24. Bach’s (or Breitkopf’s) curious “maesto,” silently amended to “maestoso” in virtually every subsequent edition and in Helm’s Thematic Catalogue, may in fact mean what it says. The instances of slow movements marked adagio e mesto, adagio mesto, largo e mesto, and the like are frequent in Bach’s works with keyboard instruments. This is music of melancholy, not majesty. I have found only one instance of “maestoso” in any of Bach’s slow movements: the Largo maestoso in Probestücke IV, in its pointed allusion to the majesty of overture in the French style. In “Beethoven’s ‘Expressive’ Markings,” Leo Treitler probes the significance of the “Largo e mesto” inscribed at the head of the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D, Opus 10, no. 3; see Beethoven Forum 7 (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 89–112, for “mesto” esp. 89–92.