Ivana Vuksanović

Univerzitet umetnosti u Beogradu

Fakultet muzičke umetnosti

UNDERSTANDING HUMOR IN INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: THE CASE OF BEETHOVEN’S

RONDO1

ABSTRACT: The article deals with questions related to the humorous experience in listening to music
and the construction of musical meaning. Humor is explained as a positive aesthetic emotion based on the
cognition of incongruity and then considered in relation to expression, metaphor, autonomous music logic
and the structure of music. The dynamics of musical meaning production is summarized through a model
of the three-leveled musical sign cascade and applied in the analysis of Beethoven’s rondo movement
from Violin Sonata Op. 30 No. 3 in G major. The final considerations refer to the boundary between irony
and humor in this work.
KEY WORDS: humor; instrumental music; expression; sign cascade; Ludwig van Beethoven; rondo;
violin sonata; irony

The standard argument against the existence of truly musical humor is that in all instances which provoke
smiles or laughter it does not appear to lie in the musical sounds themselves but in the associated ideas .
But, how do these ideas come to our mind? What causes us to laugh or feel amused by some pieces of
music or, at least, a phrase or gesture in them? It is probably easier, but no less intriguing, to
understand how a humorous effect could arise from syncretic works or compositions made up of
different texts: gestures and music in ballet, theatre and music in opera, poetry and music in song, etc.
Linguistic and visual humor is considered to be more immediate, unlike humor in “pure”, “abstract”,
instrumental music, due to the specificity of the music medium (as sound organized in time) and its
lack of semantic precision. However, listeners’ experiences throughout several centuries tell a
different story: even “abstract”, instrumental music does indeed have a great capacity for evoking
humorous reactions.

1
This research was carried out as part of the scientific project “Identiteti srpske muzike u svetskom kulturnom
kontekstu” [Identities of Serbian Music in the World Cultural Context (No. 177019)] of the Department of
Musicology of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. The project is supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and
Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.

1
 Before undertaking the risky investigation into the relationship between humor and
(instrumental) music, it is important to emphasize that my interpretation of that issue will be made
from an anti-essentialist theoretical standpoint, based on the fact that there are no sufficient and
necessary conditions for all the cases that could be subsumed under "comic experience" in listening to
music.2 I will start this survey with an explanation of humor as an aesthetic emotion and then consider
it in relation to expression, autonomous music logic and the structure of music. In doing so, I will follow a
semiotic model of the three-leveled sign cascade which will be used in the analytical interpretation of
Beethoven’s rondo movement from Violin Sonata Op. 30 No 3 in G major. Inevitably, the result of this
survey will be in accordance with what we already knew: that musical meaning is fluid and unstable. To
use Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman’s metaphor, the musical meaning of the work could only be
asymptotically approached3.

Humor, emotion, metaphor and musical structure

Of all the phenomena which come under the investigation of empirical and philosophical psychology,
humor is easily one of the least understood. Modern philosophy still has not reached a consensus about
the mutual relationships between humor, wit, laughter, amusement and emotion. Part of the difficulty
in clarifying the nature of humor is that laughter, the bodily manifestation of our amusement at something
funny, is also our reaction to many non-humorous kinds of stimulation, such as tickling, winning the
lottery and embarrassment. But then, we can also consider something to be witty and amusing and yet not
react to it with a smile or laughter.
I am not going to offer here any kind of theory of humor, but I will start with Warren Shibles’
explanation of humor as an aesthetic emotion4. Shibles grounded his explanation of humor on the
cognitive-emotive theory (its counterpart in therapy is the Rational-Emotive Theory) and the association
theory of meaning as the ones currently prevailing in the philosophical literature. According to Shibles,
humor is considered an aesthetic emotion based on the cognition of incongruity/ deviation/ category-
mistake which is positively evaluated. 5 Musical distractions may be regarded as humorous only if they are
positively assessed. Cognition causes a feeling and the feeling refers to sensation and perception (hearing,
seeing, tasting, etc.). For Shibles, “Pure perception is a fiction; pure feeling, a myth. The eye and ear are

2
According to Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” model, there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for
members of a set; some members of the set are “better examples” of the set than other members. In linguistics this is
called a “prototypical” or “polythetic” approach.
3
Cf. Мирјана Веселиновић-Хофман, Пред музичким делом (Београд: Завод за уџбенике, 2007), 174.
4
Warren Shibles, Emotion in Aesthetics (Dordrecht/ Boston /London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995).
5
Ibid., 160.

