Beethoven and C minor

The compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven in the key of C minor carry special significance for many listeners. His works in this key have been said to be powerful and emotive, evoking dark and stormy sentiments. Background During the Classical era, C minor was used infrequently and often for works of a particularly turbulent cast. Mozart, for instance, wrote only very few works in this key, but they are among his most dramatic ones (the twenty-fourth piano concerto, the fourteenth piano sonata, the Masonic Funeral Music, the Adagio and Fugue in C minor and the Great Mass in C minor, for instance). Beethoven chose to write a much larger proportion of his works in this key, especially traditionally “salon” (i.e. light and diverting) genres such as sonatas and trios, as a sort of conscious rejection of older aesthetics, valuing the “sublime” and “difficult” above music that is “merely” pleasing to the ear. Paul Schiavo wrote that C minor is a key “that Beethoven associated with pathos, struggle, and expressive urgency.” The key is said to represent for Beethoven a “stormy, heroic tonality”; he uses it for “works of unusual intensity”; and it is “reserved for his most dramatic music”. P