portraying the daring spirit who first stole fire from Heaven and
as the crowning message of a work meant to glorify all heroic
endeavor. A thorough familiarity with this movement will re-
pay the student not only as exemplifying Beethoven’s freedom
of expression but indeed as a point of departure for so many
modern works in free variation form. See Supplement No. 45.
To illustrate Beethoven’s Pianoforte compositions we shall now
analyze theSeventh Sonata in D major, op. 10, No. 3. Only
wholesale hero-worshipers consider all of the thirty-two Sonatas
of equal significance. It is true that, taken as a whole, they are
a storehouse of creative vitality and that in each there is some-
thing, somewhere, which strikes a spark; for everything which
Beethoven wrote was stamped with his dominating personality.
But the fire of genius burns more steadily in some of the Sonatas
than in others. It is the very essence of genius to have its tran-
scendent moments; only mediocrity preserves a dead level. It is
therefore no spirit of fault finding which leads us to centre our
attention upon those Sonatas which have best stood the test of
time and which never fail to convince us of their “raison d’être”:
theAppassionata, theWaldstein, theC-sharp minor, thePathé-
tique, theSonata in G major, op. 14, No. 2, andallthe last
five, especially the glorious one inA-flat major, op. 119. It
is futile to deny that some of the early sonatas are experimen-
tal and that certain others do not represent Beethoven at his
best, being more the result of his constructive power than of
an impelling message which had to be expressed. The D major
Sonata has been selected for study because, though composed
in Beethoven’s first period, it is thoroughly characteristic, and
because its performance is within the powers of the average in-
telligent amateur. The full beauty of the later Sonatas can be re-
alized only by great virtuosi who devote to them years of study.
The work is in four movements: the first, complete Sonata-form;
the second, modified Sonata-form; the third, Three-part; the Fi-
nale, a freely treated Rondo-Sonata-form. The first movement,
Presto, begins with a vigorous presentation of the main theme
which ends in measure 22 with the last of threeffoctaves. The
unusually long transition, containing a subsidiary theme in B
minor, is remarkable for its onrushing excitement and for the
playful false leads which usher in the second theme. After a
brilliant cadence in the dominant key, one would suppose this
theme might be announced in measure 53, but not so; after
three measures of cantabile melody, progress is interrupted by