Moonlight Sonata

Beethoven finished the C♯ minor sonata in 1801 and published it the next year with an unusual instruction on its title page: Sonata quasi una fantasia, a sonata “almost a fantasy.” The label was a warning as much as a description. Where a classical sonata was expected to open with a brisk, argumentative Allegro, this one begins with a slow, dreaming Adagio and saves its fury for the end. That famous first movement is built from almost nothing: a rocking triplet figure, a bass that moves like slow breathing, a melody that barely rises above a whisper. Its spell is so complete that in 1832, five years after Beethoven’s death, the poet Ludwig Rellstab compared it to moonlight on Lake Lucerne. The nickname stuck to the whole sonata, though Beethoven never used it, and reportedly grew tired of a reputation built on his gentlest music. The truth of the piece is in its shape. A brief, consoling Allegretto acts as a hinge, and then the Presto agitato breaks loose, arpeggios racing upward and chords struck like blows. It is among the most violent things Beethoven had written to that point, and it is where the sonata finally speaks plainly. The moonlight, it turns out, was the calm before the storm. He dedicated the work to his pupil, the young Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom he was briefly and unhappily in love. A private grief folded into a piece the world would come to know for its serenity.