Beethoven’s Sonata “Appassionata” op. 57: An Interpreter’s Analysis

A hermeneutic, performative analysis implies going beyond formal, harmonic analysis to include rhetorical, topical, and dramaturgical issues.Musical aspects related to language, such as rhetoric and narrativity, tend to enliven a performance with a communicative sense.This paper draws specific performative conclusions from its analytical findings, regarding tempo, articulation, timbre, or dynamics.Musical signification has been occasionally equated with a bodily reaction to listening, singing, dancing, and playing.Hepokoski and Darcy, in their turn, have underlined the importance of the "presence of absences" in analysis, that is, of looking into what is missing in the score.Both assertions have inspired this author and performer a hermeneutic analysis of Beethoven's Piano Sonata "Appassionata".In his op.57, Beethoven seems to be experimenting with the symbolic value of a represented absence.Fundamental musical parameters such as harmony, melody, or movement are systematically ruled out in the three main themes of the sonata.How can these voids be understood hermeneutically?Too often, academic analysis remains unrelated to anything else but itself, as if mirroring the outdated ideology of so-called "absolute music".On the other hand, performers have been relying on their only intuition to reach conclusions that go beyond harmonic and formal scrutiny, ignoring decades of serious study on music's semantics and symbols.Establishing links between performance and analysis enriches performers with criteria and theorists with signification and cogency.