Op. 111 was Beethoven's last piano sonata. It was also the last of the three commissioned sonatas he wrote for the publisher Adolph Schlesinger. In many ways, these three sonatas, Opp. 109, 110, and 111, can be regarded as a series of works through which Beethoven's writing of piano music for the 'sonata' genre reached a new phase. Beethoven succeeded in expressing his several complex ideas which went beyond what a traditional sonata texture would have been able to accommodate or have notated. For instance, the shift between fast and slow tempos within a movement was an unusual practice at the time, yet it was a means of creating tension in the music. In the first movement of Op. 111, Beethoven indicated poco ritenente several times to slow the ending of a phrase, and then he indicated a tempo to bring the music back to the original tempo. He even indicated Adagio twice above three chords to strengthen the tension between these chords and the coming passage which has a contrasting character and tempo.riccio, to end the Partita.


Beethoven's skill in connecting sections or writing transition passages gives the impression that he was blurring the border between sections. When Beethoven connected the Introduction (Maestoso) to the Sonata form (Allegro con brio ed appassionato) in the first movement, he used a written-out trill to bridge the two sections from demisemiquavers to semiquavers, although the value of notes is varied in the two sections, the trill is still continued. This gives an idea as to how the speed of Maestoso relates to the speed of the Allegro, which was normally impossible to measure or indicate clearly.

As for the texture of this movement, Beethoven seems to have used all the best from the past. He combined fugue with the sonata form by developing a motif concisely in the two subjects. In addition, he used different articulations, as well as the above mentioned tempo changes, to characterize the repeating figures differently. To Beethoven, all the detailed articulations were of great importance in this movement. This can be seen from his letter of 3 June 1823 to Schlesinger; he clearly instructed how he wanted an error of his articulation to be corrected in bars 4-5 of the beginning first subject. He said that the slur should be added over five dots, as .

The second movement Adagio is the last movement of this sonata. A two-movement sonata did not seem like a complete sonata, thus when the publisher Schlesinger received this sonata, he was wondering whether there was still one more movement to come from Beethoven, yet this movement was indeed the final movement. The reason Beethoven wrote only two movements could be that this Adagio movement was sufficient to be the last movement of a sonata. This movement was structured with a theme, four variations and a long coda in which there was one more variation. Although the theme starts slowly, Beethoven actually increases the speed from variation 1 to variation 3 by reducing the value of the notes from quavers to demisemiquavers, and then the rest of the movement, including variation 4 and the coda, was all based on demisemiquavers. This implies that the predominant speed of this movement is in fact faster than the impression of the speed given by the playing at the beginning of the movement.

The scale of this second movement appears to be bigger and longer than that of any usual slow movement of a classical sonata. In these long developed variations and the long coda, Beethoven seems to have intended to keep the calm and peaceful atmosphere which he created from the beginning of his sublime theme, an Arietta. The meaning and the depth of this movement is far beyond that which a usual sonata movement could have expressed. Presumably, this was a reason for Beethoven's ending this sonata with this poetic scene, it was already complete.