Page:Rolland - Beethoven, tr. Hull, 1927.pdf/192



Dedicated to Freün Dorothea Ertmann and performed for the first time as new on February 18th, 1816; it was not published until February, 1817. With this Sonata we reach the third period of Beethoven's works, that in which reflection and philosophy play such a great part. Many passages in some of his latest works reach such a massive spaciousness that they seem to lose all touch of human comprehension. Beethoven was seeking a new style, in striving after which his music became more and more contrapuntal. One cannot help connecting his use of the fugue in many of his later works with this new phase. But it was not the fugue of Bach, but one filled with sublimity and mysticism in which he attempted to render the spiritual force more and more concentrated, the meaning sometimes becomes completely dissipated in his attempt to grasp and hold it. Such is not the case, however, with the fugue with which this Sonata ends. It grows out of the chief theme of the Finale and forms the development portion in this combination of the Fugue and Sonata form proper.

The martial feeling in the first movement seems to have produced a substitute for the Minuet or Scherzo movement. The trio with its prolonged