2
not innocent. Perception does not have epistemological primacy”. 6 Seeing or hearing involves seeing or
hearing things as something. All perception involves interpretation. Therefore, aesthetic emotion is not
passive, it changes with feeling and there are no two aesthetic emotions alike. Considering the relation
between art and emotion, Shibles’ view is that it is music “as associative metaphorical cognition causing
feeling that creates aesthetic emotion”. 7
The concept of metaphor needs a brief explanation too but only through the notion of imagination
as a dynamic component of human cognition. Although sometimes regarded as mere sense impressions
below the level of consciousness, imagination is the activity between feeling and cognition which
arranges, unifies, invents and associates. As Mark Johnson stated, “human reason is itself imaginative as it
involves image-schematic structures that can be metaphorically projected from concrete to more abstract
domains of understanding”.8 The imaginative projection of schematic structures that organizes mental
representations into meaningful, coherent units is metaphorical by nature. For Johnson, all our
experiences are embodied and meaning arises from the state of being in a body.
In cognitive linguistics, metaphor is explained as a cognitive process in which a structure from a
source domain is metaphorically projected on to a target domain. This is what happens when we listen to
music. For instance, in a study on the common-practice period (1600–1900), Candace Brower states that
“the image schemas that lend coherence to our bodily experience are metaphorically reflected in
conventional patterns of melody, harmony, phrase structure, and form”. 9 She even names some of those
body-based image schemas that are most relevant for the period in question, such as container, cycle,
verticality, balance, center-periphery and source-path-goal. 10
When we listen to music intentionally we engage in the comprehension of not only sound, but also
structured time. We entrain to a pulse and synchronize ourselves to a temporal pattern of tensions and
relaxations, expectations and predictions, set up through musical form. Regarding some biological
constraints on musical perception, we select subjectively some of the musical elements from the sound
stream (not all of them and not all of the time, which means that they are marked). These gestalts or
gestures are organized in ‘chunks’ of a certain size. As ‘moving forms’ or ‘energetic shaping’, gestures
acquire a sign function. They are joined in a process of signification by an event frame.
Semiotic theory constitutes one of the fields in which description of experiential structures can be
explained at a more general level. As a theory, it does not prescribe any particular method of sign reading,
it rather explains how music signifies. Musical semiotics offers a more elegant description of the way we

6
Ibid., 31.
7
Ibid., 6.
8
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 194.
9
Cf. Ole Kühl, Musical Semantics (Bern: Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, 2008), 82.
10
Candice Brower, “A Cognitive Theory of Musical Meaning”, Journal of Music Theory, 44/2 (2000), 323–79, 327.

3
make sense of music, as it can tie together the semantic fields of gesture, emotion and narrativity, and help
us understand the way in which internal and external meaning emerge.
The model of the three-leveled musical sign cascade, introduced by Per Aage Brandt (but
borrowed from Ohle Kühl’s book Musical Semantics11), actually reveals a familiar Peircean triadic scheme
with three distinct levels of cognition – iconic, symbolic and indexical. The term “cascade” refers to a
procedure by which the content of a sign at one level becomes another sign function at a new level. “The
notion of such multileveled signification is based on the supposition that not only perceived objects and
events in the world can function as signs, but ideas and cognitive representations will, as mental patterns,
also do so”.12
At the first level, the musical phrase is represented in the mind as implied gesture (physical
expression of feeling and sensation). 13 Expressive gestures, as somatic signs, represent an emotional state
and intention. The perception of movement and expressive gesturing leads to the idea of a virtual agent
(self, other, someone imagined) placed in a scenario, a narrative frame.

It is important to stress that this is a possible metaphorical projection evoked by sounds. It should not be
forgotten that what we perceive is an auditory stream of sound, with no real agents, emotions or stories.
Having in mind the fact that music is sound organized in time, operating according to its autonomous
logic, the concept of musical meaning should be defined as a symbolical superfluity of the structural
organization of a work of music.14

11
Cf. Ibid., 236.
12
Ibid., 235.
13
Depending on the style of a composition, as well as on the listener’s competence, gestures could be observed as
sound patterns, motifs, rhetorical figures, musical topics, etc.
14
Cf. Мирјана Веселиновић-Хофман, Пред музичким делом, op. cit., 298.

