Piano Sonata Number 21 in C Major, Opus 53 (L'Aurore) (Beethoven)

Saturday, June 18, 2016
Levine School of Music - Strathmore Campus
Bethesda, MD
Difficulty score: 6/9

So I gave my first full-length piano recital in eight years this past June (I had wanted to do it sooner, but trying to finish up graduate school, moving to DC and settling in, and placing a greater emphasis on running these past few years prevented me from doing so).  I realized I had neglected to bore everyone about how during this recital, I finally got to perform this piece that I had wanted to learn and perform since I was twelve years old.  I figured now was a good time to do so, while I'm planning another full-length piano recital for June 2017.

This piece, also known as the "Waldstein" or "L'Aurore" Sonata (I prefer the latter as it is more poetic, even though the "L'Aurore" nickname is not frequently used in the United States), is one of Beethoven's most substantial, popular, and most historically significant piano sonatas.  Beethoven had  composed and published 32 piano sonatas in his lifetime.  This one, composed in 1804, is Number 21 in that cycle and an archetypal example of Beethoven's "middle period" compositions, in which Beethoven started implementing changes in his writing style and amplifying his works to much larger scales.

In the Classical Era, a piano sonata was a large-scale work for piano solo, typically consisting of three or four movements: a fast-paced opening, a contrasting slow movement, (optionally) a dance movement in the form of a minuet, and a moderately to fast-paced finale.  Superficially, the basic structure of this piece adheres to that format: a fast-paced opening movement (0:00 to 11:21 in the video above), followed by an intervening slow movement (11:22 to 14:50) that serves as an introduction to the leisurely rondo closing out the entire sonata (14:51 to 25:20).  But in many ways, this piano sonata was quite different from anything anyone else had ever composed before.  The chord progressions and modulations in the first movement, although they might not seem particularly strange to our ears in 2017, were very novel in the early nineteenth century.  The long pedals in the third movement (the pedal is held down sometimes for as many as ten or more measures), as well as virtuosic figurations such as the lengthy trills (24:25 to 24:59) and the octave glissandos (i.e. gliding the hand across the keyboard; 24:16 to 24:23) creates sounds and pianistic effects that were quite new in 1804.

I first came across this piano sonata some time in 1994 after I borrowed my piano teacher's copy of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas so that I could photocopy the "Moonlight" Sonata and begin learning the notes.  I flipped through the entire book to take a look at the other piano sonatas, and this one caught my eye.  The reason was pretty dumb; I was simply fascinated by its page count.  At nearly fifty pages, this piano sonata was much longer than any piece I had encountered in my then limited exposure to the repertoire.  In terms of page count among Beethoven's piano sonata, the "L'Aurore" is also second only to the twenty-ninth in the cycle, the "Hammerklavier."

However, I could not sift through the score of the "L'Aurore."  Editions of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas typically need to be split into two volumes simply because the total page count often reaches seven hundred pages or more, which would result in a book that is too bulky for use at the piano.  The "Moonlight" is often in the first volume whereas the "L'Aurore" is typically in the second.   Shortly afterwards, I borrowed a recording of the "L'Aurore" from the local library, wondering what a fifty-page piece would sound like, and how long it would be in terms of playing time.  Back then, I did not have the patience to listen to all twenty-five minutes of the sonata, but I did listen to the first movement.  I listened to it over and over again, captivated by the soft repeated chords in the opening, the transformation of these repeated chords into a tremolo during its restatement a few measures later, the chorale-like secondary theme, and the rapid broken-chord and scalar passages.  I even tried to learn as much of the first movement as I could by ear.

Not long afterwards, my father purchased a recording of this piano sonata for me.  I started listening to the second and third movements.  I needed a while to warm up to the second movement, a very slow and harmonically unsettling arioso serving as an introduction to the third and final movement, a spacious rondo (a piece of the form A-B-A-C-A-B-A, namely where a refrain is repeated amidst contrasting episodes) that enthralled me upon my first listen as much as the first movement.  I then asked my piano teacher if I could borrow her copy of the Beethoven piano sonatas again; but this time, I requested the second volume so I could tinker with the "L'Aurore".  Understandably, she seemed a little reluctant; after all, this piano sonata is one of the more technically and musically difficult ones of the thirty-two.  She gave in, and I was able to work on learning the notes for a little while before she took the score away, deciding that this piece was indeed too difficult for me.

Three years later, I ordered a copy of the score of the "L'Aurore," attempting once more to learn the notes.  I got much further than I did last time, but since my technique was nowhere near the level needed to successfully execute this piece, I developed many bad habits.  I switched teachers that year, and after my new one gave me a bracing reality check about my current technical and musical abilities, I listened to her, put the "L'Aurore" back on the shelf, and focused my attention on less ambitious pieces more appropriate for my level at the time.  I finished learning all of the notes to the first movement when I was seventeen, and finished learning the notes to the second and third movements five years later right after my graduation from the University of Rochester, after my teacher there suggested I start working on this piano sonata.  I had planned to perform this piece in a piano recital I had intended to give in 2009 that I needed to cancel as I needed to focus on finishing my dissertation and secure a job for after my thesis defense.

Initially, I had intended to perform another Beethoven piano sonata during this recital, but after some consideration, I decided now was a good time to perform "L'Aurore"; I had brought this up to performance standards before, after all, and the notes came back to me surprisingly quickly; after less than two weeks of work on the "L'Aurore," I was able to play the first movement at tempo.  Plus, I felt this piece would be more friendly toward an audience that was able to appreciate piano music but did not know much about it.  But I'm happy to say that I can cross performing this piece off my bucket list.

Considerations for Learning and Performing this Piece

• I gave this piece an overall difficulty rating of 6 out of 9.  This rating is primarily because of the scale of this sonata and the technical figurations; this is one of the virtuosic middle-period Beethoven sonatas, even though it is not the most difficult piece Beethoven wrote.
• Practice slowly, of course, and figure out how to convincingly integrate the many virtuosic passages into one cohesive whole.
• Focus on clarity of the notes and keeping a constant tempo throughout each of the movements; this is still a Classical Era piece, after all.
• In the last movement, the opening section (14:51 to 16:10) recurs several times essentially verbatim.  Figure out a different way to execute this theme each time it appears to change things up and to prevent the piece from getting too repetitive.  During the first occurrence, I like to milk every note to really emphasize the spaciousness of the theme.  During the second occurrence (17:20 to 18:43), I play more flatly.  During the third and last occurrence (21:29 to 22:07), I play the theme more grandiosely to emphasize its glorious return after a lengthy and tempestuous middle section.