Three Centuries of Keyboard Music

Three Centuries of Keyboard Music

On Jeremy Denk’s Recital Program

Harry Haskell

Tonight’s concert surveys the evolution of the keyboard repertoire from the dance-oriented suites of the Baroque era to the quasi-symphonic character pieces of the 19th century and the relentlessly experimental idioms of the 20th. The half-dozen English Suites that Bach wrote early in his career helped lay the foundation for his four-volume Clavier-Übung (“Keyboard Practice”), a magisterial compendium of contemporary keyboard styles, genres, and forms. Building on Bach’s foundation, the Romantic composerpianists created a new kind of music for the piano, compounded of heroic virtuosity and poetic intimacy. Schumann dedicated his great C-major Fantasy to Liszt, whose innovative forms, harmonies, and sonorities anticipated the musical language of impressionism and modernism. Berg, born a year before Liszt’s death, tempered the concentrated intensity of the modernist idiom with a freer Romantic impulse. Two generations later, Ligeti composed piano music of singular density and complexity based on what he called “simple structures of rhythms and sounds.”

Dances and Etudes

In the years before he moved to Leipzig in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a number of didactic works for the clavier (the generic German term for a keyboard instrument at the time), including the Inventions and Sinfonias and the first part of the Well-Tempered Clavier. At the same time, he demonstrated his facility in the florid French idiom in a set of six incongruously named English Suites. (According to his early biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, they were “made for an Englishman of rank.”) Together with the half-dozen French Suites, they constitute Bach’s earliest contributions to the instrumental dance suite. Based on courtly dances of the day, the English Suites exemplify the elegant, melodious galant style that appealed to well-bred amateurs and cultured aristocrats alike.

The Suite in A minor opens with a substantial Prélude in fugal style, its elaborate contrapuntal puzzles unfolding in leisurely fashion. This magisterial peroration introduces a conventional sequence of dances in the same key, including a stately Allemande, a vivacious Courante, a broadly lyrical Sarabande, and a bouncy Gigue. The suite format was flexible: not all of Bach’s suites contain the same movements in the same order, and some have special companion movements. The A-minor Sarabande, for example, is followed by a richly embellished variation in the French manner (hence the French term for ornaments, agréments). Bach then inserts a pair of flowing Bourrées in duple meter, the first in the home key, the second in the parallel major, and the suite ends as it began, with a brisk, densely contrapuntal Gigue.

György Ligeti came of age artistically during the period of Nazi and Stalinist repression in his native Hungary. In the aftermath of World War II, he dutifully produced his quota of patriotic choral works and other ideologically acceptable music, while keeping his more stylistically advanced scores safely stowed away. After emigrating to the West in 1956, he discovered his distinctive voice in a string of highly influential works, ranging from the cloudlike orchestral tone clusters of Atmosphères to the zany operatic extravaganza Le Grand Macabre. By the time Ligeti returned to writing solo piano music in the mid-1980s, after a hiatus of more than two decades, he was determined to reformulate his musical vocabulary and technique. The 18 etudes he wrote between 1985 and 2001 were designed as exercises to that end. As Ligeti explained, “They proceed from a very simple core idea, and lead from simplicity to great complexity: they behave like growing organisms.”

The six Etudes in Book I exemplify Ligeti’s “micropolyphonic” style, characterized by a dense, chromatic saturation of musical space. “Disorder” is an apt title for Etude No. 1, a frenetic study in pounding polyrhythms. No. 2, “Empty Strings,” explores the idea of rippling arpeggios, while in No. 3 the player is instructed to depress, or “block,” certain keys so the notes don’t sound; the resultant stuttering effect turns what appears on the page to be a succession of evenly spaced eighth notes into a sonic kaleidoscope of shifting melodic and rhythmic patterns. The sparkling “Fanfares” of No. 4 are propelled by a sharply etched ostinato figure (3 + 2 + 3 notes), in contrast to the shimmering, “rainbow”-like sonorities of No. 5. “Autumn in Warsaw,” based on a descending four-note motto, brings the first book of Etudes to a clangorous, cacophonous close.

The Enduring Romantic Impulse

A seminal figure in the Romantic movement, Franz Liszt was both a consummate virtuoso and a musical visionary who prefigured many of the major compositional developments of the 20th century. His vast catalogue includes some 1,000 works in sundry genres, but he is best known for his dazzlingly virtuosic and often richly poetic piano music. Celebrated for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, Liszt took Europe by storm as a young man. At the height of his fame as a concert artist, in the 1830s and 1840s, the lanky, shaggymaned Hungarian’s name was a byword for pianist prowess and showmanship.

