Beethoven’s B Minor Bagatelle - Which Version Is Better?

Beethoven’s final major work for piano was the set of bagatelles Op 126, published in 1825. They were conceived as ‘a Cycle’ of pieces, arranged in a specific order, and it seems likely that he intended them to be played together as a complete set. When Beethoven sent them to his publisher, he wrote. “They are probably the best I’ve written.”

The stormy B minor bagatelle is the 4th piece in the cycle and immediately precedes the lyrical G major bagatelle, which this channel featured in a recent video (see below for details). The B minor is a very different piece with a fierce and uncompromising character, behind which elements of Beethoven’s gruff humour are occasionally perceptible. It takes the form of a ferocious Presto march, with a terse theme in which the hands play in contrary motion. This contrasts with a second, equally concise phrase in G major octaves. The two ideas pivot, rather obsessively, over a semitone (F sharp to G) and Beethoven keeps hammering away at this semitone throughout the piece. There follows a sort of development section with characteristically groovy syncopations and a modulating canon, before eventually recapitulating the main theme in the tonic minor, darker and more uncompromising than before

The trio section couldn’t be more different: it consists of a simple ‘musette’ with a folk-like melodic line, floating over a syncopated bagpipe-style drone. Beethoven allows this to expand, only interrupting his bagpipe idyll briefly with a mysterious pair of tritones, and a short silence near the end.

Originally, after the return of the march, Beethoven composed a characteristically assertive ending, but then, sensing that it was perhaps overly conventional, he scribbled it out, and replaced it with a return of the musette, which floats along once more, and ends quietly and unexpectedly. The piece was thereby transformed from a simple ABA structure into a dialogue between two utterly contrasting kinds of music: the first impetuous and tightly constructed, the second innocent and harmonically static. The entire piece seems propelled along by Beethoven’s elemental sense of rhythm.

Beethoven: Bagatelle in B minor Op 126, no. 4.

Pianist: Matthew King.

Beethoven’s Bagatelle in G major Op 126, no 5 can be heard here:    • Beethoven's Farewell To The Piano  

Beethoven’s A minor bagatelle (Für Elise) can be heard in its 1822 revision here:    • You've Never Heard This Version of Fü...  


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Edited by Ian Coulter ( https://www.iancoultermusic.com )
Produced and directed by Ian Coulter & Matthew King