4
The case of Beethoven’s rondo movement: mere cheerfulness, funny ha-ha or self-irony?

During the years of teaching Analysis of Musical Form, I have come to realize that, in dealing with the
rondo form, there is one specific example from the classical period repertoire which my students find
extremely funny. It is the finale of Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin Op. 30 No. 3. There is always
a spontaneous giggling reaction near the end of the composition, right after the standstill on the dominant
seventh chord. Since the home key of the Sonata (thus the key of the final movement) is G major, this
reaction is provoked by the sudden shift to the key of the flat submediant (E flat major) with which the
concluding part of the rondo starts (measure 177 in the score; Example 1).

Example 1: Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 30 No. 3, G major, third
movement, Coda section (starting in measure 177).

A fermata at the close of the preceding section makes a very strong rhetorical gesture: an ascending
melodic leap of a diminished fifth (f𝄰 - c) in the violin, emphasized with a sforzando and placed above the
dominant seventh chord, implies resolution in the tonic and a final return of the main theme. Then, out of
nowhere comes the flat submediant tonality with oom-pah figures in a lower piano register preceding the
statement of the rondo theme in this “wrong key”. 15 This play upon the expectations of the listener, as a

15
Cf. Rey L. Longyear, “Beethoven and Romantic Irony”, The Musical Quarterly, 56/4 (1970), 647–64.

5
common technique of creating humor in music, was explained by Meyer on the grounds of Gestalt
psychology:

As soon as the unexpected, or for that matter the surprising, is experienced, the listener
attempts to fit it into the general system of beliefs relevant to the style of the work. This
requires a very rapid re-evaluation of either the stimulus situation itself or its cause –
the events antecedent to the stimulus. Or it may require a review of the whole system of
beliefs that the listener supposed appropriate and relevant to the work. If this mental
synthesis does not take place immediately, three things may happen: (1) The mind may
suspend judgment, so to speak, trusting that what follows will clarify the meaning of the
unexpected consequent. (2) If no clarification takes place, the mind may reject the
whole stimulus and irritation will set in. (3) The unexpected consequent may be seen as
a purposeful blunder. Whether the listener responds in the first or third manner will
depend partly upon the character of the piece, its mood or designative content. The third
response might well be made to music whose character was comic or satirical. 16
Although this specific moment in Beethoven’s rondo triggers the laugh, “getting the joke” of the whole
movement is not a matter of one tonal shift. The comic experience is more the result of the whole musical
process, the succession of events between the beginnings and endings of significant wholes in the form,
the work’s rhetoric and narrative quality. Understanding the meaning of music is not exclusively
“congeneric” or “extrageneric” (in Wilson Coker’s and Deryck Cook’s terms), but comes from the
comprehensive design – the relationships of all the sonic elements in a significant temporal structure –
perceived and understood in a broader social, historical and cultural context. Thus, my analytical
interpretation of Beethoven’s rondo will operate between the “inner” and “outer” traces of the work in the
hope of explaining better the comic experience it provokes.
Many writers have stressed that it was the opera buffa which made the rondo so popular in
eighteenth-century instrumental music, especially during the 1770s and 1780s. 17 Buffo composers like
Sarti, Paisiello and Piccinni sometimes included the rondo in their overtures or interspersed their scores
with vocal rondos. These unpretentious compositions established the stereotype of a ‘pleasing’,
‘charming’, ‘cheerful’ rondo theme, worthy of being repeated several times in the course of a
composition. Wye Jamison Allanbrook went even further when stating that mimesis of the comic musical
theater had been an overall model for music-making habits in eighteenth-century instrumental music.18
16
Leonard B. Meyer, Emotions and Meaning in Music (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1956), 29–30.
17
Cf. Malcolm S. Cole, “The Vogue of the Instrumental Rondo in the Late Eighteenth Century”, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 22/3 (1969), 425–55.
18
Wye Jamison Allanbrook, The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music (Oakland,
California: University of California Press, 2014), 30.

