Sonata in E minor, Op.90

Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck

Nicht zu geschwind and sehr singbar vorgetragen

The Piano Sonata in E minor, like its immediate predecessor, Les Adieux, is one of the few Beethoven works of its kind to have been inspired by events in life around him. Dedicated to Count Moritz Lichnowsky, Op.90 is said to relate to the Count’s controversial marriage in 1814 to a woman - variously described as an actress and an opera singer - below his social station. According to his contemporary and biographer, Anton Schindler, Beethoven referred to the first of the two movements as a “struggle between the head and the heart” and to the second as a “conversation with the beloved.”

Although not everything Schindler wrote can be taken at face value, the character of the music does seem to bear him out in this particular case. The E minor first movement (“Lively and with feeling and expression throughout,” according to the German heading) is tersely argued with little time in it for lyrical reflection and none at all for playfulness. We are, however, presented with both sides of the argument. The first theme is a peremptory five-note motif, repeated three times in sequence. Immediately contrasted with it is a soft and syncopated theme with wider and more expressive intervals. The tough first theme of the second subject also has its direct contrast, in another quietly syncopated melody. Although the more expressive of the two first-subject themes is given sympathetic treatment in the development section, the general tendency of the movement is to sweep such sentiment aside.

The first movement ends on a sigh in E minor. The second (“Not too fast and very songlike”) begins in E major with a delightfully serene melody which suggests that the heart has won the struggle after all. This melody, with its Schumannesque left hand and cadence pattern, is precisely the sort of lyrical material which made the sonata such a difficult form for Beethoven’s romantic successors. It does not lend itself easily to development. Beethoven simply brings it back three times in its entirety, developing it scarcely at all, separating its appearances with more dramatic episodes - the conversation does not always run smooth - and incorporating it in a quietly happy coda.