ABSTRACT

Beethoven's early life was spent in Bonn, where there was a flourishing musical establishment under the patronage of Maximilian Friedrich, the Elector of Cologne. Beethoven was often surprisingly modest about his achievements, even in later life, and in 1783 he had good cause to hope that he would be able to compose much better works in due course. No further piano sonatas are known from Beethoven's Bonn period, but he may have written or drafted some now lost. Beethoven had much more ambitious plans for a sonata during this period, but they seem not to have materialized. A bifolio from the late Bonn period contains the beginnings of two different sonatas, one in E minor and one in E flat major. In planning his set of sonatas, Beethoven adopted a pattern that was to serve him in almost all his groups of three instrumental works, but was used much less consistently by either Haydn or Mozart.