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Program Notes: Apollon Musagète Quartet

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Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartet in D major, Op. 18 No. 3

In the Napoleonic era, when a Viennese aristocrat was thinking of entertaining friends at home, he might pop down to the local shop to pick up a six-pack—a six-pack of string quartets, that is. The most refined form of self-entertainment in the homes of the upper classes in Austria’s capital was the string quartet, and the established practice in the trade was for publishers to commission them, for composers to compose them, and for amateur performers to buy them, by the half-dozen.

And so it was that when Beethoven finally decided in 1798 that it was time for him
to scale the summit of compositional glory by composing for string quartet—a genre already aglow with masterpieces by Haydn and Mozart—he had a big task ahead of him. Or rather, he had six tasks.

The six quartets which Beethoven published as his Op. 18 were an important milestone in his career and he was out to impress. Each of the members of this brood of sextuplets displays a distinct personality and a temperament widely different from
that of its siblings. The D major Quartet Op. 18 No. 3 is the quiet one of the litter, the gentle introspective one, but surprisingly capable nonetheless of cutting up like a trickster when the circumstances are right. This quartet is bright and lyrical but not a show-off. There are no fugues or flashy variation movements, just a non-stop display of surpassing compositional inventiveness and contrapuntal skill.

The first movement Allegro opens unconventionally with the vocally conceived
leap of a 7th (A to G) played solo by the first violin. (If you don’t think a 7th is particularly singable, consider the first two notes of “There’s a place for us” from Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story.) This leap spawns points of imitation in the other instruments that seem to spring spontaneously, without fuss, from the very fabric

of the texture. There is, in fact, such an assured air of relaxed normality about this movement that its contrapuntal feats almost pass unnoticed. The second theme is a pulsing chordal subject in simple note values with a slight bit of oomph on the second beat. The one feature of this movement that does raise an eyebrow is its moderately substantial coda—a hint at Beethoven’s future fascination with lengthy postscripts.

The second movement Andante con moto is a cozy little rondo comprised of a principal theme and two contrasting episodes. It begins in close harmony with a songlike melody in even 8th notes delicately nuanced by chromatic inflections in the harmony. The mood of this movement never varies from its pose of poised thoughtfulness, even when passing through moments of reflection in the minor mode. Rather, it becomes ever richer in texture until finally reaching its climax in a pulsing stream of repeated 16th notes before slowly saying farewell to each of its constituent motives in a quiet farewell.

The Allegro third movement is a one-to-the-bar scherzo with a contrasting Minore middle section in place of a trio. Its mood is good-natured rather than overtly joking or rambunctious, as future Beethoven scherzos would turn out to be. The middle section picks up the pace with swirling runs in the first and second violins but this minor-mode merriment is tinged with the furrowed brow and secret sorrow of the Gypsy fiddler.

The quartet finally comes out of its shell in a Presto finale giddy with excitement and bubbling over with merriment. Its constantly bouncy rhythm and breathless pace make a joke out of every little ‘dumb’ pause—and there are many. Contrapuntal hi-jinx blend so effortlessly into the mix that even a thorny fugato section is tossed off like a walk in the park. Sealing the deal for Beethoven’s first four-voiced essay in musical wit is the ending, tossed off with the dry delivery of a stand-up comic.

 

Anton Webern
Langsamer Satz

Anton Webern is a composer known chiefly for his short, delicate, exquisitely concise atonal works written using the serial techniques developed in the early 20th century by what came to be known as the Second Viennese School, of which he was part—the ‘First’ School being that of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert a century earlier.

Celebrated as he is for the pristine, intellectually rigorous miniatures of his maturity,
we must remember that even this most cerebral of atonal composers was once young, and in love. And to express the torments and transports of young love there is nothing quite like good old tonality, especially the wildly yearning chromatic tonality of the late- Romantic period.

Webern’s utterly ravishing Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) for string quartet is deeply romantic (with a small r) and dates from June 1905, when the 21-year-old composer went on a five-day hiking tour of the picturesque Austrian countryside with Wilhelmine Mörtl, his cousin and future wife, with whom he was besotted.

Described by some as “Tristan und Isolde compressed into 11 minutes,” this work still counts as the longest that the famously laconic composer ever wrote. Perhaps because it was a student work—Webern had just begun studies with Arnold Schoenberg the year before—it was not performed publicly until 1962, when it was premiered by the University of Washington String Quartet at an international Webern festival in Seattle.

Longtime Webern wonks will no doubt note the sophistication of motivic manipulation in the work, especially the inversion of the opening theme that foretells one of the basic procedures of 12-tone composition. But for now let us take this work for what it was at its inception: the spontaneous creative outpouring of Young Anton in Love.

 

Franz Schubert
String Quartet in G major, D. 887

When faced with a string quartet lasting two full periods of National League hockey, it were vain to skirt the debate dividing rival Schubertian factions as to whether the mimeographic profusion of ideas in this composer’s works should be qualified as “heavenly length” or “earthy tedium”. The man does seem to go on, and on, and on.

No less a scholarly titan than Carl Dahlhaus has proposed that Schubert operates according to a different sense of psychological time. Some of his colleagues stress the trance-like quality of Schubert’s musical thinking, likening him to a musical somnambulist who bids us enter an enchanted world of involuntary dream-filled wandering. Others, while encouraged by how much sleep Schubert seems to be getting, still bemoan the way in which his practice of open-ended variation hijacks the tradition of concise formal argument established by Mozart and Haydn, and betrays the expectation of propulsive forward drive created by Beethoven.

Fortunately, Schubert’s String Quartet in G major—his last, written in 1826—silences all critics, rendering moot their musings as to whether it is Schubert, or his listeners, who have the greater claim on the ministrations of Morpheus. Here is an arresting work that, for all its length, constantly engages the listener directly and viscerally. It is a work of symphonic dimensions, particularly orchestral in its use of tremolo. Schubert lays on the tremolo with a liberal hand: to beef up the weight of sound to create an orchestral-style tutti, to add a touch of hushed tenderness or an air of deepening mystery, or simply

to render long-held notes more sonically pliable and expand their range of expressive effect.

The first movement Allegro molto moderato opens with a major chord that swells in sound over two bars to emerge like a primal scream—in the minor! No lack of drama here. What follows combines the emphatic pomp of a Baroque French overture with the suspenseful hinting at things-to-come of a sonata movement’s slow introduction. The first theme, when it arrives, mixes great leaps with jagged dotted rhythms over a slowly descending bass-line, continuing the tone of epic grandeur announced at the outset. A lilting second theme could not be more contrasting. Rocking back and forth within a small range, it does everything it can to de-emphasize the first beat of the bar. While the development section is tumultuous and intense, the movement’s two themes start duking it out long before that, interrupting each other, even in the exposition, in a continuous alternation of tranquil lilt and surging protest that plays out through the movement in the flickering shadows of quicksilver changes between major and minor modes.

No respite from turmoil arrives with the Andante con moto, a movement of impressive dimensions and intense emotional drama. Beginning innocently enough with a dignified little minor-mode tune in the cello, more musing than mournful, it plunges six times into high drama when the jagged dotted rhythms of the first movement return and fretting tremolos vibrate with a sense of fear and foreboding.

It is left, then, for the Allegro vivace scherzo to lighten the mood and finally bring relief from the pall of anxiety and tension that has so far dominated the work. Continuous patterns of repeated notes mark this movement with a fleetness of foot that would soon become Mendelssohn’s trademark. Here the tremolos are written out in full, emphasizing their role as individual pulses of rhythmic intensity rather than furry blurs of sound. Antiphonal echo effects abound, with the barrage only interrupted by a delicious Ländler melody in the trio.

High-contrast drama, often verging on comedy, returns in the Allegro assai finale, a perpetual-motion sonata-rondo of kaleidoscopic moods. The opening tarantella theme, glinting alternately between major & minor tone colouring soon gives way to a perfect parody of an opera buffa patter aria à la Rossini. This is one Schubert movement that is so much fun, you wish it would go on forever.

 

Donald G. Gíslason 2015

 

Program notes: Ian Bostridge & Wenwen Du

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Franz Schubert
Winterreise

It is a fact of musical life that there are commonly accepted ‘right’ ways (and even more ‘wrong’ ways) of performing the great works of past. These works arrive on our music stands embedded with notions of ‘stylistic correctness’ that guide our first attempts at interpretation, serving the same function as the lines in a colouring book beyond which aspiring daycare Dürers and kindergarten Caravaggios, crayons in hand, are admonished not to stray.

In the musical world such stylistic guidelines have massive inertia, acquired through the respect that a long performing tradition grants, and so shifting them is not a task for dull minds. And yet, it has been done. Glenn Gould sent powder flying from the wigs of the Baroque establishment with his startling new vision of how Bach should be performed. More recently, fortepianist Robert Levin has attempted to liberate Mozart from the plaster cast of ‘elegant prettiness’ in which he believes this composer has been mummified since the Romantic era.

And now something similar may also be happening to Schubert.

Schubert has always been thought of as a ‘nice’ composer, the sort that you could bring home to meet your mother and tell her you were taking up with, without awakening the kind of worries that an interest in, say, late Scriabin might provoke in the mind of a fretful parent. No, rosy-cheeked Schubert, the composer of blithe and radiant mood, has always remained a kind of Julie Andrews avant la lettre, whistling a happy tune in the face of the challenging circumstances of his life. Was there a care in the world that the soothing balm of the G flat Impromptu could not dissipate? A reversal of fortune that the Ave Maria could not banish from present thought? Generations of Schubert venerators have thought not.

Yet if ever there were a work to challenge the view of Schubert as a composer of buoyant good spirits, light but not deep, it is his song cycle Winterreise, which, with its themes of lost love and the imminent approach of death, would be hard to mistake for a pep talk from a Rogers & Hammerstein musical. Its dark psychological probings and often sombre tone truly shocked the group of Viennese friends before whom Schubert first performed these schauerliche Lieder (horrifying songs), as he called them. And it still has the power to shock us today.

Few musicians have taken their interpretive flashlights into its dark corners quite so fearlessly as Ian Bostridge has done. He stands apart from the crowd of Winterreise performers for the degree of modern anxiety and psychological urgency that he pulls from the score, an approach that has even caused his interpretation to be called ‘expressionist’.

Bostridge performs these songs in heightened psychological relief, as it were, and this approach has much to recommend it, for while simple melodies in balanced four-bar phrases are not lacking in this collection, more striking and memorable by far are the dramatic declamatory monologues that approach in psychological intensity the Sprechstimme of Pierrot Lunaire.

It should not be surprising, then, that shades of Samuel Beckett, Arnold Schoenberg and other modernist innovators haunt Bostridge’s interpretation of this work. He brings notes of biting sarcasm and palpable anger to the score, as well as an occasionally rasping quality of voice not typically found in ‘art song’. And by so doing, he expands our idea of the range of real, intense, lived emotions which this composer was capable of expressing.

Those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of this work through Ian Bostridge’s extensive historical research into its origins and meaning, may wish to consult his newly published tome entitled Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Faber & Faber, 2015).

Conceived as a journey into the cold of winter, Schubert’s Winterreise is a musical setting of poems selected from those published in 1823 and 1824 by German Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller under the title Seventy-Seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Horn-Player. The narrative thread is sketchy, at best, resembling more a slide show than a plot, since all the important action has taken place before the narration begins.

We know that the singer’s journey is prompted by a love affair gone wrong but one of the more vexing questions bedevilling this musical slide show is that of the singer’s status within the house from which he announces his departure as the cycle opens. He leaves in the dead of night, while everyone else is sleeping. What, enquiring minds will ask, was he doing in the family home of his beloved so late at night? Here Ian Bostridge steps forward with a brilliant suggestion that finds much resonance in the social customs of the time: our protagonist is a private live-in tutor of low economic status who had developed feelings for, and perhaps even an understanding with, his young student. (Schubert had at one time been employed as just such a live-in tutor.) Marriage, we learn from the text of the second song, was a live possibility until the young woman’s mother switched her allegiance to a wealthier potential son-in-law.

In the course of the work, the narrator-singer is heard in conversation with his own heart, by turns reflective, questioning, ironic, and finally resigned. In this speculative frame of mind, he drifts fluidly between the world of his dreams and the bitter reality he faces. Despairing and alone with his thoughts, he travels through dark emotional territory, traversing a wide range of village and country settings before finally encountering the forlorn organ-frinder at the end of his journey, symbolic of the death that awaits him. The poems from Wilhelm Müller’s collection provide apt imagery for such a bleak journey, with their recurring themes of loneliness and isolation, watchwords of the emerging Romantic movement in art.

This work was composed in two separate parts in 1827, the year before Schubert’s death, making the terminal illness from which he was suffering one obvious point of reference. The cast of characters with whom the narrator interacts are elements of the natural landscape (sun, wind, trees and leaves, flowers, rivers and snow, crows and ravens), elements that form symbolic company for his journey. Schubert’s achievement in setting these poems is to give musical life to these images, not only in the contours of the singer’s melody, but especially in the pictorial vividness of the piano writing, in a score that is both richly allusive and unusually austere.

