♫ In a movement of perhaps unequaled calm, the development stands out – it's a moment of high drama. This we actually did discuss in that previous lecture, but it’s so brilliantly wrought and powerful, it deserves a much closer look. I’ll start by playing the first half of the development all in one go, and then, I’ll break it down bit by bit, so that you can see its ingenious construction. ♫ So. First, the opening theme moves for the first time into minor, automatically giving it a new and darker character. ♫ This sets into motion a long sequence, all based on the last four bars of the opening motive, with the units shrinking bit by bit, increasing the tension. First we get four iterations of the full four bars, modulating each time, as is so common in developments. ♫ But then, Beethoven dispenses with the first two bars of the figure, and we get just the last two, over and over again. ♫ Then, the two bar figures shrink down to one – the last bar of the figure played time and time again, each time with a new harmony, meaning that from both a motivic and a harmonic point of view, things are now moving four times as fast as they were at the outset. ♫ And just as the forward momentum seems to be hurtling out of control, Beethoven says HALT! At the point at which I stopped playing, we land on an F sharp major chord – NOT a close relative of this sonata’s D Major – and we simply sit there for an insanely long thirty bars, as all other musical elements – motive, even rhythm – dissipate, bit by bit. ♫ It’s a striking – even shocking – effect. The whole exposition was slow-moving, harmonically, but this is a new level of slow, and eventually the music stops entirely, landing on that final fermata. And for this to happen in such a foreign key creates a palpable sense of disorientation – in its sophisticated, subtle way, this is an effect as extreme as anything to be found in op. 26 or 27. Now, at this point in the proceedings, I need to offer a little mea culpa. When I spoke in that earlier lecture about the passage that follows this F sharp major stasis – the passage that leads us back to the recapitulation – I used the word “perfunctory”. A pianist colleague chided me over this choice of word, and he could not have been more right. This passage is efficient and orderly, in sharp contrast to that endless sea of F sharp major we just experienced: in just three four bar phrases, we make our way back to D Major and the opening theme. But it is the furthest thing from perfunctory: it is the most moving moment in the entire sonata, taking a few bars of the closing theme, and turning it into a fragment, searching imploringly for home. ♫ Perfunctory! What was I thinking? It’s a heightened version of this movement as a whole: quietly glorious. Interestingly, when the opening music returns, Beethoven marks it slightly differently: at the beginning of the piece, everything was marked piano. This time around, the first bar – the bar where the Ds in the bass appear alone, before the entry of the theme itself – that bar is pianissimo; when the right hand begins playing, the dynamic rises to piano. ♫ This really heightens that sense of the eternal: rather than having a clear starting point, the Ds come gradually into being – it’s as if they were there all along, but only just rose to the level of audibility at that moment. I think we can pass over the recapitulation without you losing a sense of the piece – it functions just as one would expect from a classical recapitulation. But there is a coda, in which the Ds in the bass once again dominate. ♫ The return of the main theme in the coda, ♫ and, above all, the return of the Ds, give this movement an almost cyclical quality. It is, clearly, a sonata form, but by adding a coda that relies so heavily on the opening theme, there is this sense of the movement ending in the same way that it began: yet again, evoking the eternal. The final phrase of the piece features the same bar of the opening theme repeatedly, set against increasingly high upbeats: the upbeats rise and rise, exultantly, while the other material remains implacable. ♫ Often, when Beethoven writes a rising line like that, with a crescendo attached, it comes across as determined and intense; here, the rise reads as generosity. A final act of generosity in a movement replete with them.
