♫ So, today we come to the Sonata in F Major, Op. 54. This is the penultimate lecture of this course. The course has seen close to 30 lectures, in six installments over seven years, we're only now getting to this sonata, even though it's not a late work. On the contrary: as sonata no. 22, written in 1804, this is very much a middle-period work, from the center of Beethoven’s turbulent life. So, why has it taken this long to get to Op. 54? Well, there’s a very good reason: this sonata is strange. It is the wackadoodle among the 32 sonatas. As you’ve heard me say so often, many of Beethoven’s sonatas are predominantly comic, or at least have prominent comic elements; some – like op. 78, for example – are outliers, off-the-beaten path works which don’t really represent the larger road Beethoven was going down; many of the sonatas, particularly the late ones, are hard to pin down – elusive in both character and structure. But Op. 54 is just weird. Beethoven was, of course, a rule-breaker – even when they were his own rules – but there are certain patterns that are recognizable from sonata to sonata. If there is one sonata which leaves the patterns behind, it is this one. There is a determined intensity to ALL of Beethoven’s music, which is still to be found in this piece, no matter how peculiar it is; if it weren’t for that, it might even be difficult to identify as Beethoven. For this reason, it has confounded pianists for many generations – it is among the least played of the 32 sonatas, and many pianists are open about their dislike for it – let me say here that I am not one of them! The story goes that Claude Frank – one of the great interpreters of Beethoven in the second half of the 20th century – SO disliked it that whenever he played the complete sonatas publicly, when the time came to play Op. 54, he TOLD the audience that he didn’t care for the piece, preferred not to play it, and would only do so if someone piped up and explicitly requested it. As I heard the story, someone always did, and so he always got stuck playing it. Claude Frank was, in addition to being a great artist, an eminently sane man, so this story says a lot about how prickly the Sonata Op. 54 is.
