative, each of the other four variations acquires a new and distinctive rhythmic identity – most effectively perhaps the second, where the left hand converts the melody into even semiquavers echoed a quarter of a beat behind by the right, and the third (in A flat minor) with its disconcerting combination of sycopations and displaced accents.

Just as Chopin was to do in his Sonata in B flat minor nearly 40 years later, Beethoven precedes his funeral march with a scherzo, It is in the major in this case however, and, given a reassuring trio section to offset any alarm occasioned by the high speed and dramatic dynamics of the outer sections, it offers little hint of the sad event to follow. Beethoven’s funeral march (which was to be performed at his own funeral as Chopin’s was at his) seems to have been written with no particular personage in mind. Though headed “Funeral march on the the death of a hero” only as an afterthought, it is clearly a forerunner of its counterpart in the “Eroica” Symphony of 1804 – less developed but actually more solemn in that the middle section in A flat major echoes with the drum rolls and brass fanfares appropriate to the occasion of a military hero being laid to rest.

There is an interesting comparison to be made with Chopin’s Sonata in in B flat minor in relation to the last movement too. Chopin’s eerily skeletal closing Presto could be taken as his fevered commentary on Beethoven’s fleeting Allegro which, though set in a healthy A flat major, has enough minor harmonies and unsettling rhythms and dynamics in it to provoke that kind of reaction in a susceptible romantic imagination.