The Sonata number 11 in B-flat major is an interesting one, because it is the last "Grande Sonate" with the four movement "Grande" sonata form.
It is also the culminating point with the past sonatas.
This is when Beethoven will close the Sonata in four movement form.
Of course there will be the Sonata "The Hunt" (op.31 N.3) which has four movements as well but this is in another context.
Here I'm referring to the four movements being made of, after the first "Sonata-Allegro", a large slow movement, a Menuetto/Scherzo and a final Rondeau.
The Sonata is almost like a Concerto. One can even call that a "Concerto without Orchestra" if there was such a name at the time.
So it is a concerto without orchestra with clear demarcation of solo piano and tutti parts.
Sometimes this Sonata has been
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Actually this thema is a funeral march thema.
It is a lugubrious one, the rhythmical formula: dotted-eight and quarter note has a macabre association in the entire western musical civilization, for 400 years.
But here this "formula" of a funeral march is not harmonized with massive block-chords as it happens in a funeral march but with fluidly and gently moving triplets. That "softens" it (the theme) enormously.
So there is a very particular mixture of this gloomy aspect repeatedly stated by the quite obsessive theme and the deployment "dolcissimo" of those triplets which will keep on during the entire movement.
There is something ambiguous here: a bizarre relationship between an expressive romanticism and a macabre obsession.
Finally those triplets show the envy of going higher up but there is always something at the left hand, something at the basses which will refrain them (the triplets) and attract them towards the low keys, the macabre regions (of the keyboard).
Like a bullet chained to the right hand which will prevent it from "developing further" or "going higher" (or