NOTATIO

The following unusual passage occurs repeatedly in the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 28: Beethoven could have written the triplet and quintuplet as 8 normal sixteenth notes, but he seems to have something special in mind.

Often Beethoven picks out certain notes from scale passages rhythmically to bring them out melodically or orient them as part of the harmony. Here is an example of the latter from the last movement of the piano sonata op. 81a where each note with an asterisk belongs to the harmony at that point:
However, this doesn't seem to be the case in op. 28, because the third beat note sometimes conflicts with the harmony as at ** in the first example.

Could this be another example of Beethoven anticipating our present-day feathered beaming, and would he have written the passage like this if that notation had been used at the time? See viewtopic.php?p=7839&hilit=feathered+beaming#p7839 for another example of a potential Beethoven feathered beam.

John Ruggero wrote: ↑24 Mar 2025, 18:57
Could this be another example of Beethoven anticipating our present-day feathered beaming, and would he have written the passage like this if that notation had been used at the time?

You could probably drop off the question mark. Admittedly, I am no Beethoven expert, but I can say baroque and late baroque era (probably early classic era too) treatises and other writings deal with musical rhetoric. One rhetoric figure was the “katabasis” (ruin down, falling, humbling), consisting in an accelerated scale or arpeggio downward. Usually it wasn’t notated with any precision, as any organist or harpsichordist then would know what that specifical figure would mean and how to play it. Other times the speeding up was notated in a way similar to how Beethoven does in the example you posted.
Sorry for my failing memory, but right now I can only cite Mattheson treatise “Das vollkommene Capellmeister”, 1739.
Here are other recent writings on the subject:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41640282

http://charles.arden.free.fr/wp-content ... 8II%29.pdf

https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/man/ ... 1830ar.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/929558

https://kmh.diva-portal.org/smash/get/d ... FULLTEXT01


Scarlatti’s sonatas often show section or sonata ends with fast scales or arpeggios downwards, probably meaning an acceleration (katabasis). See Enrico Baiano and Marco Moiraghi, the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, LIM, 2024.

If Beethoven would share these much previous theories, I can’t say. But probably it was something never truly got out of fashion among composers, maybe subconsciously.

These notions are probably a bit sectorial, widespread among harpsichordists but much less so among pianists. Recognizing that rhetoric figure without knowing them is the proof of an exquisite musicianship on your part.

However, as Bach is literally full of rhetoric figures, I think they can be useful to pianists as well when playing Bach.

Thanks so much for your compliment, Harpsichordmaker! And for your opinion about this passage, which is hard to make sense of except as explained above.

You are right, I am ignorant of the literature on the influence of classical rhetoric on music. But I find the subject very interesting, more so than most non-Schenkerian music theory, and I think it adds something missing from that approach, and not just for Baroque music. I am going to read those articles today.

According to the following article Beethoven was familiar with Mattheson's The Complete Cappelmeister:

https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.23.29.4/m ... .posen.php

And reading on in the article, that Beethoven had studied Kirnbergers Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie, in which basic harmony is explained in a manner very similar to Schenker's.

Bingo!