The three Beethoven piano sonatas Opus 109, 110 and 111, were written between 1820 and 1822. As his sketchbooks show, these three sonatas were worked on all at the same time and may thus be thought to form a close group of Beethoven’s last thoughts on the piano sonata as a musical form.
A strong feature of the late instrumental works is their increased concentration of musical thought. Compressed into brief utterances of compelling significance, they seem reduced to their essentials, their composer quite unconcerned about the rules of polite aristocratic musical conversation that characterized his early period.
Emblematic of this increased density of thought is an increased density of texture that often tends towards the fugal, as in the finale to the Sonata in A flat Op. 110. Curiously paralleling this phenomenon is an increased density of pure sound, audible in the flamboyant use of trills as pedal sonorities, not just in the bass, but in the top and middle registers, as well.
Here is pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy to perform the Piano Sonata Opus 110 by Beethoven:
