The
Songs and the Sketches for the Allegro molto from Beethoven's Op.110
by William Drabkin
Hard facts are difficult to ignore. Things we know about a piece of music
that lie outside the notes—a date of composition, an anecdote about
its genesis, a last-minute change of dedicatee—are not only useful to
consider but often difficult to overlook when we contemplate them. Some
of these things may be purely musical ("Doesn't that horn player know
how to count?"), others lead beyond the realm of tones to the theater
and literature ("the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet," "Read Shakespeare's
Tempest"), or to philosophy ("the starry skies above us").
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