Piano Sonata No 14 in C#m
Depeche Mode / Sonata No 14 in C#m (Moonlight Sonata) (Ludwig van Beethoven)
Performed by Alan Wilder
The first band I embraced full on was the electronic band Depeche Mode, formed 1980 in Bristol, England.
My favorite band member was Alan Wilder, always a bit more in the background than the others. Cooler. Quieter.
Among all their thirteen albums I hold the sixth one—Music for the Masses—closest. It's the top of my Depeche Mode mountain; the abysms of my Depeche Mode subterranea.
The fourth single—Little 15—had two b-side tracks: the beautiful Stjarna (stjärna is star in Swedish) by Martin Gore, and Ludwig van Beethoven's incredible Piano Sonata No 14, played in C#m by Alan Wilder.
Alan Wilder's Moonlight sonata (1st movement) is played with a forthrightness, well, almost bluntness. Raw, and with the lonesome cold of moonlight beams. The piano sound adds to it, of course. It's a harsh and dark sound—as in tracks like Strangelove, Never Let Me Down Again and Little 15.
Depeche Mode (Martin Lee Gore) / Stjarna
The sonata weren't supposed to be on record at all. After Alan Wilder had played Stjarna in the recording studio, he just started to play the Moonlight sonata. Band mate Martin Lee Gore skillfully knew what was going on and got it all on tape. And the fact that Wilder is just playing along might add to that raw feeling. (There's even some performance errors in the end.)
Ludwig van Beethoven never called this sonata the »Moonlight Sonata«, by the way. It was the german poet and music critic Ludwig Rellstab that compared van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No 14 with the moonlight shining upon Swiss Lake Lucerne. And this caught on with the public.
Beethoven himself called it »Sonata quasi una fantasia«—sonata in the manner of a fantasy, or almost a fantasy.
One interesting thing about this piece is Beethoven's pedal mark. The whole first movement of Piano Sonata No 14 is supposed to be played wite the sustain pedal depressed. Back in the days when Beethoven was around, pianos had a much shorter sustain than modern ones. This leave todays performers with a delicate problem, since they just can't play the first movement as said in the score. It would simply be too much sustain, with horrendous disharmony as result.
A couple of things can be done to get close to the effect Beethoven wanted. First, there's half pedaling, perhaps combined with releasing the pedal a fraction of a second late, if pianist Charles Rosen may have a say.
Then there's a way where you're creating vibrations of the low bass strings to get the similar sustain effect where chords and notes dissolve into each other. Read more about this at the Piano Sonata No 14 wikipedia page.
To end this text, before it gets really long: I can almost not believe that music this amazing can be made. I don't mean it in a sense that it, otherwise, has to be a higher power that has stepped in and shown the way—even if Beethoven himself might have believed that.
I'm honestly awed and amazed by every note in this piece of music. And every order of every note. And the fashion every single one of those notes are played in. How the »lead« figure is taken down some octavos at the end. How weary and woeful the music becomes, and I with it.
Ludwig van Beethoven / Piano Sonata No.14 in C#m, Op.27 No.2 (1st movement, Adagio sostenuto)
Vladimir Ashkenazy
Decca 1983
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