Sonata in C major Op.53 “Waldstein”

It was Count Waldstein who so prophetically said to the young Beethoven as he left Bonn for Vienna in 1792, “You are going to receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn” – a prediction which would have made him a worthy dedicatee of some major work in the future even if he hadn’t contributed as much as he did to the composer’s early development. He had to wait for his Beethoven dedication until 1805 but the work that came with it represents the most exhilarating experience offered by any piano sonata up to that time.

The most significant feature of the Sonata in C major Op.53 is that it includes no real slow movement. Beethoven had at one time intended that an F major Andante (later published separately as the Andante favori) should occupy the central position in the construction. He withdrew it presumably because he felt that a full-length slow movement would dissipate the impetus he had carried through the first movement with the long-term aim of taking it up again in the last. In the final version of the work, the rhythmic impulse generated by the throbbing quavers of the opening bars is scarcely ever relaxed and when it is – as in the comparatively serene but elusive second subject of the Allegro con brio – it can still be sensed as a phantom pulse somewhere below the surface.

The last movement, which follows without a break on the short and unsettled Introduzione that replaced the original Andante, does not immediately fulfil all the deep-laid expectations. Here, it is true, is something like the C major serenity the first movement pursued, but there is something still undefinable missing. It is defined and supplied only in the Prestissimo coda, where the main theme of the Rondo emerges at twice its original speed, at long last picking up the momentum which has been there since the opening bars of Allegro con brio.

The Sonata in C major, Op.53, which was written in 1804 - twelve years after its dedicatee, Count Waldstein, had advised Beethoven to go to Vienna and “receive the spirit of Mozart from the hand of Haydn” - represents the most exhilarating experience offered by any piano sonata up to that time. From the throbbing quavers of the opening bars onwards, the rhythmic impetus is scarcely ever relaxed, and when it is the purpose is not to soothe the nerves but to stimulate them.

The second subject of the first movement, for example, is expressed in minims and crotchets. But this elusive vision of serenity appears not in the conventional G major but in E major, which is a somewhat unrealistic key in a C major context, and it is soon overlaid by quaver triplets and precipitated into the rapid figuration which characterises the rest of the exposition. The development is about the search of C major for the kind of serenity represented by the E major second subject. Indeed, at one point, a less important (syncopated) second-subject motif is actually fixed in the tonic key. It is then taken through several other keys before entry of the low whispers which lead via a crescendo into the recapitulation. When the second subject duly reappears here it is in A major; and it is only towards the end of a coda long enough to amount to a second recapitulation that it is captured in C major, but only briefly even then.

There is no slow movement. At one time Beethoven had intended that an F major Andante, later published separately as the Andante favori, should occupy this position. He withdrew it from the sonata presumably because he felt that a conventional full-length slow movement would relax the tension and dissipate the impetus generated by the first movement. So he made a masterful compromise and inserted instead a short Adagio molto intro­duction, which toys with thematic ideas from both movements but which makes no direct statement, arousing curiosity and creating suspense before the final Rondo.

The last movement does not immediately fulfil all the deep-laid expectations. Here, it is true, is something like the C major serenity the first movement pursued, but there is something indefinable still missing. Various alternatives are offered, like the sensationally long trill between the melody in the right hand and the violent scales in the left, the bouncy new them in the bass, and the anticipation of a Schubert Impromptu in the searching C minor development. But the missing element is defined and supplied only in the Prestissimo coda: the main theme of the Rondo emerges at twice its original speed, at long last picking up the momentum which has pulsed along below the surface since the end of the first movement.