Piano Forum

I read somewhere that Beethoven was not happy with the disproportionate popularity of the Moonlight Sonata compared to his other sonatas and that he himself thought the F# Major Sonata Opus 74 was a better piece.

First of all you mean Op. 78 ... as someone who has played both, I do think that the F-sharp major Sonata is much better-written than the Moonlight, but it also came eight years, ten sonatas, two concertos, and five symphonies later. I think he might have grown up just a little bit as a musician during that time, don't you? Of course he looked back on it, slightly confused why people loved it more than the stuff he'd written since then that was clearly so much more mature. Rachmaninoff felt the same about his famous C-sharp minor Prelude, Chopin about his Fantasie Impromptu.

That said, I still have a special place in my heart for the Moonlight Sonata. Like the earlier Pathetique, it is much more dramatic than anything else written at that time, and it really captures the imaginations of people who otherwise wouldn't know classical music well. Most people in Western culture have at least heard of it, whether or not they actually could recognize it. It got me into playing the piano as a preteen, that's for sure! Now, a decade and (nearly) a music degree later, do I see its faults and the ways Beethoven grew as an artist over the course of his career? Yes, very much so. But that doesn't mean it's overrated, any more than the C-sharp minor prelude of Rachmaninoff or Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu. I personally would prefer that people are interested in popular pieces like that and open to hearing new music, rather than completely rejecting classical music as a whole, which so often happens now.