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

of the very few passages of instrumental recitative to be found in Beethoven, 127 in
which thematically and tonally indeterminate material leads imperceptibly to the
‘Arioso dolente’ in A flat minor which is the beginning of the finale proper.
Although only eighteen bars long, the Arioso has none of the incomplete,
provisional nature of an introduction. It is a perfectly self contained binary Liedform
in four symmetrical clauses, without the slightest phrase extension except for an
additional cadence at the end. If it had been an introduction its relevance would be
exhausted by the arrival of that which it was intended to introduce, and it could be
forgotten once it had served its purpose (as in Haydn’s Symphony no.104, Mozart’s
string quartet K.465, or Clementi’s Sonata op.40/3, where a serious introduction gives
way to a more light-hearted allegro). Instead it simply finishes what it has to say and
stops, leaving unanswered the question of what function it serves in the structure as a
whole. Out of the final A flat emerges a consolatory fugue in the major, containing
some of the smoothest counterpoint Beethoven ever wrote (even if a few of his
chromatic neighbour-notes are not quite impeccably Baroque). The tonal course of
this fugue shows his respect for the normal range of keys, confining itself to I, ii, iii,
IV, V, and vi. This means that when an E flat seventh chord unexpectedly mutates
into a second inversion G minor chord (‘L’istesso tempo di Arioso’), it is—within the
context of the movement—nothing less than a catastrophe. The fugue is completely
dispersed, for the moment at least. Beethoven’s fugal style cannot absorb a shift like
this from A flat to G minor without considerable disruption. Like a repressed memory
the Arioso dolente returns, in an even more broken-backed form, stubbornly
unreconciled with its surroundings. When the fugue starts again in G major (with the
subject inverted), Beethoven has set himself a difficult problem. To integrate the
127 Statistically very few, but immensely influential: Tovey notes ‘how enormously these two single
clauses of recitative have bulked in the imagination of critics and composers .... In the works of
Mendelssohn’s boyhood—the Sonata, op.6, and the A minor Quartet, op.13—they expand to pages
and pages’, A companion to Beethoven’s pianoforte sonatas (London: ABRSM, 1931), p.263.
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