Beethoven: Sonata in A-flat Major, , “Funeral March“ (Lewis, Kovacevich, Buchbinder)

If you’ve been following this series of Beethoven sonatas for a while and (God forbid) you’ve actually been reading all the analyses, you’ll have noticed that structural unity is sort of B.’s thing. His movements tend to be connected by all sorts of motivic tissue, linkages and affinities and backward glances, plus boundaries between movements get fuzzier as we reach the late sonatas, and themes more concentrated and abstract. But you also have this sonata, standing in spectacular isolation. It’s not just that it has no movement in sonata form; it’s that the first movement is in *Theme and Variation* form, which, in lacking literally any tonal tension whatsoever, is as far from sonata form as you can get. And the theme, which in Beethoven is usually designed to be a sort of rich motivic/developmental mine rather than an attractive thing in itself, is here just flat-out-beautiful. And so all the forward movement in this movement comes only from the theme’s unfolding and elaboration, nothing else.