Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, third movement. Everyone knows the quiet triplets of the first movement, but the weight of this sonata is at the end. Beethoven wrote the finale as an unbroken presto: it opens with a rush of arpeggios straight upward and barely stops for six minutes. 265 bars as played and close to 6,600 struck notes. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
He turned the order of the movements upside down
The sonata was written in 1801 and published the next year. On the title page Beethoven wrote quasi una fantasia — in the manner of a fantasy — and that is not decoration but an instruction: this piece does not follow the rules of a sonata.
The rule then was fast, slow, fast. Beethoven put the slowest, stillest movement first, placed a short interlude after it, and loaded the whole work's weight onto this finale. The first movement settles nothing; it sets a mood. The argument is finished here.
Beethoven never called it the Moonlight. Five years after his death the German poet Ludwig Rellstab compared the first movement to moonlight on Lake Lucerne; the comparison spread and the name stuck.
He was thirty-one when he wrote it, and his hearing had already begun to fail. The sonata is dedicated to his pupil Giulietta Guicciardi; he is said to have wanted to marry her, and their difference in rank made it impossible. What happened between them has never been settled.
It launches upward at once and never really stops for six minutes
There is no preparation. The first sound is a rush of arpeggios from low up to the top, two hard chords at the peak, and then the same again, higher. The gesture repeats several times, stacking the sound upward step by step.
Then the theme arrives: unbroken sixteenth notes in the right hand over an angular bass in the left. The two run together and hardly rest — there are only 112 rests in the movement, which against 6,884 notes is close to none.
Several times the sound shrinks to a thin line low down, like someone dropping their voice. The smaller it gets, the harder the next eruption.
Near the end everything stops and a few extremely slow bars appear — the score marks them Adagio, the only genuine pause in the movement. After it the original speed returns and the last stretch drives all the way down to two closing chords.
This is not music to leave running. It pushes forward from beginning to end, and it suits the moments when you want to be pushed.
265 bars, 6,884 notes, and barely a hundred rests
265 bars as played (202 written, with bars 2 to 65 repeated), 4/4, C-sharp minor, 6,884 sounding notes plus 108 grace notes — and only 112 rests.
Bar 1 is the upward rush; from bar 2 the theme runs to bar 65, and that whole stretch is played twice as the score asks, so you hear it through a second time already knowing where it goes.
From bar 66 comes the central section, the sound shrinking several times to a single line and building back to full texture; the bass travels furthest here.
From bar 132 the opening returns, its figuration nearly identical to bar 2 onward but resolving elsewhere.
From bar 186 is the coda: first the fiercest writing in the movement, then at bar 190 everything stops — marked Adagio — and two bars later Tempo I brings the original speed back for a final drive to the bottom.
Six thousand eight hundred and eighty-four sounding notes, the shortest lasting 0.029 seconds. The sixteenth-note stretches go past almost as one sheet of sound.
The difficulty is lasting, not playing the notes
This is one of the notoriously hard Beethoven sonata movements, and the difficulty comes in four parts.
First, stamina. The right-hand sixteenths run from bar 2 to the end with almost nowhere to relax. Once the arm tightens the second half will not hold, so find the instant in each phrase where weight can be released.
Second, the opening arpeggios. They rush upward in groups of four, and the wrong fingering caps the speed. Practise them separately until the hand does not need watching.
Third, the left hand. The bass is not accompaniment; it has its own angular line and must match the right hand in volume rather than be washed away.
Fourth, the Adagio in the coda. It is the only stop in the movement and the contrast has to be made — do not slow down early, and do not drag once Tempo I returns.
The tempo is 160 to the quarter, as printed at the head of this edition (the heading is Presto agitato). The finished video runs seven minutes thirty-six.
We rate this 5 out of 5.
The first movement of the same sonata, and his other sonatas
The first movement of this same sonata is already on the channel — the part everyone recognises: quiet, in triplets, one figure from beginning to end. Hearing the two together is what shows why Beethoven inverted the order.
The slow movement of the Pathétique sonata, his best-known early one, is on the channel too.
For more unbroken sixteenth notes: Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu, also here.
