At four movements in length, opus 31 no. 3, will be the last of Beethoven's piano sonatas, before sonata no. 28 and 29, to contain more than three movements and the last to include a minuet among its movements. According to Charles Rosen: The first bars of the Sonata in E♭ Major, opus 31 no. 3, are emotionally the most unsettling that Beethoven had written.
What may seem unsettling is the questioning nature of the opening. This movement, purportedly in E♭ major, does not begin in E♭ major, and the sense of question and answer that characterizes the opening is, in reality, a search for a tonic harmony and the eventual discovery of a tonic harmony. The duality of this opening theme is what makes it so unsettling; it is a rhetorical gesture or a musical question—Where has E♭ major gone? —and, at the same time, the first theme in a sonata-form movement. We observed the same sort of duality in the first theme of the first movement of the Tempest Sonata, where a single theme represented two different emotional and spiritual states!
Sonata-form exposition and recapitulation on the one hand, and the rondo's customary rhythm of. Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York. Merging with) a transition to the recurrence of a refrain. According to Charles Rosen's account of the exposition-vs.