Almost a Fantasy

The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, was a massive hit in Beethoven's lifetime. So huge was its popularity, that Beethoven, baffled, was prompted to say to his friend Carl Czerny, "Surely I've written better things". 
But whether he had or not, was beside the point: people fell in love with it. With the whole sonata, to be sure, but mainly and most profoundly with its haunting ear-worm of a first movement, the Adagio Sustenuto.
And, truly, it's a hard heart that hears the first movement without feeling something. 
In 1832, ten years after Beethoven's death, music critic Ludwig Rellstab was also moved by it and likened the movement to moonlight striking the surface of Lake Lucerne. Within 10 years of this analogy's coinage, it had grabbed onto the piece and never let go. We still call it "The Moonlight Sonata". 
I'm writing about this piece today, obviously, because it's Valentine's Day and no work by Beethoven is more associated with love and romance and the human heart than the Moonlight Sonata. The music itself is off-the-charts emotionally evocative and there's also about fifteen volumes of lore around its composition, dedication and meaning that will get its own entry maybe this time next year. 
For today, I'd like point out something that scholars have frothed about for centuries. Namely, that Beethoven was dead by the time it garnered the name "Moonlight". When he initially published it and dedicated it to the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom he was probably in love, he titled it, "Sonata, quasi una fantasia". Literally translated, that means "Sonata, almost a fantasy". 

Love, in this music, is not a fantasy - it's almost a fantasy.
It has its fantastic dream-like elements, but the flesh and the life and death and the real, the truly human, asserts itself over and over and gives us something so much more complex and alive than paper hearts.
Berlioz called the first movement, "one of those poems that human language does not know how to qualify". It think that can be said about the whole sonata and, more to the point, about love. It is unwordable, unqualifiable, unquantifiable and realer than real.
This poem showed up in my inbox today and says all of that so much better than I just did:

Heart to Heart Rita Dove

It’s neither red nor sweet. It doesn’t melt or turn over, break or harden, so it can’t feel pain, yearning, regret. It doesn’t have a tip to spin on, it isn’t even shapely— just a thick clutch of muscle, lopsided, mute. Still, I feel it inside its cage sounding a dull tattoo: I want, I want— but I can’t open it: there’s no key. I can’t wear it on my sleeve, or tell you from the bottom of it how I feel. Here, it’s all yours, now— but you’ll have to take me, too.

And here's the great Daniel Barenboim playing the whole sonata, in what I can only guess is his bedroom. When you give the sonata a listen, I'm asking to give some serious love and attention to the second and third movements. Because in the first movement, you get moonlight. But in the second and third movements, you get sunshine and rushing blood and we need those too.