Written by Robert Greenberg,
Format: MP3

Beethoven was a revolutionary man living in a revolutionary time. He captured his inner voice-demons and all-and the spirit of his time, and in doing so, created a body of music the likes of which no one had ever before imagined.

''An artist must never stand still,'' he once said.

A virtuoso at the keyboard, Beethoven used the piano as his personal musical laboratory, and the piano sonata became, more than any other genre of music, a place where he could experiment with harmony, motivic development, the contextual use of form, and, most important, his developing view of music as a self-expressive art.

Pushing the Piano to Its Limit and Beyond

Spanning the length of his compositional career, Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas provide a window into his personal musical development, and they show the concept of the piano as an instrument and the piano sonata as a genre undergoing an extraordinary evolution.

The sonatas are not simply compositions for the piano, but are about the developing technology of the piano itself, an evolving instrument that Beethoven pushed to its limits and then beyond, ultimately writing music for an idealized piano that didn't come into existence until some 40 years after his death.



24 Lectures
45 minutes / lecture