The first time Ludwig van Beethoven’s name ever appeared in print—on March 2, 1783, in an article by his teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe in Cramer’s Magazin der Musik—he was described thus: “… a boy of eleven years old and of most promising talent. He plays the keyboard very skillfully and with power, reads at sight very well …. He surely would become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were he to continue as he has begun.” In November 1792 he moved from his native Bonn to Vienna, which he would call home for the rest of his life. During his first decade there he was in demand as a piano teacher and virtuoso performer, applauded for his vehement flair at the keyboard and his skill as an improviser. Once his hearing began to fail, around the turn of the century, his reputation as a pianist gradually declined, though it was replaced by growing veneration of him as a composer. His last public appearances as a pianist were in 1814—two performances of his Archduke Trio that April. His fellow-composer Louis Spohr attended one of the rehearsals at Beethoven’s apartment. “It was not a treat,” Spohr wrote, “for, in the first place, the piano was badly out of tune, which Beethoven minded little, since he did not hear it; and secondly, on account of his deafness there was scarcely anything left of the virtuosity of the artist which had formerly been so greatly admired. … If it is a great misfortune for anyone to be deaf, how shall a musician endure it without giving way to despair? Beethoven’s continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me.”

He did, however, continue to play the piano at home. His hearing was better some days than others, but by 1816 he was regularly listening through an ear trumpet, and in 1818 he began communicating largely through conversation books, in which his interlocutors would convey their half of discussions in writing. He apparently still sensed some of the piano’s sonorities through touch and veiled sound, and he had technicians devise useful aids to assist him at the piano, the most striking of which was a canopy installed over the instrument to focus the sound and direct it toward him. Other accounts have him resting the bell of his ear trumpet on a resonating plate beneath the piano or clenching between his teeth a stick that, at its other end, touched the piano—a form of bone conduction, a phenomenon still harnessed today for delivering vibrations through the jaw to the inner ear. Both of the latter two may have some anecdotal truth, but neither could be of ongoing practical service to someone playing the piano.

In any case, Beethoven was not dependent on a piano to compose, to which his instruments bore testimony. Visitors remarked that his piano had fallen dreadfully out of tune and into general disrepair, echoing Spohr’s observation. In 1824, a London harp-builder was brought in to tune his current piano, an English Broadwood instrument. “As I opened it,” reported the tuner, “what a spectacle offered itself to my view! There was no sound left in the treble and broken strings were mixed up like a thorn bush in a gale.”

When Beethoven was born, in December 1770, the piano was just beginning to supersede the harpsichord as the most-used keyboard instrument (assuming we situate organs in a world apart), and it underwent tremendous evolution by the time he died 56 years later, in March 1827. During his first decade in Vienna his personal pianos (perhaps owned, perhaps lent) were built by the intermarried Stein and Streicher families and by Anton Walter—pianos with light touch, clear tone, and, in the years around 1800, a five-octave range. In 1803, he acquired a piano from the Parisian firm of Érard, richer in sound, equipped with four pedals for various effects, and boasting a five-and-a-half octave keyboard; but he didn’t like it much. In 1817, the Broadwood piano (the one the tuner later found in disrepair) arrived as a gift—a useful marketing ploy, since any piano-builder would have loved to boast that the great Beethoven played their instrument. It was a state-of-the-art instrument, larger and more monumental than the composer’s previous pianos, offering a range of six octaves. (About two decades after Beethoven’s death, this piano made its way to Franz Liszt, who later bequeathed it to the Hungarian National Museum., where it still resides.) In 1825, the Viennese builder Conrad Graf also built a hefty six-octave instrument for Beethoven, who apparently used it at his home in 1826-27, the last year-plus of his life. That coincided with the composer’s giving his unloved Érard piano to his brother, apparently to make room for the new Graf.

As Beethoven’s pianos—and, importantly, those of his patrons—grew through the years, his piano sonatas reflected their expanding capacities. This is most obvious in their venturing into extremes of range at both the high and low ends of the keyboards, but they also reflect an evolving exploitation of possibilities of texture and sonority, even as the composer’s ability to hear those sounds decreased. Of course, Beethoven also had to take realities into account. Just because the piano given to him by Broadwood had a range of six octaves didn’t mean that very many other pianists could draw on similar resources. As with most things Beethovenian, this evolution did not follow a straight line; sometimes he seemed to be restraining himself to an outmoded, smaller range, and he was known to write a note that was beyond the range of his current piano. But on the whole, his sonatas grew to reflect up-to-date possibilities. What today’s pianists decide to do with that becomes a matter of personal interpretation; the 88 keys of a standard concert grand today cover seven and a third octaves, substantially more than Beethoven would ever have envisioned.