6
She noted that the topics, as lexical units, were the metaphoric figures or the clichés of the late
eighteenth-century musical cosmos characteristically associated with the activities of society, whether
popular or highbrow. The particular profile of a movement of late eighteenth-century instrumental music,
formed by chains of such topics, “takes the shape of a narrative without a plot, of oratory without a
message, presenting a dialectical image of ‘how the world moves’”. 19 Indeed, this Beethoven’s rondo is
no exception: it is full of low-style clichés on a musical surface such as musette-like droning, repeated
notes with acciaccatura ornaments, oom-pah figures, simple singing tunes, imitative duo figures, etc.
As the ‘story’ of a rondo is generally based on the alternation of two kinds of ‘events’ – the main
theme (refrain) and the episodes (subsidiary themes, couplets or contrasting passages), getting familiar
with their qualities and giving a description of the musical surface (or the level of expressive gesturing)
seem to be a good start to analysis.
The rondo-theme of Beethoven’s G major Violin Sonata comes as a tightly-knit and perfectly
symmetrical small ternary form. Since the harmony is simple, no more than a tonic and a dominant over
the pedal points, melody and rhythm are the most active parameters which provide the piece with that
vivacious, cheerful, rustic character (Example 2). The pedal points suggest a musette-like droning and the
melody is nothing but the arpeggio and a few other common melodic figures codified and labeled in
dictionaries, manuals and lexicons of the eighteenth century: Springer (leaps and arpeggios), Läuffer
(running scales), Halbcircel (half circle), Messanza (mixture of figures) and Schwärmer (quick repeated
tones). Compared with the cliché examples from various resources given by Leonard Ratner in his
famous book Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style 20, it could be said that Beethoven composed this
rondo-theme “by the book”. According to Johann Forkel’s set of rules for the construction of the rondo-
theme, (a) the theme must be worthy of the frequent repetition, (b) the theme must be capable of
dissection and alteration, (c) the couplets must be derived from the main theme, and (d) connecting
modulations must be as smooth as possible. 21 Forkel obviously derived those rules from the French
rondeau, adopted in the works of Johann Christian Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach; by the end of
the eighteenth century, this type had undergone valuable further development in combination with the
sonata form.
The theme from the G major violin sonata has three significant elements which I will label x, y
and z (Example 3).
Example 2: Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 30 No. 3, G major, third movement, main theme, mm. 1–
20.

19
Ibid., 109.
20
Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980), 83–7.
21
Cf. Malcolm S. Cole, “The Vogue of the Instrumental...”, op. cit., 428.

7
Each of them is a four-measure phrase (consisting of a repeated two-measure group). The first one
(phrase x), consisting of arpeggio and circle figures in rapid sixteenth-notes, is announced in the piano
part. It is immediately repeated, only with a new eight-note figure (ascending motion from the fifth
degree of the scale to the tonic) of a countermelody in the violin part (phrase y). After the contrasting
middle section of the ternary form, these four-bar phrases will return in reverse order (as a chiasmus). The
middle section, also a four-bar group (phrase z), contrasts the outer sections of the ternary form with a
dominant pedal point and inverted scalar figures of the piano and the violin in a sixteenth-note motion.
The additional buffa sense in this section is provided by a figure of repeated tone d with acciaccatura c𝄰
played by the piano. Perfectly symmetrical and balanced in its structure and form, the rondo-theme is
encoded with repetitiveness, basic harmonic progression (T – D – T) and common melodic figures in
altering positions (foreground – background).

8
Example 3: The scheme of the rondo’s main theme (refrain)

section a b a1

grouping 4 + 4 4 4 + 4
s
(2+2) (2+2) (2+2) (2+2) (2+2)

