♫ So, the second and third movements of the “Pastorale” explore very different emotional territory; the last movement is to a great extent a return to the world of the first movement. This music again is “pastoral”: unhurried, and gentle, conveying a sense of the cyclical, the eternal. This is accomplished through many different means. First of all, the form is a rondo, which means that whatever happens, we always return back to that A section: ABACABA. But there are other contributing factors as well, which I will get into once I’ve played the A section for you. ♫ So, one notable aspect of this music is the steady predictability of the rhythm. Just as the opening of the first movement was anchored by those quarter note Ds in the bass that never budged, ♫ here, every single bar is grounded by the short-long, short-long rhythm of the bass. ♫ And as you’ll hear, the long notes are always Ds – making this last movement feel highly reminiscent of the first, another way in which the piece feels cyclical. And while the short notes in the bass line DO move, ♫ the harmonic progressions remain very simple – usually I-V-IV-I ♫ or even just V-I, V-I. ♫ Beethoven makes the listener feel that he didn’t even write this music: it simply exists in nature. So again, this movement is a straightforward rondo. There is, inevitably, a certain amount of variety of character between the sections, but all the material has a gentleness about it. The first part of the B section rolls forward a bit more easily than the A, but like the opening, it has absolute rhythmic regularity – and harmonic, with a new chord coming exactly each half bar. ♫ And the continuation is even more closely tied to the A section, dominated as it is by a short-long, short-long rhythm. ♫ There are moments in that B section that are powerful, but absolutely nothing in it is confrontational – this is not music with points to prove. The C section does present a bit more of a departure from the rest of the movement: it’s more dramatic and exploratory than the music that surrounds it, and its proportions are also more generous: it’s by a large margin the most expansive section of the piece. It begins in a playful mood, with music that in its short-long, short-long rhythm, is very much tied to the opening of the piece. ♫ This leads to a wonderful passage in pianissimo, with a somewhat unearthly sound and character. ♫ Rather than short-long, short-long, the rhythm is now constant, with every eighth note played, and while it begins dolce, this new rhythm eventually begins to read as insistence, as the music turns to minor, and grows to a true climax: the only legitimately dramatic moment in the whole movement. ♫ So this is again reminiscent of the first movement in number of ways. First of all, within a generally placid movement, it is the exact midpoint – the C in an ABACABA structure that brings the drama and intensity. In the first movement, too, it was the development that broke free of the general serenity. And just as in the first movement development, this dramatic episode involves a lot of harmonic motion which suddenly simply stops as we reach a pedal point. ♫ Of course, in the first movement, that pedal point was on the dramatic, unexpected F sharp; ♫ here, the pedal point is quite simply the dominant. ♫ To find his way back from the f sharp, Beethoven needed to write that highly moving transitional passage. ♫ To get from the dominant back to the tonic in the last movement, Beethoven needs to do…nothing at all. ♫ I find this very moving: after all that sturm und drung, Beethoven returns to the A theme, essentially unaltered. He understands that without doing anything to it, it will inevitably sound different, coming as it does out of turmoil. Now, I said that this form was cyclical, but that’s not quite true – it doesn’t begin AND end with the A section, as the final A section is followed by a whirlwind coda, which Beethoven leads into in marvelous fashion. The last A section is, for the first and only time, in a key other than the tonic of D major – it’s the subdominant, G major – and this combined with a series of suspensions, gives it a more fragile character. ♫ Now there, you hear, we have reached the dominant. ♫ And once we do, we stay there – this is an even longer pedal point than the one in the C section, and it sets up a terrific sense of anticipation. ♫ Leading us, finally, to the whirlwind of a coda. ♫ This is simply exhilarating. This whole movement – this whole sonata – has been so measured, so deliberate, that to have the tether taken off – he marks it “quasi presto” – is thrilling and even a bit shocking. The material is obviously drawn strictly from the opening of the movement, and we still have the same pedal point D and harmonic predictability. ♫ But the music now has determination. For most of this piece, the LACK of determination – the sense that we were absolutely not in a hurry to get anywhere – was central to its expressive nature. So this coda feels wonderfully freeing – it’s the moment when the shackles finally come off, and what was a gentle contentment turns into unbridled joy. So, that is op. 28. It makes its points so quietly, so unassumingly – which is atypical for Beethoven, really – it's very easy to overlook it in favor of the “statement” sonatas. But once you do look into it, you find that it commands the attention completely. It has the kind of beauty that can only be produced by a composer whose guard is down. Beethoven’s guard is rarely down, and so this sonata provides a window into a corner of his personality that we don’t often see. It is a great gift.
