I'm conscious that I can't dwell too much on this opening movement. I can't afford to exhaust you before the really hardy stuff comes. But there is a pair of surprising events in the recapitulation which are too critical to the piece to overlook. Many recapitulation, as you know well by now, stick religiously to the tonic, this one does not. First, we make a slight not especially notable detour to the subdominant of D-flat major. Nothing to get worked up about. But the next harmonic move is revelatory. E major. We've gone from the mellowness of A-flat major with its four flats to the radiant shine of E major. Two tonalities and sonority that are just about as far away from one another as it's possible. The presence of E major in the middle of A-flat major Opus 110, and in the middle of the recapitulation of all places is so unexpected, so out of context. I cannot help but feel that Beethoven is for the first time in the piece making reference to Opus 109 itself in E major. There is to my knowledge no other instance of Beethoven juxtaposing two keys that are so far apart, and there is nothing in this movement that would have predicted much less necessitated disappearance of E major. Recapitulations are normally there to bring a sense of familiarity and homecoming. This excursion into distant radiant E major is rather a fantastic voyage into a past work that is evidently still on Beethoven's mind. I referred to a pair of surprising events in his recapitulation. The first was the appearance of this magical E major. The second is the extraordinary jarring way Beethoven gets out of it. Given that these two keys, E major, A-flat major are so far apart, modulating between the two takes a lot of doing. That is, if one bothers to do it. Probably, the most maverick and inexplicable moment of the piece, Beethoven declined to move us from one key area to the other. He simply stops writing in E major and without ceremony moves back A-flat. That is not a modulation, it's a gear shift. That is the whole process by which Beethoven gets from key to key, and nothing in it can be called a modulation. There's nothing in it that helps to move us eight links down the circle of fifths. Beethoven just keeps lowering the base by step until he gets where he wants to be. This non-modulation through its abruptness and near incoherence has the effect of driving home just how unrelated the two key areas are. In the process, it really highlights how strange the presence of that E major passage was in the first place. I could never prove that it is meant to be an oblique reference to Opus 109, but there is simply no other coherent explanation for it. The remainder of the movement's recapitulation is not only coherent, it adheres strictly to the exceptionally beautiful model that the exposition laid out for it, and leads to an equally beautiful coda. That closing phrase of the exposition, the one that evaporated upward. That recurs here but instead of landing neatly on the tonic, it takes a turn and extends to the narrative, and there merely delayed comes the cadence. This is not one of Beethoven's massive codas there to expand the scope of the movement or introduce new elements, instead, it continues in the mode that has dominated the movement as a whole, one of tenderness and of quiet intensity. With Beethoven, that's no contradiction. Beethoven is always intense even when he's tender, or dolce, or anything else of the sort. Not only does this could have not break new ground or open the movement up in any way, it actually fails to provide a conclusive firm ending. The final phrase offers a series of cadences but each is compromised in some way. Either it doesn't have an A-flat as the root of the chord or it comes mid-sentence. Then, the final one ends not with any real conviction but with these two short almost wispy chords leaving a silent that hangs in the air. If musical notation used punctuation marks the way that language does, that would be more likely to be a question mark than a period. Certainly, it's the furthest thing from an exclamation point which can often be found in Beethoven's music, and it ends the movement on a note of ambiguity.
