Alexander Melnikov

Playful Imaginations

Piano Fantasies from Bach to Schnittke

Harry Haskell

Spanning the spectrum from Baroque to modern, the eight works on tonight’s program are united by the spirit of fantasy, which the dictionary defines as “the free play of creative imagination.” To be sure, freedom has meant different things to different composers in different eras. Bach and Mozart exercised their creative imaginations within the boundaries of generally accepted stylistic and formal conventions, such as the pairing of a free-form fantasy or prelude with a strictly contrapuntal fugue. Thanks in part to the ever-expanding tonal resources of the 19th-century piano— as illustrated by the period instruments that Alexander Melnikov is playing tonight—Mendelssohn and Chopin enjoyed considerably more latitude in their keyboard music. With the end of what musicologists call the “common practice” period, roughly corresponding to the abandonment of traditional tonality by Arnold Schoenberg and other early–20th century composers, all bets were off. We continue to live in the brave new world ushered in by pathbreaking musicians like Alexander Scriabin and Alfred Schnittke.

Classic Fantasies

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his D-minor Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in Cöthen while serving as court kapellmeister to the music-loving Prince Leopold from 1717 to 1723. This early masterpiece exemplifies the improvisatory prowess that Bach displayed in his “unpremeditated fantasies,” according to his biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel. True to its name, the work modulates freely, unpredictably, and often daringly. The Fantasy section has a distinctly improvisatory feel as it wends from one tonal center and scalar pattern to another by way of a dazzling variety of figurations and passagework. Bach’s music abounds in surprising twists and turns; at times it sounds as if he himself is not quite sure where his fancy is leading us. The theme of the companion Fugue is a rising chromatic melody that returns throughout the piece, ingeniously embedded at different levels in the contrapuntal fabric and combined with music of a contrasting character.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most famous of Johann Sebastian’s musical sons, combined his father’s contrapuntal skill with the finely nuanced introspection and expressive range of the newer empfindsamer Stil (sensitive style). A much-admired pianist, and the author of an influential treatise on “the true way of playing the keyboard,” he spent three decades in Berlin at the court of the music-loving Prussian king Frederick the Great before rounding off his illustrious career as a church musician in Hamburg. The brooding, mercurial Fantasy in F-sharp minor illustrates the free, fantastical, and often passionately expressive style for which the younger Bach is known. He described the fantasy as an expression “of true musical creativeness [in] which the keyboardist more than any other executant can practice the declamatory style, and move audaciously from one emotion to another.”

Although born more than a generation apart, both C. P. E. Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played a central role in the development of the Classical style, which was in full bloom by the time they wrote these three fantasies in the 1780s. Yet, as Mozart’s keen interest in fugal counterpoint shows, the legacy of the older Baroque style continued to exert a strong hold on composers throughout the 18th century. The agitated, passionate, and often tragic atmosphere of the Fantasy K. 475 is traditionally associated with the key of C minor. (The piece is often paired with a three-movement sonata in the same key that Mozart wrote a few months earlier.) The multi- section work 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.

Mozart’s incomplete (and untitled) sonata movement in C minor K. 396 provides further evidence of his 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. Apparently conceived for violin and piano, this musical orphan has found a home in the solo piano repertoire in an accomplished completion by Maximilian Stadler, the executor of the composer’s estate. Mozart’s manuscript breaks off after 27 measures, only the last five of which contain a violin part, and the presence of a double-bar suggests that he intended to extend the exposition into a fully developed sonata movement. Nevertheless, the unofficial title “Fantasy” has stuck, aptly describing as it does the music’s rhapsodic, quasi-improvisatory character, wayward rhythms, and dark-hued chromaticism. Although the rippling arpeggios that open the second half are Stadler’s invention, his expansion seldom strays far from the path Mozart laid down.

