♫ Well, that was enough stage-setting! Let me now play the beginning of op. 10 no. 3’s slow movement, the “A” section. ♫ I think perhaps the first thing to be said about this is how broad it is: again, the first part of the marking is “largo”, which means broad, and the opening phrase immediately establishes that in terms of motion, this movement will be the polar opposite of the first: it is as pulled as the first was driven. The extremes of tempo are reminiscent of the c minor sonata op. 10 no. 1. The breadth of this first phrase is yet more evidence that Beethoven may have had strings in his ear when writing this movement: the piano has many virtues, but making a long line out of a series of VERY slow notes is not one of them: that sort of thing is infinitely easier when you have a bow that pulls the sound from the instrument, unlike the piano, where the sound is produced by a hammer striking the string. To get the desired effect here, one has to fight against the instrument; on a violin, it would be very natural. But despite the great, un-pianistic breadth of this music, what is really striking about it is the sense of lamentation. It is in the frequent use of diminished chords, starting in the third bar of the piece, ♫ and continuing throughout. It is in the arioso theme that arrives eight bars in, sounding so much like a vocal lament. ♫ It is in the almost complete avoidance of the major mode: there is the briefest of landings on C Major, (PLAY), but instantly we go back to a minor, which is this opening section’s true destination. (PLAY). Even the op. 18 no. 1 slow movement – this movement’s closest analog, and in most ways, a more extreme piece of music than this is – even that movement has real periods of major-key respite. Here, the pitch-dark atmosphere persists all the way through. And finally, the sense of lamentation comes through in all of those anguished sforzandos, which become more frequent as the movement progresses. ♫ Those last three, ♫ are marked not just “fortepiano”, but “fortissimo piano” – meaning that the attack should be not just loud, but very loud, before dying away. It wasn’t quite right to say that this is impossible to achieve on the piano: you can do it through some fancy footwork – literal footwork, as it’s mostly accomplished with the pedal. But really, this is not an effect inherent to the piano, and the struggle against the instrument, as is so often the case with Beethoven, is part of what makes this music so potent.