Denis Kozhukhin

Hidden Affinities

Music of Brahms, Schoenberg, Boulez, and Prokofiev

Thomas May

For his second solo recital at the Pierre Boulez Saal, Denis Kozhukhin has chosen three works that trace a clear-cut lineage from the 19th to the mid-20th century. Though he would soon come to repudiate Arnold Schoenberg, in his first published works, including his Piano Sonata No. 1, the young Pierre Boulez was especially attracted to such pre-twelve-tone works as the Chamber Symphony as models for new formal procedures—at a time when Schoenberg was indeed poorly understood. The Austrian modernist in turn had reclaimed Brahms as a misunderstood “progressive,” pointing specifically to the ingenious techniques exemplified by his late piano compositions as a source of inspiration for his own concept of “developing variation.” To conclude, Kozhukhin then turns to the most expansive of his compatriot Sergei Prokofiev’s piano sonatas, a work that in turn echoes aspects of the melancholy lyricism and introspection that had putatively been banished with the rejection of Romanticism.

Brahms’s Maximal Miniatures

The very first and very last items in the catalogue Brahms published over his lifetime were for the keyboard: the Op. 1 Piano Sonata and the Op. 122 Chorale Preludes for organ, respectively, with the collections of Opp. 116–119 marking his farewell to the piano. As with so many composers, the instrument provided a foundation for discovering his voice, and Brahms additionally became known to the public as a formidable solo pianist. The conductor and musicologist Leon Botstein observes that an alignment of technical innovations related to piano building and social-political change—an upsurge in the middle class and its demand for musical outlets—accounts for “the significance of [the piano] in 19th-century European culture.” As a result, “Brahms wrote from the beginning to the end of his career for the instrument as a freestanding, autonomous vehicle, capable of transmitting a full musical experience without assistance from the voice or another instrument.”

Nowhere is this more obvious than in his outpouring of the 20 pieces comprising Opp. 116–119, miniatures in form whose range of expressiveness and economy of compositional craft have made them some the most admired of all Brahms’s works. In his solo piano writing up to the Eight Piano Pieces of Op. 76 (1878), Brahms had been mostly oriented towards large-scale Classical forms—sonatas and variation sets—but the intimate medium of the miniature opened the door to a new degree of emotional revelation for this highly self-conscious, secretive composer.

Possibly drawing on some earlier material, Brahms composed these sets in 1892–93, distilling his final say for solo piano into the Four Pieces Op. 119. The simple, abstract title—opposed by his publisher, who tried to get him to adopt a more fetching or even Romantic name for the collection—seems to anticipate the modernist aesthetic, with its renewed concentration on the autonomous processes of the work of art. Arnold Schoenberg turned received opinions on their head by discovering in Brahms a “progressive” tendency pointing the way toward “an unrestricted musical language”—particularly in works such as these highly concentrated miniatures. As the musicologist Larry R. Todd writes, they look ahead, “in their thematic restraint and formal concision, to the experiments of Schoenberg and his disciples.”

Yet the late piano pieces are also profoundly linked to the composer’s personal life and friendships. Of the first Intermezzo in B minor, Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann: “I would like to know how it suits you… Every measure and every note must sound like a ritard[ando], as if one wanted to suck melancholy out of each and every one, lustily and with pleasure out of these very dissonances!”

As a group, Op. 119 juxtaposes the first three Intermezzos with a powerful Rhapsody. The Intermezzo in E minor presents contrasting agitation after the ineffable melancholy of its B-minor predecessor. The third Intermezzo shifts the home key to C major, though Brahms’s subtle emotional gradations defy straightforward correspondences to tonality. Capping the set, the Rhapsody, also in the major, continues to deploy motivic imagination with rhythmic gestures and phrasing. Brahms then turns, unexpectedly, to E-flat minor to conclude his last statement for solo piano.

