How to Approach the Moonlight Sonata (1st mvmt)

Mystery vs Drama

When Beethoven began his “Moonlight” Sonata in 1801, he was already well established in Vienna as a composer and pianist, with a symphony and numerous chamber pieces already published. He was in an experimental mood, titling the work as a sonata or “almost a fantasia”; a normal sonata of the time placed the main weight in a carefully organized first movement, whereas the Moonlight has a nebulous, prelude-like first movement, and the core of the drama is not to be found until the last movement.

If, like most amateur pianists, you can only aspire to performing the first movement, then you will need to make a choice: do you want to perform the movement as Beethoven intended – mysterious and understated – within the context of the complete three-movement work? Or do you want to inject it with more drama in recognition of the fact that you are presenting it as a free-standing piece? Both options are legitimate, but whichever you choose, aim for consistency if you hope to convince your listeners.

Pedalling

Beethoven presents a general instruction at the beginning of the movement that publishers often omit today: the piece is to be played “with great delicacy” and “without dampers”. The problem lies in the second phrase, which effectively means that you are to keep the sustaining pedal (the pedal on the right) depressed throughout the movement. If you try doing this for even a few bars, you may find the result hopelessly blurred, but at the time when this sonata was written, pianos had much less sustaining power than their modern counterparts, and constant pedalling would have resulted in much less mingling of the harmonies.

Still, we have originals and painstakingly constructed replicas of such pianos, and following Beethoven’s instruction does lead to a degree of blurring on these instruments. On the other hand, it is significant here that pedalling was still a special effect at this time, rather than an essential part of piano technique.

Again, you have a choice to make: do you want the safer option of using normal modern pedal technique, smoothing out the sound within each harmony, but not running one harmony into the next? Or do you want to recreate some of the blurring Beethoven intended, even through you’ll have to use modern techniques on a modern instrument? The second option would require you to change the pedal a little later than normal, or to use half pedalling (lifting the pedal only part of the way up before depressing it again). Either of these techniques will allow you to retain the blurred effect, but also to control it according to what you find most convincing (remember that you’ll never convince your listeners if you haven’t convinced yourself in the first place).

Tempo

Amateur pianists often take this movement too slowly, not so much because they lack sufficent technique, but because of a misunderstanding over Beethoven’s tempo marking, Adagio sostenuto. While this is undoubtedly a slow marking, the crucial consideration here is what it applies to. No melody emerges until the end of the fifth bar, so all the preceeding music is a preface to this, setting up the accompaniment figure that will underpin the melody through the rest of the movement.

If you try playing the melody alone in a manner that reflects the “Adagio sostenuto” marking, and then bring back the accompaniment, you’ll find that the triplets are now at a much faster pace than you’d imagined them. If you play these triplets delicately, and understand that they do not form a melody in the opening bars, then the result will not sound in the least agitated to your listeners.

Reinforcing this, Beethoven’s metrical marking (the symbol that looks like a “C” with a vertical stroke through it) instructs you to play with a two-in-the-bar feel, so again, this will force you to take the triplets faster than amateur pianists generally imagine them.

Dynamics

Related to this is the issue of dynamics. Beethoven scattered “pp” and “p” instructions around his manuscript score, with nothing louder than this, although the “decresc.” in bar 40 follows a passage that appears to be the climax of the movement – how much you make of this climax depends on which option you take from the choices I presented in the first paragraph. But in the passages where the pp applies, you should not be playing every note at this level.

Look at the first page of the score from bar 6 onwards, after the melody has begun: there are three strands to the music, namely the melody at the top, the triplet accompaniment in the middle, and the slow bass line in octaves at the bottom. Since the triplet accompaniment has far more notes than the melody, and since its notes are always close to those of the melody, it can easily overwhelm the melody unless you take care to play the triplets more softly. This is the concept of “cantabile” or the singing style, where the pianist has to give a greater weighting to melody notes, even if the same hand is also being used for notes of the accompaniment. The bass line, on the other hand, is at some distance from the triplets, and reinforced with octave doubling, so it will stand out clearly without having to go beyond pp. It might be helpful to think of the overall pp as the average of the three strands: the melody p, the triplets ppp and the bass line pp.

The Mona Lisa Effect

Put this advice into practice and your performance of this movement will sound much more professional, even if you feel you can never hope to play the whole sonata with its fiery and virtuosic finale. The advice here will also help you to overcome what might be called “the Mona Lisa effect”, where a great work of art has been seen or heard so often that it becomes hard to experience it afresh. The advice I’ve given has included choices at two levels, and my intention is not to force you one way or the other, but rather to make you aware that you these choices are available, so that you can build  them consciously into your interpretation and follow them with consistency.

The “Moonlight” nickname, by the way, only became attached to the sonata three decades after it was composed - a critic said the first movement made him think of the moonlight on Lake Luzern. If you enjoy the image, by all means keep it in mind, but you needn't let it place limitations on your performance.

I hope you enjoy working on the piece. For many, it’s the watershed when at last they can learn to play music that genuinely excites and moves them. Make the most of it!