After leaving Bonn and settling in Vienna in November 1792, Beethoven there published his first three piano sonatas in 1796. It was only three years since the heads of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had fallen in revolutionary France, but in monarchical Vienna, the music was still fresh and light. The Eroica Symphony and the perishable dedication to Napoleon were still a few years away. Meanwhile, Beethoven tries to take Vienna by storm, trying to earn a name for himself as a piano virtuoso and unbeatable improviser.
Opus 10
For the master, these were good years. In 1798 he would publish another three sonatas, as Opus 10, following the tradition of grouping chamber works in multiples of three, a practice he had abandoned with Sonata No. 4, the only piece of Opus 7. He will also resume the healthy habit of dedicating the works to his godparents or tutors, or to his wives.
Opus 10 is dedicated to Anna Margarette von Browne, wife of a Russian diplomat in Vienna and, for the time, one of his most conspicuous benefactors. For the time being, Beethoven is a free-lance musician receiving monetary stimuli for creating music for a Viennese society that, in his own words noted on a raging day, "thinks only of laughing, drinking and dancing."
Sonata Opus 10 No. 1 in C minor - the little Pathétique?
Some scholars have sought to see in the piece a sort of "rehearsal" for the later sonatas. Precisely for the only sonata of the following opus, the rather more notable and popular Pathétique Sonata. And they have called it, very loosely, "the little Pathétique". Granted, both are written in C minor and begin by attacking, forte, the same chord. Now, as this seems a bit weak, they add in expert language their coincidence in "dramatic power" and the presence of "similar dynamic contrasts"... A lot of theories to extol a work from Beethoven's early period, simply kinder and less stormy than the later work in the genre, which does not detract one iota from its genius.
Movements:
Just under twenty minutes long, it is in the usual three movements.
00:00 Allegro molto e con brio
06:03 Adagio molto (one of the maestro's most beautiful slow movements)
14:32 Finale: Prestissimo
The rendition is by Daniel Barenboim, on the occasion of the complete Beethoven sonatas, in Berlin, in 2005.