Formal Ambiguity: Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony for Solo Piano

If Brahms’s style, with its ingenious polyphony and concentrated density, inspired Schoenberg and his circle, the young Pierre Boulez turned directly to Schoenberg as a model for his earliest compositions—in particular, to the master’s Chamber Symphony Op. 9 from 1906. Composed for 15 instruments, the work renounces the aggrandizing tendencies of late Romanticism and its attendant Wagnerian expansion. Aspects of his compositional strategy are indeed very close to the method of Brahms in his late piano pieces— above all, the intense concentration of motivic and harmonic activity within a compressed time frame.

Many different arrangements of this score were later created by Schoenberg and his students, including one by the composer himself for piano four hands and the one for solo pianist made by Eduard Steuermann, which Denis Kozhukhin has chosen for this program. One of Schoenberg’s composition students, Steuermann was the pianist at the world premiere of Pierrot lunaire in 1912 and for the Piano Concerto in 1944.

The Chamber Symphony appealed to young Boulez in particular because of its formal innovations—though soon afterward, following the composer’s death, he renounced Schoenberg, singling out Anton Webern as the true prophet of musical modernism. “In this work you have the four movements of a sonata, but at the same time these four movements constitute the four stanzas, the four developments of a single movement,” the French artist noted in his conversations with Célestin Deliège, admiring the “ambiguity between a small form and a large one” that results.

The Chamber Symphony’s paradoxes have influenced a rich variety of other composers as well, from Schoenberg’s own students, Berg and Webern, to John Adams and other post-post-Minimalists. You might think of it as a sonic Rorschach test. Some hear this score as a last gasp of Romantic hypersensitivity; some focus on its neoclassical, Brahmsian economies and its objective, almost astringent sonorities. For those inclined to analogies from the visual arts, the Chamber Symphony evokes perhaps a canvas splashed with Expressionist outbursts; still others perceive a work arranged geometrically into Cubist dislocations.

Schoenberg compresses the experience of a full-scale symphony into 20-some minutes. Along with the piece’s formal originality, its harmonic structure produces tonal ambiguity through the prominent role it assigns to the interval of the fourth (both ascending and descending) and the whole-tone scale. Following a short introduction, with its mysteriously beautiful cadence on an F-major chord (a half-step from the home key of E major), Schoenberg stacks a series of ascending fourths on top of each other to create a rousing fanfare. The main theme follows, combining the whole-tone scale with triplets and a dotted rhythm. These gestures introduce both the piece’s characteristic harmonic language and a sense of impetuous, forward-driving motion.

As with Brahms, dazzling recombinations of motivic and rhythmic ideas intensify the sense of endless development. Note the polyphonic adventures that occur between the “scherzo” and “slow movement” interludes, where the musical hyperactivity (vertical and horizontal) is as exhausting as it is exhilarating—and even humorous, in its way. Schoenberg himself referred to the “centrifugal” tendencies of his thematic material.

The final section summons back the themes from the first part of the work, in reverse order, directing the music’s jagged energies into an (ironic?) affirmation of a home key in which Schoenberg has hitherto prevented us from finding harbor.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Boulez’s First Sonata

Along with works like the Chamber Symphony, which especially influenced his Sonatine for Flute and Piano, in his early phase Pierre Boulez was influenced by the piano style of Schoenberg’s experimental Op. 11 and Op. 23 (collections of solo piano pieces, like those of Brahms). He notes that the first of his three piano sonatas clearly manifests such influences, “even if it lacks the Romantic hypertension of the Op. 11 pieces. It was the third of these pieces, and also of course the Op. 23 pieces, which led me towards a pianistic style quite different from what I saw around me.”

The year was 1946, not long after the 21-year-old Boulez had begun immersing himself in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system via the instruction of René Leibowitz. The Piano Sonata No. 1 itself caused Boulez to make a furious, never-to - be-healed break with Leibowitz when the latter started marking up the manuscript with “corrections,” prompting the self-assured young composer to exclaim: “Vous êtes de la merde!” As Boulez authority Peter O’Hagan comments, “the First Sonata takes a cavalier approach to twelve-note theory, and Leibowitz might well have been as perplexed as subsequent commentators in attempting to unravel the serial processes of the work.”