Tradition and Innovation

On a visit to Weimar in 1821, Felix Mendelssohn famously sightread K. 396 from the manuscript in Goethe’s possession, prompting the great man to dub the twelveyear-old prodigy the “new Mozart.” By the summer of 1829, when he took a hiking trip with a friend in the Highlands of Scotland, Mendelssohn was the toast of Europe. Among the musical fruits of his working holiday were the Hebrides Overture, the “Scottish” Symphony, and the Fantasy in F-sharp minor, which Mendelssohn originally called “Sonate éccossaise” (Scottish Sonata). Laid out in three sonata-like movements, the Fantasy opens on a wild, dramatic musical landscape painted in minor/major-key chiaroscuro and punctuated by swirling arpeggios that evoke the sound of the Celtic harp. After the sound and fury of the Con moto agitato ebb away, Mendelssohn treats us to a short, sunlit interlude in the form of a perky Allegro con moto in the major mode. But more Sturm und Drang lie in store in the final Presto, with its raging torrents of 16th notes, percussive triplets, and sharp contrasts between loud and soft, legato and staccato articulation.

Like Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin was firmly grounded in tradition—Bach and Mozart were his favorite composers—but his radically unconventional conception of the piano, coupled with his unique blend of Classical discipline and Romantic freedom, made him one of the most revolutionary figures in music history. Composed in 1841, the ambitious F-minor Fantasy attests to his mastery of both compositional and keyboard technique. As its name implies, the Fantasy is free in form and features a plethora of themes of sharply divergent characters linked by common elements. The ominous, downward-marching theme in octaves heard at the beginning alternates with a surging melody built on the same dotted rhythm. Later, a series of dreamy arabesques pick up speed and morph into torrential roulades. A lightly syncopated, Schumannesque theme gives way to another march, this time jaunty and four-square. Just as all passion seems to be spent, the mood of a quietly luminous interlude in B major is shattered by an explosion of Lisztian fireworks that continues almost uninterrupted to the end.

Shattering the Mold

The Russian composer-pianist Alexander Scriabin was a force of nature, a proto-modernist who shattered the mold of musical Romanticism much as Liszt had done. Highly strung, impetuous, self-centered, and relentlessly driven, he combined a sharp, wide-ranging intellect and a disposition to mystical idealism with an exceptional sensitivity to tonal nuance. In addition to his formidably challenging piano works, he is best known for his luxuriantly orchestrated Poème de l’extase and the ballet Prométhée, which demonstrated his theory of the synesthetic equivalence between colors and musical keys. Scriabin devoted his final years to an unfinished, multisensory theater piece called Misteriya (“Mysterium”), including dance, colored lights, and perfume. Liszt’s influence is on display in the fiendishly difficult Fantasy in B minor, with its thundering octaves, complex rhythms, and dark, brooding harmonies. A contemporary critic commented that Scriabin’s playing “always had an improvisational character. It seemed as if he was creating a piece that you know well from a printed score right there on the stage, in front of the piano.”

Scriabin’s compatriot Alfred Schnittke kept the iconoclastic tradition alive in the later 20th century. Like many musical nonconformists, Schnittke had a tense and often contentious relationship with the Soviet Union’s cultural apparatchiks. Only in the last dozen or so years of his life, which coincided with the glasnost of the Gorbachev era, was he permitted to travel abroad freely and garner wide international acclaim; in 1990 he moved to Hamburg to teach and died there eight years later. As if compensating for his isolation, Schnittke cultivated an eclectic and highly idiosyncratic musical language, juxtaposing widely disparate styles and incorporating quotations from sources as diverse as Russian liturgical chant, Bach, Tchaikovsky, and jazz. Schnittke’s mature “polystylism” is foreshadowed by the virtuosic Improvisation and Fugue, written as a test piece for the 1965 Tchaikovksy Competition but not performed until a decade later. Based on a single twelve-tone row, the two pieces combine formal rigor with a jazz-like improvisatory impulse, as in the left hand’s simulated double-bass pizzicatos.