ABSTRACT
There is a certain passage – it doesn’t matter which – in Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 14 No. 2 in which the composer, when he played it, “expressed the reaching over of the sixths . . . by holding the cover tone of each sixth beyond its written value, so that it continued to sound for an instant beneath the higher tone which follows.”1 At least, so the early twentieth-century musician and theorist Heinrich Schenker tells us, conjuring up a vivid image of the composer – who, after all, died half a century before the invention of any kind of sound recording – through what seems to be a kind of musictheoretical spiritualism. Yet Schenker’s account of the tiniest nuances of Beethoven’s playing, which is also an account of Beethoven’s intentions as expressed in it (to express “the reaching over of the sixths”), is only a particularly striking example of a way of writing about music that is so ubiquitous in the analytical literature that we hardly notice it. “For a longer time than in any work he had written until then,” says Charles Rosen (1976, p. 267) of the Quintet K. 515:
Mozart avoids a real movement away from the tonic: he transforms it into minor, he alters it chromatically, but he returns to it decisively again and again before moving to the dominant. His powers of expansion – the delay of cadence, the widening of the center of the phrase – are called into play on a scale he had never before known.
