Allegro assai
Andante con moto
Allegro ma non troppo


Does the word 'Appassionata' describe the programmatic content of this f minor sonata? There were only two piano sonatas for which Beethoven gave a title or further description: Path?tique for Sonata Op. 13, and Lebewohl, Abwesenheit und Wiedersehen (Farewell) for Op. 81a. All the other 'titles', such as 'Moonlight', 'Pastorale' and 'Appassionata' were nicknames given by others. Carl Czerny played this f minor sonata several times for Beethoven. When he stated how he thought the third movement of this sonata should be interpreted (1846), he said that 'Perhaps Beethoven imagined to himself the waves of the sea in a stormy night, whilst cries of distress are heard from afar.' According to Czerny, Beethoven was fond of representing scenes from nature, and thus perhaps as Czerny indicated, such imagination could help performers with this movement. Yet, since the idea 'Appassionata' was not Beethoven's, this is therefore not necessarily the character or the mood one needs to adopt when interpreting this sonata. It is a particularly unsuitable description for the second movement, for which Czerny repeatedly suggested piano and cantabile.

Although he inherited the principle structures of sonata formats from his predecessor, Beethoven was already in search of his own structures or expressions for the genre from the late 1790s. For instance, he added an introduction at the beginning of a first movement (Op. 13, I), wrote large-scale variations (Andante) for a first movement (Op. 26, I), included an unusual Quasi una Fantasia as the first movement of Op. 27-1, swapped the order of a slow movement with either a scherzo or a minuet, omitted a scherzo or a minuet, and wrote a short slow movement as an introduction to its following movement (Op. 53, II, III).

In the Op. 57, Beethoven reached a balance for a three-movement sonata. He even thought that this sonata was his greatest until the period when he worked on his last four sonatas. The first movement is an expanded through-composed sonata form based on motivic development, with a coda section. The second movement is written in the submediant key. It is a cantabile two-strain theme (16 bars) and its four variations. Beethoven's unusual method of varying the theme was to reduce the value of the theme notes to quavers in the first variation, to semiquavers in the second variation, and to demisemiquavers in the third variation, whereas in the fourth variation the theme was again presented in its full value. The third movement was bridged from the ending of the second movement. In addition, there is a short prelude which leads into the main sonata-form section, and there is also a Presto coda section. Both the bridges which Beethoven inserted show that Beethoven was expecting to connect the movements as a continuous whole work. ort, but this does not apply to fast movements in this suite.

By the time Beethoven wrote this sonata, he had owned or borrowed only Viennese fortepianos, but he received a French Erard in 1803. Since the actions of Viennese and French pianos were much lighter than the actions of later English pianos, it is likely that Beethoven's expectation of Allegro assai, Pi? Allegro, Allegro ma non troppo was faster than his same indications in later works. Regarding the suggestions of the tempi of these movements, Sandra Rosenblum states that there are four versions of metronome marks: two versions from the Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger, one from Czerny (1846), and one from Czerny-Simrock edition (1856-1868); they all varied. In 1828, Haslinger indicated 1st mvt dotted crotchet =120, 2nd mvt quaver=120, and 3rd mvt crotchet =138, whereas in 1846 Czerny indicated: 1st mvt dotted crotchet=108, 2nd mvt quaver=108, and 3rd mvt crotchet=132, yet later Czerny changed them again in the Czerny-Simrock edition. It seems that the tempi also varied due to the regional fashion or personal taste at the time. For instance, Schumann and Mendelssohn preferred playing Beethoven's slow movement faster and the fast movements even faster, whereas Liszt and Wagner's preference was for slower tempos. This implies that the metronome marks given in these sources can be regarded only as suggestions.