Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is thrilling and brain-twisting. Its nickname derives from the fact that it was published as a sonata ‘for the hammer-action keyboard’, which just means a piano. But the notion of hammering suits this work. It’s his longest sonata — a late one, No. 29 in B flat, Op. 106 — and a mighty piece of machinery. I’ve been listening to it for 40 years and I’m not even close to grasping its details. It’s far more of a mental puzzle than the sublime last trio of sonatas, Opp. 109–111, whose construction is less tortuous.
The Hammerklavier has been in and out of my CD player a lot recently, for two reasons. I’ll explain later. If you don’t know the work, let me give you my version of the plot, as it were.
The sonata begins with an explosion: a fusillade of descending thirds that Beethoven originally wrote, years earlier, to be sung to the words ‘Vivat, vivat Rudolphus!’ — the opening fanfare to a never-completed brown-nosing cantata in honour of his patron Archduke Rudolf.
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