To start off previous open threads, I have written about how the idiotic tariffs have already hurt sales of pianos, harpsichords and other musical instruments. As far as I can tell, sheet music sales have not been directly affected. But there’s definitely a chilling effect.
I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the score of Vagn Holmboe’s Chamber Concerto No. 8, music of great, cool confidence and seemingly effortless contrapuntal complexity. You can actually look at a lot of Holmboe’s scores for free online. But Chamber Concerto No. 8, I either have to buy it directly from Edition Wilhelm Hansen for $80 or from Hal Leonard for $70 before I can even look at the title page.
I might be misquoting those prices. But it doesn’t actually matter. Hal Leonard gives the disclaimer
Prices and availability subject to change without notice.
And well before that,
Please note: this is a priority direct import item that will ship directly from our Hal Leonard Europe warehouse overseas. Please see or call your favorite retailer to place your order.
Sheet music is supposed to be considered informational material, and thus exempt from tariffs, but with Trump treating every law like a suggestion, who knows.
We don’t have that problem with the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and his contemporaries. Seemingly everything Beethoven wrote is available on IMSLP in at least one edition for each composition. You can print up as many copies of scores and parts as you have paper and printer toner for… oops. Back in May, Julia Suh wrote for Pixel to Parcel that
Israel, despite its longstanding free trade agreement with the U.S., was hit with a 17% tariff on all exports.
That matters because Israel exports a lot of electronic equipment, like printers. Israel also exports paper to the United States, but is not a major importer in that category.
Other notable tariff increases include a 34% tariff on Chinese imports and a 20% tariff on goods from the European Union. These tariffs affect a wide range of products, including those critical to the digital printing industry, such as printers, ink, toner, and electronic components.
This week I want to talk about Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in B-flat major, Opus 22. I’m not expecting you to print it out. Unless you have a piano and want to play it for yourself, in which case you can probably check the piece out from a library or put it on a tablet that you can put on your piano’s sheet music holder, like the one Yuja Wang has actually used for some of her Beethoven performances.
This is a sonata that I’ve listened to in the past several times, but it just hadn’t made any sort of impression. I was shocked to realize last week that for the past several years, the only performance in my iTunes collection is one by Artur Schnabel, which is a brilliant performance but the sound quality leaves something to be desired. For the price I paid for it, all those sonatas for 99¢, plus a few other solo piano pieces, I should not complain.
I have most of the other sonatas in recordings by Bruce Hungerford, from another one of those sets that I paid just 99¢ for. Though Hungerford is nowhere near as famous as pianists like Alfred Brendel and Maurizio Pollini, he’s still very good. If he recorded Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 11, it’s just not in the collection I bought. Somehow I had been aware of the hole in the collection of not having Hungerford’s performance of No. 31, but failed to notice the absence of No. 11. EDIT: I was wrong, I’m missing Schnabel’s performance of No. 31, not Hungerford’s, but I was correct to write that I’m missing Hungerford’s performance of No. 11.
Beethoven wrote this No. 11 sonata in 1800 and published it in 1802 as his Opus 22. According to Britannica, this sonata is in G-flat major. I’m sure this would have been corrected a lot quicker on Wikipedia, but in general I trust Britannica more. Whatever little details Britannica contributor Betsy Schwarm gets wrong, I trust her conclusions more, such as when she writes that
Hans von Bülow, the virtuoso pianist who is believed to have been the first to play all 32 sonatas in performance [concert?], remarked that collectively they had near-sacred significance: if Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is the Old Testament, he said, then Beethoven’s piano sonatas are the New Testament.
The key is of course an important detail for any performer. I’m sure Beethoven wrote some music with G-flat major as the declared key, though I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head. B-flat major does have an association with Beethoven, though it’s not as strong as those of C minor and E-flat major.
Every time that I’ve thought Michael Haydn sounds like Beethoven, it has been for a piece in B-flat major, like Michael Haydn’s Symphony No. 36 in B-flat major, Perger 28, in which he gets somewhat close to Beethoven’s brand of humor. Conversely, there are a couple of passages in this Sonata No. 11 in B-flat major in which Beethoven sounds a tiny bit like Michael Haydn.
The beginning of this sonata is rather unpromising, and that is quite unusual for Beethoven. There’s no doubt whatsoever that this music is in B-flat major, and not just because of the lack of accidentals in the first two measures, but because the first four chords are tonic chords. It seems a little too straightforward to be Beethoven. The lack of dynamics markings in this snippet is an omission on my part.
The Hammerklavier Sonata, which Beethoven would write a decade and a half later, begins with even more tonic chords, but Beethoven finds a way to make those a lot more interesting and distinctive.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first movement of the Sonata No. 11 does have plenty of interesting occurrences to hold the listener’s interest.
This is followed by an Adagio that would be a lot more popular if it was in the context of a sonata with a stronger beginning. Words like “sublime” would be used to describe it.
At this point in his career, Beethoven was still writing minuets, and with plenty of repeat signs. Anyone who has played or at least examined enough sheet music knows what repeat signs look like. In notation software like Finale 2010, they’re called forward and back repeat signs, referring, respectively, to repeat signs placed at the beginning of a section to be repeated and repeat signs placed at the end of a section to be repeated or at the end of the first ending.
As strictly a toy example, consider this music:
The two measures bracketed by the blue bar lines (they print black, of course) are to be played twice. Generally, one should not use repeat signs just for two measures.
