♫ And then, all of a sudden, an event! ♫ So! The reverie comes to an end not gradually, but all of a sudden, with a thunderclap. The middle section of this movement is an Allegro in C major – note the key, by the way, the same key that was our only excursion away from E flat major in the first part of the movement. ♫ Now that we’ve heard this middle section, in the same key, that dream-like phrase starts to seem like it was a kind of premonition. Anyway, in tempo, character – really, everything – this middle section is utterly unlike the music that came before it. Whereas the opening was not just soft but sedate, this feels like a boisterous dance -- a German dance, perhaps. The opening tended to hang out all in the same, middle register for bars on end; this section covers the great majority of Beethoven’s piano just in one phrase. Almost all of the opening section is in pianissimo – “very soft” – with just the occasional crescendo; this middle has lots of fortes, and lots of subito pianos, which means that not only is it much louder, but that we jerk back and forth between different volumes, in contrast to the dynamic stability of the opening. It is, obviously, fast, whereas the opening was slow. It lives in a different harmonic zip code. Again: nothing in common. This is the first example – and it’s an excellent example – of the piece’s structure elevating the material: the lack of harmonic, motivic, and rhythmic interest in the opening, however beautiful it was, has the effect of making this interruption seem more rambunctious and attention-grabbing than it would in isolation. So, in referring to this section as “the middle of the movement”, I’ve sort of ruined the surprise. This is a sonata without precedent, which we know from its first phrase – it’s not just that it’s slow, it’s that we sense almost immediately that this is no sonata four movement. So when this opening E flat section comes to its peaceful end and this bluff allegro arrives, I think the most logical conclusion a listener could reach is that we’re done with the opening movement, and that we’ve moved on to new business. But that turns out not to be what this is: this movement, however unconventional, is a strict ABA, with that C major section the rudely interrupting “B”, and the peaceful E flat major making its return in short order. ♫ On the way into that section, there was no transition to speak of – the C major just came slamming in. On the way out, there is at least a harmonic transition – that chord ♫ preparing the E flat major. But from a character point of view, the way out is just as blunt as the way in – the nonstop sixteenths just slam into a brick wall (a fermata, if one insists on using the technical term), and eventually the opening blithely returns, ignoring the ruckus, as if nothing had ever happened. ♫ And it just continues in that vein, the whole theme playing out, virtually unaltered. If op. 27 no. 1 owes something to Mozart’s c minor Fantasy, and to Bach’s Chiesa sonatas, this particular idea seems to be completely original: a first movement in two completely different tempi is not something that I believe had been tried before. Beethoven would himself come back to it, in very different ways and to very different expressive ends. The opening menuet of Op. 54 is all technically in the same tempo, but it juxtaposes two types of music that seem as if they absolutely do not belong together. ♫ And the first movement of op. 109, Beethoven uses two different tempi to create an absolute opposition between first and second themes. ♫ So when I said that op. 27 no. 1 was an experiment that was never repeated, that was not entirely true; the overall structure may not have been, but there were certain details that he found useful and returned to. At any rate, after this almost note-by-note reiteration of the opening – not a recapitulation, mind you, this not being a sonata form – there comes a brief, beautiful coda. The coda is grounded in the repeated note figure that opens (and dominates) the movement. ♫ Beethoven starts the coda out with these two note gestures, one after another, before breaking it down – the two notes become just one, and then the silences in between them grow longer, eventually bringing the movement to a point of total rest. ♫ This end is obviously very peaceful – but is it an end? Even without knowing that this piece is titled quasi una fantasia, and even without taking into consideration the fact that this movement has already been rudely interrupted once, there is something going on here which makes this seem less than final. It’s not that there’s harmonic ambiguity – ♫ nothing in this movement has any harmonic ambiguity! But there are other aspects of this ending that feel a bit wishy-washy, inconclusive. There is the separation of the hands, which means that the bass only arrives on a weak beat. ♫ Combine that rhythmic aspect with the very wide spacing of the chord, and the whispered dynamic, and the whole thing feels just a bit unstable…
