MUSIC

Ludwig Van Beethoven

No, classical music is not dull. It is not the music of the high society, that listens to it not for its intellectual value but most of the time for "snobbing" purposes. Classical music is the science of sounds, the science of how to adapt sounds to convey feelings from one person to another without going through the alphabetical medium, i.e. without converting feelings to words and then words to feelings. The following sonata composed by Beethoven is an example of what I’m talking about, listen to it carefully and I hope that you’ll enjoy it.

"Quasi una fantasia" was composed in 1801 for Giulietta Guicciardi, the sonata n° 14, op. 27 (later to be called “Moonlight” Sonata), very passionately melancholic, inspires the idea of an unhappy love as the one that certainly the composer had for a young woman that was making her debut in the world. It is noteworthy that at that time, the composer was starting to feel the early symptoms of his hearing impairment.

The sonata is opened by a romantic and low pitched adagio sostenuto that expresses his unfortunate love, it then continues and expresses an instant of hope with the allegretto central that is a “recalling” of some happy feelings and memories, but this recalling is quickly suppressed with a presto agitato with tragic overtones which is a swift return back to his unfortunate reality.

Glossary

Representative Tempo Marks:
adagio = quite slow (in a quiet, easy manner)
allegretto = moderately fast
presto = very fast (with a sense of haste)

Representative Character and Mood Marks:
sostenuto = sustained
agitato = agitated