Joyce Maier wrote:

>No, it's not bad.  On the contrary.  And it's also not really sad,
>though I hear some "stress" in the first movement and melancholy in the
>second.  However, the name is Beethoven's own.  How to explain? Maybe by
>understanding that he used the word "Pathetique" in the original sense,
>common in his days, not in the modern American one: full of emotion.

In my Music 101 course taken as a college freshman from William Austin, he
told us that someone (Schindler again?) asked LvB what was in his mind when
he wrote the slow movement to the "Pathetique" sonata, whereupon LvB simply
sat down and played it.

Walter Meyer