Premiered on November 30, 1946, in Paris by Yvette Grimaud, the Sonata emanates an exciting sense of purpose and event that seems to belie its duration of roughly ten minutes. Into the very first seconds, Boulez crams a handful of contrasting gestures: a plaintive opening ascent of a minor sixth (the interval that begins Wagner’s Tristan), then a plunge into the depths, a cluster of notes, suddenly explosive dynamics, a chord splayed across the keyboard’s range.

This is the Big Bang of this miniature, the first of the Sonata’s two movements, which provides the material that Boulez unfolds with a Webern-like accumulation of momentby-moment detail, but with an aggressive concentration all his own. There follows a dazzling toccata, offset by slower, more reflective music. Overall, both the energy and textural precision of this score already foreshadow the hyperactive brilliance of the Boulez to come.

“Tenderness and Nostalgic Regret”: Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata

Only two years before Pierre Boulez introduced his First Piano Sonata, Sergei Prokofiev completed the last of his trilogy of so-called “war sonatas,” the piece in B-flat major—though he initially began working simultaneously on all three sonatas in 1939, before the war. One biographical factor these works do share is their origin at the time Prokofiev met and fell in love with Mira Mendelsohn, during the summer of 1939. A young writer half his age, Mira eventually became the then-unhappily married composer’s second wife, and Prokofiev dedicated his Eighth Piano Sonata to her.

The war years interrupted Prokofiev’s progress on these works, and it wasn’t until 1943–44 that he could focus again on completing the Eighth. There followed one more solo piano sonata (like the Seventh Symphony, a final statement of seemingly remarkable simplicity), though he had sketched out two more before his death in 1953—on the same day Stalin died.

Sviatoslav Richter, who became one of his most significant champions, experienced these works as an epiphany. Following Prokofiev’s private performance of the Sixth Sonata in 1940, he remarked that he “had not heard anything like it before. The composer, with barbaric audacity, breaks with the ideals of the Romantics and includes the shattering pulse of the 20th century in his music.” And he believed the Seventh, which he premiered in 1942, reflected “a world without reason or equilibrium.”

At the same time, many commentators see in the composer’s return to the solo piano (the previous sonata for the instrument, the Fifth, dates from 1923) a continuity with the earlier, pre-Soviet part of his career. The biographer Simon Morrison states that the three war sonatas “are united in the radiant discord of their melodic and harmonic language and the willfulness of their rhythmic writing,” though the Eighth emerges as the most “enigmatic” of the group—and in striking contrast to its predecessor. There are additionally discernible links between the Eighth Sonata and the Fifth Symphony, on which Prokofiev was working at the same time. In addition to the key of B-flat major, the first movements of both works share a pronounced lyrical impulse toward long, harmonically meandering melody.

Emil Gilels gave the public premiere in Moscow on December 30, 1944, less than a month before the triumphant first performance of the Fifth Symphony. Prokofiev’s status in the Soviet Union soared, but he had little time to enjoy it. He suffered a serious injury from a concussion soon after, from which he never completely recovered, and in 1948 was officially castigated (along with Shostakovich) for the transgression of “formalism”—the Eighth Sonata being one of the works cited and consequently banned from performance.

The most ample of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas, it begins with an Andante dolce of grand dimensions whose main characteristic is a sense of continual and restless development even while unfolding a profoundly lyrical, even introspective sensibility. Schubert may even come to mind for some listeners. In his book on the sonatas, Boris Berman perceives “both tenderness and nostalgic regret, as if the composer has allowed himself to look back to the war’s tragic events and to the happiness that preceded them and was shattered.” Both this wandering first theme and a second theme in G minor are subjected to wide-ranging trans formations yet retain the character in which we first encounter them.

According to Berman, Prokofiev, who initially planned four movements, borrowed some material from projects he had worked on earlier on involving Pushkin: a film version of The Queen of Spades and incidental music for a theater production of Eugene Onegin. The latter is the source for the work’s second, “dreamy” Andante, a waltz in D-flat major. The “motoric” and virtuosic Prokofiev of yore comes to the forefront in the toccata gestures of the Vivace finale, whose harmonic roving echoes that of the first movement. Prokofiev recalls earlier themes as well before bringing the sonata to a fiery close in unambiguous B-flat major.