Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Beethoven Sonata Op. 101 - trills

I sight-read through this sonata and decided I want to learn it.

My biggest fear on a technical level are the trills in the finale. Trills have always been my weakness, but there are measures in the finale where the inner fingers trill while the outer fingers play a melodic note, or vice versa. I particularly noticed this difficulty when I attempted learning Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody 12... Any possible tips for these measures? I'll show pictures of some of them here:





Sorry for the watermarks, but you can still clearly see the measures/trills I'm referring to.

Any other insights for this sonata that anybody has? I'm excited to tackle it and hopefully in a couple months take it to a teacher for a couple lessons.

For passages like these I try to use rotation for the trills and get used to using the outer fingers in the direction opposite the rotation if necessary. For the second one I'd play two lines with the LH. It can also work to drop the hand on the melody notes so the rotation and dropping are like different motions. It's hard to describe better than this. If you can trill uninterrupted while raising and lowering your hand you'll see what I mean.

I don't think there's an easy solution, but they get easier. It took me a long time to get comfortable with similar (but easier) examples in Op. 81a. I suppose it's just one of those things we have to deal with in Beethoven...

I would play the first trill using 212121212.

You could PM Can Cakmur as he has played this sonata.

Measured trills in 32nd notes starting on auxiliary note.
1st one: 2121-1323 or 2121-1212
2nd one: 5353-5323
3rd one: 2121-3212 (there's no easy answer for this one)
4th one: 1212-1232 with the bottom notes from 4 to 5 instead 5-5

Played as 32nds makes it easy to align the trill with the accompanying 8th notes. Good luck, this is one heck of a masterpiece!

A little bit of a non-sequitur here, but it's always seemed to me that even on paper this passage looks a lot like the A minor fugue from WTC I. This is obviously Beethoven in his Bachian mode. There's your best starting point for getting trills and other ornamentation down.

The third one I would play 2-3-2-3 with 1-2 for the Nachschlag and 1 on the following D.

I would play these starting on the main note to keep the melodic flow. So either as septuplets or in case of the first one for example if difficult you can skip the middle one and play as 2xtriplets. So that would be G sharp, A, G sharp (2,3,2) E with the 5th, G sharp, F sharp, G sharp (2,1,2). Full septuplet would be 2,3,2, A.3 with the E and then 2,1,2.

Several posters seem to have suggested repeating the same note twice in sucession during the trill. I have never heard of this being allowable during a trill.

I checked two YT performances(Cakmur and Blechacz), and they both seem to play G#A-G#AG#F#G# on the first trill. This seems more reasonable than what I suggested no matter what fingering is used since there is so little time.

I'll revise my little "contribution" here: it should probably be 2-3-2-3-2, so as to end on C#, then 1-2 on the nachschlag and then 1 on D. But what do I know. I'm not a concert pianist.

Yeah I would imagine that the fingering there would be something like a 2-3 pattern too to begin the trill so that 5 could play the E in the treble and then use 1-2 playing the F#-G# afterbeat. But it's true, it's going a little fast for on-the-fly analysis. At least for me.

Dear Ethan,
The trills are really nasty. In fact I wrote down the trills (which I normally don’t really like to do). For me what works is to group it as a 16th triplet and 4 32nd notes. Starting from the main note of course. When you have 8th notes in counterpoint, this way you know exactly where they fall on the trill. Lots of ugly practice, hammering out the trills in very slow tempo and experimenting with different hand positions do help unfortunately . When I practice this, I always put two accents, one for the triplet and one for the 4 32nd notes. As you get more comfortable, reduce the accent until it is completely uniform.

I didn’t really try any fancy fingerings but used very often 2-1 for right hand when it starts on a black key instead of 2-3.

Hope this helps, it is always difficult to write these stuff down! And take care. Let us know how it goes

Thank you all for your feedback! I'm looking forward to my practice sessions later today, and I'll definitely spend some quality time on these particular spots.

Interestingly enough, that's what the oft-maligned von Bülow-Lebert edition recommends.

Although I'm learning from an Urtext, I definitely plan on looking at various other editions just to try out what other pianists suggest.

Yeah the old von Bülow-Lebert edition (Schirmer) does have a place in my heart because it's the first I became familiar with. In spite of a certain 19th century "quirkiness" here and there - and in spite of the fact that I think it gets Op. 27 no. 2 wrong in the first movement - the suggested fingerings and execution tips are often pretty helpful. And comparatively it's pretty cheap.

I had no clue! Well of course that was a time when they were crazy about notating everything as detailed as possible.

Ain't that the truth. There's hardly a phrase (in the "major" works anyway) that they don't annotate..or offer up a Beethovenolatrous comment about.

Learned a new word.