Gute Nacht (Good Night)

Our traveller’s grim journey begins at an even walking pace, punctuated by recurring sudden off-beat accents in the piano, emblematic of his inner turmoil. The narration drifts between his present unhappy state (in the minor mode) and happier thoughts (in the major). The poetic theme tying the song cycle together, alienation from emotional fulfillment and earthly existence, is summarized in the very first line: “A stranger I came, a stranger I depart.”

Die Wetterfahne (The weather-vane)

The piano imitates a weather-vane spinning atop his beloved’s house as the singer wonders about those inside. Do their affections also change with the wind? The musical texture is brilliantly evocative, with unisons between piano and singer making you feel the bitter chill in the air and trills evoking the wind blowing the weather-vane around on its spindle.

Gefrorne Tränen (Frozen tears)

This song mixes an eeriness and daintiness, anger and irony. Against a steady backdrop of drip-drip sounds
in the piano, often punctuated by a sudden sforzando accent, the singer asks how his tears can have frozen to his cheek so soon. They were hot enough to melt ice when they poured from his heart. Alternating major & minor harmonies evoke both the warmth of feeling and the chill in the air of this scene.

Erstarrung (Numbness)

Stunned by the loss of his love, he searches frantically for any piece of green grass beneath the snow to remind him of happier times. But all is dead around, like his frozen heart. In this strange take on the classic Petrarchan figures of fire and ice, the agitated piano accompaniment portrays the protagonist’s raging inner turmoil.

Der Lindenbaum (The linden tree)

We hear the first intimation of death in this song. As a chill wind blows through the fluttering leaves evoked by the piano, he passes by a tree into which he once carved words of love. Once the emblem of his happiness, it now offers him eternal rest beneath its branches. Bostridge has pointed out that the linden tree was popular meeting place for townsfolk, giving this song a resonance of German nationalism. It is not surprising, then, that this simple tuneful melody lives on outside of Schubert’s song cycle as the well-known German folksong, Am Brunnen vor dem Tore.

Wasserflut (Flood)

In this eerily calm, almost stately song, the protagonist muses on how the snow will absorb his tears, then thaw in the spring and flow with them into the stream. The flow of this stream will feel their warmth once again as it passes his beloved’s house. Here we find a classic example of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in Romantic poetry, in which Nature is imagined as reflecting and experiencing human emotions.

Auf Dem Flusse (On the river)

The strange tiptoe pace of this song gives it an aura of mystery, or perhaps merely tentativeness. The ice covering the river, on which he has carved the story of his love affair, is like his heart: it rages with a torrent beneath. Changes from minor to major and back again are chilling, and near the end, the piano pulses with signs of his inner torment.

Rückblick (A backward glance)

Pursued by crows as he breathlessly escapes, the wanderer casts a nostalgic glance back at the town he is leaving, once so pleasant to his memory. And looking back, he still longs to stand in front of her house once again. Like many of the songs in this cycle, this one is divided clearly into major- and minor-mode sections.

Irrlicht (Will-o’-the-wisp)

The flickering light of a will-o’-the-wisp, imitated in the fast repeated notes in the piano, leads him astray into
a mountain chasm. He has no worries, though, for as rivers lead to the sea, so human miseries, like will-o’-the- wisp, are but a game, all leading to the grave.

Rast (Rest)

A drowsy opening piano introduction finds him pausing from the fatigue of his journey. He shelters in a little hut, but this bodily respite from the cold and wind only allows him to feel more keenly the burning sting of jealousy in his heart. The concentration of thought that has overtaken the singer is conveyed in an often speech-like, un-’melodic’ vocal line.

Frühlingstraum (Dream of Spring)

In one of the happiest of Schubertian melodies, we find our protagonist lost in a dream of springtime, then awakened by the rooster’s call and the shrieking of crows. Drifting between a dream state and harsh reality, he longs to feel once again the warmth of love. The piano score paints in turn the sudden shrieks of birds and the torpor of his drowsy eyelids. The change of mode from major to minor at the very end conveys his hopelessness. When will the ice-flowers in the window turn green? When will he hold her in his arms? The answer to both questions is: never.

Einsamkeit (Loneliness)

The slow trudging pace of the piano’s opening paints his despair as he travels on his way, lonely as the cloud drifting overhead above the tops of the trees. The stillness in the air, the brightness of the scene, are no help to his pain. When storms raged he was less miserable than this.

Die Post (The mail-coach)

The gallop of horses’ hooves and the triadic call of the post-horn sets the second half of the song cycle in motion as our wanderer’s heart leaps with the arrival of the mail-coach. Does it bring a letter from her? The upbeat tone of this song is an ironic set-up for emotional travails to follow.

Der Greise Kopf (The hoary head)

Eeriness returns in a song shrink-wrapped around the text rather than arranged in stanzas. The frost on his head has made him look like an old man, a welcome thought. Then horror sets in as he realizes he is still young, with so very far yet to travel to the grave. The sparseness of the piano part creates a chilling stillness as sonic backdrop to these dark thoughts.

Die Krähe (The crow)

Circling overhead, a crow has been following the wanderer. Is it waiting to feast on his carcass? Will this crow, unlike his beloved, stay with him till he dies? The piano, brilliantly imitating the circling path of the crow, twinkles and wafts above the singer, who stoops very low in his range, creating a pictorial image in music of the two figures, one in the sky, the other walking below on the earth.

Letzte Hoffnung (Last hope)

The traveller identifies with a lone leaf hanging on a barren tree, waiting to fall. If it falls, so too do his hopes fall to their grave. The piano paints a vivid picture of leaves falling all around him. There is so little rapport between the piano and the voice, the piano seems so convincingly exterior to the singer’s concerns, that one thinks of the tone and texture of Pierrot Lunaire.

Im Dorfe (In the village)

As he passes through a village, dogs growl at him from the lower regions of the piano texture, rattling their chains. Everyone is in their beds, dreaming. Why should he stay with these dreamers, when his own dreams are all over?

Der Stürmische Morgen (The stormy morning)

With the courage of desperation, the traveller faces an early morning storm that tears the heavens apart. Raging in the cold of winter, it is the very image of his own heart. Unisons between piano and singer again evoke the blowing of the wind and bitter chill in the air.

Täuschung (Delusion)

He sees a light dancing in the distance, which might be a warm house with a loving soul inside. In the dream world he inhabits, even a delusion brings him some comfort.

Der Wegweiser (The signpost)

Avoiding the busy byways, he heads for wild and desolate places, ignoring every signpost but one: the one leading him to a place from which no one returns. Here is another foreboding of approaching death: the path indicated to him is one “from which no one returned.”

Das Wirtshaus (The inn)

Liturgical solemnity, combined with a grim determination, pervades the scene as the traveller stops at a cemetery filled with garland-bedecked graves that beckon him like a welcoming inn. All its rooms, however, are taken and he is turned away, so he resolutely resigns himself to continue on his journey.

Mut (Courage!)

A plucky spirit overtakes him, as he dispels defeatism to face wind and weather, feeling like a God on earth. Quick changes between major and minor tonalities from phrase to phrase embody the difficulties he faces and the courage he uses to face them.

Die Nebensonnen (Phantom suns)

He sees three suns in the sky, and stares at them. He, too, had three suns once, but having lost the two he cherished most (her eyes), he now has only one, and he wishes that would go dark, too.

Der Leiermann (The organ grinder)

A drone in the piano announces the forlorn figure of an old organ grinder playing with numb fingers, barefoot in the cold, his begging plate lying empty as dogs growl at him. This is the only human being the traveller meets on his winter journey. Shall he go with this strange man? Will the organ grinder play his songs? The symbolic resonance of this final scene is quietly shattering.

Donald G. Gíslason © 2015

 

 

Program notes: Sir András Schiff

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Franz Joseph Haydn
Sonata No. 60 in C major Hob. XV1:50

Haydn’s last three piano sonatas, Nos. 60 to 62 (Hob. XVI:50-52), were written during the composer’s second trip to London of 1794-1795. All three were composed with a specific dedicatee in mind: the female keyboard virtuoso Therese Jansen Bartolozzi (1770-1843), a student of Clementi whom Haydn had met and befriended while in England. They were also written for the distinctive qualities of the English fortepiano, more powerful in sound and wider in range than the delicate Viennese pianos which Haydn had been accustomed to playing.

In his Sonata in C, classed by Lázló Somfai as a concert sonata or grand sonata, Haydn takes advantage of the capabilities of this instrument in a score rich in punchy arpeggiated chords, sudden changes of dynamics, brilliant running passages and eerie pedal effects meant to make it a memorable ‘performing’ piece. Not missing, of course, is Haydn’s famously dry brand of humour, so different from the more slapstick ‘macho’ mirth of his student Beethoven. The humour in these sonatas is perfectly shrink-wrapped around the persona of the female performer, half Maggie Smith, half Lucille Ball.

The work begins with a series of dainty short hops in the right hand, nothing you couldn’t manage even in a long skirt, but then comes the first ‘gag’ of the piece. The hops get larger, and funnier, especially when they begin to cover the awkward interval of a 7th (as if trying for an octave, but just missing it by one note), followed by a pleading series of two-note phrases. The bass, of course, is having none of it. Like a distracted husband reading his newspaper at the breakfast table, the left hand just keeps repeating the same octave leap on C, as if to say: “Yes, dear. Yes, dear. Whatever you say, dear.”

Nonetheless, a few brisk arpeggiated chords later and the movement is off to the races, repeating the same series of comic hops it opened with, but now with new frilly ornaments, in the first of a series of endless variations that will decorate this theme throughout. For this is another one of Haydn’s celebrated monothematic movements, in which he dispenses with secondary themes in order to concentrate on presenting a single theme, over and over, in a constant variety of different textures and new harmonic guises. Notable pianistic effects in this movement include the dark and mysterious indication “open pedal” in the development section, and a hand-crossing double trill in the recapitulation.

The second movement Adagio is a classic Italian cantabile, with a simple melody rhapsodically enveloped by a myriad of gorgeous ornamental figurations right from the very start. While the general mood is one of serene contentment and poised lyrical reflection, Haydn includes a few moments of harmonic surprise and pianistic sparkle to drop an ice-cube down the backs of those whose eyelids might droop.

The unusually brief last movement is a masterpiece of irregular phrase lengths, comic pauses and harmonic wrong turns as its naively upbeat and jovial melody keeps trying to cadence but constantly ends up making a wrong turn.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in E major Op. 109

Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas, Opp. 109, 110 and 111, exist in a world of their own, governed only by the formal rules they themselves invent for their own unfolding. The Sonata in E major Op. 109, despite its three-movement structure, may be thought of in two halves. First comes a complementary pair of emotionally contrasting movements, both in sonata form, played together without a pause, the first a dreamy star-gazing fantasy in moderate tempo, the second a frighteningly focussed agitato of nightmarish intensity. The emotional volatility of these two movements is balanced and resolved by the poised and serene set of variations which serves as the sonata’s finale. These variations are based on a melody of such quiet dignity that they virtually erase all memory of the emotional wanderings of the previous movements.

The compression of form of which Beethoven is capable in his late works is evident in the first movement, the exposition of which is complete in a mere 16 bars. It opens with a melody buried within a delicate tracery of broken chord figuration that flutters innocently as if floating suspended in the air. It has barely breathed out its first two phrases and is moving to cadence, when it is interrupted by a disorienting diminished seventh chord that leads nonetheless to a lovingly lyrical duet, adagio espressivo, between left and right hand. But this second theme only has time to sing out a few bars itself before breaking out, cadenza-like, into a keyboard-spanning series of rapturous arpeggios and scale figures. And then the exposition is over, on the first page of the score. The development deals exclusively with the broken chord figuration but with the melody line more clearly exposed, and builds to a climax for the return of the opening material, presented this time with the hands at the extreme ends of the keyboard, after which a coda extends the dreamlike reverie.

The expansive mood of rhapsodic wonder is brought quickly down to earth, however, when E major changes to E minor and the second movement, marked Prestissimo, stomps defiantly into the ear. This is no scherzo: there is no trio, no contrast of mood. The development section may murmur sullenly, but this is only a momentary lull before the defiant tone of the opening, flickering with menace, returns to close the movement in the same uncompromising spirit in which it began. Remarkable in this movement is the way in which Beethoven manages to express such extremes of emotional violence within a texture so starkly ruled by the strictures of imitative counterpoint.

This is not a coincidence. The musical spirit of Johann Sebastian Bach has been hovering over this sonata since it began. The broken chord figuration of the opening movement looks back to similar homogeneously ‘patterned’ textures in the preludes of Bach, and the movement’s cadenza-like exaltations of arpeggios find their correlative in similar outbursts of spiritual bravura in Bach’s organ toccatas. More explicit reference is made in the second movement, which is shot through with canons and passages in double counterpoint. And now, in the concluding movement, we encounter a variation melody characterized by an almost religious serenity, with the rhythmic imprint of the sarabande (emphasizing the second beat of the bar), and harmonized with the melodically-conceived bass line of a four-part Lutheran chorale.