Violin / y x x
Piano x x z y x
pedal G: T D T
point

Since the refrain returns three more times, each time in the home key and without any significant changes
in structure and arrangement22 its identity stays intact throughout the movement. At least until that final
part coming after the fermata. However, the most interesting thing about this Beethoven’s rondo is that
the entire movement is constructed from the motifs of the main theme/refrain. In fact, all episodes but the
first are restatements of either section a or section a1 of the refrain in keys other than the home key.
Therefore, the musical narrative of this particular rondo stems primarily from the levels of differentiation
between the main and the subordinate and their tonal distance and direction in formal logic.
Since the first episode (mm. 21–36) stays in the initial key, thus prolonging tonal stability, it is
provided with relatively new motifs. They are derived from phrases x and y, combining the rhythm
qualities of both – the sixteenth-note movement of the former and the eight-note movement of the latter.
The episode consists of a repeated eight-measure phrase with the violin and the piano exchanging lines.
The internal structure of the phrase is built on a basic two-measure group (grounded on tonic-dominant
harmony), immediately repeated with a simple ornamentation and followed by another two-measure idea
(cadential sequence ii-V-I), also repeated. The main principles of refrain construction – simple
ornamentation, repetitions of groups and figures interchanging between two actors – prevail in the first
episode, too.
After the first return of the refrain, the second episode (mm. 57–64) enters without a transition,
simply by restating phrase y in a relative key (E minor). It is played in the violin first and then repeated in
the piano with arpeggio figures differing from those in the refrain. The retransition to the refrain is
signaled by the intrusion of a G major dominant chord, simply repeated several times in a forte dynamics.
In a series of ‘disruptions’ in the movement, this one occurs on harmonic and dynamic levels.
22
The rhythmic change in the arrangement of the tonic pedal point in the last return of the theme is of a figurative
kind; it does not disturb the apprehension of the theme’s identity.

9
 The transition to the third episode (mm. 92–101) starts with an ascending chain of unresolved
dominant seventh chords moving to the C major key and involves repeated tones with an acciaccatura
(motif z) played by the violin. The episode (m. 102) acts as a restatement of section a1 of the refrain in a
subdominant key, this time in reverse order of four measure phrases (another chiasmus).23 It continues in
the manner of a development section with prominent sequential repetitions of the model, until it reaches
the dominant chord of B minor. The prolongation of dominant and obsessive repetitions of tone f𝄰
produce great tension which resolves temporarily in another restatement of phrase x – this time in the
upper chromatic mediant key (B major) – with the composer’s instruction dolce (Example 4).

Example 4: Aborted “dolce” theme in the third episode

Above phrase x in the piano part, the violin introduces a new, gentle lullaby-like motif, as if promising
the long-awaited ‘other’ theme (presumably in a singing style). But that expectation is not going to be
fulfilled. The ‘theme’ is aborted, quickly abandoned for the sake of another return of the refrain. What
follows the refrain seems to be an excessive transition in which circular and scalar figures are elaborated
in a rosalia manner24, until it reaches a dramatic standstill on the dominant seventh chord. By that point in
the movement, the main theme’s material has already been worn out by repetitions, identical and
transposed, and the expectation of a conclusion becomes almost unbearable.

23
Regarding the violin/piano relationship, in section a1 of the refrain, the order is (x/y), (x/x); in the third episode the
order is (x/x), (y/x).
24
“(…) sometimes regarded as absurd by 18th-century theorists”, Cf. Leonard Ratner, Classic music..., op. cit., 419.

10
 The greatest disruptive momentum in the movement – E flat major coming after the fermata –
announces the final part of the rondo (or the coda, for that matter) in which the previously established
keys in the rondo will be “neutralized”, one by one, in backward direction, starting with the flat
submediant being a ‘neutralizer’ for the upper mediant. After the hilarious, low-style oom-pah
introduction, the phrase x of theme is restated in a piano dynamics and in a dolce manner (word
inscription given by Beethoven!), followed by phrase y/x and then continuing with a model – sequence
developing. Through the sequence (V-I, Dvi-vi and Diii-iii), C minor and G minor are briefly tonicized, as
if Beethoven wanted to ‘neutralize’ the subdominant major of the third episode and the initial major key
of the first one. This little trip “down memory lane” ends with a German sixth chord resolving in the
dominant of G major. Towards the end of the movement, a cadence figure and the phrases of themes x
and y are repeated a few more times in order to confirm the home key while the bass drone is broken up
into rustic off-beat sfforzandi. Thus, the ‘happy ending’ of the movement and the Sonata cycle is secured,
but not without “the smile of self-knowledge that hangs in the air”. 25
The tonal trajectory in Beethoven’s rondo reveals that D major, the dominant key, has not been
achieved once during the course of the movement. Related to the principal G major, there are only
parallel minor, subdominant major and upper and lower chromatic mediant major keys (Example 5).
Considering the flat submediant key relationship of the Sonata’s three movements (G – E𝄬 – G) and the
inner tonal trajectory of each movement, this ‘exclusion’ of the dominant area becomes even more
noticeable. In the first movement (Allegro assai) the secondary theme of the sonata form starts unstably
and turns first in the key of the dominant minor before closing in the major mode. The second movement,
marked Tempo di Minuetto, vacillates between E flat major and G major in the outer sections of the
ABA'(coda), while the contrasting central section spirals into E flat minor. Thus the gradual suspension of
the dominant key, the interchange of mode (major–minor), and inverted mediant relationships turned out
to be the overall strategy of the Sonata.
Modulation to the dominant key is considered to be the most important modulation for all
eighteenth-century music, a general principle of all tonal music and “an event of high dramatic
importance in large scale classic form”26. As Charles Rosen puts it in his book The Classical Style,
The movement to the dominant was part of musical grammar, not an element of form.
Almost all music in the eighteenth century went to the dominant: before 1750 it was not
something to be emphasized; afterward, it was something that the composer could take
advantage of. This means that every eighteenth-century listener expected the movement

