Musical Offerings, Spring 2019

Musical Offerings ⦁ 2019 ⦁ Volume 10 ⦁ Number 1 37 all the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, all that you actually publish.” 25 The following section will demonstrate a few similarities between the piano sonatas of Beethoven and Emanuel Bach. The analysis shows that several pre-Romantic characteristics in Beethoven’s sonatas, although commonly taught to be innovations of Beethoven, were found earlier in the sonatas of Emanuel Bach. One distinguishing characteristic of Beethoven’s piano sonatas was his blending of sonata and fantasia styles into a single work, especially in his Sonata quasi una fantasia , Op. 27, No. 2 (Ex. 1). In a lecture on Beethoven’s Sonata quasi una fantasia , Jonathan Biss of The Curtis Institute of Music says that up until Beethoven, merging structured sonata and free-flowing fantasia into a single, coherent unit was unheard of: Now the notion of fantasy and sonata united is not entirely new. But in the past, the idea was to present them as distinct works in a sequence, their opposed natures being the very point of the exercise. Mozart for example wrote a Fantasy and Sonata in C minor. . . . So, to have a work that is simultaneously fantasy and a sonata surely seemed like a contradiction in terms. The title [ Sonata quasi una fantasia ] makes really a bold statement which Beethoven has clearly been leading up to with Opus 26—that something other than sonata form and the standard succession of movements can be the glue that holds a sonata together. 26 It is safe to say that this is pre-Romantic, since his merging of sonata and fantasy would inspire nineteenth-century Romantic composers, including Schumann, to do the same. Biss continues: The Schumann Fantasy, one of the really greatest piano works of the Romantic generation, was originally titled Grand Sonata. . . and what was Schumann's motivation 25 Donald W. MacArdle, “Beethoven and the Bach Family,” Music & Letters 38, no. 4 (1957): 356-357 , http://www.jstor.org/stable/730116 . 26 Jonathan Biss, Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas , online course (Curtis Institute of Music) , https://www.coursera.org/learn/beethoven-piano-sonatas .