“Beethoven’s work,” says Paul Bekker, “is based on the pianoforte;
therein lie its roots and there it first bore perfect fruit.” Yet it is
a curious paradox that he abandoned this phase of composition relatively
early, producing the majority of his works for the keyboard before he
was forty. A number of reasons might be cited for this—his growing
deafness, the consequent impossibility of his public appearances as
performing virtuoso, the circumstance that his intellect outgrew the
expressive capacity of the piano, and the immense broadening and
deepening of his creative faculties which demanded subtler and more
ramified channels of expression. “The pianoforte is and always will be a
disappointing instrument,” he said at one stage of his career. And he
was distressed that his compositions for the piano exclusively always
produced on him the most regrettable impression. “Oh! Beethoven, what an
ass you were!” he exclaimed on one occasion when someone played him his
own Variations in C minor.
Nevertheless, the tremendous series of thirty-two sonatas, which began,
roughly speaking, in 1795 and continued more or less intermittently till
1822, are among his most moving, gracious, original, adventurous, and
completely extraordinary achievements. They range all the way from the
so-called “Pathétique,” “Pastoral,” and “Moonlight” to the “Waldstein,”
the “Appassionata,” and the programmatic “Les Adieux, l’Absence et le
Retour,” to the mighty series beginning in 1816 with the A major, opus
101, and culminating in the gigantic B flat, opus 106 (universally known
as “for the Hammerklavier”), the extraordinarily imaginative ones in E
major and A flat, opera 109 and 110, and the transcendent, Promethean C
minor, opus 111. Within the cosmic limits of this stupendous succession
there stretches a whole world of emotional experience and an
incalculable diversity of invention. And we may as well mention here
(though it was not composed till 1823) that prodigious set of
Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by the publisher Diabelli, which has
not its like in the whole range of Beethoven’s output. Looking back over
the immense panorama of the composer’s piano works (including
variations, bagatelles, and solo sonatas) stretching, let us say, from
the awesome summits of the “Hammerklavier,” the C minor, and the
“Diabelli” Variations backward to the comparative simplicities of the
sonatas Opera 2, 22, 26, and 27 leaves one with the dizzy impression of
surveying a whole Alpine panorama.