Music to listen to when you’ve broken up with a precious friend

Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is thrilling and brain-twisting. Its nickname derives from the fact that it was published as a sonata ‘for the hammer-action keyboard’, which just means a piano. But the notion of hammering suits this work. It’s his longest sonata — a late one, No. 29 in B flat, Op. 106 — and a mighty piece of machinery. I’ve been listening to it for 40 years and I’m not even close to grasping its details. It’s far more of a mental puzzle than the sublime last trio of sonatas, Opp. 109–111, whose construction is less tortuous.

The Hammerklavier has been in and out of my CD player a lot recently, for two reasons. I’ll explain later. If you don’t know the work, let me give you my version of the plot, as it were.

The sonata begins with an explosion: a fusillade of descending thirds that Beethoven originally wrote, years earlier, to be sung to the words ‘Vivat, vivat Rudolphus!’ — the opening fanfare to a never-completed brown-nosing cantata in honour of his patron Archduke Rudolf. In the words of the pianist and scholar Charles Rosen, the writing exhibits ‘a determination and fury previously unheard in music’. Also, Beethoven’s metronome mark requires a supernatural technique. No wonder that most performers decide that it ‘works better’ if you play it a bit slower, ‘allowing the detail to be heard’ — and, anyway, the old boy was deaf so probably misjudged the metronome.

Then there’s a snatched scherzo, also brutally fast, with a flurry in the middle that sounds like the piano accompaniment to a silent movie in which the heroine is tied to a railway track.

The slow movement is an Adagio sostenuto in F sharp minor, described by one 18th-century poet as ‘a gloomy key: it tugs at passion like a dog biting a dress.