Elisabeth Leonskaja

Tradition and Innovation

Piano Works by Schubert, Schoenberg, and Webern

Richard Wigmore

Towards the end of 1816, the 19-year-old Schubert made his first bid for freedom. Abandoning the drudgery of teaching at his father’s school, he moved into the luxurious home of his sybaritic friend Franz von Schober. Shortly afterwards he gave up his studies with Antonio Salieri, irked by the venerable Italian’s insistence that he should give “the barbarous German language” a wide berth. Resisting his teacher’s efforts to turn him into a cosmopolitan Italianate composer, Schubert had produced some 250 lieder during his miraculous song years of 1815 and 1816. That this frantic pace slackened in 1817 was due at least in part to Schubert’s absorption in the challenge of the piano sonata.

Schubert had begun two sonatas in 1815 but failed to finish either. Now he returned to the medium with renewed enthusiasm, inspired, no doubt, by the presence of a stateof- the art six-octave piano in the Schober family apartment. Another factor behind this spate of sonata composition was his desire to establish himself as a composer in the serious instrumental genres. A sensitive but relatively modest pianist (one of his friends observed that “the expression of the emotional world within him far outweighed his technical development”), Schubert could not follow Mozart and Beethoven as a composer-virtuoso. But he could emulate them by publishing sonatas for the flourishing amateur market. It was surely with the hope—vain, as it turned out—of immediate publication that he composed three sonatas, and began at least three more, during 1817. While publishers were soon eager to acquire Schubert’s songs and piano dances, they baulked at issuing sonatas by a relatively unknown 20-year-old.

Schubert’s first completed piano sonata, the one in A minor D 537, shows him poised between Classical tradition and a more Romantically subjective style. The first movement’s fiery, almost heroic opening has a Beethovenian cut. Characteristically, Schubert then spirits the music from A minor to its polar opposite, E-flat major; and when the calmer second theme arrives, it is not in the expected C major but the more colorful F major, shadowed with minor-keyed harmonies.

The not-so-slow second movement is a leisurely rondo in Schubert’s most gemütlich vein. The theme’s march background becomes foreground in the second episode, an etherealized military march held down to pianissimo almost throughout. Eleven years later Schubert returned to the rondo theme and gave it an added breadth in the finale of his great A-major Sonata D 959. The finale opens with an imposing A-minor unison. But after a brief, haunting glimpse of B-flat major, the music quickly settles into cheerful conviviality, made the more piquant by typically bold modulations and dramatic, mysterious pauses.

Arnold Schoenberg, the arch-subverter of musical tradition, always vehemently denied that he was a revolutionary. He was, he protested, merely perpetuating the great Austro-German tradition from Bach through the Viennese classics to Brahms, Wagner, and Mahler. When his early works—above all Verklärte Nacht—were praised at the expense of his later twelve-tone music, he retorted by saying that there were no fundamental differences, except that in his later works he expressed himself with greater clarity and economy. While Schoenberg may have been a touch disingenuous here, it was always important to him to emphasize continuity rather than disruption—though his hope that his tunes “might one day be whistled by the postman” may have been over-optimistic.

The years 1907–09 were pivotal for Schoenberg: a period in which the extreme post-Tristan chromaticism of his earlier music dissolved into atonality, as exemplified by the Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 and the Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16. He followed these with the epigrammatic Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19, composing the first five in a single day,

February 19, 1911, and adding the sixth on June 17. Each of these rarefied miniatures—none lasting much more than a minute—is a ne plus ultra of concentration, “a novel conveyed in a single gesture, or happiness in a single breath,” as Schoenberg later described the aphoristic Bagatelles of his pupil Anton Webern.

Compared with the Op. 11 Piano Pieces, the textures in Op. 19 are altogether sparer and more delicate, epitomized by the fleeting, diaphanous sonorities of No. 1. The second piece, just nine bars long, unfolds as a gentle tussle between tonality and atonality: the former in the repeated bell-like iterations of the two notes G and B, the latter in sustained, espressivo fragments that touch all the remaining notes of the chromatic scale. No. 3, opening with forte chords in the right hand and pianissimo octaves in the left, is the most fully textured—and it is tempting to add, most Tristanesque— of the Op. 19 pieces. No. 4 is an airy quasi-scherzo that culminates in a ferocious martellato (“hammering”) crescendo, while the whimsical No. 5 distantly suggests a skewed Viennese waltz. With its evocation of slow tolling bells, No. 6 is an homage to Gustav Mahler, whose coffin Schoenberg had accompanied to the cemetery less than a month earlier.

Between 1820 and the autumn of 1822 Schubert began and then abandoned several large-scale instrumental works —most famously the “Unfinished” Symphony—as he struggled to reconcile his expanded subjective vision with the four-movement sonata design. Only with the “Wanderer” Fantasy of November 1822 did he triumph over his creative impasse, through a show of demonic energy (Schubert often treats the piano with a Beethovenian brutality) and through a radical—and prophetic—reinterpretation of the traditional sonata design, whereby four linked movements each grow from a single thematic cell.

