The Sonata in F minor Op.57 only acquired its famous nickname ‘Appassionata’ after Beethoven’s death – an invention by a Hamburg publisher that has stuck. The work was mostly sketched in 1805, finished the following year, and first published in 1807. The manuscript, in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, came from the family of the French pianist Marie Bigot, to whom Beethoven had given it after she sight-read it for him. Her husband recalled that just before Beethoven’s visit, during his journey back to Vienna from Silesia, he was ‘surprised by a storm and driving rain, which soaked through the case in which he carried the Sonata in F minor which he had just composed’ and, indeed, the manuscript has many water stains, presumably made by this downpour. The Appassionata is recognized as one of the greatest of Beethoven’s middle-period piano sonatas (alongside the Waldstein), and its turbulent emotional world moves from the gloom of the opening to a quotation from a folk song (for the second theme), a set of variations on a deceptively simple chordal theme for the slow movement, leading via a chromatic diminished seventh chord to the finale.  

Nigel Simeone © 2011