Beethoven: Two Sonatas for Pianoforte G minor, G major op. 49

One must look long and hard to find a piano pupil who hasn’t studied Beethoven’s two “sonate facile” op. 49.

They are not only relatively easy to play but highly lyrical and effective, ideally combining joy in music-making with a mastery of early classical literature. The two works were composed much earlier than the opus number suggests. Beethoven wrote them around 1797/98, during a time when he also worked on one of his most important sonatas, the Grande Sonate pathétique op. 13.