Teutonic Tenderness

I still clearly recall the first time I heard Beethoven's last violin sonata. The music, as well as the live performance, was mesmerising. It continues to be the only violin sonata by Beethoven I truly like, no other reaching for me the level of the great piano sonatas and quartets despite the popularity and the simple sweeping excitement of the Kreutzer. It is whimsical, poetic, gentle, sophisticated, joyful, smiling, original. The fantastically quirky ending of the first movement with its reams of trills, the almost bewilderingly chromatic sixteenth-notes (in a movement of gently lilting eigths and triplets), the final statement of the opening theme suddenly hijacked by a rush of sixteenth notes leading to two concluding bangs (usually pedestrian but so surprising and effective here), all odd and strange and full of contrasts but so skillfully seamless, magical and exciting, forshadows a similar conclusion, although perhaps less subtle there, of the final movement. (Some quartets, for example, have also such potpourri endings, but this one here is perhaps the most successful). I find this an oddly brave and relatively unusual piece for Beethoven: the music meanders, most of the time unconcerned whatsoever with "impressing" anyone, fully confident without posturing; for even in the other late works full of deep spirituality there often is still a conscious element of Greatness. But here Beethoven comes close to the early-Romantic spirit and the great and unassuming poetry of Schubert.