Andreas Staier

Andreas Staier

Program Note by Harry Haskell

Keyboard Classicists

Haydn—Mozart—Beethoven

The world in which Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven lived was the world of the Enlightenment, an era of burgeoning individual freedom that found expression in the egalitarian, humanistic ideal of freemasonry. (All three composers had strong masonic ties.) This revolutionary spirit gave rise to the musical lingua franca known as the “Classical style,” whose emergence ran parallel to innovations in the design of keyboard and other instruments. The fortepiano was invented at the turn of the 18th century, but it wasn’t until the 1770s that it came into its own in the hands of such master craftsmen as Anton Walter and Andreas Stein in Vienna and John Broadwood in London.

Although Haydn’s early keyboard sonatas were designated for either piano or harpsichord, the dynamic and expressive features of his later works suggest that he had long been writing with the more modern instrument in mind. Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn was not a pianist of virtuoso caliber, but he habitually composed at the keyboard and often conducted his own works from the fortepiano. In 1788 he acquired a fine five-octave instrument by the Viennese maker Wenzel Schanz. Haydn was partial to Schanz’s fortepianos, finding them “particularly light in touch and the mechanism very agreeable.” Mozart’s piano of choice, now preserved at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, was made by Walter around 1782. Having discovered that the Viennese were willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of attending his subscription concerts, Mozart worked day and night to keep the programs stocked with a fresh supply of music. His boundless energy impressed his father when the latter visited Vienna in 1785. “It is impossible to describe the trouble and the commotion” Leopold Mozart reported to his daughter. “Since my arrival your brother’s fortepiano has been taken at least a dozen times to the theater or to some other house.” The Beethoven who took the Austrian capital by storm seven years later, a few months after Mozart’s untimely death, was a cocky young tyro bursting with talent, confidence, and ambition. He dazzled audiences with his no-holdsbarred approach to the keyboard, which wreaked havoc on the light-framed Viennese instruments of the day. Yet there was a tender, poetic side to Beethoven’s pianism as well. Comparing him to another celebrated pyrotechnician, the amateur composer Carl Ludwig Junker wrote that Beethoven had “greater eloquence, weightier ideas, and is more expressive—in short, he is more for the heart.”

Mozart’s Fantasy

Upon resigning his post at the ecclesiastical court in Salzburg in 1781, Mozart moved to Vienna, where he spent the remaining decade of his life as a highly successful freelance pianist and composer. In addition to writing no fewer than 17 piano concertos, he produced a wide variety of solo keyboard music, ranging from multi-movement sonatas to rondos, fantasies, fugues, and other stand-alone pieces. This diverse body of work illustrates Mozart’s determination to expand the range of piano technique and expression, even as he breathed new life into forms and genres associated with his 18th-century predecessors.

In October 1784, Mozart presented the dedication copy of his Sonata in C minor K. 457 to his favorite piano pupil, Maria Theresia von Trattner, the socially prominent wife of a Viennese music publisher. (Mozart and his wife had lodged in the Trattners’ house for a few months earlier that year; speculation that Mozart was secretly in love with Frau Trattner has never been substantiated.) A few months later, he wrote a multisection Fantasy in the same key, and although the two pieces can be performed separately—hence the different numbers in the Köchel catalogue of Mozart’s works—they were published together in 1785 as Opus 11. The agitated, passionate, and often tragic atmosphere of these sublime works is traditionally associated with the key of C minor. The Fantasy begins and ends with a slithering chromatic theme that is repeated sequentially at different tonal levels. This ominous preamble gives way to a luminous aria in D major, followed by a torrid Allegro, a tender Andantino, and a second, even more brilliant Più allegro characterized by broken chords and intense chromaticism.

Haydn’s Classicism

Haydn occupies a pivotal place in music history. In 1732, the year he was born, Bach and Vivaldi were still in their primes. By the time he died 77 years later, Beethoven was busily ushering in the Romantic era. Haydn’s lifetime thus neatly encompassed the Classical era, and his music reflects the “classical” virtues of clarity, equilibrium, and seriousness of purpose. His influence was felt throughout Europe, although he spent virtually his entire career either in Vienna or in the idyllic isolation of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s country estate, where he served as resident Kapellmeister. After that sinecure, so conducive to leisurely creativity, came to an end in 1790, Haydn embarked on two extended trips to London, from which he returned to end his days in the imperial capital.

