Moonlight

I've made a snide remark before about the countless renditions of the first movement in Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata that are on YouTube, but now I am one of the monkeys, for I've recorded and uploaded it too. (It may be the first Beethoven sonata movement that I played from start to finish, because my piano teacher taught it to me at one point.) The music doesn't remind me of moonlight in itself so much as a nocturnal scene among the shadier canals of Venice; the broken triads remind me of the washing of the waves against the piers and of the gliding of a gondola under the faded bridges and along the faded façades. This train of association is simple to trace to its source; Felix Mendelssohn also employed broken triads in his Venetian gondola songs, and the Italian connection is reinforced by the fact that Beethoven dedicated the sonata to a Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. A flaw in this narrative is that I haven't figured out yet how the remaining sonata movements fit into it.