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Beethoven.

Yes. The first one is the easiest and the rest get increasingly harder.

Exactly !!!!!

Check the beginning of this thread

This is a list I submitted for another thread. It is taken from the 2-volume edition by Liszt and published by Boswell. The ordering may be Liszt's, I don't really know.

Volume one

1 Op49 No2
2 Op49 No1
3 Op79
4 Op14 No2
5 Op14 No1
6 Op2 No1
7 Op10 No1
8 Op10 No2
9 Op2 No2
10 Op2 No3
11 Op10 No3
12 Op13
13 Op22
14 Op28
15 Op7
16 Op78
17 Op26
18 Op31 No3


Volume two

19 Op31 No1
20 Op90
21 Op27 No1
22 Op27 No2
23 Op54
24 Op31 No2
25 Op53
26 Op81a
27 Op57
28 Op101
29 Op110
30 Op109
31 Op111
32 Op106


John

I hadn't realised I'd posted this earlier in this thread. Oh well.

The copy of the Liszt edition I examined presented the sonatas in the standard order. Is this alternate ordering something in a preface that has been added?


M.

I've found it surprisingly hard, in this information age, to find a definitive listing of Liszt's difficulty ordering of the sonatas. I remember hearing that he ranked op.7 very near the hardest on the list, so I don't think this is it.

-J

This would be my list:

1 Op49 No2
2 Op49 No1
3 Op79
4 Op14 No2
5 Op14 No1
6 Op2 No1
7 Op10 No2
8 Op2 No2
9 Op10 No1
10 Op26
11 Op10 No3
12 Op13
13 Op31 No2
14 Op27 No1
15 Op27 No2
16 Op22
17 Op31 No3
18 Op28
19 Op31 No1
20 Op54
21 Op90
22 Op2 No3
23 Op7
24 Op78
25 Op81a
26 Op57
27 Op53
28 Op110
29 Op109
30 Op111
31 Op101
32 Op106

Have you played all 32 sonatas jeffreyjones? I haven't, but from those I have played, I see many things I really disagree with on that list: Op 10 no 3 is definitely harder than plenty of the pieces ahead of it. I also would say that Op 26 is harder than Op 13, Op 27 No 1 is MUCH harder than Op 27 No 2. Op 90 is easier than Op 10 No 3, actually, those two could pretty much switch places IMO. I am not gonna rank all 32 because I haven't played them all; also I consider it impossible to rank pieces, because you learn them in different stages of your life, and therefore you find them easier/harder depending on when you learn them. But the sonatas I have played are: Op 10 No 3, Op 13, Op 26, Op 27 No 1, Op 27 No 2, Op 49 No 1, Op 90 and Op 109. Out of these pieces, I had the hardest time learning Op 27 No 1, even harder than Op 109 for me. Though Op 109 is hard to make sound good, I still had a much easier time learning it than I would have expected. Op 90 was also alot easier than I thought it would be, except the alberti bass in tenths in the first movement. Op 10 No 3 was way harder than Pathetique and Moonlight for me. Op 26 was also harder than Moonlight and Pathetique; try playing the last movement of that sonata at the same tempo as Emil Gilels plays it(I think he plays this sonata the best), it's insanely difficult.

I really don't understand the obsession that some appear to have with precisely ranking each and every Beethoven Sonata in order of difficulty relative to all the other Beethoven Sonatas. Since we each have different strengths and weaknesses - both musical and technical - the whole question seems an exercise in futility.

It becomes absurd when one person will argue with another person's ranking of the order of difficulty, but, then again, the whole idea seems somewhat absurd to me.

What's the point?

It's fun. That's all. If it's not fun for you, that's fine... but it is for some of us.

Just did op.2/2, and it's not clear to me that its first movement is significantly easier than op.57's first movement, because it goes so fast.... I'm surprised to find it so low on various lists.

-J

It's the order in which the sonatas are presented in that edition. I, unfortunately, only have the first volume. I sent away, at great expense, for what I thought was volume two, but it was volume 2 of the standard ordering - and a facimile of a poor quality 19th century edition with poor quality cover to boot.

John

At the time I obtained a copy it seems to have been out of print except for an edition out of the orient which I obtained through interlibrary loan. Even with the standard ordering of the sonatas it was definitely Liszt's edition and it detailed his various small changes to the sonatas - it was all 32 sonatas in one volume.

I like the ordering based on difficulty. If someone with a limited amount of time for it wants to learn a Beethoven sonata this makes it quite easy to identify one neither too challenging or too easy.


M.

I find that 2/2 is not as difficult as it looks, because the fingerwork is kind to the fingers. It's fast and sometimes tricky, but it can be overcome with the right approach. There's hardly a single bar in Op. 57, or 101, or 106 that is comfortable to play even after you've practiced them extensively. I also put Op. 78 in that category but it's not as hard.

Interesting topics~

This thread is twelve years old, and was last posted in more than two years ago. You don't revive it just to say "Interesting topics."

I don't think the ranking has changed since 2013. Unless Beethoven has written something new that I haven't heard about?

I think we should regard it very differently when it's a new member. First of all I think the main thing we should do is welcome him/her, and hope that he/she will become an active member. But besides -- and I speak from my own experience, from when I first began looking at discussion forums -- it isn't necessarily readily obvious to a new member whether a discussion is current or not, plus they don't necessarily see any reason to make a distinction between new and old. By the time I came here I did know all that, because I had been active on a couple of other sites (not about music), but when I was new to this whole thing, I didn't know at all.

Besides, the way that many if not most new members come here is via internet search. They look up something, it links to a Piano World thread -- and if they find it interesting, they might want to post on it, even maybe just to say that they found it interesting, or, as in this case, that they think various of our topics are interesting, presumably including this one. I think that most people arriving at a thread in such a way wouldn't have any idea that it matters whether the thread is recent or not -- and y'know, I don't really think it does. In fact, I like how old threads sometimes get brought back, and it's almost always by new members, and I think usually it's because they found it by a search of a topic they were interested in.

But why is posting on any thread, new or old, with the words "Interesting topics" and then a squiggly mark considered a legitimate post?

Content isn't everything.

It's a legitimate post because it's a first post by a new member, and because it signals to us that this thread was (probably) found via a search and that it was interesting enough to bring someone here, and because it brings the thread back to us, for anyone else who might be interested, which I believe will be quite a few people.