The year Beethoven wrote the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata was the year he first told a friend, in writing, that his hearing was failing. The sound in this piece never fully stops from the first note to the last — at the top of the score he asks for it to be played very delicately, with the dampers raised. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
The one track on The Pianist soundtrack that is not Chopin
Eleven of the twelve tracks on the soundtrack of The Pianist (2002) are Chopin. The remaining one is this — the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight.
The film follows the wartime survival of the Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman and takes almost all its music from his own countryman; this is the single exception.
Like someone sitting there, not leaving
There is no plot in this movement. The left hand circles the same handful of notes from beginning to end, one turn after another — a clock, a breath, the feeling of waiting for something that is not coming. Above it the right hand sings, sparingly, a phrase at a time. Halfway through it lifts slightly, as if about to say something, and then takes it back.
Nothing here is ever really loud. At the end it does not finish so much as walk away.
Beethoven never called it "Moonlight"
Beethoven never called this piece the "Moonlight" Sonata. What he wrote on the score is "Sonata quasi una fantasia" — a sonata in the manner of a fantasy. He knew he was breaking the rules: a sonata's first movement was supposed to be fast and dramatic, and he opened with an adagio that barely moves.
The name was attached five years after his death, when the German poet Rellstab said the music reminded him of moonlight on Lake Lucerne. It stuck, and it has never come off. Beethoven never heard it.
There is a sequel to the letter mentioned above: the following summer, staying in a village outside Vienna called Heiligenstadt, he wrote to his two brothers saying he had thought about ending his life, and that what held him back was the music he had not written yet. He never sent it; it was found in a drawer after his death.
The sonata is dedicated to his student Giulietta Guicciardi, a count's daughter. What was between them has never been settled.
Sixty-nine bars, one accompaniment figure
Three notes rising, four groups to a bar; across 1,183 notes the figure barely ever leaves — the sense that something keeps circling is not your imagination.
The melody does not enter until bar five, and it is deliberately out of step with what is underneath: dotted long-short above, even triplets below, the two layers always a fraction apart. That is why it sounds like someone speaking while time runs along beside them.
The middle takes a turn through other keys; when the opening returns, the melody sits lower. At the end the bass sinks to its lowest point and repeats a single note while the sound peels away, layer by layer.
The hard part is the slowness
The triplets have to stay even while the melody above them stays clearly louder — one hand doing two different jobs, with the melody usually landing on the least cooperative fingers, the fourth and fifth.
Beethoven's instruction senza sordino (without dampers) cannot be followed literally on a modern piano: modern instruments ring far longer than his did, and holding the pedal through the whole movement turns it to mud. Most players change pedal with the harmony instead — connected, but not blurred.
We rate this 3 out of 5. The real wall is the third movement, not this one; this one tests patience.
One more after this
Same shape — something circling underneath while a voice sings above: Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1.
Beethoven writing the same stillness a different way: the second movement of the Pathétique.
What comes after this one: the second movement runs barely two minutes, and the third is the wildest thing in the set. Most people only know the first movement, but Beethoven wrote all three as one piece.
