Beethoven understood how different his new sonata #9 was from any that had come before, including his own eight. His title page describes it as a “Sonata for the pianoforte and violin obbligato, written in a very concertato style, almost like a concerto” – in other words, nothing like the modest sonatas for keyboard with optional violin accompaniment of the early Classical era.
The Sonata begins with a slow introduction, something expected more in a symphony than a violin sonata, and the violin has the first notes, echoed by the piano. This chromatic introduction emphasizes the key of D minor, making it harmonically a bookend matching the coda of the finale. The main Presto is a vigorously driven dialog in A minor, whose passionate intensity later inspired Leo Tolstoy’s short story, “The Kreutzer Sonata”.
The second movement is an expansive theme with four variations and a coda, rhythmically and harmonically off-kilter. It is in F major, an odd key for a piece in A major but one related to the prominent D-minor digressions in the framing movements. Not only that, the theme begins not in F, but with four bars on the dominant. With the variations, Beethoven lets the piano dominate the first variation and the violin the second, and he puts his next-to-last variation in minor mode, a common practice.
The spryly sprung finale, the only movement actually in A major, is in sonata form, though with its own odd deviation near the end of the exposition, mirrored, of course, in the recapitulation.
Here are Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug in a performance of this amazing music:
