Connections between the movements

It is generally agreed that the music of Beethoven's maturity is among the most highly organized in the repertory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that the analysis of any work – choral or instrumental – should take into account not only the structure of the individual movements but also the connections between them. Music theory, however, is conventionally concerned with dynamic processes – chord progressions, melodic motion, musical form as movement between regions of instability and stability – and is ill-equipped as a theory to determine the conditions under which one can sensibly draw connections between distant points, for example on the basis of thematically similar material. Moreover, a thematic relationship between, say, two or more movements of a symphony is no guarantee that the symphony is well-composed; more importantly, the absence of such relationships cannot in itself be regarded as a shortcoming of its composition.

Nevertheless, analysts are bound to return to the question: what makes these particular movements belong together, as parts of a single work and not merely as a series of discrete pieces? The question may properly be asked of any work whose individual parts – whether songs of a cycle, movements of a sonata, or numbers of an opera – are intended to be performed in succession; indeed it must, ultimately, be asked of such works.