Beethoven is not attempting to rehabilitate the outdated styles and procedures of the Baroque, but rather enriching the music of his own time with the density of musical thought typical of that bygone
era. And as Sir András has so aptly pointed out in his Wigmore Hall lecture on this sonata, it would be difficult to think that Beethoven was not inspired by the example of Bach’s Goldberg Variations when constructing his own for this sonata finale. The recall of the simple, unadorned theme at the end of Beethoven’s sonata has the same commemorative resonance as this same gesture at the end of the Goldbergs. Not to mention the textures of many of the variations that parallel those found in Bach’s famous set.

The first variation is not one of them, however. There is no hint of contrapuntal interest in this Italian opera aria for keyboard, marked molto espressivo, with its elegantly expressive melody and clear bass-and-chord left-hand accompaniment. Variation 2 lightens the texture with a hocket-style alternation of the hands that presents the harmonic and melodic outlines of the theme in interlocking 16th-note flashes of sound, similar to the texture of the Goldberg variation 20 and the second variation of Beethoven’s own sonata of Op. 26 (first movement).

The yeast of Baroque ferment comes overtly to the surface in Variation 3, a vigorous exercise in double counterpoint, with the right and left hands regularly swapping melodies in the course of presenting the theme. Variation 4 moves the time signature to 9/8 for a change of pace to present a full four-voice texture of imitation, much in the style of Goldberg variation 3. The contrapuntal impulse emerges even more clearly in the more strictly structured imitative texture of Variation 5, richly suggestive of similar textures in Goldberg variations 18 and 22.

Beethoven’s own synthesis of old and new emerges in the final variation, which moves from a simple chordal statement of the theme to a gradual accumulation of rhythmic energy that finally emerges into a texture of whirling trills and flecks of melody flickering in the high register, before a simple re-statement of the original theme ends the sonata in a mood of spiritual peace.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sonata in C major K.545

There is a reason most piano students know this sonata. It is listed in Mozart’s own personal catalogue of his works as being für Anfänger (for beginners) and its unpretentious texture of scales, broken chords and Alberti basses, not to mention the choice of the simplest possible key (C major, with no black keys), seem to confirm Mozart’s intention to write a small-scale piece that would be ideal for teaching the musical novice the basic building blocks of keyboard technique.

But because this is Mozart (and not Czerny) the level of musical sophistication in this sonata is noteworthy. The first movement opens with a melody of the utmost simplicity, its outlines based on the three notes of the major chord, which issues into a series of rising and falling runs. These runs, however, cleverly mask the fact that the opening theme and the transition to the second theme are merged together, so that the second theme area, in G major, seems to arrive in the most natural manner possible. This more perky theme leads to a series of harmonic sequences in broken chords which summon up general agreement that a cadence would now be in order and the cadencing pattern chosen is one from which a closing thematic motive in rocking arpeggios emerges to end the exposition.

Nothing to wonder at, one might suppose, unless of course you happen to notice that the second theme is constructed by inverting the melodic outline of the the first, and that the closing theme is merely a rearrangement of the notes in the broken-chord sequences that preceded it. No, nothing to notice here.

The development immediately takes up the rocking arpeggio figure and goes minor with it, to provoke the appropriate level of eyebrow-knitting concentration that a good, roiling development section is wont to inspire. Advanced beginners in the class will no doubt notice that the recapitulation begins in the subdominant (F major) instead of the C major tonic. But is it such a bad thing to give students a little practice in a different scale pattern, one requiring their 4th finger to hit a
B flat on the way up, as well as on the way down? Pedagogical minds with hearts that beat for the general welfare of their pupils think not.

The second movement Andante is a three-part song with a development section in the middle, all ticking along over the steady rhythmic guidance of an Alberti bass in the left hand throughout. It seems gifted with an endless supply of variations for the scant few melodic and rhythmic patterns that characterize its theme, the triadic outline and dotted rhythm of which (just between us) make it a sibling to the second theme of the first movement. The middle section, which is more like the B section of a Baroque da capo aria than a real sonata-form development, dips into the shade of the minor mode to mull over a few more serious thoughts but fails to stay there long and the sunshine of the major mode soon returns to end things off with a rosy- cheeked smile.

The last movement, a miniature rondo of diminutive proportions, features a symmetrically structured playful theme alternating with two intervening episodes. As is common in Mozart, the episodes are not entirely contrasting in thematic material as the little imitative hops of the opening theme seem to keep poking their heads in the door at every opportunity.

Franz Schubert
Sonata in C minor D. 958

In September 1828, as Schubert lay suffering the debilitating effects of the tertiary syphilis that would fell him only two months later, he managed a feat of compositional prowess that speaks to the steely will that coexisted with the delicacy of sentiment in the personality of this Viennese composer of distinctly bohemian habits of life. The 130 manuscript pages of his monumental three last piano sonatas, the Sonatas in C minor, A major and B flat major (D. 958-960) were all produced within this single month.

The Sonata in C minor D. 958 is undoubtedly one of his most serious works, for which he chose the key associated with so many of the greatest achievements of his idol Beethoven, at whose funeral he had served
as a pallbearer the previous year. C minor is the key of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata, the Symphony No. 5 and the great Piano Sonata Op. 111, as well as the 32 Variations in C minor from which the defiant opening subject of this sonata is quite obviously derived. But while Beethoven’s mind bent ever towards compactness and density in musical expression, it was Schubert’s gift to stretch, extend and elaborate his musical material in a poetic search for its inner psychological meaning.

This he does with telling effect when he transitions the uncompromising stance and abrupt rhetoric of the sonata’s opening pronouncements into less heroic territory to prepare for his lyrical second subject in E flat major. Here is where Schubert’s ability to ‘orchestrate’ on the piano is most evident. The repeated pedal tone in this simply harmonized melody, at first confined to the alto, soon shines out in the treble like a beacon of hope over all that passes on beneath it. But E flat major soon turns to E flat minor in a sprightly and slightly wicked variant of this theme.

The development begins in an expansively modulatory frame of mind, ranging widely through various keys until its interest settles on a distinctly un-settling voice of small range and ominous import in the bass, that ruminates and builds, marked with the rhythmic stamp of the opening chords to prepare for the recapitulation. This motive recurs again in the coda, emerging into the light of day in treble octaves that carry its worrisome preoccupations to the final bars of the movement.

The second movement is one of the few genuine adagios that Schubert wrote, given as he was to more moderate- tempo slow movements. It unfolds in a 5-part scheme of alternating themes in an A-B-A-B-A pattern. These themes are of opposing emotional valence, however, the first exuding elegiac tranquillity, the second more disquieting in its deliberations. Each is elaborated in a series of different textures, which only increases the emotional distance between them when they are juxtaposed in this way. The Adagio of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata seemed to have been an inspiring point of reference in the elaboration of this movement.

The restless Menuetto that follows evokes little of the light-hearted mood of the dance, though it lacks neither elegance nor grace. Dance-inspired enjoyment seems impossible to achieve as each successive idea is undermined by a flickering doubt, expressed in irregular phrase lengths, as a small deviation into the minor mode, or in mysterious pauses, as if the flow of emotion were cut off in mid-thought.

The sheer size of the last movement Allegro indicates the weight which Schubert intended to give this finale. Here the spirit of the dance is undoubtedly present in the tarantella rhythm of its opening theme, but merriment is elusive in this curiously thrilling, but strangely ominous rondo with the developmental features of the sonata. Much of its rhythmic energy is more suggestive of a night ride on horseback, of the sort memorialized in Schubert’s famous Erlkönig, and no more so than in the brilliantly effective passage of cross-hand writing in which short bursts of melodic ideas are tossed from the high to the low register while the pounding pulse of horse hooves is maintained in the middle of the keyboard.

Donald G. Gíslason © 2015

 

 

 

 

Program notes: Steven Osborne

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Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in E minor, Op. 90

The use of the piano sonata in marriage counselling has not found wide adoption in the profession since Beethoven first introduced the practice with his Sonata in E minor Op. 90. The curious story associated this sonata is as follows.

Beethoven’s biographer Anton Schindler relates that in 1814 the composer’s boon companion, Count Moritz von Lichnowsky, was having girl troubles. The Count, younger brother of Beethoven’s patron Prince Karl von Lichnowsky, was romantically entangled with a stage actress many years his junior – a woman of undoubted charms but few dynastic connections – whom he wanted to marry. The Count’s family, of course, took a dim view of this prospect, but marry her he did, and it was not long afterwards that Beethoven informed the Count that a new sonata, dedicated to him, was soon to be published. Do tell, replied the Count, or wordsto that effect. And what might it be about? Making obvious jocular reference to the Count’s recent marital deliberations, Beethoven said that the first movement of his Op. 90 sonata was “a struggle between the head and the heart” while the second depicted “a conversation with the beloved.”

Now any musicologist worth his salt – whether Maldon flaked or Windsor free-pouring – would have reason to sniff at this account published, as it was, some years after both Beethoven and Lichnowsky had joined the Choir Immortal, and by a biographer with a less than sterling reputation for truthfulness in reporting. (Schindler actually forged conversations in the notebooks that the deaf composer had used to communicate with the outside world.) Besides, had not Beethoven been a student of Haydn, was he not a master of classical form and motivic development in the tradition of pure ‘absolute’ music? Are we to believe that this sonata from the late pen of such a master was intended as no more than a kind of film score to a Viennese ‘Pretty Woman’ rom com?

Absolute music and program music, its quarrelling proponents would have us believe, are as different as chalk and cheese. And yet both have valid claims to make in this unusual work. Partisans of the ‘chalk’ faction might rightly defend the two-movement structure as a perfectly normal inheritance from Haydn, who wrote many a two-movement sonata. They might point to the formal clarity of each movement: the traditional sonata-form structure of the first movement and sonata-rondo layout of the second. They might, not without justice, remark further on the intensity of motivic development in this sonata, particularly the importance of the first movement’s falling-third motive (G-F#-E) that not only opens the work, but also appears at important sectional divisions within it. They might even note how it recurs, transformed as a rising-third motive (E-F#-G#), at the start of the second movement: proof positive of the ‘absolute’ music composer’s mind at work.

Those of the ‘cheese’ persuasion, however, would see the two-movement layout as narrative in structure, with a tumultuously argumentative first movement resolving into a second movement lyrically evocative of marital bliss. For those steeped in the ‘cheesy’ faith, then, the transformation of the first movement’s falling (minor) third motive into the rising (major) third motive that opens the last movement is not simply an abstract musical transformation, but rather emblematic of the personal transformation of Count Moritz from a torn and tormented lover into a happy contented husband. While noting the traditional formal outlines of the two movements, they would see Beethoven working within these established forms to tell his romantic story in the smaller-level details: how the work opens with a gruff, head-strong pronouncement only to be answered immediately by a more submissive heart-felt restatement of it. Indeed, the whole first movement seems to alternate between forceful statements of irremovable principle made by the head and more submissive, emotionally inflected phrases (pathetically evoked in sigh motives with suspensions over the bar line) pleaded by the heart. To the esprit de fromage, then, the presence of such pervasive contrasts as these vividly suggests the interior dialogue of a mind in conflict, one that reaches its peak of argumentative intensity in the development section.

Especially intriguing in this movement is the retransition (the end of the development section leading to the return of the opening thematic material), which features two lone voices in stretto, like the opposing sides of an argument speaking on top of each other, repeating over and over the falling scale motive G-F#-E, slower and slower, as if gradually coming to the realization that they don’t disagree at all, since they are arguing the same point.

The second movement evokes the logical consequence of such agreement: the honeymoon, a period in which the maritally conjoined are given to staring languorously at each other with the eyes of dairy cows when together, and singing tra-la-la to themselves when alone. Pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, the first pianist to perform a complete cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas in the 19th century, described the difference between the two movements of this sonata as the difference between ‘speech’ and ‘song’. And Beethoven’s performance indication singbar (songfully) reinforces the eminently songlike character of the second movement. Indeed, one might almost suspect Beethoven of channelling Schubert here, but for the fact that young Franz was only 16 at the time that this sonata was composed, so the influence is more likely to have flowed in the other direction.

The other indication, Nicht zu geschwind (not too fast), was aimed squarely at pianists who considered every rondo coming under their fingers a rondo brilliant, to be taken at a breathless clip with the aim of bringing down the house and prompting riotous applause. Nothing could be further from the gentle onward pulse of this movement’s classically balanced, simply harmonized opening melody, that flows effortlessly between sections of episode and refrain without glaring contrasts of mood or tone. The last appearance of the refrain, presented in a ‘love duet’ alternation of tenor and soprano voices, confirms this match as a happy one, and the aptness of Beethoven’s own happy marriage of ‘absolute’ and ‘program’ music in this sonata.

Franz Schubert
Klavierstück in A major D. 604

This isolated movement, found amongst Schubert’s papers, is generally believed to be the Andante of a sonata composed in 1817 and published after the composer’s death as his Sonata in F# minor, D. 571. Its connection to the proposed sonata is not only based on manuscript evidence, but on its opening harmonic progression, a deceptive cadence in F# minor, presumably linking it to the opening movement of a sonata in that same key.

