Week 52: Which is the Most Difficult Beethoven Piano Sonata?

One pianist's journey to perform the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven.

Drumroll…

Well folks, we’ve reached the finish line of Year One of the Beethoven Journey!!

Along the way, I have met you, the listeners and readers, and just loved hearing all your comments and suggestions. My warmest thank you to each of you, for being here and enjoying Beethoven along with me!!

To those who recently subscribed, I want to say a big “Welcome!” Please feel free to comment – or just quietly enjoy this moment in your day. This spot is for everyone. I live in a small, cozy Island community together with Islanders of all ages and backgrounds, and I’m an ordinary one of them. They know me well enough to tolerate me with a smile when I go into my wizard world of Beethoven, and they’re not shy to listen with interest and ask all sorts of questions. So, please feel that you are a part of this Island community in spirit and do the same!  If you’d like to see more of something, just drop me a comment anytime – I’ll be sure to respond.

During this year, I learned all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas, performed them for others, and blogged about them for 52 weeks.

Next week, I’ll be welcoming you to Year Two, which looks even more exciting! After the past year spent quietly wood-shedding on my North Atlantic Island, now I’ll sometimes be out in the world, meeting other Beethoven pianists, possibly adding a video podcast, and hopefully meeting you at some public concerts. I’ll stay living on the Island. I hope to share more of this beautiful place with you, and I’ll still be looking after my Mum. Through it all, I will keep reporting back to you here. I can’t wait!

So, the burning question: which Beethoven Sonata is the most difficult?

And my answer is…

The David Baker Sonata!

Okay, okay, not what you were asking. I’m talking about the Piano Sonata subtitled “Black Art”, written in 1968 by the jazz legend David Baker, a trombonist, pedagogue, composer of crossover jazz-to-classical music, and one of my former professors at the great Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana.

David Baker

Baker’s sonata was my 2020 pandemic lock-down project. The Black Lives Matter movement that year inspired me to tackle it. It took me all year to learn, memorize it, and perform it in the Laurier Music at Noon series  on December 9, 2021, live-streamed for a distanced audience.  

Meanwhile, several pianists worldwide were taking on the challenge of learning the Beethoven sonatas, reaching out to locked-down audiences by live-streaming them.

I think the most unique, charming, and educational instance of this “pandemic Beethoven” trend was Eric Zivian’s presentation of all 32 sonatas on historic Viennese instruments in his home. Using the score, and amidst bushels of wrong notes, Zivian captured even more bushels of precious and innovative insights into these works. You can feel as if you were right at his side as he hunted and captured them,  here.

Which begs the question: is the most difficult Beethoven sonata the one gives you the most challenging insights as a listener (or scholarly sight-reader)?

Or is it the sonata most difficult for a concert pianist to perform as a polished, memorized work in concert?

While I was bringing the Baker Sonata up to a polished level – an experience equally rewarding to me as doing the same for Beethoven – I had an idea for the future in mind. Maybe I could learn all 32 Beethoven sonatas, but then, as a response to Beethoven from our time, learn 32 sonatas written by living composers.

Dave Baker passed on in 2016, but my interpretation of “living composers” would extend to all those who have been alive during my lifetime. People with whom I have been contemporary.

To give you an idea of how demanding this may be, I’d like to throw in the Baker sonata for comparison when discussing the difficulty of Beethoven sonatas.

To my knowledge, everyone who has ranked the Beethoven piano sonatas by difficulty has chosen one of the following two as the most difficult of all:

1.     Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Opus 106 “Hammerklavier”.

Like other piano geeks, I’ll call this one “The Hammerklavier”, even though Beethoven actually designated two of his sonatas as being “for the Hammerklavier”.  The word just meant “ piano”, in the German of his time. He had chosen to use German for awhile for political reasons, rather than the Italian “pianoforte”, for which “piano” is the short form.  

He wrote this work in 1818, when he was 48 and already almost stone-deaf.  

“The Hammerklavier” is in four movements. All four have insanely fast speed indications, which Beethoven measured by using the newfangled device of a metronome that clicked the beats. It was invented by his buddy Maazel, who was also inventing various metal hearing devices for him.

Some of Beethoven’s hearing devices.

Maalzel’s metronome.

There well may have been some glitch in how Beethoven tried out the metronome. Or maybe he was just extra-wizardly in his brain that day, imagining an almost inhuman tempo while having a great cosmic laugh at the pianists he knew would try it in the future. How hard this piece is to perform depends on whether you decide to use his metronome marks. But it’s hard to play at any speed.

