LDV111-2

33 GARY HOFFMAN, DAVID SELIG Do you feel that the Fifth and final Sonata is a continuation of its immediate predecessor, or does it underline a stylistic break? Gary Hoffman: Continuity and break, simultaneously! This sonata contains the only real slow movement of the five works. The first movement may seem more conventional than its equivalent in the Fourth Sonata. Yet the music keeps stopping and starting. The modernity of the discourse increases all the way through the score. Beethoven opens a door to the future and it’s no coincidence that he decides to end the cycle with a fugue. I’m sure he would never have imagined, when he started writing sonatas for this combination, that he would end up merging the voices of a cello and a piano in a fugue. David Selig: The three movements are very different from one another, as if each part synthesised the very diverse approaches that Beethoven had explored since the First Sonata: a Classical first movement with abrupt changes, then the Adagio ‘con molto sentimento d’affetto’, exceptionally dense in its expressiveness and thereby tending towards Romanticism, and finally the fugue, which sums up his exploration of counterpoint in the final decade of his life.