Beethoven's Piano Sonatas
A Short Companion
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Beethoven’s piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the whole history of music. Spanning several decades of his life as a composer, the sonatas soon came to be seen as the first body of substantial serious works for piano suited to performance in large concert halls seating hundreds of people.
In this comprehensive and authoritative guide, Charles Rosen places the works in context and provides an understanding of the formal principles involved in interpreting and performing this unique repertoire, covering such aspects as sonata form, phrasing, and tempo, as well as the use of pedal and trills. In the second part of his book, he looks at the sonatas individually, from the earliest works of the 1790s through the sonatas of Beethoven’s youthful popularity of the early 1800s, the subsequent years of mastery, the years of stress (1812-1817), and the last three sonatas of the 1820s.
Composed as much for private music-making as public recital, Beethoven’s sonatas have long formed a bridge between the worlds of the salon and the concert hall. For today’s audience, Rosen has written a guide that brings out the gravity, passion, and humor of these works and will enrich the appreciation of a wide range of readers, whether listeners, amateur musicians, or professional pianists.
The book includes a CD of Rosen performing extracts from several of the sonatas, illustrating points made in the text.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rosen's prize-winning study The Classical Style was a wide-ranging look at music history. His latest book originated in seminars given to piano students at an Italian festival, and is divided into two sections, "Formal Principles" (considerations of phrasing and tempo, for example) and "The Sonatas" (analyses of the 18th- and early-19th-century sonatas). Rosen points out that though Beethoven wrote his sonatas at a time when such works were meant for amateur performances at home, he consistently made them too difficult for this purpose. He also observes that Beethoven rarely used simple indications of tempo, such as allegro (quickly) or lento (slowly); instead, he saddled his interpreters with complex and debatable instructions like allegro vivace e con brio (quickly, lively, and with gusto). How fast should the opening of the famous Moonlight sonata, which is "often taken at too slow a pace," be played? And what about the knuckle-busting Hammerklavier sonata, about which Rosen notes, "high-minded pianists consider the very fast tempo vulgar... more than anything else, it is an explosion of energy"? Rosen addresses many such practical questions, and, in the accompanying CD, he plays excerpts from some of the sonatas to illustrate his points. Mostly steering clear of the kind of catty comments about performers and fellow critics that pepper his journalism, Rosen keeps his eye on the subject, and the result is measured and sane. A nice complement to, if not a substitute for, earlier books by Timothy Jones, Kenneth Drake and Robert Taub, this book's musical examples and occasional technical language should not turn off Ludwig-o-maniacs.