The first movement jumps all over the keyboard, as though you had to leap from one ice floe to the next in a melting ocean. Then there’s a second movement marked “scherzo”, which technically means “joke”, if the arrival of polar bears who toss you around sharp glacier fields for fun is your idea of humour. They end by tossing you, with a parting snicker, down a profound crevasse. You then spend the whole 16 minutes of the slow third movement (the longest movement of any Beethoven piano sonata) trying to crawl out of it, while agonizing over your fate. This effort fades out when help arrives, in the form of some sort of celestial helicopter, which hovers above you as you grab its dangled lifeline of a long stringy fugue theme. You then spend the final movement trying to use that dratted lifeline while spinning about and kicking at ice walls, often getting the line twisted up in your gear, to finally  reach the skies while onlookers both laugh at you and applaud you.

So that’s the general tone of the work. The whole thing is about 40 to 45 minutes long, depending on what speed you choose, and gives you a great rush afterwards for surviving it. This isn’t a tropical-feeling sonata, it’s very much about sun blaring on snow, incoming blizzards, and hard perilous rocky shade-free climbs.

I took about 6 months to learn, memorize, and perform that sonata while a doctoral student back in 1992. This year, it took me the full 8 weeks I’d allotted for it to even get remotely comfortable with playing it again. I felt winded for the entire day after the performance. I wouldn’t say that the audience got as winded: they enjoyed it, shook their heads at it, and had a fun rowdy party for a few hours afterwards.  

The great 19^th century pianist and composer Franz Liszt chose “The Hammerklavier” as the most difficult Beethoven sonata. He chose the following sonata as the second-hardest. Others have reversed that order.

2.     Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Opus 111.

This is Beethoven’s last piano sonata and farewell to the genre. It takes just under half an hour to perform, and it’s in two movements.

You’ll notice my analogy about the Hammerklavier is all about a person struggling to survive in a grand and often hostile wilderness.  This sonata isn’t like that at all. Oh, it’s plenty hard for the pianist. But at its core, it’s not about the pianist.

So many people have come to grief describing this sonata that I kind of don’t want to try. I could attempt it by saying that the first movement begins like a prophet standing on a promontory calling forth the Creator, who answers the call in the terrible emanation of a howling, whirling hurricane. Gradually, the debris settles as the movement ends. Then, in the second movement, a voice from the still centre of the storm steps forth. It’s calm, like the quiet soulful voice of one’s mother. What follows is a set of variations like a set of ladders, taken by a human soul to answer that voice. There is a mystical union.

I know, I know.

You just have to hear it, and hear it live if possible.

All my life, I had saved learning this work until I’d learned all the other sonatas. When I finally got there in July of 2024, it took me 5 weeks to learn and memorize a first draft. This time frame was only made possible by having a lot of experience learning Beethoven sonatas.  I played it in a house concert on August 14th. It was sort of presentable but I knew I was not ready yet. I went back to the drawing board, spent another 5 weeks on it, and performed a viable version of it this past week, September 25^th.

I was more than winded after this first fully-present performance of the work.

I was wrung-out-exhausted for two full days afterwards.

My audience, meanwhile, behaved quite differently from the “Hammerklavier” crowd. They spoke of being blown away. I had heard sniffles at different times while playing. There was no big party after the concert, more a gradual dispersal. I received delayed text reactions several days later.

This sonata is very difficult technically, no doubt about it, but this is not its primary difficulty. What I found so difficult was the level of transcendence required – the acceptance that there is something beyond normal going on and the willingness to be a medium for it.

Comparing these two sonatas is like asking, what is more difficult – doing the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life, or letting go of it at the end of your life?

The David Baker sonata, by contrast, took me at least three times as long to just learn and memorize to a basic level of competence as either of those two Beethoven sonatas.

What’s hard about Baker’s sonata, for me, is first of all its language of experimental, avante-garde jazz. It is unfamiliar ground, and that’s hard, not only in and of itself, but because it’s not entirely accepted ground. I was engaging in an act of what they call “doing the hard work” of decolonizing my mind.

It takes courage to know that you aren’t going to be patted on the head for a work of art. Knowing that the barriers of discrimination are still there. Knowing that there is conflict and controversy inherent in someone like me learning a sonata by a Black composer. Knowing that Dave Baker would have applauded my learning it but he’s gone and I wish I had learned it while he was alive and well. Knowing that I hadn’t felt comfortable to bring this piece to my teachers while I was a student. Knowing that even today, this isn’t a piece of music that a big label like Deutsche Gramophone is ready to step up to record, nor is society yet ready to accept it as a required work in our colonial international competition system.  

And then, while I learned it, seeing in front of me that it is, in fact, one of the great sonatas of the 20^th century. Being blown away by its beauty, while knowing that it is a beauty very hard for most people to recognize. Resigning myself to the knowledge that it wouldn’t receive notice in the way that my Beethoven journey has received notice.

I hope to record the Beethoven cycle someday. I also hope to record the Baker sonata, and commission other new sonatas. What stands the test of time (if anything does from this perilous age) will not be my business to know.