♫ Emotionally sophisticated and complex as the first movement might be, it still does not prepare us for the slow movement – this is probably one of the most striking movements of the entire early period, music of enormous intensity and unrelentingly tragic. The movement is in d minor, and is marked Largo e mesto – broad and sad. This mesto marking is highly unusual – Beethoven’s tempo markings rarely make explicit the feeling of the movement, and the quartet op. 59 no. 1 is the only other case I can think of where the word “mesto” appears. This raises an interesting point: Beethoven Beethoven is justly famous for how deeply, intensely felt his slow movements are – there are many dozens of examples. And yet, slow movements of a tragic nature are surprisingly rare for him. There are, of course, examples – the Eroica Symphony and Hammerklavier sonatas are famous ones – but far more often, Beethoven’s dark, fatalistic music is in the faster movements. The Fifth Symphony, the Appassionata, Pathetique and Moonlight sonatas, Op. 111, the second Razumovsky quartet. In the great works, the slow movements, if I were to generalize, tend to be philosophical and spiritual. But there are a handful of profound exceptions, and Op. 10 no. 3 is the first of them. Not only that, but it is really a progenitor of many of the great tragic slow movements to come: certainly those in the quartet Op. 18 no. 1, and the “Ghost” trio, Op. 70 no. 1, both also in d minor. It’s not an accident that those are both works with strings: there are many moments in the slow movement of op. 10 no. 3 that suggest string quartet writing: passages with four part chords, others in which the bass line mimics a cello. And there are certain markings that are not really achievable on the piano: for example, often times in this movement, Beethoven will write a forte piano accent on a long note. On the piano, the best one can do is play that note forte, and then drop to piano on the next one; a string player would be able, by virtue of varying the bow speed, to adjust the volume on the note itself. In spite of having chosen the piano as his medium, Beethoven seems to be thinking in strings here. In fact, there are enough parallels between the sonata and the op. 18 no. 1 quartet that it’s worth getting into the quartet a bit more. I’m not going to play it, because it really does not translate well to the piano, but I highly recommend you give it a listen – it has moments of shocking drama, and is an altogether memorable contribution to what is, arguably, Beethoven's greatest body of work: the string quartet. Op. 18. no. 1’s slow movement – marked Adagio appassionato e affetuoso, which is slightly less specific than the mesto of the sonata – it's apparently meant to be a musical evocation of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet. Unlike the Tempest sonata, where there’s no particular evidence that Beethoven himself made the connection between the work and Shakespeare, Karl Amenda, a friend of Beethoven’s, claimed that the composer himself had the play in mind. And that dramatic – melodramatic, really – scene is a natural fit for the music, which is altogether theatrical, and has hugely violent outbursts in its middle section and coda. Haydn and, especially, Mozart wrote extraordinary tragic slow movements, but there is a raw quality here which leaves them behind, and, in spite of this being early Beethoven, written within Haydn’s lifetime, this belongs more to the romantic era than to the classical one. The sonata does not go to quite such extremes as the quartet, but it has many of the same affects, and even the same footprint – its form, a sort of modified three part form, ABAcoda, is similar, and the violent outbursts come at exactly the same moments.