Structured in a sort of sonata form without development, it places its second theme, unusually, in the subdominant of D major. Maintaining an almost constant pulse of 16th notes throughout its entire course, it draws its principal musical interest from its harmonic fullness, textural variation (the melody is often placed in a middle voice), and imaginative filigree of ornamental figuration in the high register. Its pervasive chromaticism points to a Romantic style that would later emerge in the works of Chopin and Liszt.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in A major Op. 101

In the Sonata in E minor Op. 90 a rough and argumentative first movement gives way to a sentimentally luxuriant last movement, but Beethoven’s next piano sonata does not make us wait quite so long for his lyrical side to emerge. In the Sonata in A major Op. 101, composed in 1817, lyrical effusion comes to the fore with a remarkable tenderness in the very first bars, stretching out its languorous melodic line to a length that won this sonata the admiration of Richard Wagner, that great champion of the ‘infinite’ melody. There is also a feminine grace to this opening melody that perhaps relates to the character of its dedicatee, Dorotea von Ertmann, a close friend of the composer as well as his student, whom he admired both personally and as a pianist.

And yet, despite its emotionally generous tone and mood, this first movement dallies little over its thematic material and is remarkably compact in form. After a few tuneful lines of melody that seem to be constantly searching for a home tonality, Beethoven emerges magically, like Esther Williams surfacing from the depths of her swimming pool, in the dominant (E major), without so much as a whiff of transition. Then, after a series of simple but wide-spanning gestures of almost Brahmsian dignity, he calls it a day and the exposition closes with a clutch of soothing cadences, the insistent syncopations of which blur the bar line out of existence (much to the delight Wagner, no doubt). Before you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle!’ the exposition is over – on the very first page. But the development is even shorter, pulsing along with the aforementioned syncopations until the recapitulation sets things back on a more regular rhythmic track. A surprising moment of high drama arrives just before the coda when unusually thick 9-note chords loudly call a temporary halt to the proceedings, but calm is soon restored and the movement concludes quietly, with a cadence at the extreme ends of the keyboard.

Another example of Beethoven’s influence on the following generation of composers is given in the scherzo that follows. While the last movement of the Op. 90 sonata glows with the congenial songfulness of Schubert, this march of stirring patriotic fervour is more than a little reminiscent of Schumann, especially the second movement of his Fantasy in C major of 1838. What makes Beethoven’s march even more interestingly complex is the combination of a pervasive dotted rhythm with an equally pervasive texture of imitation and contrapuntal by-play between the voices. This intensely contrapuntal constructive principle is distilled, in the trio, into a mock two-part invention à la Bach, complete with little points of imitation in strict canon, a strange bedfellowing of the lively and the learned in a movement meant to be the ‘lightest’ of the sonata as a whole.

The slow introduction to the last movement, marked Langsam und sehnsuchtsvoll (slow and with yearning), is one of those free-form intermezzos that Beethoven uses (in the Waldstein sonata, for example) to set up a weighty but exuberant finale. Its task is to make you stop and look the night sky for a while before the fireworks go off to rival the stars, and so its mood is introspective, its formal patterning improvisatory. It begins with a phrase containing a triplet motive that wanders, lonely as a cloud, though the various registers of the keyboard, sometimes ruminating in the bass, at other times pleading its case in the high register, until it loses all track of time in a dreamlike unmeasured cadenza, waking up to a reminiscence of the opening theme of the first movement.

The pace then picks up and after a few rousing trills we immediately find ourselves in the middle of the action, with a proud strutting theme that is continually leaping downward and then scurrying off in a series of runs. This sonata-form movement is packed with variety and no shortage of humour. Among its invited guests in the melody department are an Austrian yodel and a rollicking German country dance, all rubbing shoulders at the ball, of course, with a full-on fugue as a development section. Apart from the humorous incongruity of its melodic material, much of this movement’s knee-slapping merriment comes from Beethoven’s outrageous use of the low register, almost in imitation of a comic opera basso buffo.

The fugue, for example, begins low down in the bass, and ends in a trill that goes absolutely nowhere: it has no following note to resolve into, just an empty rest. And when it’s time for a good old-fashioned pedal point on the dominant, Beethoven stomps on the lowest E he can find, combining it with a few extra notes down there, just to goose up the ‘mud’ factor in the sound. This movement shows Beethoven at his most brilliantly infantile, sitting in his composer’s high-chair and gleefully flinging his sonic porridge with unerring aim against the wall.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in B flat major Op. 106 (Hammerklavier)

It has often been remarked that Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata of 1819 is a work more respected than loved. Many admire it as magnificently ‘expressive,’ but few hold it to be ‘beautiful’ in the classical sense. Its status as a monument of Western classical music is justifiably founded on the sheer grandeur of its musical ideas and the vast expanse of emotional space that these ideas both define and occupy: the explosive heroism of its first movement, the wilful caprice of its scherzo, the profound lyrical introspection of its Adagio, and the dazzling intellectual vigour of its massively intricate fugal finale.

The sonata is dedicated to Archduke Rudolph of Austria, the youngest son of Emperor Leopold II, a longtime friend and former student of Beethoven. An earlier sketch reveals that Beethoven had originally planned the dramatic opening of this sonata as the melody of a birthday greeting, for chorus, addressed to the Archduke with the Latin words: VI-vat, VI-vat Ru-DOLPH-us! (Long live Rudolph!)

But bypassing for a moment the high-minded dedication of this work, its extraordinary length (the Adagio alone is more than a quarter of an hour), and its vast emotional range, if we lift the lid and look at the compositional ‘plumbing’ that ties it together we find something very odd. We find the musical interval of the third, occurring over and over again, from the small-scale patterns of its melodies to the large-scale harmonic organization of its grand formal outlines. The musical space defined by three scale steps occurs so often, in fact, as almost to qualify as a constructive principle in this sonata, the steel rods in its reinforced concrete, if you will. When Beethoven thinks of what kind of melody to create, he thinks of using thirds. When he wonders what tonality to modulate to for the next section, he thinks that three notes away might do the job. When he thinks of the key to put the next movement in, he puts it three notes away. While he is careful not to to be too obvious about it – his choices are always effective musically – one thing is clear: the man has thirds on the brain.

The work opens with two arresting statements in the Vivat Rudolphus rhythm, each initiated by a cannon echo booming up from the bass and proclaimed by a brassy fanfare in the high register. These gestures cover virtually the entire range of the piano of Beethoven’s time, and lay out the extraordinarily wide tonal range within which his musical thoughts will travel in this sonata.

The work’s wide emotional range is hinted at, however, by the immediate change to a more lyrical tone of utterance, expressed in a much smaller tonal range, leading to a thoughtful pause. In a handful of bars we have gone from the explosive to the intimate, and we then head back into heroic territory as the opening salvos take centre stage again. A surprising cadence awaits, however, in D major, that grabs our attention, and as the dominant of G major, it leads us into that key for the second group of themes.

Without our noticing it, Beethoven, through all this, has been hammering thirds into our ears. The opening fanfares end ringingly and emphatically on two falling thirds (D to B flat and F to D). The melody of the lyrical passage which follows reverses these into a series of rising 3rds (as little 3-step runs). And the D major cadence is not coincidentally three notes up from the home key of B flat, and leads to G major, a key three notes down from it. (Normally the second theme area would be in the dominant, F major.) And as if to dispel all doubt, this second group of themes is largely occupied with a gracious series of descending running figures, figures that tumble by … thirds. And just to hammer the point home, the exposition ends with bluntly emphatic octaves in both hands, rising up three notes by step, with a big fat goose-egg pause at the end to let slower members of the audience catch up to the plot.

The development section begins by making much of the dramatic leap that began the work, but soon settles down to put its main centre of interest – three little descending scale steps – through the ringer in an extended fugato in E flat (three notes down from G major). No one should be surprised, of course, when even these little three-step motives begin confronting each other in double … thirds. The recapitulation solemnly reviews the ground covered in the exposition, but after a climactic passage buzzing with double trills, adds a coda that resounds with the opening volley of Vivat Rudolphus to bring the movement to a close as it began.

Although Beethoven had not written a full four- movement piano sonata since Op. 31 No. 3, he shows in the second movement of this work that he had not lost his knack for writing quirky, whimsical scherzos. The opening is spun out miraculously from a single one- bar cell of melodic material – a perky third up, followed by a third down – that extends itself out in a series of harmonic sequences, and then finds contrast in a moody trio in B flat minor with rolling accompaniment. This trio burbles along with grim determination until it suddenly finds itself emerging into a disorderly near-riot that hammers its way up and down until issuing into a breathtaking keyboard-spanning run to the high register. After a cutesy little measured tremolo to add a bit of camp flair to the proceedings (a twinkly sidelong glance at the audience would not come amiss here), we return to the opening material. But the tricks are not over. A stand-off breaks out in the coda over what the last note should be: B flat, or B natural. After a lot of hammering, B flat ducks ahead at the last minute and crosses the finish line in the key the movement started in.

The Adagio is a gigantic sonata form, without repeat, in F# minor, enharmonically G flat minor (three notes down from B flat). Exuding a grave tranquillity, its opening melody (which starts with a rising third, followed by two falling thirds) extends for a full 25 bars before contrasting material, scarcely less emotionally intense, appears. Despite its great length, and generally subdued tone, it achieves a remarkable degree of variety through its many changes in texture and rises to a quite passionate level of expression through its operatic style of ornamentation. One notable feature is the use of Bebung, a pattern of off-beat repeated notes that reproduce the syncopated effect of sobs. In some passages the style of melodic variation is almost reminiscent of Chopin, but then Chopin’s own style of ornamentation was also operatic, influenced as it was by the melodic style of Bellini. The extended filigree of 32nd notes in the development is the most magical passage of the movement, evoking perhaps a lonely nocturnal figure staring at the moon, cold and desolate but still admirably radiant.

The last movement, with its mighty fugue that weakens the knees of all but the most intrepid of pianists, begins with a palette-cleansing Largo of improvisatory character, spiritually much akin to the kinds of fantasias that Bach was wont to place before his titanic organ fugues. After many changes of tempo and mood, a series of high trills announces the arrival of the fugue subject, a half-note trill approached by leap from far below (parodying the opening fanfares of the first movement) followed by a series of small runs that descend by intervals of – you knew this was coming – thirds.

While Beethoven pursues his own musical agenda in this early-19th-century re-invention of the fugue, a musical form that had essentially died out with the deaths of Bach and Handel more than 50 years previous, he leaves us in no doubt that the time he had spent studying fugal procedure with Albrechtsberger and Haydn was not wasted. All of the most arcane contrapuntal devices and manners of treating a theme – augmentation, stretto, inversion, even cancrizans (playing it backwards) – sooner or later make their appearance in this mother of all fugues.

The performing pianist tasked with keeping all of this clear to his listeners, a task that may reasonably be compared to juggling chainsaws while reciting Shakespeare, must not only balance sounds at the extreme ends of the keyboard, but often do so while playing extended trills paired with contrapuntal countermelodies – in the same hand!

Just at the point, though, when both hands are chasing trills high and low at a firecracker pace, a moment of calm arrives, a moment in which the skies seem to open and a heavenly melody in even quarter notes descends from on high to spread soothing oil on the troubled waters of contrapuntal discord. But not 30 bars later, however, the old contrapuntal itch returns, and Beethoven begins to combine his fidgety fugue subject with this new peace negotiator in the texture, sweeping it along into the vortex of swirling melodies and melody fragments, with the omnipresent buzzing of trills leering incessantly through the texture with dogged persistence.

In the end, the trills win out. Beethoven concludes his sonata by reducing our focus down to the most ear- catching motives that have marked its first and last movements in a great series of leaping octaves that trill, and trill, and trill their way to a final cadence.

Donald G. Gíslason © 2015

 

 

 

 

PROGRAM NOTES: LUCA PISARONI & WOLFRAM RIEGER

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Four Songs

The earliest German lieder we have in the concert repertoire come from the more than 30 works that Mozart wrote between 1768 (at the age of twelve!) and his death in 1791. His mature songs reflect his skill as
an opera composer in their sensitive treatment of the text, bolstered by large-scale structural key modulations and delicate pictorial touches in an independent piano accompaniment.

Needless to say, it was not ever thus. The publishing tradition from which these songs emerged was much less expressively rich with composers pursuing the ideal of folksong-like simplicity in scores often consisting of a mere two staves. The keyboard player – who, in amateur performance, might well be the singer – was expected to play along with the top-line melody while improvising a suitable harmonic accompaniment from the bottom line, perhaps joined by a cello for a bit more ‘oomph’ in the bass register. Haydn’s 12 Keyboard Lieder of 1781, for example, were published in this way.

By the 1780s, however, Mozart’s reflexes when writing vocal music tended instinctively to the multidimensional sphere of the operatic. Each of his songs in this recital deploys its vocal and instrumental resources to create a mini-drama, a comic cameo or a psychological scene, much in the manner of the Romantic generation of composers who were to follow.