More mundanely, Schubert had a strong financial incentive for completing the Fantasy, which had been commissioned by a wealthy nobleman, Emmanuel Liebenberg de Zsittin. Talented though he was (he had studied with Hummel), Liebenberg may have got more than he bargained for in the bravura pyrotechnics and volcanic, quasi-orchestral writing of the outer movements. The composer himself was evidently fazed by the finale. As his friend Leopold Kupelwieser recalled, “Once when Schubert was playing the Fantasy … and got stuck in the last movement, he jumped up from his seat with the words: ‘Let the devil play the stuff!’”

The whole Fantasy grows outwards from the slow movement, a series of free variations on a passage from Schubert’s (by 1822) famous song Der Wanderer. The song theme’s repeated notes and dactylic (long–short–short) rhythm underlie the hammering opening of the first movement. This initial idea then gives rise to a more gracious, lyrical variant, in the remote key of E major, which in turn spawns a leisurely dolce theme in E-flat major.

The scherzo ingeniously metamorphoses the Fantasy’s opening paragraph, while the lulling trio is a beautiful transformation of the E-flat major theme from the first movement. The finale acts as a kind of recapitulation to the first movement. It begins as a strenuous fugue on the Fantasy’s opening theme but becomes less fugal and more deliriously virtuosic as it proceeds, culminating in a titanic send-off that seems to force the contemporary fortepiano to its limits and beyond.

Anton Webern’s Variations Op. 27 date from a particularly distressing period in the composer’s life, shadowed by the death of his friend Alban Berg and the deteriorating political situation in Vienna. He began to draft the work towards the end of 1935 and completed it in September the following year. He originally intended it to be premiered by his friend Eduard Steuermann, to whom it is dedicated. But by 1936 Steuermann, like thousands of other Austrian Jews, had emigrated to the United States. The first performance, on October 27, 1937, was given by the young pianist Peter Stadlen, who had studied the work with Webern. Stadlen later recounted how the composer “sang and shouted, waved his arms and stamped his foot in an attempt to bring out what he called the meaning of the music… He would occasionally try to indicate the general mood … by comparing the quasi improvisando of the first movement to an intermezzo by Brahms or the Scherzo character of the second to the Badinerie of Bach’s B minor Overture…”

Variation had been the guiding principle of Webern’s music throughout his creative life. In the Variations for piano the “theme” is a twelve-note series presented simultaneously both in its basic and its retrograde form (i.e., played backwards and inverted), all within the first seven bars. The series is continually varied, often in compressed form, against the background of a tripartite, ABA structure, with the central section introducing contrasted, agitated figuration. Stadlen recalled that Webern wanted this movement to be played with “a lyrical expression of restrained passion,” and described the first bar as “a suppressed cry of lament.”

The quasi-scherzo second movement has an edgy brightness and energy, with constant alternations of piano and forte and comic-grotesque extreme contrasts of register. As in the first movement, the basic and retrograde forms of the note series unfold simultaneously. The finale, in every sense the work’s climax, consists of six clearly defined variations on its twelve-note theme. After the meditative opening, the music becomes more animated, culminating in the almost violent fifth variation, which ranges across the piano’s whole compass in a sequence akin to the evocation of the glittering stars in Webern’s song Sterne, Ihr silbernen Bienen. The astral “pinpricks” continue in the slow final variation, which transfigures the lyrical tranquillity of the opening.

During 1823 and early 1824 Schubert was plagued by ill-health after suffering from the first symptoms of syphilis. Yet by early 1825 both his health and his spirits were substantially restored. With his reputation growing within and beyond Vienna, the year was a fruitful one both socially and artistically. During the spring and summer, he composed three piano sonatas: the unfinished “Reliquie” D 840, the A minor D 845, and the D major D 850. Each is conceived on a generous scale, with something of the “heavenly length” that Robert Schumann admired in the “Great” C-major Symphony.

As so often in his keyboard music, Schubert seems to be thinking orchestrally in the monumental opening Moderato of the A-minor Sonata D 845. The whole movement grows from the two themes heard at the outset, one bleakly questioning, the other a pounding military march that is later transformed into dancing lyricism. After the mysterious central development, dominated by the opening theme, the recapitulation enters in triple pianissimo in the far-distant key of F-sharp minor—a magical moment. The crisis comes in a long coda that begins in a spectral pianissimo and then drives the march theme in a crescendo of mounting fury that wrenches the tonality from A minor through B minor and B-flat minor. When the home key is finally restored, Schubert continues to rage in savage octaves that recall Beethoven’s famous exclamation, “The piano must break!”

The C-major Andante poco moto (a warning not to drag) is a set of five variations on a simple but hypnotic theme that is initially “concealed” in the alto register. After two variations of increasing brilliance, variation three turns to C minor for a vehement re-interpretation of the theme. When Schubert played this movement during an impromptu concert in Kremsmünster, his listeners were enchanted. As he reported, they told him that “the keys became singing voices under my hands, which, if true, greatly pleases me, since I cannot stand the wretched chopping which even distinguished pianists indulge in…”

The main section of the scherzo, half agitated, half playful, is full of rhythmic teasing. In extreme contrast, the trio is a spiritualized ländler of unearthly calm. The wiry moto perpetuo finale, with its luminous A-major episode, at once evokes a Hungarian march and distantly recalls the finale of Mozart’s sonata in the same key, K. 310—one of so many Mozartian homages that pepper Schubert’s instrumental music and songs.