This essay takes a practice-based approach to the relationship between Beethoven’s Broadwood piano and the aural world of the last three piano sonatas. In order to maximize his residual hearing Beethoven had a ‘hearing machine’ constructed by Stein that rested on top of the piano in front of the player. With colleagues Tom Beghin has re-created that ‘hearing machine’ to simulate Beethoven’s experience as a deaf player and composer. As well as detailing this process the author explores some of the expressive consequences of this hearing experience in the last three piano sonatas.

In the 1790s Haydn made two extended trips to London. It is during his second, in 1794–95, that he composed his “Grand Sonata” for Piano in C major, Hob. XVI:50. The following three narratives describe its opening measures (shown in Ex. 14.1), each from a different perspective. We first take the score off a library shelf, and read it:

Narrative 1

A naked triad, in the simplest of keys, is spelled out, matter of factly, without any trace of hurry. But gradually, as if adding spice to a bland dish, Haydn throws in dissonances. First, a passing tone D between E and C. Then, on the downbeat of measure 3, an upper neighbor F, which resolves to E by the middle of the measure. (This relationship is marked as “y.”) But this upper neighbor (or appoggiatura, that quintessential eighteenth-century ornament) was itself preceded by a lower one. (Marked as “x.”) To understand this double tension is as essential as it is puzzling. On the one hand, a slur (which, according to mid- to late eighteenth-century German sources, marked the first tone as the more expressive one) conveys the message that E is an embellishing tone to F. But the usual interval of a second (two adjacent tones imitating the inflection of a “sigh”) has here been inverted to a seventh. Does this inversion allow F to emancipate itself from the preceding E? If so, does F challenge the dissonance status of E, which should actually be understood as a consonance? In other words: which should be believed, x or y? With delightful delay measure 6 answers this sophistic question: not only is the second-interval restored to a dissonance–consonance pair; the effect of a slur – strong/long first tone, soft/short resolution – is materialized by no less than three performance directives: sforzando, fermata, and diminuendo. We now skip a few pages and look at mm. 120 ff. which harmonize this passage. “Y or x” does not matter any more: E and F have both become part of a descending chain of suspensions, adjusting to the laws of voice leading and counterpoint, fluidly moving in and out of dissonance or consonance status.