25
Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 210.
26
Leonard Ratner, Classic music..., op. cit., 51.

11
 to the dominant in the sense that [one] would have been puzzled if [one] did not get it; it
was a necessary condition of intelligibility.27

Example 5: The tonal trajectory of the rondo movement

T E1 T E2 T E3 T E4 Coda

20 m 16 m 20 m 15 m 20 m 50 m 20 m 15 m 45 m
7
G: e: G: C: B: G: V Es:(c: g:) G: T
G: I vi I IV III I 𝄬VI (iv, i) I
dolce dolce

upper lower
chromatic chromatic
mediant mediant
(prepared) (unprepared)
That is not to say that a chromatic mediant relationship was something completely strange to musical
practice and outside of it. Quite the contrary, sudden shifts to chromatic mediants (especially to a flat
submediant!) were found useful in comic opera for effects of surprise, frustration, or even rage, and
instantly adopted in instrumental music for the same reasons. Richard Taruskin, for instance, commented
in regard to the lower submediant that it marks “a kind of boundary between inner and outer experience
(…) endowing the music on the other side with an uncanny aura” 28.
Regarding Beethoven’s rondo movement, the quality and intensity of the rondo’s turning point
did not only come out of the flat submediant key relationship, but also of the distinctiveness of the E flat
key itself – the key which may be regarded as a “topic of its own” 29 in classical music. It ranks as
Beethoven’s most frequently selected key and a key symbolically associated with his “heroic” style.
However, as John David Wilson observed, it was probably Beethoven’s experience with the buffa
repertoire as a violist and perhaps harpsichordist in the Bonn operatic orchestra which appears to have
made an impact on his compositional thinking. Wilson especially emphasized two topics, ombra and
cavatina (or aria d’affetto), with which this key was associated in opera. According to him, the E flat key
entered instrumental music with the corn tuning and has been connected with topics of hunting and

27
Cf. John D. White, Comprehensive Musical Analysis (Lanham, Maryland and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press Inc.,
2003), 99–100.
28
Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3. (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 69.
29
John David Wilson, “Topics, Style and Temporality of Hunting, Horns and Heroes. A Brief History of Eb Major
before the Eroica”, Journal of Musicological Research, 32 (2013), 163–82.