                He wrote solo-piano music regularly through most of his career. From 1792 through 1823, there were only five years during which he was not working on a piano sonata or an imposing set of piano variations, and sometimes several such works were in progress at once. The first 18 of the 32 piano sonatas he published (that is, through his Op. 31 set) date from his first decade in Vienna, and although they are rich in imaginative, even adventurous ideas, we can at the same time imagine them as being practical pieces created to showcase their author. The remaining 14 sonatas span a period of two decades, from 1803 to 1822, and they grow increasingly more abstracted in their musical investigations. The detailed sketch materials that have survived attest to Beethoven’s fascination with working out his materials as if they were puzzles, and as his career unrolled (and as his hearing diminished), he grew ever more obsessed with putting his ideas through the crucible of fugue, a musical brain-teaser indeed. All of his sonatas make effective use of polyphony, the interaction of discrete voices, but by the time he arrives at his late-period sonatas—from Op. 101 through to Op. 111, his farewell to the genre—carefully developed fugues hold forth as emotional and intellectual pinnacles.

                From the outset, the architecture of Beethoven’s sonatas shows creativity. There were exceptions, to be sure, but the keyboard sonatas of Mozart and Haydn (Beethoven’s teacher for while) had settled into a typical layout of three movements—the rapid first movement worked out creatively in some sort of “sonata form”; the more relaxed second an introspective oasis in the middle; and the third a generally cheerful finale in an easy-to-follow form such as variations or rondo. Already with his first set of sonatas, the Three Sonatas, Op. 2, composed in 1795 and published the following year, Beethoven expands his sonatas to four movements by way of a minuet or scherzo to serve as the third of the four movements. This was standard practice in symphonies and major chamber work such as string quartets, quintets, and so on. Beethoven is giving notice that piano sonatas must now be considered their peers.

But things do not remain static. Beethoven constantly experiments. Some ensuing sonatas maintain four movements, others retreat to the earlier layout of three. Then he arrives at the extraordinary Op. 26 and Op. 27, Nos. 1 and 2 (Moonlight)—sonatas in which “sonata form” does not play a part. Op. 26 has a third movement cast as a “Funeral March on the Death of a Hero” in the very uncommon key of A-flat minor (seven flats!); the two Op. 27 sonatas are both titled Sonata quasi una Fantasia (Sonata Resembling a Fantasy), suggesting that their movements—some following each without a break—are the product of an imagination not constrained by a pre-existing form. From that point on, Beethoven travels very much his own itinerary, drawing on structural precedents as he sees fit or, just as likely, inventing musical architecture not glimpsed previously.

Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny, who in 1842 would publish the essential treatise On the Proper Performance of All Beethoven’s Works for the Piano, reported that after completing the Op. 28 sonata (Pastoral, in 1802), the self-critical composer declared: “I am only somewhat satisfied with my works up to this time. From this day forward I shall take a new path.” That new path leads into what is generally considered Beethoven’s middle period, which would give rise to some of his most widely enjoyed sonatas, including Op. 31, No. 2 (Tempest, about the first movement of which Beethoven exclaimed “The piano must break!”); Op. 53 (Waldstein); Op. 57 (Appassionata); Op. 78 (à Thérèse); and Op. 81a (Les adieux/Das Lebewohl). During these years, Czerny observed, “he fully displayed his true peculiarity.”

By the time he reaches his late period, he has made his way to a new world in which brilliance and strangeness coalesce. The title pages of his final five sonatas for the first time designate that these are compositions for the Hammerklavier, meaning simply the piano—officializing the obvious fact that for quite some time his sonatas had surpassed the possibilities of increasingly forgotten harpsichords. He tries out new tricks of melody, harmony, rhythm, and always of structure. In Op. 101, he delves into the power of memory, revisiting the work’s opening measures as an interlude linking the third and fourth movements. In the immense Op. 106 (Hammerklavier), an apparently traditional four-movement layout belies utter avant-gardism, which reaches to a slow movement of astonishing length, a finale that is not just a fugue but a three-voice quadruple fugue, and titanic technical challenges throughout. Op. 109 launches what Beethoven conceived as a sonata triptych. It consists of two short movements followed by a long one—variations on a noble, introspective theme that is among his most personal passages—though the same could be said of the pensive parts of the sublime Op. 110. Op. 111 represents sacred ground for many Beethovenians; a universe is condensed into two tightly-packed movements, as different as can be yet oddly balanced.

To hear all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas is to visit the most essential sonata cycle created by anyone in the history of music. The 32 sonatas span 27 years, from the Op. 2 sonatas of 1795 to the completion of Op. 111 in 1822, and they document the explosive growth of Beethoven’s imagination through those decades. Some became hugely popular, others less so, but not a single one of them lacks interest. The first note of the first sonata—Op. 1, No. 1—is middle C. The last note of the last sonata—Op. 111—is also middle C, or at least the piece concludes in a C-major chord with middle C at the top. That pitch appears thousands of times in the course of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, but between the first and the last of the middle C’s there is nothing middling.

—James M. Keller