Normally, if the very first measure of a piece also begins a section to be repeated, the forward repeat sign is implied, not written explicitly. No need to clutter up the first page of the piece. And also it’s easier for a composer working on paper to decide a little later that the first section of a piece is to be repeated without having to squeeze in a forward repeat sign. You can also do that with later divisions of the piece, like for example with the minuet of this sonata we’re talking about.
On what the music notation software is labeling measure 8 of this minuet, there’s a back repeat sign even though there was no forward repeat sign for the pick-up measure of the minuet, but the musician still understands that he’s to go back to the beginning of the minuet, not back to the beginning of the whole sonata.
The Finale music notation software has had computer playback capabilities for as far back as I can remember using it. Despite considerable improvements since Finale 97, computer playback can never replace human performers playing actual instruments, and composers and arrangers should not rely on it as an exact indication of how something would actually sound in concert.
However, it is a great way to check for wrong notes, incorrect rhythms, excessively slow or fast metronome markings (I have a lot of trouble with those for music in 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8) and poorly indicated repeats. If the computer misunderstands your repeat signs, your human musicians will very likely be confused and misunderstand as well.
I don’t worry about the computer playback of the minuet of this sonata incorrectly going back to the beginning of the whole piece because I almost always use separate files for separate movements of multi-movement pieces by anyone. So the computer correctly goes back to the beginning of the minuet.
I’m taking the time to explain all of this because of a detail that I noticed in the edition of this sonata by Alfredo Casella for Ricordi, which I’ll be getting to in just a little bit. There’s no explicit forward repeat sign at the beginning of the minuet, which is not the least bit surprising to me, it’s something that I’ve also seen in music by contemporaries of Leopold Mozart.
Repeats involving pick-up measures are quite doable in any version of the Finale software and I presume also any version of Sibelius or Dorico. However, in Finale they’re significantly less straightforward than repeats not involving pick-up measures.
The first time I needed such a “mid-measure” repeat many years ago, I decided to instead “simplify” the musical text to use repeats with first and second endings. But that looked so unprofessional that I resolved to figure out the right way to render those repeats as I saw them on the page.
Finale provides at least two distinct ways to create such repeats. The easiest is with a plug-in accessed through the menus Plug-ins > Measures > Mid-Measure Repeats. You’ll get a warning message that might be a little confusing, but if you just let the plug-in do its thing, it’ll probably do it correctly. If not, undo and try again, and maybe don’t second-guess yourself.
The only lasting disadvantage is that by that method forward repeat signs are always visible. No performer has ever complained about that to me and none has ever been confused in rehearsal as to what to repeat. If you don’t like the look of the explicit forward repeat sign in the following quotation, at least please understand that it was a very conscious decision on my part not to put in the extra effort required to make it an implied forward repeat.
That very first repeated section sure sounds like something Leopold Mozart’s son Wolfgang Amadeus could have written. But the second repeated section, vaguely Turkish (or Beethoven’s idea of Turkish anyway), is definitely not how Wolfgang Amadeus would have followed it up.
It’s quite an old-fashioned touch to have the trio of the minuet in the relative minor, G minor.
And now we get to the point that prompted me to write that whole explanation about repeat signs in notation software. What is an explicit forward repeat sign in the quotation above is an implied forward repeat sign in the Casella edition! I’m sure any pianist reading that will understand that he’s supposed to go back to the beginning of this G minor stretch, not the beginning of the minuet proper and absolutely not the beginning of the whole sonata. Artur Schnabel plays this trio at a noticeably faster tempo, or at least it feels faster to me.
I just realized something as I was writing the foregoing. If I really want to, I can just delete any forward repeat sign I want to delete and still have the computer playback flow correctly by adjusting the target in the Backward Repeat Bar Assignment dialog box.
A dialog box from the Finale 2010 music notation software.
I might just do that for the first repeated section of the minuet, but I’m definitely not doing that for the first repeated section of the trio.
The sonata concludes with a rondo. This would have been a great time to use my “patented” rondo rehearsal marks. The following quotation would have “A1” in a circle or oval.
Though not as famous as any of the sonatas from the previous open threads, I still had some choices for YouTube videos to embed. I decided to go with Tiffany Poon, but Valentina Lisitsa was a close runner up.
There is a spot in the finale that she seems to struggle a little bit, but overall I like her tempo choices better than Daniel Baremboim’s.
Not sure Poon actually plays wrong notes in that spot, but Baremboim does sound a lot more secure. As a conductor, Baremboim sometimes rushes through Bruckner, but as a pianist here, there were some moments that I was thinking “I know for certain you can play that just a smidge faster, and you should.”
But maybe the problem with that passage is because Beethoven, generally a hard worker, needed to have worked on it just a little bit more, so that it doesn’t feel like he just decided to cut it short and move on to a reprise of the rondo’s A melody. I can see how those thick chords in the left hand would be a problem for any pianist.
As mentioned earlier, one of the other choices available to me on YouTube is the performance by Valentina Lisitsa. Though she plays it a hair too fast, in my opinion, she does play it well and she looks like she’s having fun throughout. Marta Czech goes slower than Baremboim, not just in the sense of the metronome but also in the sense that her performance really does feel way too slow. Maybe Boris Giltburg has the right idea about that passage that troubled Poon, but overall I feel he needed to play the piece with more levity and humor.
The open thread question: Not that there are a whole lot of performances to choose from like with his more famous sonatas, what is your favorite interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in B-flat major?
