Beethoven

When Beethoven played his recently completed Piano Sonatas in F minor, A major and C major to Joseph Haydn in 1795 - at one of the Friday morning concerts in Prince Lichnowsky’s palace in Vienna - it is unlikely that the older composer greeted them as warmly as Schumann was to greet Brahms’s Piano Sonata in C major in Düsseldorf fifty-eight years later. Although Beethoven was to dedicate the three sonatas to Haydn when they were published as his Op.2 a few months later, theirs was not a congenial teacher-pupil relationship. Haydn had already advised Beethoven not to publish the third of his Piano Trios, Op.1 - which advice Beethoven had resentfully ignored - and he might well have found something overambitious about the piano sonatas too. Certainly, Beethoven declined to describe himself as “pupil of Haydn” on the title page of Op.2.

The fact is, however, that whereas Beethoven’s first three published piano sonatas were to be followed by an unrivalled series of twenty-nine others, written at more or less regular intervals during most of the rest of his career, Brahms was to abandon the form within a year or two. He turned first to variation form and then, for as long as fifteen years, he abandoned the piano as a solo instrument altogether. When he came back to it - with the capriccios and intermezzos of Op.76 - he was to write nothing other than short pieces for piano for the rest of his life.

Beautiful though these Brahms piano pieces are, they are curiously isolated - partly by their brevity, partly by their expressive intimacy - from the great works he was writing at the same time and they do not develop in the same way: the Rhapsody of Op.119, his last published piano piece, is little different in essence from the two Rhapsodies, Op.79, of 1879. Beethoven’s last set of Bagatelles, Op.126, on the other hand, could have been written only when they were, after the last of the piano sonatas, after the Diabelli Variations, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis - after everything the composer is most admired for, that is, except the late string quartets. As chippings from that monumental workshop, rough-edged in some cases and highly polished in others, they are as fascinating as they are enigmatic.

Gerald Larner©