♫ The coda of this brief movement heightens the atmosphere once more. The hands continue to be unsynchronized, the dynamic rises to fortissimo – for the first time in the scherzo proper – and every bar has a sforzando. It’s as if Beethoven wants the music hammered into the listener’s brain. ♫ This leads to the fusillade of C Major that closes the movement by tumbling all the way from the top of the piano to the bottom – I should point out that this move to C Major is NOT a modulation, but rather what’s called a Picardy third: a device that dates back to the baroque era, wherein a movement in minor comes to rest on the major chord, just at the last moment. ♫ Now, it’s interesting, and ironic, that while this ending is incredibly emphatic, it’s also inconclusive: at the bottom of that hurtling arpeggio we just land on a single C – the chord has gone, and we hold on to that one, solitary note, for a long time. ♫ Now, remember, the end of the first movement did also feel open-ended to me – but it’s possible that that has something to do with the vision of hindsight. I KNOW that the second movement is going to follow attacca, so it’s easy to retroactively hear the ending of the first movement as somehow unresolved. But it is a proper ending, with a full-fledged E flat Major chord, and there is really no connection between how the first movement ends and how the second begins. The transition between the second and third movements is in marked contrast to that. That unsupported C that the second movement comes to a halt on – the longer it goes on, the more it seems to need, or at the very least, want, a continuation. And when that continuation – the beginning of the third movement – comes, it is much more explicitly linked to the end of the second movement than the beginning of the second was to the end of the first. ♫ So, this is the third movement – Adagio con espressione. It’s in A flat major – which is very complementary both to the c minor we have just come from, and to the E flat major which is the work’s principal key. And not only that, but the C that ended the second movement becomes the first note of the third. It’s a wonderful effect, how that same C evolves before our very…ears. It begins life as the clear-cut root of a C Major chord. ♫ Then, with the chord taken away, the longer it is held, the more doubt creeps in – we don’t know what its context, its meaning, is. ♫ And finally, it finds a new life as the third in an A flat triad. ♫ This transformation is very moving. The second movement, with its minor key and relentless motion, was always agitated. Instantly, with one chord, headlined by the same note that closed the second movement, we know that all that has gone: this might not be absolutely the most metaphysical adagio that Beethoven ever wrote, but it has not one ounce of the nervous drive of the previous movement, trading it for that blend of beauty and idealism that no one else, before or after, ever came close to achieving. And once again, this is a contrast that is made so much more palpable and more effective by the fact that there is quite literally no separation between these two types of music – in fact, they are linked, by one magic C.
