Beethoven - Sonata no. 32- 2/3

Did he use peddle?

please forgive the extreme sloppiness of my last comment. my main point was that beethoven's influences were not extra-european and cannot viably be traced to anything but the occasional folk influence...of whatever (primarily western) european breed. forget the eastern european reference below...maybe for Brahms, but not King B.

I don't realy think Beethoven was African, or a time-traveller. However, his linked sixteenth notes in Op. 111 sound very strange - and exciting! Was Beethoven trying to write down what may have been a custom in live performance, to "lead the beat" and make the music more exciting? Or was he experimenting even more than usual with syncopations and off-beats? Hard for us to find out. Did anyone in his day comment on the bizarre rhythms of Op 111?

We need to research this...i'm sure umpteen thousand musicologists have devoted umpteen thousand monographs to the subject of Beethoven's beat leadings alone - which he seems to deploy particularly with Theme & Variations. Unfortunately, I don't have university access to online musicology journals and I'm sure as hell to lazy to get an interlibrary loan request from the Boston Public Library.

sound so solid, by the way, it is also good performance

1.Paul Badura-Skoda played in the Sydney Town Hall in the late 1950s/early 1960s but I cannot remember what he played, except that I remember the Chopin "Minute" Waltz as an encore.  I remember this as it was "my piece" at the time.
2. Beethoven's facial characteristics were typically European.
3. I have always liked the "jazz" variation of the opus 111/2. Reubke in his piano sonata anticipates jazz breaks by 50 years in a couple of places in his monumental piano sonata.

Beethoven was described as "a real schwartzer" by some of his friends ... he opened his violin concerto with drums (tympani) ... and he wrote swing/ragtime/jazz in this sonata. Was he of African descent? (Most scholars dismiss this conjecture as pure nonsense.)

The idea that he wrote swing/ragtime/jazz into his sonatas is simply an idiotic anacrhonistic re-reading. We must simply widen the previously narrow definitions of Romantic-era stylistics so that they are broad enough to encompass syncopatic gestures or 9th and 11th harmonies and the like, which, in bear a vague semblance to jazz, ragtime and the like. In reality, they are expropriations from common march/military band conventions as well as local dance forms, esp. E. European or Turkish ones.

He well may have had a touch of Moorish in him. But race is clearly not the issue with his music - he could have been 100% African or 100% Chinese for that matter. Regardless of his racial makeup, his ethnicity is squarely German (and later, Viennese).

I've been obsessing over this fact for the past two weeks, having just been introduced to op.111. Does anyone know of literature that addresses this swing/ragtime prophecy? I.e., how in the world he divined it; what, if any, influenced him to do so (had he heard african music somewhere?), what his contemporaries/reviewers thought of it, etc.?