Three dollars could you get you a little cheeseburger, small fries and a small pop at McDonald’s. That’s an actual meal I’ve eaten on one or two occasions years ago. I wouldn’t feel completely satisfied, but it would be enough to hold me over until dinner. I don’t know how much that would cost today. Four or five dollars, maybe?
I suppose it would be much healthier to eat one broccoli floret, a small piece of chicken, a corn tortilla and one other thing, as Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins suggested last week. Okay, I’m being a little unfair, you can get more than one broccoli floret and still come at or under $3, as intrepid reporters for the Wall Street Journal illustrated in their article that I read through MSN.
Those intrepid reporters “hit grocery [stores] in two cities, Boston and New Orleans, to look for a meal as Rollins described at that price. It was doable, but not necessarily very filling.” Huh. You don’t say. I'm finding the Wall Street Journal article a bit lacking in, um… perspective. Like maybe the correctly mocking perspective in the Huffington Post.
I don’t like broccoli. Years ago, I bought a frozen chicken alfredo dinner at Kroger, it cost $8 or $9, can’t remember if the brand was Berio or Bertolli. It had a good proportion of chicken and it had broccoli, enough to be noticeable but not overwhelming. Couple of weeks later, I bought another frozen chicken alfredo dinner of some budget brand, same size but only $5. It was like almost half broccoli. I leave you to guess what the proportion of chicken was.
I don’t like mushrooms either. If you like mushrooms and you’re a fan of Beethoven, then there’s a mushroom soup recipe you might enjoy. It’ll cost you way more than $3, that’s the only thing I can guarantee. Just the mushrooms are likely to run you more than $3, whereas you can get a whole broccoli crown for barely $2.
The recipe very specifically calls for Daniel Baremboim playing the piano, preferably in one of three specific Beethoven sonatas, of which Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor is one. The recipe was brought to my attention after I had already gone over the two other sonatas in prior installments of this series.
Some of the nicknames for these sonatas are fanciful inventions from long after the composer died. But in the case of this sonata, the name “Appassionata” is not that far off from what Beethoven thought. Apparently, Beethoven wrote “La Pasionata” on the manuscript.
You really can’t go wrong with Baremboim. When I was a teenager, I regarded Herbert von Karajan’s recordings of the Bruckner symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic to be the reference recordings for that repertoire. I’m starting to think that of Baremboim with the Beethoven sonatas. By the way, Baremboim, as a conductor, has also recorded the Bruckner symphonies.
I have remarked before that this sonata could have been published together with the Waldstein and No. 22 under a single opus number for all three. The reason why this did not happen was purely practical: Beethoven was very busy with a lot of other music at the same he wrote these. In between the Opus 54 sonata and this Opus 57 sonata, Beethoven published his Third Symphony (Opus 55) and the so-called “Triple Concerto” (Opus 56).
The previous two sonatas start out with both hands to the left of middle C. That is almost true of this sonata as well.
The Andante con moto is a set of variations. The theme (first half shown here)
is followed by three variations. Then a repetition of the theme starts an immediate transition to the finale, emphatically hammering on the dominant of F minor. Then, a downward run similar to the one that begins the Fantasia in G minor
leads to a grumbling in octaves before the true theme emerges.
In an earlier sonata, we saw Beethoven chafing at the limitations of the low range of the pianos available to him. In the finale of this sonata, there’s an example of Beethoven chafing at the limitations of the high range. Alfredo Casella recommends a change in a footnote to his edition using a few higher notes that were not available to Beethoven at the time of composition.
With the earlier example of the low notes, it is well-documented that Daniel Baremboim plays the notes Beethoven couldn’t. Since the high notes example with this sonata doesn’t involve octaves and it goes by very fast, I’m not sure if Baremboim plays it exactly as Beethoven wrote it or if he accepts Casella’s suggested modification.
With this sonata, I was definitely not hurting for choice of pianists. I could have gone with Anastasia Huppmann, among others. I like Katie Mahan’s performance, too.
Now, Shuann Chai on fortepiano. She makes at least one mistake I noticed, but it’s still a good performance and I like the instrument, it sounds a different kind of percussive than other fortepianos, I think I like it more than the instrument Eric Zivian uses (though his performance of this sonata is more technically secure than Chai’s).
Though not as much as with the “Moonlight,” people like to arrange the “Appassionata” for acoustic guitar or electric guitar. Couldn’t tell you what key this arrangement is. I would guess E minor.
By the way, Peter Schickele wrote a Sonata Abassoonata. I don’t hear any obvious connections in the musical content to the “Appassionata.”