Das Veilchen (The Violet) is likely the most famous
of Mozart’s songs. The text, by Goethe, is from the singspiel Erwin und Elmire (1773-74), which tells of how a young woman coldly tramples on the affections of a sincere young suitor, only to realize her mistake and be united with him in the end. She sings this song in recognition of her mistake, the violet being a metaphorical stand-in for the crushed and crumpled young man who nonetheless remains true in his feeling for her.

Mozart, in setting this text, creates a different mood for each verse. Notable is how the tripping steps of the young woman are evoked in the piano at the words mit leichtem Schritt und munterm Sinn (light in step and merry in mood).

The accompaniment of Komm, liebe Zither (Come, beloved zither) was not written for the piano at all, 
but rather for that miniature monarch of the sub-balconic serenade, the mandolin (which the piano arrangement ably imitates). In a foreshadowing of the later appearance of this instrument in the Don’s aria Deh vieni alla finestra from Act 1 of Don Giovanni (1786), this song features an aspiring lover who shares his girl troubles with his plucky little instrument, hoping that as his Leoporello it will do all the fretting for him and pull strings to win him the object of his heart’s desire. What is a rather ordinary poem, on a fairly standard theme, gets transformed in Mozart’s hands into an engaging duet between a sentimental young man and his chatty instrumental servant.

The term ‘explicit’ is not a word that normally comes to mind when describing Classical-era lieder, but An Chloë comes as close as one would wish to deserving the epithet. Setting prudish fans a-flutter to cool the blushing cheeks of maidens and matrons alike is this read-between-the-lines scene of serious hanky-panky, hidden behind a verbal screen of fairly transparent meaning.

Mozart plays the innocent here. Setting this ‘wink-
wink’ text in the style of a simple, whistle-able folksong melody, he loads the score with all the sigh motives and dramatic pauses of an operatic love scene. While not quite as rhythmically and randily realistic as Richard Strauss’ Rosenkavalier overture, Mozart’s setting nevertheless leaves us in no doubt that by the end our ‘exhausted’ horizontal hero is reclining snugly next to his love interest, and probably having a cigarette.

Bringing us back down to earth is Abendempfindung (Evening feeling), an elegiac meditation on death.
When composing this work in June of 1787, Mozart likely had death very much on his mind. His father Leopold had died just the previous month, and he and his wife Costanze had already lost two infant children in their young marriage.

The flow of the text is given a dramatic quality by the way in which the smooth cantabile vocal line of the opening alternates with a simpler, more direct recitative style of delivery to give the impression of emotions that interrupt the singer in mid-thought.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Four Songs

If there were action comic books for classical composers, there would surely be one for Beethoven. Few composers can lay claim to the super-hero status that this rebellious symbol of liberty and humanitarian values has become in popular and political culture around the world. Was there really any competition in the choice of the Ninth Symphony for the concert to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989? Surely not.

And yet the 80 or so songs of this composer reveal a side to him quite different from that of the heroic and high-minded herald of freedom and democracy. Without the bullhorn in hand, he reveals himself to be witty, affectionate, and just as likely as any adolescent to fall victim to a pretty face and an alluring smile.

His mid-career Lied aus der Ferne (Song from afar), published in 1810, addresses the familiar problem
of what to do when you are here, and she is not. At such times, words like Sehnsucht (yearning) come spontaneously to the mind of your average 19th-century young man of sensitivity and feeling, who will inevitably head off for a walk in the upland forested regions of the German countryside to find suitable poetic parallels for that expansive swelling feeling in his chest that tells him he is alive.

Beethoven brings the scene to life for us in a setting that gives a picturesque musical description of the successive scenes capturing the young man’s attention. A lengthy introduction replete with piano trills in the high register informs us that aviary wildlife is warbling nearby and the dance-like rhythm of the vocal line gives plausibility to the toe-tapping upswing in his mood.

The accompaniment changes for the second verse in imitation of the rhythm of his footfall as he trudges uphill while the third verse lets us hear the bout of tachycardia that afflicts him at the top of the hill. The rosy-cheeked optimism of the first verse then returns to round out our brief excursion into this Grouse Grind of the human heart.

Der Kuss (The kiss) finds Beethoven in a more jocular mood. Here we meet up with the ever-attractive girl-about-town Chloë – fresh from her engagement in the previous song by Mozart – beset once again by the attentions of a male suitor with conquest on his mind. Part of the joke here is the way the poem repeats the pursed-lip front-vowel ü sounds in the words Küss (kiss) and Müh’ (effort), forcing the singer into a visual gag by making him adopt the facial configuration of a kiss.

Reckoning it easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission, our young swain makes bold to initiate the much-desired lip-lock. Chloë, he is not surprised to learn, turns out to be one of those girls who in mock annoyance and disingenuous discouragement is wont to say: “I’ll give you exactly two hours to get your hand off my knee, or I shall write a letter.” Beethoven makes the punch line (that she didn’t scream then, but oh boy did she scream later) into a series of Benny-Hill-style elbows in the ribs, with numerous text repetitions for leering comic effect on the last page.

More characteristic of Beethoven in a straightforward lyrical mood is Ich liebe dich (I love you), in which melody flows unimpeded over an evenly uniform accompaniment pattern, untroubled by sudden dramatic inflections or intruding thoughts: a perfect embodiment of the poetic sentiments of the text.

The picture of love presented in Beethoven’s early song Adelaide from 1794-1795 is the idealized one of unattainable love – a theme that was to repeat itself in Beethoven’s personal life. (No one, apparently, took the trouble to introduce him to Chloë.)

Adelaide offers many poetic parallels to the scene presented in Lied aus der Ferne: a lovelorn swain wanders alone in a garden where he experiences the presence of his love interest in every natural feature
of the landscape, calling out her name in ecstasy at regular intervals. The uncertain, searching mood of the piece is evoked by the 2-against-3 pattern of the piano opening, indicative of the complex emotions swirling in the singer’s heart. The piano writing, unusually assertive for the time, supports the depth of feeling expressed by the singer.

 

Felix Mendelssohn
Six Songs on texts by Heinrich Heine

Mendelssohn, like Mozart, began writing songs as a child and continued for the rest of his life, with rarely a month that didn’t produce a new song from his pen. And yet this composer’s song output has suffered in comparison with that of other Romantic-era composers such as Schubert and Schumann who typified more intensely in their music and in their lives the dark psychological and emotional concerns of this age – concerns which Mendelssohn seemed to float above with a blithe cheerfulness.

Consider a song such as Neue Liebe (New love), with a text that evokes a supernatural sighting of forest fairies returning from the hunt with a load of stag antlers as their catch. The singer is torn between thinking he is intercepting a sign that could either be foretelling romantic bliss, or his own death. Spooky stuff, this, halfway to ghoulish, even. But while Schubert in his setting of Erlkönig paints the aspect of real danger in such a fairy encounter, Mendelssohn presents the scene, musically, from the fairies’ point of view, with a light, airy, scampering rhythm much akin to the mood evoked in his famous scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Typical of the un-neurotic approach of this composer to his poetic subject matter is the miniature Gruss (Greeting), which paints in a few short breaths, the sheer exhilaration of the arrival of spring.

More psychologically complex is Morgengruss (Morning greeting), in which poet Heinrich Heine sends up the cliché of a lovers’ farewell at daybreak. The young man looks up at her window for a last farewell, a parting gesture which doesn’t come. ‘No matter,’ he thinks, making the best of a bad situation, ‘it’s probably just because she is dreaming of me.’ Mendelssohn tones down the savage irony of Heine’s text, but still gets the message across with a grinding forte dissonance on the word mir (‘she dreams of me-e-e-e’), suggesting a subtle ‘Yeah, right!’ from the composer.

Darker in tone, with a tumultuous piano accompaniment to match, is Allnächtlich im Traume seh’ ich dich (Each night I see you in my dreams). Here the mode is minor and the deep disturbance in the night-dreamer’s psychology realistically presented. Exceptionally ingenious in Mendelssohn’s word setting is the harmonically inconclusive way that way the vocal line ends, leaving it for the piano to cadence definitively in the home key, a musical representation of the dreamer’s bewilderment and disorientation when he awakens from his dream.

Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (On wings of song) features one of Mendelssohn’s best known melodies. In typically Mendelssohnian fashion, it eschews a literal painting of the text (set in the exotic locale of India) to concentrate on its purpose as a drawing-room seduction poem. And seduce it does through a perfectly balanced melody lovingly constructed with contours that symmetrically rise and fall, and a floating arpeggiated drawing-room accompaniment reminiscent of Schubert’s Ave Maria.

Reiselied (Travelling song), by contrast, is definitely not meant for performance in the amateur drawing room, with its story of high drama and virtuoso piano accompaniment to match. Similar to Schubert’s Erlkönig, it features a breathless horseback ride by night, with the wind and racing horse hooves painted by a moto perpetuo pattern in the piano that almost overshadows the vocal line. Light and dark, danger and relief alternate in this song as the worrying piano figuration in the minor mode changes to a lighter, more buoyant major-mode oom-pah-pah pattern when happier thoughts pass through the mind of the rider, a young man racing to see his beloved.

 

Franz Schubert
Six Songs on texts by Heinrich Heine

These six songs come from the final period in Schubert’s life. Composed to a set of poems by Heinrich Heine, they were published posthumously in a collection entitled Schwanengesang (Swan song) in 1829 and it has been suggested that their bitter irony and tragic cast of thought make them a logical continuation of Die Winterreise, Schubert’s song cycle of the lonely wanderer treated harshly by the world which ends with a desolate picture of the lonely and lamentable Leiermann (hurdy-gurdy man).

Those who think of Schubert as a composer of ‘light’ Viennese melodies that paint the delicate flutterings of the human heart will be thrown back against the wall by the majestic grandeur and symphonic conception of Der Atlas. Atlas is the mythological figure who, after losing in a war involving the Titans and Zeus was punished by the father of the gods by being made to hold up the skies eternally. The distress of this fallen hero is symbolized by whirling tremolos in the piano, his staggering under the immense weight he bears by the two hammer-stroke octaves that begin in the first bar and continue throughout.

Ihr Bild, a song of irretrievable loss, is as spare and sonically undernourished as Der Atlas is stormy and overbearing. The bare unisons bespeak utter desolation and the numbness of loss while intervening passages in chordal harmony evoke happier days that will never return. Throughout, the steely gaze of the singer’s persona is utterly chilling.

A much less emotionally complex tone is struck in Das Fischermädchen (The fisher maiden), a barcarolle of guileless simplicity that paints the scene, musically, from the young girl’s point of view, although the narrator is a cynical seducer, trying to convince the girl to ‘trust him as she trusts the waves’. Heine’s subtle irony is toned down in Schubert’s more buoyant setting of the scene.

Desolation returns in Die Stadt (The town) as the
poet sits in a rowboat heading for the town where his disappointment in love began. The boatman’s oars
are rhythmically sketched in the tremolo pattern of
the piano accompaniment, and the misty shapes of
the town in the distance by impressionistic overlay of harmonies over top. This imaginative conception of the scene in sound, painting the poet’s despair so starkly but with so few gestures, is far in advance of its time.

A mysterious chord progression begins Am Meer (By the sea), painting a scene of mysterious calm. There seems to be nothing these two estranged lovers can say to each other. The music depicts both the shadow of their former happiness in eerily placid passages in the major mode that alternate with chromatically tortured tremolo passages emblematic of their pain.

Der Doppelgänger is the pendant piece to Der Leierman from Die Winterreise: a lonely figure standing in the middle of human society but utterly alienated from
it by his inner pain. Schubert gives the scene a tragic dimension of fateful inevitability by placing the singer’s vocal declamation – it could hardly be called ‘melody’ – over a recurring passacaglia pattern low in the piano accompaniment, as mournfully dark as anything out of Mussorgsky.

 

Franz Schubert
Six Songs on texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Auf dem See (On the lake) likely dates from sometime around 1817 and recounts a boat trip taken by Goethe with friends in 1775 while on vacation. The goldne Traüme (golden dreams) of the second verse is likely
a reference to a young girl that Goethe was infatuated with (and trying to forget). The rocking rhythm which Schubert creates in the piano accompaniment is not only astonishingly evocative of the movement of a boat bobbing among the waves, but also a perfect foil for the wide-ranging melody that it supports above.

More philosophical concerns stand at the centre of Grenzen der Menschheit (Limits of Mankind), composed in 1821. The poem dates from 1775, when Goethe was grappling with the concept of Fate and its role in human existence. Schubert’s setting reaches for the sublime in confronting the poet’s thought in music: the stern and implacable chord progressions of the piano accompaniment evoke the majesty of the gods while the low range and unadorned declamatory style of the vocal line lends prophetic heft to the text. The extreme dynamic range (from ff to pp) in this work stands witness to the stark divide that separates human and divine destinies.

Appreciation for the young male form is present, as well, in Ganymed (Ganymede), Goethe’s evocation of the ancient Greek legend of Zeus bringing the most handsome of men, the young Ganymede, up to the heavens on a cloud to become his cup-bearer. The sensuality of the scene is matched by Schubert’s rapturously arching phrases and the ever-increasing pace of the action conveyed through increasingly lively figuration in the piano.

