Beethoven's Hammerklavier was thought unplayable until Liszt performed it
Beethoven wrote thirty-two mature piano sonatas between 1795 and 1822, never meaning them as a set. Yet together they became what Hans von Bülow called the New Testament of the piano, beside Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier as the Old, and the first great cycle fit for both salon and concert hall.
The official count leaves out four pieces. Beethoven published three sonatas in 1783, when he was just 13, catalogued as WoO 47, and a C major sonata composed around 1790 remained unfinished and appeared only in 1830 as WoO 51. His early numbered sonatas lean on the models of Haydn and Mozart, yet already stretch them: nine of the first fifteen, including the first four, have four movements, unusual at the time. This period includes the Grand Sonata of 1797, the Pathétique of 1798, the Moonlight, labelled a sonata in the manner of a fantasy, and the Pastoral of 1801. He even rearranged No. 9 as a string quartet.
After finishing fifteen, he told Wenzel Krumpholz he meant to take a new path from then on. The middle sonatas bent the inherited form more boldly and dug deeper emotionally, and they shaped most sonatas of the Romantic era. Here belong the Tempest, the Hunt, the Waldstein of 1804, whose original slow movement survives separately as the Andante favori, the Appassionata of 1805, the sonata dedicated to Thérèse and the Cuckoo of 1809, and Les Adieux of 1810. From No. 20, published in 1805, he stopped issuing sonatas in groups and gave each its own opus number, for reasons nobody has explained.
The late sonatas, from No. 28 in 1816 through No. 32 in C minor in 1822, remain among the hardest music in the repertoire. They weave in fugue and break sharply with conventional structure. The Hammerklavier of 1818 was judged the toughest of all and considered impossible to play for nearly two decades, until Liszt performed it in concert.
Bülow was also the first to play all thirty-two in a single concert series. Artur Schnabel was the first after him to do it from memory and made the first complete recording, for His Master's Voice between 1932 and 1935. Later pianists to tackle the full cycle on stage include Roger Woodward, Rudolf Buchbinder and Michael Houstoun, who played it at 40 and again two decades later in 2013; Wilhelm Kempff, Claudio Arrau, Annie Fischer and Daniel Barenboim are among many who have recorded it.
Source: Piano sonatas (Beethoven)
