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Beethoven - 24 Variations on Righini's "Venni Amore," WoO 65




Beethoven - Sonata in E flat, Opus 81a

Neat catch! It's neat to see Beethoven use register and inversion to make all the thirds and fifths interesting. Visually, there's something pleasant about reading through it.

I haven't heard the first work pictured but I think I will.

Anyway, creative people repeat themselves! Compare Rachmaninoff's prelude op.32 no.12 G#m to his etude op.33 no.2 C (the Allegro, not the slower C etude).

Yes, there are many examples of this type of thing in Beethoven - he'll use some motive or theme in an early work, and come back 20 years later, use the same motive, and totally transform it to show an entirely new side of it that could never have been detected from the earlier example. Mozart does this also (for example, you see the famous Jupiter motif appearing in several early compositions long before the great symphony was even conceived).

Update: I heard the first 14 variations before I gave it a rest. Very charming writing, in moderate doses! :P.

Well, let's not pretend it's comparable to his later style.

I just heard this piece for the first time today, from a Henle two-volume complete Beethoven variations edition I purchased recently. I've been reading through it in small chunks throughout the day. (By the way, this is not the only connection I've discovered to a later Beethoven work. Not by any means. His early writing is full of them. )

I am actually interested in early Beethoven lately. I'm taking a break from late Romantic composers to pay more attention to classical and modern ones ('modern' covering everything from Samuel Barber's piano concerto for John Browning to Erkki Sven-Tuur's fantastic sonata).

I like 'Missa Solemnis' more than anything he ever wrote for the piano, though, sorry to say!

EDIT: do you make your living from music? I'm surprised that you can plop down and read through whatever you want throughout the day. That's great though.

Have you heard everything he wrote for the piano?


Where do you consider the cutoff to "early Beethoven" to be? I would say it's somewhere around 1801, which was a very productive year for Beethoven: he wrote four piano sonatas (Opus 26, 27 1+2, and 28), and several violin sonatas, among other works, and completed his C major symphony for publication.

I feel like I'm missing something. What is the coincidence?

In both excerpts, Beethoven augments each line (the rhythmic units get larger), has them played successively with overlap. In op. 81a, he has register changes as well.

And they both share the very distinctive horn-fifth "Lebewohl" motif, and also another very similar figure (see bar 4 of the 81a excerpt).

I think the two examples given are similar to the end of the first movement of his Sonata Op.90.

That is cool!

In Op. 28 near the end of the 1st movement development there's a lovely 3-note descending motif in F# major, which is also used in Bagatelle Op. 126 no. 4 in the B major section. In both pieces the motif provides a feeling of peace and gentle openness -- Op. 28's first movement is that way in general (nicknamed the Pastoral), and in the Bagatelle it is a respite from the stormy B minor sections that surround it.

Some people do get Saturdays off

Very good, Poly. Now, which two Beethoven sonatas written roughly ten years apart contain movements in which one is a harmonic transposition of the other?

79, 109. What is this, Beethoven Trivia?

Good find, hreichgott. There are other instances in the Bagatelles of "anticipations" or "reminiscences" of the Composer's other works.

As beet31425 pointed out in another thread (but it bears repeating), the coda of op. 119 #3 has the same figuration as the last pages of op. 110, though with a much different character.

While on the subject of that sonata, the melody of op. 119 #11 (composed a year later than op. 110) strongly resembles the opening motive of the sonata.

You beat me to it! Of course, I should admit that I didn't notice this on my own; it was from Schiff's Beethoven sonata lectures. When he played both as chorales, I couldn't believe that I hadn't noticed it before - they are exactly the same, just transposed!