Erlkönig (The Elf King) was published as Schubert’s
Op. 1 and along with Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) counts as one of the founding works in the development of the Romantic lied. This macabre story, cast in the popular and sensationalist genre of the strophic ballad, derives from a terrifying night ride actually undertaken by Goethe in 1779 with
a seven-year-old boy, the son of a close friend, in the saddle in front of him. The demonic energy of the ride is conveyed in the pianist’s (incredibly difficult) battery of octaves that pulse throughout, a dramatic foil to the four distinct voices heard within the poem: the narrator, the boy, the father, and the lurid, luring voice of the Elf King himself, whose ‘desire’ for the young boy is fraught with a menacing hint of pedophilic lust.

Wanderers Nachtlied II (Wanderer’s Night Song 2), the second poem by Goethe with this title, derives from a mountain hike that the poet undertook in 1780 into the beautiful forested mountains of Thuringia where, struck by the peace and calm of the view, he etched this poem into the wall of the hut where he was staying. Visiting the hut again, fifty-one years later on his eighty-second birthday in 1831, he teared up at reading his words still visible on the wall: Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch (Just wait, and soon you, too, will be at rest). Schubert captures the hushed, contemplative atmosphere of the scene in this famous setting, sung pp throughout, with simple harmonies and placidly even tone colour to create a mood of absolute serenity.

An Schwager Kronos (To Coachman Kronos) combines Greek legend and human life in the extended metaphor of the coach journey. Kronos the Titan was father of Zeus and often identified with the figure of Chronos (Time). In this poem, the poet declares, with the bravado of youth, his desire to go down in a blaze of glory at the peak of his powers rather than submit to a humiliating decline in old age. Schubert here composes with a muscular aggressiveness not normally associated with him but admirably suited to this text evoking the invulnerability of youth.

Donald G. Gíslason © 2014

 

PROGRAM NOTES: CHRISTIAN GERHAHER & GEROLD HUBER

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By Christian Gerhaher

This programme of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set to music by Franz Schubert and Wolfgang Rihm was conceived as a tribute to the eight great poetic hymns written during the poet’s Sturm und Drang period of the 1770s and 1780s. I had always regretted that Schubert had set only three of these outstanding masterworks—Prometheus, Ganymed and Kronos—and so over a period of several years I developed the idea of having contemporary composers complete the cycle. When I asked Wolfgang Rihm two years ago if he might be interested in working on some of the five remaining texts, his first reply was that he normally chooses his texts himself. Nevertheless, two weeks later I had his setting of Goethe’s Harzreise in my letterbox. This was then the core around which to build the second half of this recital. For coming recitals Gerold Huber is planning to compose the Sturmlied, and I am sure we will find a solution for Wanderer and Seefahrt, as well.

 

Franz Schubert

Eight Songs

Schlafe! was willst du mehr?

Sleep! What more can you desire?

By listening to the first group of songs it is easy to understand what Schubert’s contemporaries meant when they described his new genre as being not really ‘Lieder’ in the traditional sense. They understood his way of setting poetic lines to music as creating Gesänge, i.e., ‘chants’. In this way of writing, the words no longer simply underlined more or less suitably affective music, but rather this great innovator managed to find appropriate musical equivalents for the texts of the pre-existing poems. This explains why we no longer find music laid out in balanced and symmetrical musical ‘periods’. Instead we hear phrases invented in a semantically ambitious way, following the sense and rhythm of the language, without just cheaply illustrating it.

A good example is Sehnsucht (Longing), in which two poetic themes are intertwined. On the one hand, there is the well-established theme of the distant lover who uses Nature to pass on his messages to the beloved. On the other hand, there is the loving individual who, reminiscent of Zeus, takes on different shapes in the natural environment to tell his love of his longing for her, evoking several epiphanies of being loved in her mind. A strophic solution would never have been suitable to translate this complex and lambent poem into musical meaning. Schubert’s charming, virtuous and metamorphic music, though, definitely is.

Schubert created two successful versions of An den Mond (To the Moon), a poem comprised of nine verses. In his first version, he created a song with four musical strophes of two verses each. In order to fit the poem into the musical form he had to omit one verse. The later version, performed here, once again starts with two double-verses but then resolves the problem by changing the musical form in order to include all of the remaining text. The result is one of Schubert’s most important and best-loved songs.

The following poem, Geheimes (Secret), comes from a later period in Schubert’s lieder production. He adopts here a relatively rigorous framework of musical periods, taking only minimal musical liberties in order to depict a situation from the later ‘classical’ period in Goethe’s oeuvre. Both Goethe and Schubert express themselves clearly but economically, colourfully but moderately, with humour and yet with severity. It is the language that Goethe developed under the spell of the Austrian actress and dancer Marianne von Willemer when writing The Book of Love in Der West-östliche Divan (1819), which Schubert depicted in his own modest, again utterly appropriate language.

It is perhaps understandable only with historical hindsight why Goethe did not appreciate—or perhaps could not understand—how great Schubert’s achievement was in effecting an Archimedean turnaround from baroque-affective restriction to romantic-empathetic deliverance in his vocal music settings. The poet was probably too deeply influenced by his troglodytically conservative friend, the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, and possibly anguished by the might and power of Schubert’s musical language, which seemed to be able to subsume pre-existing poetry into itself, poetry which Goethe may have felt uneasy seeing become only part of a lied.

Even if I am convinced that a lied is not a mini-drama, Nachtgesang could form a subtle exception to this postulation. In five little verse-acts his conviction that her sleep is alleviated and removed from the vulgar world to a better ideal world (with a rhapsodic peripety in the third verse) must give way to the recognition that her alleged sleep (Hypnos) in reality might be its kin: death (Thanatos). Schubert used the refrain at the end of every verse as an opportunity to create a strophic song, whose parts are mystically merged by the fact that the second-last line is always the opening line of the next verse (even the fifth and last one is again the start of the poem in the first verse). With almost no words (there are only ten rhyme words in all) and the most reticent music, it is an enormous challenge to express this horrific progression in an adequately humble way.

The group is concluded by one of the most often misunderstood songs. Schäfers Klagelied (Shepherd’s Lament) is nothing like an idyll, but is rather an expression of complete despair. The abandoned lover is not helped, but terrorized by the elements of the natural setting that surround him. The image of being wounded and helpless depicts the imaginative polar opposite to the depiction in the opening poem and song.

 

Wolfgang Rihm

Six Songs from Goethe-Lieder

Zum Erstaunen bin ich da

I am here to marvel at it.

The selection of late Goethe poems in six out of the twelve songs by Wolfgang Rihm shows a very different poet. While not always at his most sympathetic, he at the very least expresses himself in a playful and charming way as the great old Privy Councillor who gives advice for how to lead a reasonable life. He is uplifting, wholesome, and joyful—the latter only with restrictions. As might be expected, the musical setting is not a feast for the senses, but it represents perfectly Goethe’s Gedankenlyrik (his ‘thought-poetry’). I understand Rihm’s early Goethe-songs as a reflection on the underlying poetic thoughts of the texts, and less as independent and compelling contributions to the cause of stirring musical entertainment. The last poem is from Goethe’s late (and slightly wordy) novel Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (1807-1821), a continuation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-1796), the significance of which earlier work can hardly be overestimated, especially in the influence it exercised over German vocal chamber music throughout the entire nineteenth century.

 

Franz Schubert

Gesänge des Harfners

Possibly the most utterly touching, but nevertheless most cryptic figure in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is the Harfner, the harp-player, the tragic and incestuous father of enchanting young tomboy Mignon. The Harfner is the only character in this Bildungsroman (novel of character development) who does not evolve. He simply cannot survive the heartbreaking sorrow that overwhelms him. Especially notable is Goethe’s harsh play with and interconnection of the words Einsamkeit (solitude) and Alleinsein (aloneness), which he uses to deliberately and cynically evoke people’s compassion.

 

Franz Schubert

Four Songs

Aufwärts! Umfangend umfangen!

Aloft! Embracing embraced!

Goethe was young, radical and—in his own opinion—perfectly capable of explaining the world in a new and natively German way when he joined with other poets of his generation in the literary movement known as Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). Not all of his fellow travellers in this literary fashion would move on to adopt a more classical style, as he and Schiller did, but the inner drive to create ambitious works, to strive for perfection in search of the absolute achievement motivated many writers of the movement. The eight hymn poems written by Goethe stand out for their sheer hilarity, their radiance, and their powerful juvenility.

In Mahomets Gesang, for example, the life of the prophet Mohammed is narrated by comparing him to a growing stream, which gathers all waters around, becoming in the end an ocean. This wonderfully meandering, but sadly unfinished song is surrounded by a brace of the most important of Schubert’s songs: Prometheus and Ganymed.

Prometheus presents the unlimited aspiration of pure Genius, with its disrespect and scorn for the Creator made proverbial in drama by Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804), as well as by authors of the Sturm und Drang period, who found its themes very much in line with their own pretensions. The idea behind Prometheus is conveyed in theGoethe-coined expression Verselbstung (selfing). By contrast, Entselbstigung (de-selfing) is the ruling principle of its companion poem, Ganymed, which tells the Greek mythological story of the handsome youth taken up into heaven on a cloud to become the cupbearer of Zeus. Schubert does not represent the poem’s action in terms of a dialogue between the two characters of the drama, but I can hardly imagine a more perfect depiction of the process of euphoric emanation.

An Schwager Kronos (To Coachman Kronos) bears in reality no clear relationship to actual Greek myth, but rather exemplifies how in classical thought, Nature and the world have the same meaning: reason enough for the perceptive young man of the poem to assimilate and to enter into its everlasting patterns. In this poem the aspiring young, thirsty and impatient passenger urges his coachman to go ever faster and faster (Chronos being the god of Time). He seems to hold his entire lifetime in his hands and in this overview he includes and already embraces his own death. But what a death, with important and heroic figures such as Orcus gathered in the underworld awaiting him with delirious applause. This is the young Goethe’s alluring prospect of his own life. One can hardly imagine a song more powerful and demanding than this.

  

Wolfgang Rihm

Harzreise im Winter

Then comes Harzreise im Winter (Winter Journey Through the Harz Mountains). Barely comprehensible at a first glance, this poem tells a story out of Goethe’s own life. The fortunate poet is leaving a hunting party and puts himself in danger by leaving the secure path at the foot of the snowy mountain known as the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz mountain range of central Germany and home of the witches’ Walpurgisnacht. He seeks the track of a sensitive young man—like Werther, the protagonist of one of his novels—who has become a despiser of the world. Here the subject of this poetic hymn becomes clear: it is Love, which has the duty to conciliate bliss and harm. The last scene ends on the summit of the Brocken in a euphoric expression of thanks. This poem is the last from this cycle, and the least radical. It evokes in me the connotation of a lucky version of the Way of the Cross and this I feel to be ideally represented by Wolfgang Rihm’s musical setting. Nearly a cantata, it wonderfully blends narrative with meditative and dramatic elements, totally in the service of the text’s meaning, but with tremendous sensuousness when compared with the first six songs.

 

Franz Schubert

Willkommen und Abschied

            Du gingst, ich stund und sah zur Erden…

            You went, and I stood looking down…

The earlier Sturm und Drang poem Willkommen und Abschied (Greeting and Farewell) finally shows Goethe the young lover, who frequently left a trail of passionate women behind him in his travels. Like love-corpses, they could never after manage to overcome the impression he had made on them: including his own sister, Charlotte von Stein, and Friederike Brion, the parson’s daughter whom he met and left near Strassburg, during his idyllic time in Sesenheim in the early 1770s. The disturbing thing is the poem’s first version (quoted above) in which it is not he who is leaving but she. Perhaps it means that she was leaving the departing rider, but it could also express resistance to the young and reckless lover’s guilt.

 

PROGRAM NOTES: CHARLIE ALBRIGHT

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Franz Schubert

Impromptus Op. 90, Nos. 1-4

The impromptu is just one of a number of small-scale instrumental genres arising in the early 19th century, known under the collective title of “character pieces”. Cultivated by composers of the Romantic era, these pieces present a simple musical idea in an intimate lyrical style with the aim of evoking a particular mood or moment of personal reflection, spontaneously experienced and communicated.

The typical construction was a simple three-part form (A-B-A), with a middle section that contrasts in mood or emotional intensity with the outer sections. The eight impromptus that Schubert composed in late 1827 are classic examples of the genre, and indeed are the first pieces bearing the name impromptu to establish themselves permanently in the repertoire.

The Impromptu No. 1 in C minor is the longest of the set, its expansive range of moods and textures being more typicalfortissimo octave yielding to the pianissimo of the lonely little tune that follows, strangely forlorn and introspective despite its march-like rhythm. After its assertive potential is explored, a more songful variant arrives to captivate the ear in the major mode, ending with a melodic turn figure that spawns its own lyrical discussion. The middle section offers contrast more in texture than in thematic content as it works through the two related themes in the manner of a formal sonata development. Sonata-like, as well, is the resolution of the accumulated dramatic tension in the major-mode ending of the “recapitulation”.