Many of Haydn’s 60-odd keyboard sonatas were inspired by women, whose friendship he cultivated in part to compensate for his own unhappy marriage. Dating from 1789–90, the Sonata in E-flat major is the fruit of his intense, but apparently platonic, friendship with Maria Anna von Genzinger, the wife of his employer’s personal physician. “I strongly recommend [the slow movement] to your attention,” Haydn wrote to her; “it has a deep significance which I will analyze for you when opportunity offers. It is rather difficult, but full of feeling.” The Adagio’s blend of lyricism and drama is indeed hard to bring off. (Frau von Genzinger asked that one passage involving a particularly tricky crossing of the hands be altered, a request that Haydn seems to have politely ignored.) No less challenging is the opening Allegro, with its playful starts and stops and contrasts between conjunct motion and wide leaps. The Finale, a rondo in relaxed triple time, is all guileless innocence.

The eminent Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon called the Andante con Variazioni “the finest set of keyboard variations between Bach and Beethoven.” Haydn wrote this masterly set of double variations in 1793, between his visits to London, no doubt with the robust sound of the Broadwood pianos he heard there ringing in his ears. Although the manuscript title “sonata” suggests that it was originally intended as one movement of a larger work, the composer apparently decided that it could stand on its own. There are not one but two principal themes. The first is a bittersweet melody in F minor based on a dotted upbeat figure, the second a perkier tune replete with rolling flourishes. For each theme Haydn provides two variations, alternating between minor and major, after which the F-minor theme returns in what appears to be a simple recapitulation. Instead, Haydn embarks on a long, rhapsodic excursion that comes to rest on quiet unison Fs.

Beethoven’s Innovations

Beethoven was in an expansive mood in 1802 when he composed two highly original sets of piano variations, Opp. 34 and 35, informing his publisher in Leipzig, Breitkopf and Härtel, that he had written them “in an entirely new manner, each in a different way.” (Op. 35 is the “Eroica” or “Prometheus” Variations, one of Beethoven’s crowning achievements in the form.) At the behest of a Swiss publisher, he interrupted the project to write the three Op. 31 Sonatas. Then he polished the variations off, dedicating Op. 34 to a gifted pupil, Princess Barbara Odescalchi. Casting convention to the winds, Beethoven sets each of the six variations on his unpretentious F-major theme in a different key, the tonal centers neatly descending by thirds—D major, B-flat major, G major, E-flat major, and C minor—before returning home to F major (by way of a passing modulation to C major). He injects variety in the set in other ways as well, through contrasts of meter, tempo, and ornamentation, all cannily designed to showcase the player’s (that is, Beethoven’s own) tastefulness and virtuosity.

The Op. 34 Variations and “The Tempest,” the second of the Op. 31 Sonatas, are among the many formally innovative works that Beethoven created in the early years of the century, including the opera Fidelio, the “Eroica” and Fifth Symphonies, the D-major Violin Concerto, and the three “Razumovsky” String Quartets. According to his secretary Anton Schindler, Beethoven was indirectly responsible for the D-minor Sonata’s popular nickname. When Schindler, intrigued by the “poetic ideas” that Beethoven expressed in his music, asked him to provide “keys” for listeners, the composer allegedly replied, “Read Shakespeare’s Tempest.” There is no mistaking the stormy, Romantic character of the D-minor Sonata, whose arpeggios, fantasy-like episodes, and moodily atmospheric harmonies make it a natural companion to the earlier “Moonlight” Sonata.

“The Tempest” opens with a slowly unfurling arpeggio, pregnant with possibility, followed by a shower of dancing eighth notes, like raindrops pelting the ground. These two contrasting thematic ideas generate much of the first movement’s dynamic energy. There’s a magical moment in the development section when Beethoven reprises the opening arpeggios, this time with plaintive, recitative-like elaborations, before bolting off into wild and uncharted harmonic regions. Another rolled chord signals the beginning of the Adagio, in B-flat major, an incandescent rainbow emerging from the Allegro’s darkling clouds. Both here and in the finale, Beethoven explores wide expanses of register, from gruff, subterranean bass to celestial treble. The Allegretto features syncopated rhythms and rippling arpeggios in interlocking configurations that recall the sonata’s earlier movements.