ABSTRACT
The earliest surviving reference to a sonata for Adolph Schlesinger, however, is a conversation-book entry by Beethoven's friend and secretary Franz Oliva, who wrote on 23 or 24 April: 'and perhaps use the new little piece for a sonata for Schlesinger'. Moreover, sketches survive for nearly all his sonatas, and in some cases there are a great many of them – especially for the last three sonatas. They are Op. 109, Op. 110 and Op. 111. To create a sonata with a fast minor movement followed by just an adagio in the major seems to have been a bold innovation. When he came to write out the autograph score of the sonata, Beethoven wrote out a rough draft more fully than usual, as he indicated in a later letter, enabling him to send his own fair copy to the publishers.