A more simply contrasted pair of emotions is explored in the Impromptu No. 2 in E-flat, which juxtaposes the carefree running scale passages of the opening with a more emphatic middle section dominated by vigorous emotional outbursts. Recent developments in the design of the Viennese piano made possible the extreme range of the right-hand scalar passages, which Schubert exploits to create thrilling crescendos in the high register.

The Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat presents a lyrical vocal melody over melt-in-your-mouth harmonies laid out in a gentle but ever-moving accompaniment pattern that perfectly paints the fluttering of the human heart.

Impromptu No. 4 in A-flatmajor begins with a buoyant cascade of broken chord figures that appears almost to be winking in merriment, despite its minor-mode setting – all the more playful because of the soothing chords that following, seemingly saying: “Just kidding, folks”. The middle section worries obsessively in a melody of questioning semitone rises and falls, its accompaniment fretting in pulsing, anxious sympathy with these deliberations. But in the end, the major mode wins over after the opening material is recalled to lighten the mood once again.

 

Leoš Janáček

Sonata, 1.X.1905

We are lucky to have this sonata, a product of Janáček’s impassioned middle age. Although well beyond his teen years at the time, the Czech composer nevertheless reacted with adolescent fervour in composing this tribute to František Pavlík, the 19-year-old labourer killed in the ethnic violence that marked demonstrations held on the 1st of October, 1905 in the Moravian city of Brno.

Adolescent was his decision to burn the last movement (a funeral march) before the sonata was premiered in 1906, and flagrantly Romantic was his gesture of tossing the manuscript of the other two movements from a bridge into the Vltava river shortly thereafter. Only in 1924 did pianist Ludmila Tučková, who performed the work at its premier, reveal that she had copied out the first two movements, allowing the work to be re-performed and published for the first time.

Despite its programmatic origins, the first movement, ominously labelled Presentiment, is in fairly standard sonata form, with even a repeated exposition. A few introductory bars set up the key before the restless first theme appears. Immediately noticeable is the extraordinarily wide spacing of the piano texture, evocative of the timbre and idiom of the hammered dulcimer (cimbalom) used in Moravian folk music. The second theme is more lyrically conceived, but both themes display Janáček’s characteristic use of small motives to create larger phrase units that accumulate in meaning through repetition.

The second movement, entitled Death, focuses-in emotionally on the loss of a young life. Evocative of the void left by the death of the young František, its first section begins almost every bar with an emptiness: a 16th note rest in both hands. The whole movement is built from the repetition of a single modally-inflected phrase, dully repeated in the opening section (which bears some of the ghostly stillness of Ravel’s Le Gibet from Gaspard de la nuit), but more operatically sung out in the expansive middle section. Finally, however, the meditative mood of the opening returns to end the movement pianississimo, as it edges towards the silence of the grave.

 

Adolf Schulz-Evler

Concert Arabesques on Themes from On the Beautiful Blue Danube

The idea of “covering” another performer’s songs is a practice well known to both lovers of refined jazz and those whose musical taste is circumscribed by the four walls of their local pub.

Before the invention of the radio, the amount of music being publicly performed far outstripped the means for distributing it to a mass audience; instrumental transcriptions of “hit” tunes were an easy, crowd-pleasing item to include on the programs of travelling concert artists. Liszt, for example, was famous for his opera fantasias, and Sarasate for his Carmen Fantasy.

With the death of Rachmaninoff and the older generation of pianists, however, concert programs after the Second World War saw fewer of these pieces listed. The emerging “period performance” movement put respect for the conditions of a work’s first appearance as the supreme goal of the modern musician. “Covering” a great work of musical art was akin to dumpster-diving, as frowned-upon as stealing the tulips from your neighbour’s garden. Adolf Schulz- Evler’s scintillating Blue Danube transcription, for example, was described in the 1954 edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians as “meretricious”, i.e., “whore-like” in its appeal. For 1950s audiences, then, attending a public performance of this piece was not something you could tell your mother about.

Only Glenn Gould’s brilliance in re-creating Bach on the modern piano and Vladimir Horowitz’s demonic ability to project the values of 19th-century pianism to a 20th-century audience allowed these musicians to stand apart from the general trend. Indeed it was the prestige of Horowitz’s own Carmen Fantasy and Stars & Stripes Forever – as well as his pianistic re-touching of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 – that opened the door for transcriptions to return to the concert stage after his death in 1989.

Ever since, modern pianists have been hunting around in the attic for old gems of the repertoire, in a classical-music version of the Antiques Road Show, with the Schulz-Evler Blue Danube transcription standing as one of their greatest finds. And modern audiences, like dieters rejoicing in new research that promotes the nutritional value of chocolate, have been just as enthusiastic.

The Polish-born pianist Adolf Schulz-Evler (1852-1905) was a student of Karl Tausig and the composer of minor works, mostly forgotten today, except for his pianistically exuberant transcription of Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz. Structured as an introduction with five waltzes, it begins with a tantalizing sonic apéritif that bubbles with champagne effervescence in the high register as small hints of the waltz tune emerge below.

Despite the work’s intoxicating mix of tunefulness and pianistic “ear candy”, its challenges are not merely technical.In such repertoire, the concept of “Taste” – note the capital T – is paramount, with only a few sequins, a touch of eye liner, and the odd festive sideways glance to separate a Liszt from a Liberace.

 

Charlie Albright

Improvisation

Your intrepid notes writer has consulted horoscopes, communed with his Ouija board, and even tried to contact Edward Snowden in a frantic attempt to determine what musical direction will likely be taken by Mr. Albright in his improvisation.

Alas, only Mr. Albright knows that, and maybe not even he…

 

Frédéric Chopin

Études, Op. 25

The two sets of twelve piano studies which Chopin published as his Op. 10 (1833) and Op. 25 (1837), stand, even today, as the foundation of modern piano technique. In the words of pianist Garrick Ohlsson: “If you can play the Chopin Études … there is basically nothing in the modern repertoire you can’t play”. Each étude presents a specific technical challenge to the pianist, but in a way that transcends its original pedagogical purpose, making each study into an exquisite Romantic-era “character piece”.

It is easy to imagine why the Étude No. 1 in A-flatis known as the “Aeolian Harp”. Beneath a steady pulse of melody notes, many of them repeated on the same pitch, strums a swirling, rippling accompaniment that challenges the pianist to split his hands conceptually in two between a melody or bass-note finger (the pinkie) and the fingers playing the accompaniment, i.e., all the rest. Particularly perilous are the exhilarating leaps – in opposite directions! – at the emotional climax of the piece.

The difficulty in the Étude No. 2 in F minor is metrical: two triplets of eighth notes in the right hand are paired with one triplet of quarter notes in the left. Think of trying to tap your foot to two different songs playing at once, one coming from each earplug of your iPod: your right ear is hearing 12/8 while your left ear is hearing 6/4.

The Étude No. 3 in F major is an exercise in pianistic poise. While the hands are made to leap in opposite directions, a trill-ish figure in the centre of the hand must remain calm and unruffled. Not a piece for the fidgety, the feverish, or the feckless.

Leaps are also a prominent feature of the Étude No. 4 in A minor but here the challenge is to keep the right- hand pinkie-finger singing out blithely above the jumpy accompaniment below, despite being always on the off- beat.

The Étude No. 5 in E minor is the “ugly duckling” of the set. To each attack in the right hand is attached, like a barnacle, a chromatic inflection a semitone away that makes it walk like it has a stone in its shoe. Its contrasting middle section in the major mode – as poised and elegant as the opening section is grotesquely limping and ungainly – is richly carpeted with a harmonically full, rolling texture that allows the left hand to sing out a simple but engaging baritone melody of small range and modest harmonic goals.

Double thirds, in both chromatic and diatonic varieties, haunt the shimmering Étude No. 6 in G-sharpminor. Chopin introduces here a tonal palate hitherto unknown in the piano literature in this quicksilver merry-go-round of kaleidoscopic colouration.

The slow, lyrical Étude No. 7 in C-sharpminor is a chamber trio. The left-hand ‘cello’ voice sings a duet with a treble melody in the right-hand while a gentle sympathetic chordal accompaniment occupies the middle ground. This is one of the few études where the principal difficulty lies in the left hand.

While most student pianists would rather swallow a hairball than play a whole piece in double thirds, a large majority of those would rather pass a kidney stone than do so in double sixths, as here in the Étude No. 8 in D-flatmajor.

The Étude No. 9 in G-flatmajor is a merry romp over the black keys requiring fine control of the hand to bring out the rollicking principal tune against a flurry of competing textures around it.

The pianist’s octaves – bread and butter of the virtuoso performer – receive a thorough annual check-up in the Étude No. 10 in B minor, both in their stormy and lyrical manners of performance.

The Étude No.11 in A minor, known as the “Winter Wind”, reveals Chopin as the inventor of yet another revolutionary new pianistic texture, one that seems to want to include every note on the instrument. Typical of Chopin’s pianistic approach is the way that the cascading figures descending from the top of the keyboard require passing the thumb under the 5th finger when rising back up.

The “Ocean” Étude No. 12 in C minor gets its name from the waves of sound that sweep up and down the keyboard, doled out octave-by-octave in broken chord figures that are extremely tiring to perform accurately at fast tempo. While the chordal patterns of the opening are simple, Chopin reveals himself a master of chromatic harmony and piano tone-colouring in the tension-filled middle section.

 

Notes by Donald G. Gíslason, Ph.D.

 

 

PROGRAM NOTES: SITKOVETSKY TRIO

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Johannes Brahms: Piano Trio no. 3 in C minor, Op. 101

This is the last work Brahms wrote for the piano trio. It is a magnificent work in every respect, from the sharply etched melodies to the concision and masterly manner in which they are handled. It is also one of Brahms’s most compact scores, tightly and concisely argued using a minimum of melodic substance developed with maximum efficiency. Brahms seemed to reserve C minor for some of his weightiest, most dramatic and gravely serious works – the First Symphony, the First String Quartet and the Third Piano Quartet come to mind. The first performances – in Hofstetten and Budapest that year – were private ones. The Trio’s official public premiere took place on February 26, 1887 in Vienna with members of the Heckmann Quartet and Brahms at the piano.

The very opening is sufficient to arrest the listener’s attention and hold it for the duration of the movement: a bold, even fierce gesture that biographer Malcolm MacDonald refers to as “explosive wrath.” This first subject consists of several elements, including a tautly rhythmic figure for the three instruments in unison. The second theme, though warmly lyrical, brings no relaxation of the tension and momentum.

The second movement, also in C minor, is mysterious, almost wraithlike, yet also of great delicacy. MacDonald calls it “a profoundly uneasy movement of grey half-lights, rapid stealthy motion, and suppressed sadness.” The central episode changes to block chords for the piano and pizzicato for the strings, but the mood remains subdued. The dynamic level rarely rises above piano.

The third movement’s main features are a relaxed mood of tenderness and natural simplicity with an antiphonal treatment of piano and strings and an irregular metre of 7/4. The key is now C major rather than C minor. For the central section the music moves into another rare metre, 15/8 (five equal groups of triplets).

The sonata-form finale returns to C minor and to the spirit of grim determination that dominated the first. As in the monumental First Symphony, drama and fury give way to radiant warmth, and C minor yields to C major in the final pages.

 

Felix Mendelssohn: Piano Trio no. 2 in C minor, Op. 66

Six years after writing his first piano trio (1839), Mendelssohn produced a second. It was first performed on December 20, 1845 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, where Mendelssohn was serving as conductor of its famous orchestra. The musicians were the orchestra’s concertmaster Ferdinand David, cellist Franz Karl Witmann and the composer as pianist.

The first movement, in perfectly constructed sonata-form, opens with a restless, flowing subject for the piano, soon joined by the strings. The second subject is a glorious, life-affirming theme in E flat major. The exposition is not repeated, perhaps since the development section is so extensive and does such a thorough job of working out both themes with great inventiveness.

The slow movement offers a good measure of consolation after the relentless pace and intensity of the first. It is a three-part structure, with the outer ones gently songlike and set to the pervasive rhythmic pattern of short-long, short-long. The central section has a more flowing quality and is sustained by the piano’s continuous triplet figures.

The Scherzo flies by in a blizzard of notes. It is further characterized by much imitative writing and by a vaguely Hungarian gypsy flavor.

In its powerful sonorities, massive piano chords, extremes of range, seriousness of purpose and overall intensity, the finale seems to speak more of Brahms than of Mendelssohn. Another feature of this movement is the incorporation of a chorale-like theme that has had scholars searching intently for its German-Lutheran origin – in vain. The Trio concludes with an extensive, exuberant coda in C major that is nearly symphonic is scope.

 

Franz Schubert: Piano Trio no. 2 in E flat major, Op. 100 (D. 929)

If the public today holds a slight preference for the first of Schubert’s two piano trios, the one in B flat major, this is countered by Schubert’s own preference for the other, in E flat. Both reflect the composer’s study of similar works by Mozart and Beethoven in their refined compositional technique and equal partnership of three instruments. The first performance was given on the day after Christmas, 1827 at the Musikverein in Vienna. Exactly three months later, in the same hall, Schubert performed the piano part at the only public concert he ever gave. The concert was an artistic and financial success, but the event was never repeated.

