Moving onto the third movement, we get something a bit retro: a menuet. Now, four movement sonatas can have either a menuet or a scherzo – usually as their third movement, occasionally as their second. But between the two, the menuet is the more staid, traditional choice; a "scherzo"– "joke", in Italian – tends to have more edge and bite. Beethoven gave his very first piano sonata, op. 2 no.1, a menuet, but then he seemed to move away from menuets in favor of scherzos. The other two op. 2 sonatas have scherzos, and while the third movement of op. 7 is simply marked "Allegro", to my ears anyway, it leans much more scherzo than menuet. And regardless, THIS particular menuet is very traditional, courtly. It's almost entirely danceable – it might seem that that should go without saying, but the dances in instrumental works are sometimes dances in name only! (MUSIC) This menuet – and the choice of a menuet, more broadly – fits perfectly into op. 22 as a whole. It is full of grace and charm, and at the same time nothing about it is especially subversive or original. There is a further reason this menuet fits so neatly into the sonata at large, and that is the presence of a motivic idea that is closely related to one that has featured in the previous two movements. The first movement opens with, and is permeated by, a five note gesture: a four sixteenth note pick up, leading to a longer main beat. (MUSIC) The slow movement theme, totally different in every other particular, has a near-identical rhythmic gesture, again pointed upwards, in its very first bar. (MUSIC) And now again, in the third movement, just one bar in, we get a motive with the same exact rhythm and a similar shape. (MUSIC) This unifying device, like so many other things in op. 22, is borrowed from an earlier sonata – in this case, op. 2 no. 3, which has this curlicue gesture, in one form or another, in all four movements. (MUSIC) It might not be quite as pronounced in op. 22, but the consistency of the rhythm across three very different movements cannot be coincidental. In yet another call-back, this third movement has a trio in a minor key, just as op. 2 no. 3 and op. 7 did. This g minor trio – he actually calls it a "minore", but in function it is unquestionably a trio – it is darker and stormier than the menuet that flanks it. (MUSIC) There’s a definite contrast in character – the trio is gruff and uncompromising, whereas the menuet is lilting and friendly. But if you were to compare it to the wildly virtuosic trio of op. 2 no. 3, (MUSIC) or the one from op. 7, with its dramatic "thunderclap" accents-- (MUSIC) then it would start to sound a bit middle-of-the-road. In this movement, Beethoven is once again revisiting a model that he has used before. And for Beethoven, a restless innovator, it was probably inevitable that on the rare occasions when he DID use an old model, the results were a bit less distinctive.