Transcendent Virtuosity

Transcendent Virtuosity

Piano Music from and Inspired by Italy

Harry Haskell

A peerless virtuoso known for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, Franz Liszt took Europe by storm in the early 1800s. Only the Italian violinist Nicolò Paganini and a handful of other charismatic performers matched his superstar appeal. As audiences in city after city succumbed to an epidemic of “Lisztomania,” the Hungarian’s name became a byword for showmanship as well as technical wizardry. The conductor Charles Hallé described Liszt at the piano as “all sunshine and dazzling splendor, subjugating his hearers with a power that none could withstand. For him there were no difficulties of execution, the most incredible seeming child’s play under his fingers.”

The 19th-century cult of the virtuoso had deeps roots in earlier eras. Johann Sebastian Bach was best known to his contemporaries as an unequalled performer on the organ and harpsichord. According to an early biographer, he “acquired such a high degree of facility and, we may almost say, unlimited power over his instrument … that difficulties almost ceased to exist for him.” Domenico Scarlatti’s far-flung fame likewise rested largely upon the “elegance and delicacy of expression” that one observer discerned in his harpsichord playing. The distinction between the virtuosity implicit in Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas, Luciano Berio’s Five Variations, Ferruccio Busoni’s Bach transcriptions, and Liszt’s tone poems and etudes is one of kind rather than degree.

The “Fanciful Flights” of Scarlatti

The 18th century saw far-reaching changes in both musical styles and instruments. Even as the harpsichord was gradually eclipsed by the more powerful and expressive piano, so the crystalline harmonies and contrapuntal complexity of Baroque music gave way to the elegant simplicity of the galant style and the more sophisticated tonal language of Classicism. A prime mover in that transition was Domenico Scarlatti, an exact contemporary of Bach and Handel who looked ahead to the music of Haydn and Mozart. Born in Naples, where his father Alessandro was a celebrated composer of operas and oratorios, he spent most of his adulthood in the comparative musical backwater of Spain. The younger Scarlatti was both a virtuoso harpsichordist and a composer of marked originality, and his sinecure as personal musician to the Spanish queen left him free to indulge his passion for keyboard music.

As prolific as he was inventive, Scarlatti wrote no fewer than 555 single-movement harpsichord sonatas, whose apparent simplicity masks a highly individualistic approach to the keyboard. Chiefly in binary form, with each of the two segments repeated, the sonatas owe their structure, and much of their equally uncomplicated charm, to the popular dances and folk music Scarlatti encountered on his travels around Spain with the peripatetic royal court. Despite his notable innovations in harmony and keyboard technique, the composer modestly labeled his sonatas essercizi (“exercises”) and cautioned performers not to expect “any profound intention” in them but merely “an ingenious jesting with art.” In fact, Scarlatti’s sonatas are both adventurous and seriously challenging, for performers and listeners alike, as the English novelist Fanny Burney acknowledged when she referred to “the fanciful flights of that wild but masterly composer.”

Berio’s “Aural Ping-pong”

Luciano Berio’s Five Variations present a very different set of technical demands. A pioneer in the emerging fields of electronic and electro-acoustic music in the second half of the 20th century, the Italian composer drew inspiration from sources as diverse as twelve-tone music, bel canto opera, and semiotics. Although a hand injury sustained at the tail end of World War II put paid to his goal of becoming a concert pianist, he continued to mine the instrument’s expressive resources in works whose idiosyncratic harmonies, timbres, and gestures are often infused with a keen sense of drama. Indeed, the Five Variations—composed in 1952–53 and revised in 1966—are based on a theme from the opera Il prigioniero (“The Prisoner”) by serialist composer Luigi Dallapiccola, with whom Berio studied in the United States in the summer of 1952. That brief encounter engendered a series of musical hommages in which Berio, by his own account, “entered into Dallapiccola’s ‘melodic’ world.”

In Il prigioniero, set during the 16th-century Spanish Inquisition, a political prisoner is visited in his cell by a seemingly kind but duplicitous jailor who greets him as “fratello” (brother). Two three-note motifs that Dallapiccola associates with that word—the first rising, the second falling—are woven into the densely chromatic fabric of the Five Variations. Berio’s sound world is a rich amalgam of motion and stasis, as cluster-like chords repeatedly fracture into rippling figurations. These soft, Debussyan halos of sound are punctuated by sustained sonorities and stinging tonal shocks in what one of the composer’s foremost interpreters describes as “aural ping-pong.” Berio’s characteristically free application of serialist procedures is reflected in the work’s “retrograde” structure, with the first four variations preceding rather than following the first clearly audible statement of Dallapiccola’s plaintive descending melody (D-flat, C, A). The last sonority we hear—a fading chord comprised of three half-steps piled atop one another—derives from the more hopeful rising version of the “fratello” motif.

