In the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven, the key of C minor has been regarded by some as significant. Works for which he chose this key have been suggested to be powerful and emotionally stormy.
Background
During the Classical era, C minor was used infrequently and always for works of a particularly turbulent cast. Mozart, for instance, wrote only very few works in this key, but they are among his most dramatic ones. Beethoven chose to write a much larger proportion of his works in this key, especially traditionally "salon" genres such as sonatas and trios, were a sort of conscious rejection of older aesthetics, valuing the "sublime" and "difficult" above music that is "merely" pleasing to the ear. The key is said to represent for Beethoven a "stormy, heroic tonality"; he uses it for "works of unusual intensity"; and it is "reserved for his most dramatic music". Pianist and scholar Charles Rosen writes: A characteristic 19th-century view is that of the musicologist George Grove, writing in 1898: Grove's view could be said to reflect the view of many participants in the Romantic age of music, who valued Beethoven's music above all for its emotional force. Not all critics have taken a positive view of Beethoven's habitual return to the tonality of C minor. Musicologist Joseph Kerman faults Beethoven's reliance upon the key, particularly in his early works, as a hollow mannerism: Of the works said to embody the Beethovenian "C minor mood", probably the canonical example is the Fifth Symphony. Beethoven's multi-movement works in C minor tended to have a slow movement in a contrasting major key, nearly always the subdominant of C minor's relative key : A major, providing "a comfortingly cool shadow or short-lived respite", but also the relative key, the tonic major and the sharpened mediant major, the last setting a precedent for Brahms' third Piano Quartet, Grieg's Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's second Piano Concerto. In his essay Beethoven's Minority, Kerman observes that Beethoven associated C minor with both its relative and parallel majors, and was continually haunted by a vision of C minor moving to C major. While many of Beethoven's sonata-form movements in other minor keys, particularly finales, used the minor dominant as the second key area – predicting a recapitulation of this material in the minor mode – his use of the relative major, E as the second key area for all but two of his C minor sonata-form movements, in many cases, facilitated a restatement of part or all of the second theme in C major in the recapitulation. One exception, the first movement of the Piano Sonata No. 32, uses A major as its second key area, also allowing a major-mode restatement in the recapitulation – and the other exception, the Coriolan Overture, is only loosely in sonata form and still passes through III in the exposition and major-mode I in the recapitulation. Furthermore, of the final movements of Beethoven's multimovement works in C minor, three are in C major throughout, one finishes in C major, and a further four end with a Picardy third.
