In contrast to the Bagatelles op. 119, the Bagatelles op. 126, composed in 1824, were planned as a cycle from the outset. What these new bagatelles have in common are a basic tripartite form and the highly developed technique of deriving variations and contrasts from small motifs. The novelty of these pieces, which at the same all but marked Beethoven’s farewell to piano music, did not remain hidden from his contemporaries. Thus, a reviewer opined in 1826: “These six more or less short pieces contain more that is truly new and entirely distinctive, partly in the melodies or harmonies themselves, partly in both the appearance and form, than many an act of an opera”. An additional attraction is their moderate level of difficulty, which makes the Bagatelles accessible also to amateurs.
Opus 126 is now available for the first time from Henle in a revised single edition, edited by Beethoven specialist Joanna Cobb Biermann, who, in addition to the 1825 first edition, also consulted all the surviving autograph manuscripts. Beethoven described these, his last Bagatelles, as “probably the best of this kind that I have written” – judge for yourself!

 

 

 

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