Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.
In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.
Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.
So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.
But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!
It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)
It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?
Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.
Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.
Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:
“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”
I said no more Deltarune essays but having marinated in Chapter 5 for weeks and with consultation from various experts (the internet, my wife) I would like to update my knight theory and I would like to do it in public. Big swing time!
The knight is Asriel puppeting Dess' body. He's running around town in the dark with her ashes.
Reasoning, and other misc Chapter 5 thoughts:
-Asriel is already here. The weird route establishes that at least for the duration of our playthrough the town is a locked room.* (You need to resort to speedrunning strats to break out of it.) He's in this game - it would be insane if he wasn't - and that means he's currently within its boundaries, hiding.
-The Asriel from Undertale who turned the world into an eternal nightmare loop just to keep playing with Chara is not going to take the death/disappearance of his girlfriend lying down. Chapter 5 ramps up the references to Undertale to remind us of this.
-I think it makes a lot more sense for Asriel to be the voice on the phone with Kris than for it to be Carol, both logistically and in terms of tone. It's a much stronger baseline motivation for Kris to go along with the conspiracy and hide things from their friends if it's their brother enforcing the promise.
-Themes do not flap around loose in this game. Puppets keep coming up. Mind/body duality keeps coming up. The effect mind/body duality has on gender and attraction and identity keeps coming up. This is about Kris but it's not just about Kris. It should be obvious that Ralsei is in some way connected to Asriel - I'm leaning toward their being a part of Asriel that broke off when the disaster happened, at this point - and I don't think Ralsei's gender feelings in Ch 5 are irrelevant to the larger plot, because so little is. Inhabiting a girl's body is doing something to/awakening something in Asriel and if I'm correct about this it's going to be fascinating to watch the narrative try to handle it in a way that isn't transphobic.
-This gives us a Doyleian reason for the encounter with Gerson's statue in Chapter 4. We know that under some circumstances the remains of monsters can become nightmare versions of themselves in dark worlds. The Knight has Dess' bat initially but it transforms into a sword - a baroque, decorative sword as it appears in their bullet patterns, which fits UT Asriel's design sensibility far better than it does Dess' cool teen vibe. The knight has an eye in their chest where Kris has a heart.
-On the topic of Asriel's aesthetics, which we know carry over into Deltarune from our morning forays through his things, I have been thinking for a while that the Chapter 4 dark world that the Knight created does not jibe with what we know about Dess and her vibe - all the little cups climbing impossible heights to rescue fair maidens, etc. The combination of high-flown, slightly cringe philosophy and white knight romance on display feels a lot more like the nerd we are led to believe Asriel is than the punk Dess is meant to be.
-Last but not least, Illusion of Gaia, which is now maybe the most heavily-referenced bit of media in a reference-heavy game, ends with the main characters - the boy and the girl - fusing bodies, turning into a being called Shadow which fires phoenixes from its slashy arm in its battle against death.
Final thing I'll say on the subject is that there has been foreshadowing of something nasty and broken in Asriel's relationship with Kris from the get-go (Ralsei's attempts to flirt with Kris being a big signpost there) and I'm interested to see how that shakes out.
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Chapter 5 is once again really good, the text is again complex enough to reward close reading while still being entertaining and full of jokes, the gameplay is significantly more fun than it's ever been, it's all beautiful to look at and listen to, etc. If Toby completely fumbles the last two chapters we will still be at masterpiece level overall. My personal favorite bit of Ch. 5 is how the flower kids all feel like someone's OC - or, more precisely, how they're so stylistically varied that they feel like a bunch of different people's OCs - and how you can buy fanfic interactions between them with in-game currency. Collectively they constitute a big salute to the game's forebears, collaborators, and audience. Some of the specific shoutouts I noticed:
-Aqua looks a lot like the little ghost girl from Baman Piderman (smallbu studios, animators on ch 3 and 4)
-Seth is Seth from Illusion of Gaia (they're Morris in Japanese, which is also what the character was named in the JP version of IoG), but is also Jade Harley wearing Derse pajamas
-Green looks like a Splendidland design (ch 2 concept designer)
-Orange, I don't know. (I did enjoy the Ratatouille joke as yet another iteration of puppet theming.)Yellow, besides being a nod to Woody theory, absolutely scratches something in the back of my brain but I cannot put my finger on it. His squareness reminds me of Everhood in a way that is not at all supportable.
-Blue is incredibly Steven Universe, in a way which is both loving and slightly nasty. All the flowers are abused/neglected kid archetypes, and Blue is the mediator, which (along with the occasionally nausea-inducing tweeness of some of the paid-for interactions) is absolutely a gentle critique of that show and its messaging.
If you can think of any shout-outs I'm missing here, let me know!
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Other notes - I'm interested in how themes of suicidality are being handled here. (Again, no themes flap around loose in this game, and Yellow's comical attempts to off himself are a signpost.) Kris ending up with a package of poison seeds at the end of Ch 5 is particularly alarming if you're playing the aborted weird route, but even normal route Kris is not, I would say, a hundred percent trustworthy re: self harm. Noelle's attempt to leave the game in the weird route is, of course, heavily coded as a suicide, and is played scary and tragic, but it still carries the excitement of transgression and escape about it, which is nuanced, for a piece of media with a huge teenage audience. Suicide and suicidality have been underexplored themes in Toby's work since Undertale (Why did you go to the mountain nobody comes back from, Frisk?) and I think we're going to be dealing with it more explicitly here.
Finally - as a Krusie partisan I enjoyed the way that this chapter was designed to torture me specifically. One of the very very loudest themes the game keeps coming back to is that you can't change the way people feel about you using game mechanics, and this has always been an important lesson for lovelorn nerds, but man. Man. There's a part of me that thinks that we're steering into a throuple endgame, but a larger, more sensible part of me looks at the pizzapants fiasco and thinks that it's going to be very hard for Susie to forgive Kris once the truth comes out. It is very clear in this world that you don't get the girl by winning the game, no matter who the girl is. Questions remain about the game outside the game.
The only note I can think to end this on: as someone who grew up fascinated by Illusion of Gaia and convinced that nobody else on earth cared about it, watching Toby's dream unfold has been a complete mindfuck and I can't possibly be normal about it. If you're still reading, thanks for indulging me.
*I've been on the Deltarune is Umineko train since Chapter 3, and am delighted to see people catching on
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