of the sforzandi from the beginning of the piece. Having reached this point, we, as listeners, are wondering—how will the composer draw the short piece to a close, and with what style of writing from his wide palette? What ensues is truly an instance of Beethoven at his pinnacle: in just five bars, he manages to combine all the different strands of thought he developed over the course of this short piece. The closing phrase being five bars and not four tells us that he is ending the work, so to say, “on the wrong foot”. Why would he need a fifth bar? Keep this question in mind. He starts by reverting to learned style—but not quite (bars 35-36). These two bars invoke the theme in both appearances, in the beginning (the figure in the left hand) and in the recapitulation (the lack of long rests). Next, Beethoven is ready to cadence in B-flat major and to finish the piece… except that he doesn’t. He just needed to throw us listeners off balance one more time with another little episode of quasi-imitation before properly cadencing in B-flat major with a familiar sforzando in the very last bar. This is why he needed five bars instead of four. He wouldn’t have been able to use his sense of gentle slapstick humor with a four-bar ending. In just one page, Beethoven gave us a panorama of his musical language. It is all painted on the wide canvas of his astonishing sense of humor, but on that canvas we have passion, sophistication, simplicity, confusion, equilibrium, among so many other things. The decision (which I guess was Brendel’s) to place this Klavierstück before the Op. 119 bagatelles (written shortly afterwards, between 1820 and 1822) was clever and fastidious, as the sixth bagatelle from that set has exactly the same opening figure, which fittingly appears in imitation. But besides this empirical connection, the Klavierstück sounds surprisingly good when played right before the first Op. 119 bagatelle, perhaps as a “no. 0” bagatelle. Just as it also sounds soothing and mellow if played as a preamble before the volcanic opening chords of the Hammerklavier …
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