Talk:Piano Sonata No. 28 (Beethoven)

message: Is it just me, or is that scan of the original manuscript upside-down?  Can it be flipped rightside-up? 24.98.20.220 (talk) 18:15, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Original Manuscript

message: There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Piano Sonata No. 1 (Beethoven) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RM bot 13:16, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Note the date of the foregoing notice. The discussion, now long closed, concerned whether to move the sonata articles to new titles incorporating opus numbers. The conclusion was not to do so. Drhoehl (talk) 23:52, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Move discussion in progress

message: I find the following passage questionable, at the least:
:Though the sonata is marked as being in A major, Beethoven does not write any cadences on the tonic key; the exposition and development do not include a single root position A major chord. The first tonic chord in root position appears towards the end of the recapitulation. It appears once more at the end of the recapitulation, but even then is blunted by the omission of the fifth scale degree.
Finding this a rather astonishing fact, I looked through the score for the first movement, looking for root-position A-major triads, to see if this really could be true.  While there may be slight variability in how to define when such a triad is present or not, I found chords in several places which I would accept as being root-position A-major triads: namely, in bars 3, 9, 14, 59, 64, 67, 77, 79, 81-85, 92, 94, 96-97, 101, 102.  The one "towards the end of the recapitulation" is probably the one in bar 77, or conceivably the ones in bars 64 or 67.
But anyone who examines the score can see that there are several earlier ones, so the statement in the article is not true - although I grant there are surprisingly few of them.  Some of them are brief (a quaver long), but that still doesn't stop them from being root-position A-major triads.
Moreover, I would consider the ones at bars 79, 81, and 92 to be cadences, as well as the one in bar 102, at the very end of the movement.  So the statement that there are no cadences in the tonic key is not correct.
Also, the only A-major root-position chord without the 5th degree of the scale I could find was in bar 77, which is not at the end of the recapitulation (that is at the beginning of bar 85).  Also, the bluntening effect of that omission is negligible because that omitted E appears very prominently before before and after the chord - that is also a perfect cadence, so the establishment of A major is very strong at that point.  (Beethoven often ends movements on a major chord without the 5th degree, and it doesn't seem to blunten the tonality.)
I said earlier there might be some variability in what is considered to be an A-major triad.  Some might want to dismiss the very brief unaccented A-major triads such as in bars 3, 59, 64, and 67 - but they are still A-major triads in root position, and cannot reasonably be explained as multiple passing notes, appoggiaturas, or similar.  Some might want to dismiss other instances because other notes sound simultaneously with the A-major triads, but I don't think that is reasonable.  Cases of this sort appear in bars 9 (top voice has a suspended B# move to D# then C#), and 14 (top voice has a suspended G# go to F#).  I don't know if whoever said there were no root-position A-major chords in the movement until towards the end of the recapitulation would want to dismiss these because other notes (mostly resulting from suspensions from previous chords) are sounding together with them; but I would say this does not prevent the essential harmony at those points still being root-position A-major harmony.
I won't alter the article, because someone might accuse me of "original research", and I cannot cite references for this; I'd have no idea where to search for them, and finding them might take hours.  It is just basic music theory, not really research.  But I might be inclined to think the statement should be removed, as it seems patently untrue to me.  If someone else who knows music agrees with me and is more familiar with exactly what Wikipedia allows and what it doesn't, perhaps they may feel confident to alter the text.  I will for now be content, though, with merely noting this here, and leaving it up to someone else to decide, if they happen upon my comments.
I appreciate why there is a rule against making statements based solely on original research; but I have (in other articles in the past) seen statements which I would consider flatly incorrect remain simply because anyone who correctly pointed out the error couldn't provide a source, so it was dismissed as original research. M.J.E. (talk) 18:36, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questionable statement about root-position A major triads.