Keywords:
Beethoven piano sonatas, piano sonatas, Beethoven and genre
Abstract
This study deals with Beethoven’s piano sonatas in relation to his works in other genres. Unlike Haydn or Mozart, Beethoven composed many more piano sonatas than symphonies or string quartets; the sonatas far outnumber piano concertos, string trios, sonatas for piano and violin, and sonatas for piano and cello. Moreover, he wrote piano sonatas regularly, with few extended interruptions. During the approximately twenty-nine years between Op. 2, No. 1 (1793-95) and Op.111 (1822), there were only two three or four-year periods—1806-08 and 1811-13—in which he did not complete a piano sonata. In other genres, Beethoven neither composed nor completed works for extended periods of time.
Author Biography
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Roger Kamien
Professor Kamien received his B.A from Columbia College and Ph.D from Princeton University. His teachers of piano were Anna Kamien, Nadia Reisenberg and Claudio Arrau. He studied Schenkerian analysis with Felix Salzer and Ernst Oster. Roger Kamien was on the Queens College CUNY music faculty for twenty years. In 1980, he and his family came to Israel, where he began teaching at Bar-Ilan University and continued at Hebrew University where he was appointed to the Zubin Mehta Chair of Musicology. The author of Music: An Appreciation, now in its 12th regular and 9th brief editions, he has written articles analyzing the works of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. Roger Kamien has been honored as “musician, theorist and teacher” by the volume, Bach to Brahms: Essays on Musical Design and Structure, edited by David Beach and Josef Goldenberg (University of Rochester Press: 2015).
