From Beethoven Cello Sonata no.5 in D major op.102 no.2. Urtext edition with marked and unmarked string parts. Ed. Jens Dufner. Pf fingering Ian Fountain. Vcl fingering and bowing David Geringas. Order no. HN 1475. ISMN 979-0-2018-1475-9. €9.00. Printed with permission of G. Henle Verlag, München © 2020
Playing this sonata as part of the collection of Beethoven’s five for cello and piano, in concerts over many years, has given me a sense of what it meant to Beethoven. His Fourth and Fifth cello sonatas are often regarded as difficult to interpret because of their complexity and an introspective quality, but as part of his journey in writing for cello and piano they represent a definitive conclusion to his mastery of the genre.
I’m convinced Beethoven would not have thought when writing the first sonatas in 1796 that a fugue with cello and piano were possible. And neither did he appear to consider exploiting the singing nature of the cello in a slow movement. But in the Third Sonata we can hear he is conceiving the ways in which these two instruments can function happily together in a certain world of sonorities, and he continues to develop his compositional ambition for the combination, apparently recognising the need to write a whole slow movement and a fugue as his final contribution to the genre.