Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas: A Handbook for Performers by Stewart Gordon (review)

The title of Stewart Gordon’s book does not inspire confidence, for it is now fairly well known that Beethoven composed—and published—thirty-five sonatas for solo piano, not thirty-two. The first three (WoO 47) are missing not only from the title but from the entire book, even though they are full-scale, three-movement Beethoven piano sonatas and were published as such in 1783. Their complete absence here must be a result of either remarkable ignorance or a deliberate attempt to suppress their existence.

The book opens with a short chapter on the sources for the chosen sonatas, followed by one on pianos of Beethoven’s day and one on ‘Performance Practices’. The book’s subtitle implies that this third topic might be expected to form the heart of the book, but it is instead confined to just twenty-seven pages. A chapter of similar length is devoted to ‘Beethoven’s Expressive Legacy’, and a shorter fifth chapter examines inter-movement connections in individual sonatas, as well as connections between different sonatas in the same key. The remainder of the book—well over half—is devoted to an account of each of the thirty-two selected sonatas in turn.

The discussion of the sources offers only a very general overview, indicating how many autograph scores survive but not where they are or what they show. Moreover, although Beethoven often supplied a publisher with a copyist’s manuscript that he had corrected, such copies are not mentioned at all. On the contrary, we are told (p. 4) that Beethoven (always?) ‘prepared a second autograph for the publisher, one that was cleaner and easier to read’. Actually this rarely if ever occurred. He normally gave the publisher either the original autograph (provided the publisher was local) or a corrected copy.

Gordon rightly warns that there are sometimes discrepancies between autograph and first edition, illustrating his point by mentioning an important F♭ in the autograph of the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, where the flat is absent in the first edition. The reason is that Beethoven suppressed the flat during proofreading of the edition, thus indicating a final preference for a natural, but this vital information is not given. This chapter also briefly describes Beethoven’s sketches, posthumous editions of the sonatas, and ‘written sources’, which here include letters, recollections, and more recent biographers. It is not made clear, however, how these sources might throw light on the sonatas or what help they might provide for the performer.

The account of Beethoven’s pianos is more successful, with a summary of the differences between German/Austrian and English pianos, and an examination of how Beethoven coped with a limited keyboard compass in his early sonatas, by adjusting material in various ways. The individual pianos that Beethoven owned receive more extended attention, and the Erard and Broadwood are appropriately related to the ‘Waldstein’ and ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonatas respectively.

The rather brief account of performance issues draws attention to many of the main problems, and is refreshingly free of ex cathedra statements of what a performer should do. Yet in places it goes to the opposite extreme of being uncomfortably non-committal. Phrases such as ‘Most editors recommend . . .but some recommend . . . ’, ‘there is a strong tradition . . .’, and ‘Editors are equally divided . . . ’ (pp. 34–5) demand further investigation and explanation. Which editors are more convincing, and what is their evidence? Very little detail is presented at this point to support particular points of view. Recent research on performance practice has been largely ignored, and there is only one reference to William S. Newman’s work in the entire chapter. The discussion of grace notes fails to recognize that in Beethoven’s day crossed quavers were simply another way of writing semiquavers, and that Beethoven himself never used this symbol. Nevertheless Gordon makes some useful observations about performance, especially on Beethoven’s slurring; he argues that this makes good...