Piano Sonata No. 17 (Beethoven)
piano sonata written by Beethoven
The Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, known as The Tempest, was composed in 1801–02 by Ludwig van Beethoven. The British music scholar Donald Francis Tovey says in A Companion to Beethoven's Pianoforte Sonatas: With all the tragic power of its first movement the D minor Sonata is, like Prospero, almost as far beyond tragedy as it is beyond mere foul weather. It will do you no harm to think of Miranda at bars 31–38 of the slow movement... but people who want to identify Ariel and Caliban and the castaways, good and villainous, may as well confine their attention to the exploits of Scarlet Pimpernel when the Eroica or the C minor Symphony is being played.
Structure
The piece consists of three movements and takes approximately 25 minutes to perform:
Each of the movements is in sonata form, although the second lacks a substantial development section.
I. Largo – Allegro
The first movement alternates brief moments of seeming peacefulness with extensive passages of turmoil, after some time expanding into a haunting "storm" in which the peacefulness is lost. This musical form is unusual among Beethoven sonatas to that date.
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This entry incorporates text from “Piano Sonata No. 17 (Beethoven)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.