Piano Sonata No. 11 (Beethoven)

Beethoven regarded it as the best of his early sonatas, though some of its companions in the cycle have been at least as popular with the public.

[1] Prominent musicologist Donald Francis Tovey has called this work the crowning achievement and culmination of Beethoven's early "grand" piano sonatas (the "grand" modifier was applied by Beethoven to sonatas with four movements instead of three.)

Subsequent sonatas find Beethoven experimenting more with form and concept.

The theme of the closing octaves from the exposition comes back again in the bass, leading into a chromatic scale resolving in an F dominant seventh chord (dominant function of the sonata), which sets up the recapitulation.

The recapitulation is at first the same as the exposition, but has some changes, with a deviation that sets the rest of the movement to stay in the tonic key.

A fake "A" section is played in the subdominant key before developing into the final "A" section where the melody consists of triplet sixteenth notes instead of regular sixteenth notes.

The very end of the final "A" sections runs right into the coda that builds up to an exciting final climax before relaxing to a piano dynamic level and two big chords (dominant seventh to tonic) to conclude the sonata.