Unvollendete 12 Fantasia for Piano. (Sonata?)

(Formerly Biamonti 213)

Perhaps shortly before leaving for Vienna or perhaps already in Vienna, Beethoven left this long sketch for piano that prefigures a Sonata with three movements: an Allegro almost complete, an Andante that is already a little less so and a Finale Allegro, very fragmentary.

This is high-level music and, if it had been completed, it could be said that it is undoubtedly the most important thing Beethoven had achieved, in solo piano music, up to that moment.

The question that arises is: why did Beethoven not finish it or resume it in later times, as happened with other music? Obviously, no certain answer can be had, but one cannot fail to notice that, if the whole of the sketch reveals a Beethoven already later, musically speaking, compared to his contemporary works of at least 10 years, the Finale, very fragmentary and unstable from a harmonic point of view, touches the border of atonality, even projecting itself towards his greatest masterpieces of recent years. Perhaps it was for this reason that the draft remained such: too premature for the times.

Professor Giovanni Biamonti, in 1968, was the first to include it in his catalog of Beethoven’s works, dismissing it as a “Piano Piece. (Draft)“[1]. Although with some reservations, Joseph Kerman was the first  to define it as a “Fantasies für Klavier“[2]. After him, Adolf Fecker[3] in 1973, completely reconstructed this draft and, according to Luca Chiantore,  his edition: «(…) it is serious and rigorous, and has fallen into unjust oblivion. (…)».[4] In the early years of the twentieth century, following a greater attention to Beethoven’s fragments, the Dutch composer Albert Willem Holsbergen made a new version that was presented in public by several performers including Massimo Anfossi in Settimo Torinese in 2006 and was recorded, as a world premiere, in July 2005 by the young American pianist Steven Beck for Monument Records while, the English pianist John Kersey, recorded it for Romantic Discoveries Recordings, in the original version, with the fragmentary Finale.

More recently, in December 2011, the Inedita record company  presented the first critical and philological edition of the first two movements and in 2014 our pianist Massimo Anfossi, performed it  at  the Beethoven-haus in Bonn, recording it.

Meanwhile, in 2012 the Dutch musicologist and composer Cornelius Wilhelmus (Cees) Nieuwenhuizen, also completed the Sonata and it is interesting to understand how he worked with the fragmentary third movement: «(…) The ferocity and atmosphere of the third part is similar to the third and final movement of Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor, Opus 27 no 2 (…). The third movement was the real challenge because the composer left it in a very fragmentary way. There are also parts that are completely elaborated by the composer, for example, the entire Coda. However, I wanted to use all the notes and all in the same place where Beethoven wrote them. So all the themes of the manuscript are used. It’s mainly the left hand that I had to add(…)».[5] On  21 October, pianist Martin Oei, performed this version of the Sonata as a world premiere at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

Below are the three movements of the sonata in the Cees Nieuwenhuizen version by Francesco Gussago at the piano. All other known versions will follow.