17-th sonata of Beethoven, 3 movement, “Tempest”

The third movement of the sonata, called “The Tempest”, is, in my unprofessional opinion, the most interesting. And I really like it.

There is only one “BUT”:

Somehow, there is NO special storm in the usual HUMAN perception of it!

AND WHAT did I hear?

To do this, we had to imagine ourselves as a seabird, a seagull, an albatross or a petrel, so that the melodic pattern of the sonata somehow coincided with THEIR perception of the storm. For them, seabirds with powerful wings and the ability to fly, swim, and even to dive like cormorants, this is a BIRD’s-EYE STORM. They perfectly feel and perceive the blows of gusty winds, air swirls, air holes and powerful updrafts, using which birds are thrown up in seconds, even above the clouds. And YOU can hear IT in the sonata!

But for them, huge waves, unlike human navigators, are JUST a “PICTURE FROM ABOVE”! They perfectly see the beginning of the churning of the top of the wave (and this can be heard in the sonata), their rapid rolling “over very rough terrain” of the sea, but, again, this is only a visual sensation, unlike the blows of wind clusters and mini-tornados.

So Beethoven described a storm, but not through the perseption of a sailor on a ship in a storm, not on a boat, not through the eyes of a man standing on the shore, or even fish, but through the experienced eyes of seabirds, for whom a storm is just rapid movements of air, thunder, lightning, but not the agitation of a boiling surface the sea.

I asked my school friend about his impressions of this part of the sonata…

And, amazingly, our perception almost coincided!

And for some reason we both remembered “The Song on the Petrel” by M. Gorky.

“Above the gray plain of the sea

The wind collects clouds,

Between clouds and sea

The Retrel flies proudly,

Black lightning like”

By the way, Nadson also wrote the poem “The Storm”:

“Look, the petrel screams, fasten the sails,

And menacing, and shrouded in darkness,

The storm rested its angry face against the heavens

And stepped onto the waves with it’s foot.

In a chasuble of clouds, girdled by a fleeting fire of

Bright lightning flashes around a powerful camp, —

It sends out rumbling thunder menacingly

To the leaden surface of the ocean.”

The poem is not finished, because it was written in the year of Nadson’s death at the age of twenty-four.

Since my impressions coincided with my friend’s, I ventured to express the following hypothesis (in accordance with my long-standing speculations):

Temporal Waves carry the imprint of thought, just as radio waves carry the sounds of a voice or music modulating them.

But, unlike electromagnetic waves, Temporal Waves DO NOT DISPERSE in space, because they “travel” not in it, but back and forth in time: from the past to the future and from the future to the past.

Gorky wrote “The Song of the Petrels” at the beginning of the last century, in 1901. Beethoven wrote his sonata in the early years of the nineteenth century, 1801-1802, a hundred years earlier. But a Temporal Wave from the future, from 1901, carrying the “feelings of a Petrel” came to his Superconsciousness, and having received such a message, he composed this third part called “The Storm”.

My friend made a much less fantastic assumption: Gorky either heard this sonata and wrote his verse under its impression, or simply watched the storm and described his feelings. But I replied that in Gorky, too, in my opinion, the storm is NOT seen by a PERSON FROM the SHORE, but through the eyes of a bird flying over a boiling sea!

It would be interesting to hear the opinion of readers who are sensitive to music…

Faciant meliora potentes.

3 IX 2025