Beethoven is famous for writing huge epic structures. But he could write memorable tunes, too, and the second movement of the “Pathétique Sonata” contains a particularly good one. It’s best to known to my age cohort from Schroder’s performance:
Here’s my Ableton Live visualization:
The similarities with Mozart’s Sonata in C minor are obvious. I assume this was a deliberate homage?
This movement has five subsections:
- The beautiful opening part, which I call “the hook,” in A-flat major.
- A beautiful but less memorable part in F minor and E-flat major.
- The hook again.
- A part in A-flat minor and E major using a (frankly annoying) triplet feel.
- The hook a final time, also played in annoying triplets.
Here’s a transcription of the hook.
The harmony is mostly plain-vanilla A-flat major, with the exception of three notes that I’ve marked in red. I’ll explain them one at a time.
The first note from outside A-flat major comes in the last chord of measure three, the Bb7 chord. If you make a chord starting on B-flat that only uses the notes within A-flat major, you’ll get a Bbm7. But Beethoven uses D natural, not D-flat. That’s the sharp fourth in the key of A-flat major. It’s not shockingly dissonant to modern ears, but it definitely sticks out. The D natural makes sense, however, if you think of the Bb7 chord as belonging to a new key, E-flat major. The Bb7 resolves to Eb, and then the Eb becomes the V chord in the original key of A-flat.
The next outside note is an even spicier one, part of an F7 chord in the second half of measure six. If you build a chord starting on F using only the notes within A-flat major, you get Fm7. But Beethoven wrote an F7, which uses A natural in place of A-flat. That is the most dissonant possible note in the key! Once again, the weirdness of the F7 chord gets retroactively justified when you find out that it’s really the V chord in the temporary key of B-flat minor. And then it resolves to Bbm, which is the ii chord in A-flat, so everything resumes being reassuringly diatonic.
Both the Bb7 and F7 chords are examples of secondary dominants (known as applied chords in classical music nomenclature). This is an easy technique for adding dissonance to your tonal music without disrupting its basic tonal-ness. Pick a chord from within the key, think of it as being the tonic chord in its own temporary key, and precede it with the temporary key’s V7 chord. It always sounds good!
Beethoven uses one other conspicuous dissonant note in the hook: the E natural at the end of measure four. This one is not part of a secondary dominant. Instead, it’s a passing tone, a chromatic bridge between the E-flat on top of the Eb7 chord and the F on top of the Gø7 in the next measure. It’s a “meaningless” dissonance, not part of a smoothly functional chord.
Secondary dominants are technically “dissonant”, but the dissonance gets resolved quickly and smoothly. I like this passing tone because it doesn’t have a harmonic function, it’s just there, creating friction for the sake of friction. It keeps the pretty melody from being too pretty.
Beethoven’s music is in the public domain, so you’d expect pop songwriters to be repurposing the Pathétique hook. Billy Joel used it for the chorus of “This Night,” and KISS used it for the intro to “Great Expectations.” But I’m surprised to say that these are the only two examples I could find. People! It’s an earworm for the ages! Write lyrics for it, have a hit, win some Grammies!
There’s another great hook in the first movement of the sonata, at 1:48. I won’t analyze it here, just enjoy:
The third movement is exciting or exhausting, depending on your tastes, but I do like the little Thelonious Monk clusters at 2:53.
I am a bad Beethoven listener, because I hear a hook, I get excited, then the music wanders off and so does my attention, then I hear the hook again and my attention snaps back into focus. I know I’m supposed to only be thinking about the hooks in the context of the entire composition, but I can’t help it. I’m doing a thing here that Theodor Adorno called atomized listening, which he said was symptomatic of capitalist society’s regressive listening generally. In his essay, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Adorno wrote:
Beethoven’s greatness shows itself in the complete subordination of the accidentally private melodic elements to the form as a whole (p. 277).
If you take little moments from large-scale canonical masterpieces out of context, you destroy them.
The man who in the subway triumphantly whistles the theme of the finale of Brahms’ First is already primarily involved in its debris (p. 281).
Adorno would surely be even more horrified by my remixes of canonical works. But with all due respect to him, I have not seen classical works functioning as the liberatory force that Adorno hoped they would be. Here in the US, at least, they’re too tied up with hegemonic whiteness. Would an infusion of Afrodiasporic rhythm help to challenge white hegemony? It’s worth a try.
I especially like 4/4 funk grooves under the parts with triplet feel, it makes them feel less prance-y and awkward, and more like West African three-against-four polyrhythm. Is this kind of thing distracting me from the aesthetic beauty of Beethoven’s music? I believe that it’s moving me closer. When I can dance to the Pathétique, I’m using more of my brain, involving the motor cortex in my cognition. The pleasure of the funk also motivates me to listen more closely, to memorize, and to analyze. I don’t see any difference between “intellectual” and “bodily” musical experience. The brain is part of the body, and there’s too much bodily experience that’s cut off when you’re sitting in a chair.
Update: a Twitter connection pointed me to Hiromi’s jazz version, it’s pretty good: