Free Online Course by Coursera on Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

Coursera Platform is offering an online course on exploring Beethoven’s piano sonatas.

Course background:

Our relationship to Beethoven is a deep and paradoxical one. For many musicians, he represents a kind of holy grail: His music has an intensity, rigor, and profundity which keep us in its thrall, and it is perhaps unequalled in the interpretive, technical, and even spiritual challenges it poses to performers. At the same time, Beethoven’s music is casually familiar to millions of people who do not attend concerts or consider themselves musically inclined. Two hundred years after his death, he is everywhere in the culture, yet still represents its summit.

This course takes an inside-out look at the 32 piano sonatas from the point of view of a performer. Each lecture will focus on one sonata and an aspect of Beethoven’s music exemplified by it.

Course duration:

Approx. 17 hours to complete.

Course topics:

• Week 1: Welcome to Class!

We’re happy that you’ve joined us! The items you see here will enable you to get the most out of this course. Please note that many of the items have been updated to reflect the addition of Jonathan’s newest lectures.

• Week 2: How Things Were:

To examine the relationship Beethoven had with the piano sonata, we begin by looking at its origins. In this lecture, we will discuss the role of music generally, and of the sonata specifically, in the time of Haydn and Mozart. This lecture will also provide an introduction to the form of the sonata—to the psychological effect sonata structure has on the listener. This background will be necessary to appreciate the innovations Beethoven introduces.

• Week 3: The First Thirteen:

Beethoven’s work has traditionally been divided into three or four periods. This is problematic, for various reasons, but the first 13 of the 32 sonatas do, in a sense, form a unit. This lecture will focus on Sonata No. 4, Op. 7, which is the largest and altogether one of the most impressive of the early works.

• Week 4: New Paths:

Beethoven’s conception of the sonata was perpetually in flux, but the year 1801 is a particularly experimental one. The four sonatas Op. 26 through 28 (Nos. 14 through 17, chronologically) feature the most concrete innovations among the sonatas written up to that point, and are the focus of this lecture. There will be discussion of the relationship between the movements in a classical sonata, and the radical shift it begins to undergo at this point. We will also examine the ways in which these sonatas were influential to future generations of composers, which the earlier works, great as they are, were not.

Course costs:

Learner gets to register full course for free, no certificate:

He/she will still have access to all course materials for this course.

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