Our special guest Mikael Darmanie has performed around the world, including appearances at The Weill Institute at Carnegie Hall, The Moscow Conservatory, and the Mainly Mozart Festival. Our performance will not put you to sleep though, we promise! She may be the “enchanting girl” he referenced in an 1801 letter to a friend, although he had no hope of marrying her and she married a count in 1803.Īccording to ClassicFM, a 2020 survey in the UK showed that “Moonlight Sonata” was the most popular piece of music to fall asleep to (although the site notes that it is most likely the first movement that the survey respondents meant, which has been referred to as “dreamy”). The first movement is solemn, the second movement was described by composer Franz Liszt as “a flower between two chasms,” and the final movement has been described as “stormy,” “unbridled,” and “ferocious.” Typical for Beethoven, the “Moonlight Sonata” is filled with emotion and rebellious in its form.īeethoven dedicated the “Moonlight Sonata” to Countess Giulietta Guicciardi of Austria, a young woman who was his piano student for a short time.

In contrast, the three movements in the “Moonlight Sonata” are slow, moderately fast, and very quick/excited. Traditionally, the movements of a sonata were arranged in a fast-slow-fast tempo pattern.

We don’t know why Beethoven wrote that subtitle about “the manner of a fantasy,” but it is fact that the sonata does deviate from the norms of composing at the time. “Moonlight Sonata” quickly became the well-known name and was used in published copies of the work in both German (“ Mondscheinsonate') and English. 14” to moonlight shining on Lake Lucerne (a lake in Switzerland). It also came with the subtitle, Sonata quasi una fantasia, translated from the Italian as “sonata in the manner of a fantasy.” Thirty years after publication, and five years after Beethoven’s death, a German music critic named Ludwig Rellstab compared the first movement of “Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor,” written in 1801, when Ludwig van Beethoven was in his early thirties. The formal name of the piece is “Piano Sonata No. Pianist Mikael Darmanie will perform Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” with the Cape Symphony at Beethoven’s 9th: Ode to Joy – but what is it that makes the “Moonlight Sonata” so special?

Moonlight sonata