Sonata in D major, Op.28 (“Pastoral”)

The autograph manuscript bears the inscription “Gran Sonata, Op.28, 1801, da L.van Beethoven” and that is more or less how it was published in 1802. The “Pastoral” title is almost as old as the work itself, however, since it appeared in an English edition as early as 1805 – more than thirty years before the Hamburg publisher Cranz, who is usually given the credit for it, issued Op.28 as “Sonata Pastorale” (and Op.57 as “Sonata Appassionata”). Beethoven was aware of the English edition and apparently didn’t object to it. Certainly, spurious though it is, the title is by no means inapt: the first movement opens with a quietly happy melody over a rustic drone bass and it ends in much the same way. So, though in a rather more animated way, does the Rondo finale.

“Pastoral” would be misleading, however, if it was taken to imply that the work is inspired by the same kind of mood as that which prevails in the authentically titled “Pastoral” Symphony of 1808. For one thing, the Sonata in D major is harmonically more eventful, not least in the intriguingly round-about way taken through the second subject of the first movement. For another thing, it is actually quite grim in places. The often minor-key development of the same movement, clinging tenaciously to the now not so serene opening theme, is an early example of that. There is something very serious also about the D minor outer sections of the Andante – a piece the composer often played to himself, incidentally – where an air of resignation is carried in the right hand over the staccato bass in the left. The brighter mood introduced by the D major middle section (the material of which Beethoven was to use again in the slow movement of the Second Symphony just a few months later) is negated by its melancholy transformation in the final bars.

If the brief waltz-like Scherzo in D major is too brusque and too obsessive to qualify as a country dance, the last movement begins in unmistakably pastoral mode with a shepherd’s pipe melody played over a gentle ostinato figure in the bass. But here too there is an intense and increasingly dramatic development. Although the care-free atmosphere is re-established after only a short pause, it is finally swept aside by the impetuously più allegro coda.