Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 11/13/2007, uploaded on 01/13/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

I have dubbed today's Noontime concert a "Moonlight Recital" with a variety of pieces celebrating the nighttime.  Oni Buchanan

No Moonlight Recital would be complete without Beethoven's famous Sonata No. 14 in c-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, "Quasi una fantasia," composed in1801, and inheriting its nickname "Moonlight" in 1832, years after Beethoven's death, when the Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab described the first movement of the sonata as evoking the image of moonlight over Lake Lucerne.  In the first movement, Beethoven writes that the performer is to "play the entire movement as delicately as possible and without dampers," or in other words, without anything to muffle the sound of the ringing strings, allowing dissonant harmonies to bleed into one another, an extraordinary compositional effect unlike anything else Beethoven wrote.  The second movement, has a character that seems to be part minuet and part scherzo, featuring a contrasting Trio section.  Liszt famously referred to the second movement as "a flower between two abysses."  The third movement, Presto agitato, churns with ferocity and unrelenting drive.      Oni Buchanan

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Piano Sonata No. 14 "Moonlight"      Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor is one of the most often performed works for the piano. Indeed, the first movement enjoys the same popularity as Für Elise and the Fifth Symphony. Beethoven gave the sonata, and its counterpart, the Piano Sonata No. 13 in E flat major, the title Sonata quasi una fantasia, meaning "almost a fantasia." The title is an indication that neither sonata follows the traditional three or four movement pattern. In the case of the Moonlight Sonata, the prominent difference is the first movement being a slow Adagio instead of an Allegro. The nickname "Moonlight," like so many of the descriptive titles for Beethoven's works, was not given to the sonata by him. It was actually coined by the music critic Ludwig Rellstab in 1832 when he compared the sonata to the moonlight shining upon Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.

The first movement opens in the key of C sharp minor. It holds to the traditional sonata form, but as stated above, it is not in the typical Allegro tempo. The movement's principal melody, with its dotted-eighth-sixteenth rhythms against the accompaniment triplets, was described by Berlioz as a "lamentation." The melody begins pianissimo and never rises above a mezzo-forte. Karl Schumann noted that the softer dynamics occurred more often in Beethoven's piano music than loud ones. This movement gained instant popularity during Beethoven's lifetime. Berlioz called it "one of those poems that human language cannot qualify." However, the Moonlight was not without its critics. Carl Czerny, grieved by the success of the movement remarked, "Surely, I've written better things."

The second movement is a tranquil scherzo and trio in the relative major key, although, written as D flat major instead of C sharp major. Liszt described this movement as a "flower between two chasms." The movement stands out against its surrounding movements because of its simple, cheerful expression.

The final movement is a thunderous sonata form. Like the previous sonata, No. 13, this movement is an experimentation in shifting the usual weight of the sonata from the first movement to the last. In the conventional Classical sonata, the first movement is the most important to which the succeeding movements simply augment. However, Beethoven reversed this in the Moonlight Sonata, making the final movement the goal to which the previous movements build towards. In essence, the last movement served as the final resolution of the conflicts of the previous movements. This trend was taken up by the later Romantics to great effect. Of the final movement, Charles Rosen remarked that "it is the most unbridled in its representation of emotion. Even today, two hundred years later, its ferocity is astonishing."

Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.