J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

LATE BEETHOVEN
The land of the last five Sonatas! As often as we have entered it we have been awed by its gigantic
rocks and gloomy chasms or made happy by its flower-strewn heaths, true Elysian fields, its secret
springs; the night of his fugues, the eased sorrow of his adagios, the defiant conflicts of op.106 and
111 have passed before us, till in the highest, loveliest pastures all is bathed in the strange, gleaming
light of chains of trills. Who will ever take in the whole of this land, quite comprehend it, who will
solve the enigmas that lie between, above and beneath these notes and sonorities, beyond the
playable and the perceptible....? 51
The later works of Beethoven have traditionally been surrounded with a
superstitious awe. No other music of his—perhaps no other music at all—has the
reputation of being so profound, so obscure, so difficult, so rarefied; in short, so far
above ordinary human experience. Piano students practice the earlier sonatas; the
middle period works are the staple of the concert hall; the last works remain fenced
off, inviolate.
George Bernard Shaw made a valiant attempt at demythologisation:
why should I be asked to listen to the intentional intellectualities, profundities, theatrical fits and
starts, and wayward caprices of self-conscious genius which make up the features of the middle
period Beethovenism of which we all have to speak so very seriously, when I much prefer these
beautiful, simple, straightforward, unpretentious, perfectly intelligible posthumous quartets .... the
difficulties of these later works of Beethoven are superstitiously exaggerated. As a matter of fact,
they fail much seldomer in performance nowadays than the works of his middle age. 52
And yet the prestige these works possess is (with the exception of the ninth symphony)
51 R. Kastner, Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, tr. G. Abraham (Berlin: AFA-Verlag Hans Dünnebeil,
1935) p.28; italics and ellipses in original.
52 Music in London 1890-94, 3 vols. (London: Constable, 1932), vol. III, p.157.
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