Every summer (if that is what we are calling this), I programme a small chamber music concert. A few days ago, I was asked by a friend if I might be able to put on a favourite non-vocal piece for two instruments. Music-lovers among you will instantly attest that this a completely impossible decision.
I would struggle to pick my top ten from 200 works, let alone select a single piece. However, in the end, I settled on Beethoven’s Third Cello Sonata – Op 69 – because my friend had not heard it and because, for me, this piece has everything. Indeed, the minute I returned to the sonata, I realised that if I had to push one chamber music piece as a gateway drug for the Beethoven-curious, then this would be it.
If you’ve not heard it before, promise me you will listen to it today. If you have heard it before, revisit it. Play it through headphones, loud.
Because this is pure, distilled Ludwig, at his sublime and unsurpassable best. Twenty-six minutes of intense musical pleasure. So much invention and virtuosity and involvement and drama and soaring beauty.
The attack. The variation. The originality.
The lyricism. The sheer innovation. Beethoven was in his late thirties, his so-called middle period and living in Vienna when he completed the work in 1808.
The enchanted woods of the late string quartets and the mighty summits of the late piano sonatas were still a way off, but his life’s great expedition was already beginning to darken. His developing deafness would mean tha.