The Moonlight Sonata: What’s in a Name?

Ludwig van Beethoven. Engraving by J. Lindner after C. Jaeger. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

If I started to play for you the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 27, No. 2, subtitled “Quasi una fantasia,” you would immediately recognize it.

Title doesn’t ring a bell? Trust me. You’d recognize it.

The gently rocking triplets beneath a one-pitch dotted-rhythm (long-short/long) melody would give it away inside three seconds—max. You’d name it in an instant, even though you wouldn’t call out its proper name. Instead, you’d call out its most improper, yet irrevocably ingrained-in-the-consciousness, name. You’d call it ... the “Moonlight Sonata.”

The common name of the first movement of the Sonata, this eerily beautiful piece of solo piano music from 1801, is actually a nickname, given to it decades after Beethoven inked its notes onto musical staves. Yet the unofficial moniker could be viewed as a stroke of luck. Somehow the name caught the fancies of millions since it first gained acceptance in the 1830s, so that when we hear the piece, whether moonlight is evoked or not, we are led to appreciate the suggestive, atmospheric qualities of a composition so perfect in form and balanced in expression that we cannot imagine a universe without it.

Love, Professional Success, and the Threat of Deafness

Portrait of Beethoven, 1920, by Leonid Pasternac. British Museum, London. PD-Art

Beethoven was 30 in 1801, a watershed year that saw both a major theatrical commission and the first evidence of encroaching deafness, a calamity that plagued him for the rest of his life. The commission was for a full-length ballet on a classical theme “The Creatures of Prometheus.” It’s largely forgotten today save for a theme the composer later used in his Third Symphony. Yet it was an important event in Viennese cultural life and helped introduce Beethoven’s music to a public wider than that of professional musical circles. There, he was already known as the likely inheritor of the mantle previously given to Mozart and, at the time, worn by Beethoven’s teacher Franz Josef Haydn: Europe’s greatest living composer. As Count Waldstein wrote, Beethoven moved to Vienna to “receive the spirit of Mozart at the hand of Haydn.”

It was also the year in which Beethoven fell in love, not for the first time, with a noble woman far above him in societal station. Her name was Julie Guicciardi, a Polish-born Austrian countess with an Italian name. Her family moved from Trieste, an Austrian city at the time but with a largely Italian population and culture, to Vienna, in 1800. As most young ladies of the era did, she sought out piano lessons, and the best teacher in Vienna at the time was young Ludwig.

Beethoven later confessed to his biographer Anton Schindler that he came under his pupil’s spell. In a letter to a friend dated Nov. 16, 1801, Beethoven wrote of an unnamed love interest that was likely her: “My life is once more a little more pleasant. I’m out and about again, among people—you can hardly believe how desolate, how sad my life has been since these last two years; this change was caused by a sweet, enchanting girl, who loves me and whom I love.”

The Many Ways of Hearing One Piece of Music

It was not to be, for, as Beethoven concluded in his letter, “unfortunately [the girl] is not of [his] station.” Falling in love with women whose high social rank made marriage impossible became a recurrent theme in the composer’s life. While the implications of that are best left to speculative psychology, artistically, this provided a string of romantic inspirations for music.

The Moonlight Sonata was composed at the time of his infatuation with the countess, and he dedicated the published score to “Giulietta Guicciardi,” employing the more accepted Italian form of her first name. Might she, and the love he felt for her, have been the real inspiration behind the music?

Title page for the first edition of the Piano Sonata No. 14 (1802). Public Domain

Listen to the sonata’s first movement without the baggage of the “Moonlight” moniker, and it’s possible to hear it as a plaintive love song, full of yearning and weighted with the knowledge that the lovers’ feelings could not last. Of course, the repetitive rhythms make it also possible to hear the piece as having “almost the character of a funeral march,” as Michael Kennedy wrote in the “Oxford Dictionary of Music.” He wasn’t alone. French composer Hector Berlioz, who heard the sonata before “moonlight” stuck to it, pronounced the melody of the first movement a “lamentation.” That word suggests yet another possibility: that Beethoven composed the opening movement of his sonata to express the grief he felt at the onslaught of deafness.

How did it come to pass that the term “moonlight,” as opposed to “love song” or “lamentation” or any other extra-musical condition, came to rest on these 69 measures of quiet (no dynamic marking above “p” for “quietly”), reflective piano music in C-Sharp minor, marked “Adagio sostenuto,” or “slow and sustained”?

The Story Behind the Nickname

In 1824, poet and critic Ludwig Rellstab published the following comments regarding the Adagio sostenuto of Beethoven’s Op. 27, No. 2: “The lake reposes in twilit moon-shimmer, muffled waves strike the dark shore; gloomy wooded mountains rise and close off the holy place from the world; ghostly swans glide with whispering rustles on the tide, and an Aeolian harp sends down mysterious tones of lovelorn yearning from the ruins.” (Note “lovelorn yearning.”)

From this, publishers derived the sobriquet “Moonlight,” and by the late 1830s, the name became commonplace.

The fact that the “Moonlight” label has clung to Op. 27, No. 2 for two centuries is testimony to the connotative power of music. Beethoven’s music describes an emotional arc that suits one’s feelings whether the imagination runs to moonlight on a lake or a solemn funeral procession or impossible, yearning love.

One thing is certain: The strictly musical aspects of the piece were revolutionary. In 1801, sonatas always began with a fast movement, followed by a slow movement, and ending with another fast movement, usually at a quicker tempo than that of the opening. This placed the weight of the sonata at the beginning. In the “Moonlight,” Beethoven opted to begin with a slow movement, progress to one of moderately fast tempo, and end with a movement played at breakneck speed. This moved the weight of the sonata to the finale, a fact underlined by the sheer size of the finale, which is roughly the length of the first two movements combined.

With the “Moonlight” sonata, Beethoven completed what is widely considered to be this early period. The stage was now set for the exploration of musical form in sonatas, string quartets, symphonies and concertos that would continue the great tradition of Western art music, moving it to a new and higher plateau of expressive content.

Correction: A previous caption in the article misstated Beethoven’s participation in the performance of his Ninth Symphony. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

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