Beethoven and the «Moonlight» Sonata: the story of a title
Beethoven's Sonata Op. 27 No. 2, known as the Moonlight: the dedication to Giulietta Guicciardi, its three movements and the nickname Rellstab later gave it.
Few compositions are as closely linked to the Moon in the popular imagination as Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2. Yet its composer never called it Moonlight. The title by which it is universally known arose years after his death, and its story shows clearly how the Moon, in the Romantic nineteenth century, had become almost the very symbol of music.
A sonata quasi una fantasia
Beethoven composed the sonata in 1801, in Vienna, and published it in 1802 together with the Sonata Op. 27 No. 1. Both bear the heading Sonata quasi una fantasia, signalling an unusual formal freedom: instead of opening with a fast, structured movement, No. 2 begins with a slow, meditative Adagio sostenuto. A brief Allegretto follows, then a Presto agitato of great violence, the true climax of the work.
The sonata is dedicated to the young Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, a piano pupil of Beethoven's, for whom the composer felt an intense attachment in those years, as a letter to his friend Franz Wegeler suggests. Much biographical romancing has flourished around this bond, but the dedication in itself is not enough to make the sonata a confession of love.
Delicatissimamente e senza sordino
The first movement is built on a continuous flow of triplets, above which stretches a simple, almost motionless melody, while the bass descends step by step. At the head of the score Beethoven wrote in Italian: «This whole piece must be played very delicately and without dampers». Sordino then meant the dampers, so the instruction asked for the strings to be left ringing, creating a halo of sound.
On the fortepianos of the time, with a clearer and less sustained tone than modern pianos, that effect produced a particular haze. Performers still debate how to render the instruction today, on far more resonant instruments. Some scholars have also noted the movement's affinity with the death scene of the Commendatore in Mozart's Don Giovanni, which Beethoven knew well.
Lake Lucerne and the birth of the nickname
The name Moonlight is owed to the Berlin poet and music critic Ludwig Rellstab, author of some texts set to music by Schubert. Around 1832, that is some years after Beethoven's death in 1827, Rellstab compared the first movement to the image of a boat gliding by moonlight on the Lake of the Four Cantons, near Lucerne.
The image was an extraordinary success. Publishers adopted it, and within a few decades the nickname Mondscheinsonate came into common use in Germany and then throughout Europe. Not everyone liked it: already in the nineteenth century some commentators observed that the dramatic finale, with its storms of arpeggios, had very little of the moonlit about it.
The story of the title says a great deal about Romantic taste. For nineteenth-century listeners the Moon was the emblem of melancholy, dream and inwardness, and instrumental music seemed the language best suited to express them. Calling this sonata Moonlight meant reading it through that sensibility: an arbitrary interpretation, but so evocative that it has become part of the work's history.