♫ The other most interesting aspect of this movement is also a rhythmic one -- Beethoven plays all kinds of creative games with rhythmic displacement. But that will be much easier to talk about once you've heard some of it, so I will now go ahead and play the exposition of the first movement. ♫ So, obviously, the very end of what I just played is the beginning of the repeat of the exposition. The actual ending of the exposition -- ♫ is so nebulous, it would have fet very strange to stop there! This kind of inconclusiveness becomes a bit of a theme later on in the piece, but again, I shouldn't get ahead of myself. So, I think I've used this phrase before, but it really does fit here: this movement crackles with energy. The opening, upward gesture is not a "Mannheim rocket", but it is a kind of a rocket. ♫ It's the kind of gesture that seems to want to have a big dramatic crescendo attached to it, but Beethoven keeps the whole thing in piano, with just a small sforzando at the end: this way, it has a palpable but contained energy, which is soon let loose. It's interesting, given that most of this motive is aimed upward, that it's the opening four notes -- a downward scale fragment -- ♫ that become extremely important as the movement progresses. They form the basis of the very next phrase, and the next, where the contained energy is let loose. ♫ This is just the first of countless times that the downward four notes play a role in this movement -- they become a real organizing principle in the work. Be that as it may, the next phrase brings the return of the opening's upward motion, and in fact, extends it even further. Now, don't worry, this lecture isn't going to be a blow-by-blow, but I want to take a moment on this phrase, just to point out that it has the dynamic scheme -- big crescendo leading to a forte -- that would have felt appropriate in the opening. ♫ In the opening, the energy comes from holding back, at least dynamically. Here, the very different sort of energy comes from letting loose. There are two further sources of energy: the separation of the hands, which means the motion is now twice as fast, ♫ and the fact that the upward motion goes even further -- not just to the A but well beyond it, to the next octave's F sharp. ♫ In short, this is the opening phrase, let loose. The following section -- again, crackling with energy -- is really just a bridge section, beginning in b minor (the relative minor of the home key), but ultimately setting up the dominant of A major and the business of the second theme. ♫ Just worth noting before going on, again, is how propulsive this all is -- the energy doesn't let up for a moment. Things do become a bit less relentless with the arrival of the charming second theme, where the downward four note motive makes yet another appearance. ♫ Double time, in fact. But it is otherwise the identical music. The second theme then takes a turn into minor and trails off in a question. ♫ The first of many questioning, inconclusive "endings" -- if endings is even the right word -- in this piece. When the music continues, on the other side of that rest, it is here that two of the work's main ideas -- that opening four note motive, and off-kilter rhythms that play havoc with the meter -- really come together to the forefront. ♫ So, it's slightly buried by what's going on in the right hand, but the left hand is dominated by the falling four notes of the opening. ♫ And in the right hand, the emphases are everywhere except where they are supposed to be. Given that we are in alla breve, and that therefore there are only two, not four beats to the bar, the accented notes are not even on weak beats; they're on offbeats. ♫ This plants the first seeds of rhythmic instability, which bear fruit immediately afterwards, in a sequence dominated by that same old downward motive. Now, this motive always begins with an upbeat -- it's the second note that is the downbeat. ♫ This remains the case here, Beethoven repeats the gesture so many times -- 4-1-2-3 4-1-2-3 – that you start to feel as if the bar line is displaced -- 4!-1-2-3 4!-1-2-3 – and then he really exacerbates the confusion by again putting an accent on a weak beat -- in this case, the upbeat. ♫ Beethoven really wants the listener to begin to question his ears -- is the downbeat where I thought it was? Or is it where the accents are? This is known as a "rhythmic displacement", and it became a favorite trick of Schumann's. Listen, for example, to the middle of the second movement of Schumann's great Fantasy, Op. 17. ♫ When this begins, it seems certain that the first note, ♫ is the downbeat; but it isn't. The downbeat is a rest, and that first note is in fact the second eighth note of the bar. ♫ So for those several bars, all the main melodic notes occur off the beat. You almost wouldn't be able to tell, except that Schumann "corrects" the rhythm three bars in. ♫ The trick here is to make you just aware enough of the true rhythm to sense that what you are hearing is "off". And that's just what Beethoven manages in that passage. Several minutes of music have provided us with context. We know full well the bar line is. But with this repetition of the accented upbeats -- 4!-1-2-3 4!-1-2-3, we begin to doubt ourselves. ♫ Beethoven finally corrects our misimpression a trimuphant passage, in which every single downbeat gets an accented chord. ♫ Again, just like Schumann would do decades later, Beethoven establishes the correct rhythm, makes us doubt it, and just when we're thoroughly confused, he restores order. So from there, things do proceed in an orderly -- even exultant -- fashion, until we get to the closing theme, which AGAIN is based on the opening bar of the piece. ♫ I don't think there is any other early period work that is this tightly organized, motivically. And just like the second theme, ♫ this closing theme ends in a completely open-ended, inconclusive fashion. ♫ The exposition begins with an exclamation point, but ends with a question mark.