12
chivalry30. It was only after the French Revolution that it acquired the meaning of “heroic”. On the other
hand, the prevailing opinion in theoretical treatises and debates at the turn of the century was that there
exists a relatively consistent psychological tendency behind the ordering of the affects (“sharp–flat
principle”). Centered within the circle of fifths, C major is considered to be the purest key, around which
the addition of sharps to the key signature elevates or brightens the affect and the addition of flats deepens
or darkens it31. Indeed, this ambiguity of E flat major is stunningly ‘imprinted’ in the rondo movement
discussed here. It gives the “uncanny aura” to the music, darkens the cheerfulness of the main theme, but
at the same time softens it with that “dolce” inscription by Beethoven. As “dolce” was ascribed to the
quasi-singing unfinished phrase in the bright and “lifted” B major, evoking it together with the darkened
main theme phrase seems almost like a signification of loss; a loss of a once hinted at and now completely
missing “cavatina” (or aria d’affeto).
It would probably be accurate, but all too simple, to qualify this movement as “cheerful moto
perpetuo”32. Doubtless, anyone knows the importance of that fateful year of 1802 when the sonatas of
Opus 30 were brought into the world. It was an exceedingly traumatic time for the composer, due to his
growing deafness33, and also an intensely unstable moment in Viennese history, directly between the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Beethoven dedicated the Opus 30 sonatas to Tzar Alexander
I of Russia, who, like Napoleon, seized on revolutionary fervor to force his will on the masses. 34 Amid
these important events that radically changed the composer’s view of life, the sonatas of Opus 30
reflected suffering, discouragement, inner tragedies combined with pride and willpower. Thus, the last of
the set, the Violin Sonata No. 3 in G major, eloquently disguises in its cheerful disposition the life-or-
death inner battle the composer was likely already facing. On the other hand, for the late eighteenth-
century composer music was not only the expression of the common human language of the soul but the
representation of cultural values as well. Hierarchical structures within music correlate with a system of
ideas through signification and signs can be organized semantically into binary oppositions of various
types. The asymmetrical valuation of an opposition can be expressed with respect to various dichotomies
(presence vs absence, stable vs unstable, etc.) and rank relations (main and subordinate, high and low,
foreground and background, etc.). Seen from this perspective, Beethoven’s rondo movement becomes

30
Tugend in German. Wilson suggested “chivalry” as a more accurate translation (instead of “virtue”). Cf; Ibid.
31
Cf; Rita Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century (Rochester-
Woodbridge: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 140–41.
32
Angus Watson, Beethoven’s Chamber Music in Context (Woodbridge: The Boydall Press, 2010), 129.
33
It was during this year that Beethoven confessed desperation over his growing deafness in the famous
Heiligenstadt Testament. In this amazing document, written only four months after completing the Op. 30 set, the
composer disclosed that he had seriously considered suicide.
34
Although Beethoven saw Napoleon as a necessary corrective for the excesses of the Revolution and praised him
for producing political order out of chaos, he later reviled him for sacrificing revolutionary principles to his own
ambition. Beethoven was not an uncritical admirer either of Napoleon or of Tzar Alexander; both of them became
dedicatees because of Beethoven’s striving for an improvement of his social and financial position.

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more than just an example of a “monothematic” rondo type in textbooks and more than just a contribution
to the comic style that captivated the public’s fancy in the last few decades of the eighteenth century.
In Rey Longyear’s text “Beethoven and Romantic Irony”, this rondo movement is qualified as
one of “a few borderline cases between playfulness and romantic irony” 35. Playfulness is, indeed, what is
heard at the musical surface as buffa figures gesturing throughout the movement. What is truly
captivating about this rondo – and very Haydnesque in style – is that it plays on the edge of irony.
Underneath that cheerful foreground lies a process of indicating and subverting hierarchical structures at
the same time. Even the main theme, as a symbol of “self” or “authority”, is itself ambiguous with its
interchangeable and inverted figures in reverse orderings. However, the subversive power of irony is most
effectively enacted by the movement’s tonal strategy and its marked mediant relationships. Moreover,
that turns out to be only the final consequence of the Sonata’s overall strategy of the suspension of the
dominant key. Thus, Robert Hatten’s question “How Much is Ironic?” 36, posed as a subtitle in his book on
Beethoven, is not an easy one to answer. Following his instruction that the “operative level of irony must
be interpreted in terms of the governing expressive genre”, one might conclude that the rondo is more
playful than ironic. But in the context of the Sonata, coming after the Minuet – which only starts like one,
but tears up the expected rhythm, key and dance style of a minuet, only occasionally returning to the
opening melody and reminding of what a minuet “should” sound like – the rondo turns up as a final
destruction of illusions, an escapism into ironic laughter. Ultimately, what Daniel Chua said about
Haydn’s music could equally apply to Beethoven’s: if you hear only happiness, then the joke is on you. 37

35
Rey L. Longyear, “Beethoven and Romantic Irony”, op.cit., 655.
36
Robert S. Hatten, Beethoven. Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 184.
37
Cf. Daniel Chua, Absolute music... op. cit., 216.

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