Bach à la Busoni

Although Bach’s music fell out of fashion after his death in 1750, he was restored to his place in the German pantheon in the mid-1800s through the efforts of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and other historically minded musicians. But the 19th-century Bach revivalists were hardly concerned with authenticity in the modern sense, as the heavily romanticized editions of his six Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin by leading performers like Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim attest. It may have been David who introduced Bach’s solos to the general public in 1840, when he played the great Chaconne from the D-minor Partita in Leipzig (to Mendelssohn’s spurious piano accompaniment). Not until the Bach Gesellschaft’s collected edition got under way in 1850 did scholarly texts of Bach’s music become widely available.

The Italian composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni edited many of Bach’s works for publication and emulated the Baroque master’s elaborate contrapuntal style in his own music, notably the monumental Fantasia contrappuntistica. His transcription of the Chaconne appeared in multiple versions between 1892 and 1916. Like his predecessors, Busoni argued that he was doing Bach a favor, since the grandeur of his musical conception clearly exceeded the capabilities of the violin and could only be adequately realized on a modern piano. The Chaconne’s majestic architecture rests on the simplest and sturdiest of foundations: its 256 bars are supported by a repeated but ever-changing bass line that provides the harmonic underpinning for 32 stunningly imaginative variations. Busoni preserves both the structure and the contrapuntal textures of the original score, while adding colorings and other effects appropriate for piano, organ, or even orchestra. (At one point, he instructs the pianist to imitate the sound of trombones.) With its octave doublings, transpositions, and occasional newly composed lines, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne is almost as much Busoni’s work as it is Bach’s.

Lisztian Sonnets and Caprices

In 1848, Franz Liszt virtually retired from the stage and devoted the rest of his life to composing, conducting, and proselytizing (with Wagner, his future son-in-law) for the “Music of the Future.” Tre sonetti del Petrarca appeared in his three-volume Années de pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”), composed between 1838 and 1882. The pilgrimage in question was both physical and spiritual: some of the pieces relate to Liszt’s travels as an itinerant virtuoso, while others reflect his late-life decision to take minor orders in the Catholic Church. Steeped as he was in literary culture, it is not surprising that Liszt’s three miniature tone poems (originally conceived as songs for tenor and piano) are, in effect, “deep readings” of Petrarch’s sonnets. In Sonetto 47, the breathless ardor of the lover’s laundry list of blessings is echoed in the subtle syncopations of the melodic line. Sonetto 104 explores the conflicting emotional states engendered by love. “Pace non trovo” (“I find no peace”), the heartsick pilgrim begins: impetuously climbing octaves give way to a pensive, yearning melody that builds to an ecstatic climax, with dazzling roulades and chains of thirds, then subsides in an achingly tender coda. In Sonetto 123, Liszt’s wistful theme is swathed in rolled chords and chromatic runs, a ballad-like setting that emblematizes Petrarch’s “sweet concert” of feminine virtues.

Liszt was bowled over when he first heard Paganini play in 1832. “What a man, what a violin, what an artist!” he

exclaimed. “Heavens! What sufferings, what misery, what tortures in those four strings!” At the apex of his performing career in the late 1830s, Liszt paid homage to the Italian in six fiendishly difficult piano etudes inspired by Paganini’s music for solo violin. Typical of the set is the third etude, freely based on the Rondo alla campanella finale of Paganini’s B-minor Violin Concerto. A favorite of Busoni and other keyboard pyrotechnicians, La campanella (“The Little Bell”) is a veritable tour de force of pianistic legerdemain, with its split-second acrobatic leaps (some stretching across more than two octaves), scintillating chromatic runs, pearly trills, and delicate, bell-like textures. The other five etudes cast equally dazzling spells with their bravura passagework, shimmering tremolos, daredevil hand crossings, and staggered octaves (a Lisztian trademark). In Number 4, based on the first of Paganini’s famous 24 Caprices, Liszt notates the score on a single staff, as if to transform the piano into a violin.