Movement I - Measures 65 to 70

As I mentioned in the last post, this passage is particularly pianistic:

A literal transcription is virtually impossible at this speed, so I changed the arpeggios to something more string-friendly:

Beethoven does something quite different in his arrangement. Instead of arpeggios, he uses sixteenth-note tremolos in the middle strings. To keep this from getting boring, he adds a new countermelody in the cello. This countermelody takes up the arpeggio idea from the piano version, but the arpeggios are now staccato eighth notes and span two octaves. The countermelody provides the motion when the melody has a long note but then drops out on each even measure when the melody is moving. This scheme results in a cleaner, less busy sound.

Beethoven also changes the dynamics. The piano score contains a crescendo in the last two measures. (A short-lived crescendo. The very next measure, measure 71, will be marked piano.) Beethoven drops the crescendo in the string score and adds a forte-piano to the first beat of each odd measure. The forte-pianos add to the excitement, and it is the tremolos that makes them possible. Forte-pianos would sound very strange in the piano version.

Beethoven begins this passage with a dramatic leap in the second violin, which helps to differentiate this new section. Beethoven went out of his way to make this leap a large one. We noted last week that he gratuitously widened the spread between the second violin and viola at the end of measure 64. This widening sets up the high D-flat in measure 65. A more natural voice-leading would have had the violin leaping, less dramatically, from a B-flat.

Why does Beethoven invert the voicing in the tremolo chord, giving the second violin the B-flat and the viola the D-flat? Perhaps one reason is to make the leap in the second violin that much larger. But I suspect the main reason is he simply didn't want the viola to play the same note on the downbeat as the in rest of the measure. He did something similar in the first measure of the piece, scoring it as

rather than

This movement, in each case, ensures that we hear the chord on the downbeat as an entity distinct from the ensuing tremolos.