The Beethoven who arrived in Vienna in late 1792, a few months after Mozart’s death, was a cocky young newcomer bursting with talent, confidence, and ambition. He dazzled audiences with his no-holds-barred approach to the piano, which wreaked havoc on the light-framed Viennese instruments that Haydn was partial to. Anton Reicha bore witness to his elemental force when he assisted Beethoven at a performance of a Mozart concerto in the late 1790s. “He asked me to turn pages for him,” the Czech composer recalled. “But I was mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte which snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings. Beethoven insisted on finishing the concerto, and so back and forth I leaped, jerking out a string, disentangling a hammer, turning a page, and I worked harder than Beethoven.”

Yet there was a tender, poetic side to Beethoven’s pianism as well. Comparing him to another celebrated pyrotechnician of the day, the amateur composer Carl Ludwig Junker wrote that Beethoven had “greater eloquence, weightier ideas, and is more expressive—in short, he is more for the heart.” Testimony abounds to Beethoven’s prowess as an improviser—a litmus test of musicianship in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a vital element in Beethoven’s creative process. His rival virtuoso Joseph Gelinek reportedly exclaimed, “I have never heard anyone play like that! He improvised on a subject that I had given him in a manner that I have not heard even from Mozart.” Improvising at the keyboard became even more important after Beethoven’s increasing deafness forced him to curtail his performing activity around 1805.

In 1817 Beethoven received a six-octave Broadwood piano as a gift from the English manufacturer. Although he was too deaf to appreciate the instrument’s enlarged tonal and dynamic range, his music reveals a similar expansion of musical boundaries, as evidenced by the last four of his 32 piano sonatas, from the mighty “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Op. 106, of 1818 to the hauntingly poetic Sonata in C minor, Op. 111, of 1822. Like much of the music of Beethoven’s so-called late period, these works juxtapose passages of great tenderness and lucidity with lacerating eruptions of raw energy and emotion. How, and how much, the composer’s deafness affected his music and outlook on life is to some degree a matter of conjecture, but there is no mistaking the profound “inwardness” of these extraordinary sonatas, with their radical discontinuities, far-flung tonal relationships, and bold reconfigurations of musical time and space.

Commissioned by the Berlin publisher Adolph Martin Schlesinger, the Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major dates from 1821, a time when Beethoven was struggling to bring the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony to completion. It’s no coincidence that all three of these works feature extended passages of intricate fugal writing. These late-blooming specimens of Beethoven’s contrapuntal mastery had their roots in his exposure to Bach’s music as a child: the first favorable review he received, at age 11, was for a performance of The Well-Tempered Clavier in his native Bonn. After moving to Vienna, he took lessons in counterpoint from the eminent teacher and theorist Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. In later life, Beethoven came to worship the cantor of Leipzig as “the immortal god of harmony,” and a copy of Bach’s Art of Fugue was found among the scores in his personal reference library when he died.

The first movement of the Op. 110 Sonata is a study in contrasts: between leisurely melodies and fast, rippling arpeggios, major-key innocence and minor-key angst, placid chordal passages and billowing crescendos. Beethoven’s tonal scheme becomes increasingly adventurous and unpredictable as the scherzo-like Allegro molto in F minor leads, by way of a quietly ruminative Adagio, to a poignant “Song of Lament” in A-flat minor. The throbbing triplet accompaniment conveys a sense of urgency; then, suddenly, the momentum dissipates and a soft, unadorned melody—a sequence of ascending fourths—sounds out in the home key, signaling the start of the Sonata’s climactic fugue. The finale proceeds for a while in familiar, almost textbook, contrapuntal fashion until the lament returns, this time in the remote key of G minor. After it, too, runs its course, Beethoven neatly pivots to G major, brings back the subject of the fugue in inverted form (with descending fourths), and beats a tonally circuitous path back to the safe haven of A-flat major.

Note by Harry Haskell, © 2018