♫ So, one element that all four components of the scherzo – the first half, its repetition, the second half, and its repetition – share is their rhythm. Throughout this scherzo, nearly every bar has the identical rhythmic footprint: an upbeat in a dotted rhythm, followed by two slurred quarters. ♫ Nearly every bar, that is, except for the final bar of each section, in which this rhythm is traded for two brusque quarters: upbeat-downbeat. ♫ In a clever little sleight-of-hand, this rhythmic ending of the scherzo becomes the beginning of the trio, making for a seamless transition between what are otherwise utterly different types of music. ♫ The rhythm and melodic shape of this trio make it sound like a ghostly, minor-key echo of the opening of the Eroica Symphony, written so many years earlier. ♫ I’m always very struck by this trio, because its character is very compelling and very mysterious, in spite of there being an almost complete lack of distinctive features in it! Ravel famously said about his Bolero: “It is my greatest masterpiece; unfortunately it has no music in it.” And that quote always comes to my mind when I hear this passage. Except for the aforementioned two note knocking motive, ♫ which begins every phrase, there’s no rhythmic interest to speak of: Every bar is long, short long, short long… ♫ Harmonically, it is truly uneventful: the first half is just a b flat minor chord leading to D flat major, ♫ the second half, an inversion of the first, D flat leading back to b flat minor. ♫ And melodically: To call this a “melody” at all would be to glorify it: it’s nothing more than a broken chord, going first up, then down, simply describing the two harmonies in the trio. ♫ I suppose there is some interest in the fact that the written-out “repetition” of each half is a cannon in two voices, between the hands. ♫ But really, in comparison with pretty much any other moment in this humungous piece, this trio is most uneventful. And maybe that’s the point – maybe this sense of a near stasis in the midst of such otherwise frenetic activity is precisely why it sounds so striking, and even a bit dangerous. And this sense of danger is definitely borne out by what follows: a wild, nutty even, passage – not a return to the scherzo, but equally not a real part of the trio, as it shares no material with it. It starts out orderly and reasonably calmly, despite being marked presto. ♫ But each subsequent phrase gets busier and more manic, until it ultimately spirals totally out of control. ♫ That final scale is really the cherry on the insanity sundae: Beethoven expressly asks that each octave (except for the last one, which is doubled), to be split between the two hands. ♫ Now, it might seem that splitting a job that could be done by one hand between two would make life easier. But in fact, to play this scale this way is monumentally inefficient, with the hands just getting in one another’s way. In that way, it is a fitting end to this altogether bonkers passage: Beethoven asking for a fingering that makes the music as disjointed and busy as possible. (Just like all of Beethoven’s other fingerings, it’s there not for convenience, but to communicate an idea.) With this presto passage – an inessential addition to a structure that is otherwise as compact and economical as can be – Beethoven seems to be rejecting the orderliness of the rest of the movement, saying that it doesn’t really make sense in the context of this sonata. And, really, it doesn’t. So, that final scale, in spite of having no motivic connection to anything else in the scherzo, would be a perfectly good way to prepare the da capo return of the scherzo, as it provides a strong – and then some! – dominant. ♫ Instead, there is a two bar connective passage, back in the movement’s main “Vivace Assai” tempo. ♫ I find those two bars hilarious, because they are related to precisely nothing. They make no claim to provide any link – harmonically, or in terms of character or anything else – back to the scherzo proper. And they are also quite literally not linked to anything – there is a silence immediately before them, and another one immediately after. ♫ They sound like a little musical seizure, or an aftershock in the wake of the earthquake that has just occurred. I think it really is the superfluousness that I find so amusing – Beethoven’s music is SO tightly constructed (with this movement as clear an example of that as any) that whenever there is a passage inserted for no reason at all, it sticks out like a sore thumb. This one certainly does, and I feel sure it is meant to.
