(MUSIC) So, the Pathetique’s last movement is akin to the second, in that it makes no attempt to match the first – not in length, not in structural innovation, not in its emotional scope. It is a rondo, which is very much expected, in a sonata finale; it is in ABACABA form, which is very much expected in a rondo; and unlike the first movement, it moves into major at the expected junctures, bringing relief from its darkness. So we are still very much in early-Beethoven, the-action-comes-right -at-the-beginning-of-the-sonata territory. This movement breaks new ground – new in the context of this sonata – in only one sense: it has an emotional ambiguity that is almost entirely lacking in the first two. The first movement has this permanently clenched jaw, and its desperation lives right at the surface, throughout. The slow movement, following it, is all about consolation, and that mood, again, remains more-or-less unbroken. The finale, by contrast, works on multiple emotional levels at once: it is evenly poised between resignation and fight. It returns to the opening movement’s c minor, but it has an uncertain, vacillating character, entirely alien to the first movement’s self-assuredness. (MUSIC) By the middle period, in works such as the Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas, Beethoven has found a way to write finales that stand up to the first movements – and by the late period, as we’ve seen, the last movement becomes the work’s focal point, the event we’ve been building towards all along. But in the early period, Beethoven hasn’t figured out how to do that yet. It’s not a shortcoming, really, certainly not in the Pathetique – the modesty of this last movement plays as a kind of fragility. It has the same worldview as the first movement, without the iron fist. And that makes it touching, peculiarly touching. An interesting note about this theme: it makes oblique but undeniable reference to the slow movement. This (MUSIC), reduces to this (MUSIC) – not far at all from this (MUSIC). I’m not at all sure that one is meant to hear this on a conscious level, but it does work on the listener, subliminally. That material has been retooled and completely repurposed in its new context – there’s something vaguely disturbing about how something that was so peaceful, even comforting, can be turned absolutely on its head. Beethoven’s ingenuity can be as unsettling as it is thrilling.