Both qualities are on display in the first of Liszt’s four Mephisto Waltzes. Taking his cue from Nikolaus Lenau’s poetic retelling of the Faust legend, he depicts a boisterous wedding feast at a village inn where, in the composer’s programmatic synopsis, “Mephistopheles snatches the fiddle from the hands of a lethargic fiddler and draws from it indescribably seductive and intoxicating strains. The amorous Faust whirls about with a full-blooded village beauty in a wild dance; they waltz in mad abandon out of the room, into the open, away into the woods. The sounds of the fiddle grow softer and softer, and the nightingale warbles his love-laden song.” Liszt paints the scene in bold, vibrant colors, from the relentlessly pounding triplets and rushing rivulets of notes that give the waltz theme its giddy, almost manic energy to the slow, syncopated, meltingly amorous strains of the middle section.

Alban Berg was the most Romantic of the early–20th century Viennese modernists—contemporaries dubbed him “the Puccini of twelve-note music.” Arnold Schoenberg saw a reflection of himself in his prize pupil. “Alban,” he wrote, “had a burning desire to express himself no longer in the classical forms, harmonies, and melodic forms and their proper schemata of accompaniment, but in a manner in accordance with the times, and with his own personality.” Berg’s music, both freely atonal and twelve-tone, stands out for its warm-blooded sensuality and rhapsodic lyricism, in contrast to Schoenberg’s densely packed expressionistic idiom and the radically compressed, aphoristic music of Webern. The rich vein of expression that he mined in such works as the Lyric Suite and the opera Wozzeck have made them popular even with listeners who shy away from modernist music.

Precisely when Berg composed the work that he elected to call his Op. 1 is unknown. The New Grove Dictionary assigns the Sonata a date of 1907–08, but some evidence suggests that it may have been written as late as 1909 (the date given in the equally authoritative Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart), a year before his “graduation” from Schoenberg’s composition class. Schoenberg, who was not given to extravagant praise, described the short, single-movement Sonata as “a very beautiful and original piece.” The first performance took place in Vienna on April 24, 1911, on a program that also included Berg’s String Quartet, Op. 3, the work in which he effectively declared his artistic independence from his teacher.

Berg’s method of construction is characteristically economical: the entire Sonata is based on a handful of rhythmic and melodic motives that are stated and restated, varied, elaborated, and combined in a wonderful example of what Schoenberg would later call “developing variation.” Much of the musical argument derives from the opening theme, a rising dotted figure followed by a series of skipping descents. Although the Sonata lacks a traditional tonal center, the essentially triadic nature of Berg’s luxuriantly chromatic harmonies is never in doubt as the music passes through a series of impassioned climaxes en route to its final resolution on a quietly luminous B-minor chord.

“All the Tones in Earth’s Many-colored Dream”

In the seven years before his marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840, Robert Schumann wrote some of his greatest piano works, including the first and second Sonatas, Kreisleriana, Scenes from Childhood, and the C-major Fantasy. Schumann was infatuated with the budding pianist and composer, ten years his junior; her father’s implacable opposition to the match had the predictable result of driving them into each other’s arms. The lines by the echt-Romantic philosopher and poet Friedrich Schlegel that Schumann attached to the Fantasy as an epigraph were clearly meant for Clara’s eyes: “Through all the tones in Earth’s many-colored dream, a quietly drawn-out tone sounds for one who listens secretly.”

The germ of the Fantasy consisted of a single movement titled “Ruins,” doubtless reflecting the lovesick composer’s despondency. Schumann later expanded it into a memorial triptych to Beethoven with the addition of panels labeled “Trophies” and “Palms.” By early 1838, however, he had reverted to his original conception, telling Clara that “the first movement is probably the most passionate I have ever written—a deep lamentation for you.” For her part, Clara was especially taken with the second movement, in which she heard “an entire orchestra.” By the time the Fantasy was published in 1839, she was on the verge of defying her father and openly declaring her love.

Like many of Schumann’s works, the Fantasy plays on the contrasting temperaments of his fictitious literary alter egos, the stormy, impulsive Florestan and the dreamy, ruminative Eusebius. Florestan takes center stage at the outset, as a broad, majestic melody soars above rippling 16th notes. But the gentle spirit of Eusebius dominates the first movement’s prayer-like middle section and the tender Adagio at the end, in which Schumann quotes a poignant snatch of melody from the song cycle Beethoven wrote to his own “distant beloved.” The second movement is a crisply energetic march pulsing with rhythmic vitality; the boldly annunciatory main theme returns several times in different guises. The finale owes its mood of reverie to Schumann’s searching harmonies and his characteristic technique of embedding the melody in a rich skein of figuration.