Lasting about forty minutes in performance, the E flat Trio is longer than any Schubert symphony except the Great C major. Although it does not contain as many beguiling themes as does the B flat Trio, it has even fuller, almost symphonic textures with greater brilliance and more breadth to the development sections.

The first movement is constructed from four thematic ideas. The first of these, memorable as it is, and boldly stated in the opening bars, turns out to be the one Schubert employs the least, while the last of them is the one he exploits to the fullest. The melancholy cast of the slow movement derives from a Swedish ballad Schubert presumably borrowed after hearing a tenor sing it. The Scherzo is a canon, with close imitation between piano and strings, while its central Trio section takes on the quality of a waltz. The finale breathes an air of carefree charm and lightness, at least initially. The second theme offers marked contrast of mood, metre and key. The movement develops into one of the longest Schubert ever wrote, over a thousand measures in the original version, but even in reduced form, as commonly played today, it runs to nearly fifteen minutes. Schumann’s description of Schubert’s final symphony as being “of heavenly length” can again be invoked for the finale of the E flat trio.

 

Program notes by Robert Markow, 2013.

Program Notes: Behzod Abduraimov

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Program Notes: Behzod Abduraimov

Franz Schubert: Piano sonata in A major, D. 664 (Op. 120)

Scholars lack definite evidence for the date and place of composition of Schubert’s early A major sonata, but most are willing to grant that most likely he wrote it during the summer of 1819 while vacationing in Steyr in Upper Austria. He wrote to his brother Ferdinand that the surrounding countryside was “unimaginably lovely.” As biographer Brian Newbould notes, “the A major [sonata] is music of such wide-eyed youthful contentment that one could imagine it being a response to both the mountain scenery of Upper Austria and ‘a very pretty’ dedicatee.”

The work opens with one of Schubert’s most gracious melodies, one in which he takes obvious delight in spinning out to almost heavenly length. The second subject, hardly less enchanting, arrives soon and without preamble. The central slow movement focuses even more insistently than the first on a rhythmic pattern, one Schubert used often (a long followed by four short notes). This dreamy idyll is derived from a single theme that Schubert expands into a perfectly proportioned structure. The insouciant finale is again in sonata form. The lyricism, blithe spirit and overall sense of contentment have led annotator Konrad Wolff to call this music “a Viennese waltz danced in heaven.”

Some years ago, when he was music critic for The Ottawa Citizen, the late Jacob Siskind wrote that “the difficulty with most of the music of Schubert, and this is especially true of his piano sonatas, is to reconcile the seeming simplicity of the structure and the endless flow of melody with the emotional tension generated by the provocative key relationships of the various sections. In lesser hands, the music can sound merely pretty, or puzzlingly disjointed. In the hands of one who has the emotional depths to identify completely with the mysteries of the music, these scores have the capacity to heal the deepest emotional wounds.”

 

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano sonata no. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 (Appassionata)

The Appassionata sonata (1804-06), along with the Op. 78 sonata in F sharp major, was Beethoven’s favorite up until the time he wrote the Hammerklavier sonata in 1819 (the 28th of his 32 piano sonatas). But whereas Op. 78, lovely and gracious as it may be, has never been a popular favorite, the Appassionata remains one of Beethoven’s greatest and most frequently heard works in any medium. As with so many of his compositions, the title was affixed not by the composer but by a publisher.

The opening movement is largely music of sound and fury, defined above all by rhythmic insistence. Both the defiantly rising principal subject (opening measures) and the lyrical, rising-and-falling second subject share a similar rhythmic pattern (long-short-long; long-short long), and both are built from arpeggios. Additionally, there is a rhythmic motto appearing often throughout the movement that corresponds exactly to that of the opening of the fifth symphony (da-da-da-daahh).

The second movement offers an oasis of tranquility and repose. It is a theme-and-variations movement built, like the second movement of the seventh symphony, more from a harmonic progression than from a melody. Each of the three variations employs increasingly rapid note values (eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds), following which there is a small coda that disintegrates into a mysterious chord, then, as if jolted with an electric shock, reenergizes itself and launches into the finale.

This concluding movement, in sonata form like the first, is one of the most demonic things Beethoven ever wrote, a musical juggernaut of relentless forward momentum and almost frightening power. Tension builds to almost unbearable levels, finally bursting its bonds in the presto coda which roars to an apocalyptic conclusion.

 

Franz Liszt: Scherzo and March; Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, Mephisto Waltz no. 1

The Scherzo and March may be one of Liszt’s lesser-known piano works, yet it is a formidable, ten-minute composition nonetheless. The title implies a two-part structure, but it is actually more than that. Following a short, mysterious introduction filled with gnome-like scurrying and scrambling figures, we arrive at a scherzo comprising two fully developed themes. Both suggest visions of hell, “a superb piece of diablerie,” as pianist Louis Kentner calls it. Then comes the march, which provides the central contrasting episode, “as if a Witches’ Sabbath were interrupted by a procession of monks carrying torches and chanting,” writes Kentner. The march rises to a fearsome climax, then recedes into the distance, after which the scherzo returns in shortened form. For a coda, the march music is recalled, now with elements of the scherzo as accompaniment.

Between 1847 and 1852, Liszt wrote a series of ten pieces under the rubric Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, a title he borrowed from a collection of poetry by Lamartine. The best known number from this set remains Funérailles (No. 7), followed closely by the Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (No. 3), the longest and, in the opinion of many, the finest of the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses.

Liszt prefaced the score with these words from Lamartine: “Whence comes, O God, this peace that overwhelms me? Whence comes this faith with which my heart overflows?” A simple, hymnlike theme glides slowly upward in the left hand while the right hand accompanies with a gentle undulation that might well evoke the lambent light of votive candles in a small, private chapel. “Is there another piano piece with such hypnotic sweetness of sound?” asks pianist Alfred Brendel. The central section consists of two contrasting episodes in new keys and new tempos. When the opening theme returns, it is furnished with fuller harmony and cascades of arpeggios that bring to mind dazzling visions of transcendent beauty. The music rises to its ecstatic, fortississimo climax, then subsides into heavenly tranquility and resignation.

The nineteenth-century romantics were fascinated with the legend of Faust. Goethe’s monumental poem was the source of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, but it was another adaptation of the story that spurred him to write the first of his three Mephisto Waltzes. This was Nikolaus Lenau’s Faust of 1835, from which Liszt chose two unconnected passages and set them to music in the late 1850s. The Nocturnal Procession is seldom performed, but the other number, Dance in the Village Inn: Mephisto Waltz, became one of Liszt’s most popular pieces, both in its original orchestral form and in the subsequent piano arrangement.

Mephistopheles has led Faust to a small inn where a wedding celebration is in progress. The devil invites Faust to choose a woman and dance with her. After he chooses, Mephistopheles berates the village musicians for their bland, dull musicianship and offers to show them how to really play the violin. He borrows an instrument and creates a kind of music that bewitches everyone into “a whirl of bacchantic revelry” (Lenau). Frederick Niecks described the result as “the ne plus ultra of weirdness and unbridled sensuality in the whole domain of music.”

 

VRSchubert – Day 22: Performance Program Notes

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Program notes help us prepare for the concert we are about to enjoy by providing a context in which the piece was composed and a deeper understanding of the composition’s musicality. Quell your excitement as you count down the hours to Paul Lewis’ performance of Schubert’s final three piano sonatas tomorrow evening at the Chan Centre by reading the following program notes:

Paul Lewis performs the Late Schubert Sonatas

The year of Schubert’s death, 1828, saw the birth of an extraordinary number of masterpieces from the pen of this master lyricist: the “Great” C major Symphony, the Mass in E-flat, the String Quintet in C, thirteen of his finest songs, and the final trilogy of great piano sonatas. This trilogy might be compared with the last three symphonies of Mozart. Each trilogy was written within a short period during the last year of its composer’s short life; each is a compact picture of its creator’s musical personality comprising three works of markedly differing character; each is a distillation of its composer’s last years of suffering and was written in a period of despair and deprivation; all the sonatas and symphonies are spacious in design, noble in concept and almost epic in scale; and each trilogy contains one stormy work in a prevailing minor key.

These sonatas also prompt thoughts on Beethoven’s last works in the genre, “final pronouncements of great minds,” as Ernest Porter puts it. “The sense of finality,” writes Porter, “is with us who cannot imagine any greater succeeding works and who perceive in these a summation of the composer’s output. Both had gone through trial and tribulation and the passions of sorrow and joy, and had arrived at that period when they could meditate on the inner meaning of life while still expressing its heights and depths. … The sequence of emotional thought is more highly controlled and resolved with persuasive logic.”

Schubert died before the sonatas were published. Diabelli published them only in 1838, with the dedication going to Schumann, an apt choice in light of his championship of Schubert’s music.

With regard to Schubert’s treatment of form, it is worth quoting Joseph Machlis’ observation on the sonatas in general: Schubert “was not the master builder Beethoven was. Inevitably he loosened the form, introducing into its flexible architecture the elements of caprice and whimsy, improvisation and inspired lyricism. His sonatas are spacious, fantasy-like compositions that display all the characteristics of the Schubertian style – spontaneous melody, richly expressive harmonies, rhythmic vitality, charming changes of key, emotion-charged shifts from major to minor, figuration that is almost always fresh and personal (with an occasional tendency to ramble), and great freedom in the handling of classical form.”

Piano sonata in C minor, D. 958

The opening subject of the C minor sonata – tragic, stormy and brusque – is often compared with the theme of Beethoven’s 32 Variations for Piano in the same key. The second subject, however, is a gracious, utterly beguiling melody in E flat major that only Schubert could have written, and probably the most memorable theme in the entire sonata. Yet Schubert devotes little time to it in the course of the first movement’s development section, preferring instead to focus on the defiant opening idea and even more so to a new, serpentine motif which becomes the predominant material of the development.

The Adagio opens with a solemn, hymn-like theme in four-part harmony in the key of A flat major. Two unsettled interludes, both derived from the same contrasting material in this A-B-A-B-A-form movement, interrupt the placid mood.

The Menuetto returns to C minor. The tempo marking of Allegro (rather brisk for a minuet) helps avoid what otherwise might have been a somber movement. The central Trio, reminiscent of a Ländler (a rustic Austrian dance in triple meter), has “Schubert” written all over it.

The finale is infused with a touch of the demonic. On paper, the rhythmic pattern suggests a tarantella (a lively Italian dance), but the effect in performance is closer to a gallop – of a ride to the abyss.

 Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959

The A major sonata opens with a grand, majestic subject that breaks off at the end to introduce one of the movement’s most characteristic features, gentle cascades of triplets. Schubert extends both the opening subject and the triplets for some time, spinning out his lyric ideas with ineffable ease. Eventually he introduces the second subject, a serenely reposeful theme as notable for its simplicity as for its charm.

The slow movement is a three-part structure. A gently rocking theme of almost hypnotic power slowly unfolds in F sharp minor. By contrast, the central section is highly dramatic, full of clashing dissonances, long trills, chromatic scales and rumbling bass.

The Scherzo is one of Schubert’s most delightful, and its lighthearted, bouncy mood all the more welcome after the seriousness of the two preceding movements.

The long rondo-finale reveals Schubert at his most endearing and congenial, calling to mind Schumann’s famous comment about Schubert’s C major Symphony: music of “heavenly length.”

Piano sonata in B flat major, D. 960

Olympian in scope, expansive yet coherently organized in its concern for proportion and balance, saturated with gorgeous lyricism and often discussed in terms of hushed reverence by its admirers, the B flat sonata stands as a landmark in the history of musical achievements. The first movement opens with one of Schubert’s most heavenly themes – a tender, reflective progression of smoothly-connected chords suggesting vast spaces and extended time spans. The sublime beauty of this theme is underscored by its utter simplicity. It closes on a low, mysterious trill, as if from a distant region. Three more times we hear the theme, each one slightly altered, but no less ingratiating. “Schubert’s piano melodies are not involved with struggles, metamorphoses and chasms,” said pianist Jörg Demus; “they wander along with gentle corpulence – likenesses of their creator – through the musical keys as through countrysides, changing by means of an apparently abrupt harmonic inflection, appearing suddenly in another light and assuming a new countenance from one measure to another.”

The deeply contemplative second movement is no less sublime than the first, but is cast in a simple A-B-A mold. The accompaniment consists of a constantly repeated four-note figure that in itself contributes to the music’s hypnotic effect.

After two long and profound movements, some lighthearted relief is needed. This Schubert provides in the form of an elfin Scherzo in which the single theme darts about, touching briefly on various keys. The brief central Trio relies on syncopation and a darker mood for its effect.

The finale’s main theme is announced by a one-note “call to attention,” which is associated with the theme upon nearly every subsequent appearance in the movement. On and on flows the music, propelled by endlessly repeated rhythmic patterns and a natural power of melodious invention.

Program notes by Robert Markow, 2012.

 

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