Picking Up the Pieces: Fragmentary Themes in Beethoven's Late Piano Works

This essay examines the fragmentary nature of Beethoven's late style from a form‐functional perspective. Extensive analyses of four passages featuring sudden mid‐theme breaks show how the widely contrasting materials that lie on either side of these gaps can come together to form a complete thematic unit. In each case the resulting thematic unit has the same set of beginning, medial and cadential formal functions found within a Classical‐style theme, but its intra‐thematic functions are articulated by materials so disjointed and dissimilar that these appear to belong to separate themes rather than to a single one.