Piano Sonata No. 8 in c minor, “Pathétique,” Op. 13

• Beethoven composed his Sonate pathétique, Op. 13, in 1797-8.
• Beethoven dedicated this sonata to his patron Prince Karl von Lichnowsky.
• Unlike many of Beethoven’s works (cf. “Appassionata,” “Moonlight Sonata,” “Emperor Concerto,” etc.), this work’s descriptive title really does come from Beethoven, and is not a posthumous nickname.¹
• Beethoven’s use of the French term pathétique had a specific connotation. “Pathétique” was a recognized musical term in the 18th Century. Sebastian de Brossard’s French Dictionaire de Musique (1705) describes the term.²

“Pathetico, that is, Pathetique, touching, expressive, passionate, capable of moving, pity, compassion, anger, and other passions that agitate the heart of man…The Chromatic genus with its semitones major and minor, as much ascending as descending, are appropriate to it, as are also the good management of dissonances, especially the augmented and diminished, the variety of tempos, as much lively as languishing, as much slow as fast, etc., also contribute much to it.”

Sebastian de Brossard, Dictionaire de Musique (1705)³

• 18th C. writers, especially in France, also associated the term pathétique with impassioned, lamenting vocal music.⁴

1.  Douglas Johnson et al, “Beethoven, Ludwig van,” Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2001), accessed February 12, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040026.
2.  Elaine R. Sisman, “Pathos and the Pathétique,” in Beethoven Forum 3, ed. Christopher Reynolds, Glenn Stanley, and Lewis Lockwood (University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 91.
3. Quoted in Ibid.
4. Ibid.