[music] So, last time around, we began in the middle, with the Sonata Opus 7; this time, we’re going to begin right at the beginning, with the marvelous Sonata Opus 2, Number 1, the first of the 32. Now, just because this is The First, we should all disabuse ourselves of the notion that this music is in any way immature; Beethoven was 24 when he wrote it, in 1795. Unlike Mozart, a child prodigy who was heavily marketed as such and who had published a symphony at the age of 8, Beethoven took a much more cautious approach to introducing himself and his music to the world. He spent ten years writing music – sometimes really quite good music – before he began publishing his works, and during those 10 years he studied, most notably with Haydn, but with others as well. He studied the piano, he studied counterpoint, and knowing Beethoven, he surely did so doggedly. So it’s not surprising that the three piano trios and three piano sonatas that comprise Opus 1 and 2, respectively, are all works that have all entered the repertory. So what accounts for this extra deliberation? Maybe it's because, thanks to Haydn and Mozart, there was already a body of truly great music in the genres Beethoven most cared about – sonata, quartet, and symphony above all – and that meant he was reluctant to publish music until he felt fully confident about its worth. Or maybe it’s simply a question of his character and the nature of his ambition. Regardless of the reason, Beethoven’s first published works are of extremely high quality, and they are fully in his “voice.” However, it is true that this sonata, like many of the other early works, owes more to the past than is true of Beethoven’s later music. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the F minor sonata – that’s the key of Opus 2, Number 1 – is the way in which it both nods to tradition, and chafes against it. The three sonatas of Opus 2 are dedicated to Haydn. It’s highly appropriate that Beethoven offered this dedication to his extremely distinguished teacher, and it’s interesting that it comes with Opus 2, and not the three trios of Opus 1 – Haydn was extremely prolific and extremely inventive in both genres, so the tribute would have been fitting either way. For Beethoven, though, the sonata ended up being a far more significant medium than the piano trio, and perhaps this dedication is an indication that he already knew it would be the focus of many of his greatest ambitions. It’s worth noting here that Haydn really was a profound influence on Beethoven. It is true that Beethoven might have studied with Mozart – or at least tried to – if Mozart hadn’t died shortly before he arrived in Vienna. But while Beethoven clearly did study Mozart’s music, his music generally shows a much greater debt to Haydn. Today, we hold Haydn in slightly lower esteem than Mozart and Beethoven. While I can understand why this is, it is both unfair and unfortunate, because Haydn’s gift to music and to musicians cannot be overstated. Haydn not only was virtually the creator of the symphony, the string quartet, the piano trio, and the piano sonata, which would be a formidable enough achievement in itself; he wrote great – truly great, timelessly great – works in all of those genres. In each, he wrote dozens of pieces – more than a hundred symphonies! – and he was as unlikely to repeat himself as Beethoven was. I’m not sure that any other composer had as many ideas as Haydn. And while there is a significant temperamental difference between Haydn and Beethoven, it is nothing compared to the difference in the temperaments of Mozart and Beethoven, who have really remarkably little in common. They may have lived in a similar part of the world in a similar time, and they may have used many of the same forms in their music, but the sources of drama in their music are generally totally different: in a nutshell, Mozart’s music is highly theatrical, and relies on his profound understanding of the reality of human emotion, whereas Beethoven is stubbornly idealistic, and writes not of the way things are, but of the way he wishes them to be. (Now this is obviously very crude, very reductive, and very personal, but given that it’s not really the subject of the lecture, let’s not get bogged down with it.) Anyway, by contrast, so many of Beethoven’s signature qualities – his humor, his delight in surprising, even shocking his audience, his combining of the most sacred and the most earthy, profane elements in his music – these find clear antecedents in Haydn. So it’s safe to say that when he was writing his first piano sonatas, dedicated to Haydn, Haydn was much on Beethoven’s mind.