Is this sonata about a storm, or does it reach deeper? Written at the time of Beethoven’s life crisis, the circumstances and the music indicate an expression of his anguish and of his way forward. My personal interpretation of a piece that has long been a favourite of mine.

The Tempest sonata (number 17, op. 31 no. 2) is so called because a friend asked what it was about and Beethoven said ‘read the Tempest’. He is presumed to have been referring to Shakespeare’s last play, though some debate that. Anyway the notes on the vinyl covers (remember those?) commonly suggest the music resembles a storm, one way or another.

The first movement opens with an eerie slow section that could be construed as a calm before a storm. Sure enough a fast, agitated, stormy section soon ensues. But then the slow section recurs. It recurs several times, becoming longer in each recurrence. That is not what a tempest usually does. One could also construe the rolling, overlapping chords of the last movement as sounding like waves, but not really. Waves rise and fall, they don’t pile each on the next.

Beethoven is not likely to have been so literal. It is true he wrote a storm into the sixth symphony, the Pastoral, but that is a clear representation of a summer storm and it fits the intent and flow of the whole symphony. The context of the sonata suggests a deeper connection with the play.

In 1802 Beethoven, age 32-ish, was advised to take a break from Vienna and live in the countryside, for the sake of his health. The distress of his growing deafness was building to a crisis. For six months or so he lived in a village, and later in the year confessed in letters that he had contemplated suicide, such was his misery at being a highly talented pianist and composer with his head full of buzzing sounds and the outside sonic world receding. As we know, he came through the crisis and resolved to develop his talent to ever-greater heights. This he did to an astonishing degree.

So Beethoven was living through his crisis while staying in the village. Despite this he was highly productive. Among his compositions was the set of three piano sonatas, opus 31. The first and third are fairly conventional, pleasant enough, innovative in some ways but not very challenging. Number two is of a different order: dark and brooding, sombre and frenetic by turns, reportedly one of the more difficult of all his pieces to perform. The set fits a pattern common for the times: light, dark, light, perhaps a way of packaging his soul-baring for the public of the time.

The sonata opens with the eerie chord and slow section already mentioned, establishing a pensive mood. Soon it is overtaken by a fast, stormy section, fragmentary at first and then at some length, confirming the troubled mood and introducing a high, poignant motif. The slow and fast sections then alternate, each recurrence of the slow section longer, more soulful and more rudely interrupted. By the third recurrence the slow segment extends into a recitative, a solo song of very slow single notes, and by the fourth into an extended, lonely, forlorn plea.

When my second marriage hit the rocks I was devastated. I felt like the world had turned unreal and I was in the wrong show: this must be someone else’s life, it’s not the one I had planned. I was desolate. I would wake in the morning and for a moment feel that everything was in its place, but then reality would crash in: I am moving out, we are splitting up, my previous intention, my self-image, that dream of mine is gone, never to return.

I hear such desolation in this music. Beethoven must have felt he was in the wrong life, one of the most gifted musicians ever, being overcome by deafness. Surely the gods would not so cruelly tease and condemn a person. So: torment, rage, pathos, and also desolation. And then reality crashing in, repeatedly.

He must also have felt he was in exile, cast away from Vienna, the centre of his musical world. Prospero, in Shakespeare’s story, was, in an earlier reality, a duke who was usurped and exiled to an island. He has magical powers and can summon magical spirits, but is nevertheless cut off from the things he loves most. In this story Prospero uses his magical powers to summon a tempest that wrecks some of his tormentors onto the island. He could seek revenge and retribution, but he chooses to find a reconciliation, and to carry on in a new way. Of course we can’t know if this is how Beethoven perceived Shakespeare’s story, but it’s not a bad fit.

The second movement of the sonata is more conventional in sound and structure, a slow, stately, expressive melody used to great musical effect. To me it has the sound of grappling more consciously with his fate, moving beyond just reacting. It is sad, perhaps becoming resigned, though not without passing shadows, and it seems to end calmly with some acceptance.

The third movement I have always found remarkable. From beginning to end it sustains a running pace. There is an occasional slight hesitation, an effect by the performer, but no break in the tempo. It is not frenetic, I wouldn’t call it relentless but is it unceasing. And it features prominently those rolling chords (broken? I don’t know the technical term) overlapping head to tail, sounding a bit like waves, but not really. Not all performances bring out the lower notes that rise up to the prominent high figure but for me the magic is in the whole rolling sequence. Other themes also come and go but the pace is unbroken.

Then, in what must be unique in Beethoven’s output, it simply rolls down the keyboard and is finished. No grand reprise, no great finale, triumphant or otherwise, no final chords, crashing or quiet, it just runs out and is over. Very un-Beethoven. Perhaps there was nothing to celebrate, no occasion or state even to mark or punctuate, just a slipping into a new phase of life, ready or not.

What does this final movement signify? I don’t have any clear feeling of my own. It could be life resuming, busily. It could be Beethoven signifying that he will just get on with it. If he keeps himself busy he will quell some of the anguish. Whatever it is, I have always found it magic. Now, I hear him taking this unusual motif and playing his usual magic expressive tricks with it even as the pace never slackens. But we know young Ludwig was a very clever lad.

You don’t need this or any other story to enjoy the music. It is highly creative and engaging and you can just listen and appreciate. One of its marvels is that it combines striking musical interest with deep personal expressions.

It is strange of course to be engaging so intimately, 222 years on, with a man who has been dead for so long. It is the magic of music and the genius of the man to have preserved, using dots and lines on paper, such a powerful emotional experience, the dark night of his soul.