The Many Voices of the Piano

Solo Works from Three Centuries

Harry Haskell

The piano has many, contrasting voices. The instrument owes its very name, pianoforte, to its ability to produce sounds both soft and loud. At once melodic and percussive in nature, the piano’s versatility is adapted to a similarly wide range of tone colors and modes of expression. Tonight’s program juxtaposes two pairs of related works, distinguished by their timbral and expressive subtleties, with one of most explosive musical utterances of the 20th century. The impression of spontaneity conveyed by Schubert’s Four Impromptus belies the music’s emotional depth and scope. Jörg Widmann, who has written a series of musical homages to the Viennese master, observes that “before Mahler, Schubert was the one who went the farthest to the most remote regions of our soul.” Another contemporary German composer, Matthias Pintscher, discerns an affinity between Ravel and Boulez as two masters of “sonic architecture” who “follow an intricately detailed plan, while at the same time liberating themselves and giving the music a logical flow.” Prokofiev completed his powerful B flat–major Sonata in the darkest days of World War II. By turns percussive and lyrical, thunderously loud and mesmerizingly soft, the music expresses what pianist Sviatoslav Richter called “the anxiously threatening atmosphere of a world that has lost its balance.”

Schubert’s two sets of Impromptus, D 899 and D 935, date from the closing months of 1827. That fall he made an extended excursion to Graz, where, he wrote, “I spent the happiest days I have for a long time.” The composer may have treated his friends in Graz to a preview of his works in progress at one of their informal house concerts, known as “Schubertiads.” (Like many of his later works, the D 935 Impromptus were not performed publicly in his lifetime; the set was published posthumously in 1838 by Diabelli as Op. 142.) Despite his debilitating headaches, probably related to the syphilis that he had contracted several years earlier, Schubert maintained an active social and musical life. In late 1827 he returned to the piano trio medium after a hiatus of some 15 years, producing two trios in quick succession. The buoyant mood of these monumental masterworks contrasts with the somber introspection of the contemporaneous song cycle Winterreise. It seems likely that both sets of Impromptus were conceived as integral units; indeed, Schumann, one of Schubert’s posthumous champions, viewed D 935 as a sonata in all but name. “A sonata is such a mark of honor in a composer’s work,” he remarked, “that I would like to credit him with one more, in fact with 20 more such works.” The Four Impromptus fit together like a sonata, with a bright, expository introduction, a dancelike second movement, a serenely lyrical slow movement, and a brilliantly propulsive finale. Three of the four pieces display the rounded, repeating forms that Schubert favored. In Impromptu No. 1, however, it is the infinite variety of his handling of the songlike themes, more than the symmetrical ABABA structure, that engages the listener’s attention. The gently syncopated pulses of No. 2 become stinging accents in the spitfire trio section, and the simple, four-square theme of Impromptu No. 3 is magically transformed in five dazzlingly imaginative variations. Equally alluring is the concluding Allegro scherzando, with its playful mix of triple and duple meters.

Born in 1973, on the cusp of the postmodernist era, Jörg Widmann came of age with the musical past at his fingertips, and much of his music is characterized by a creative engagement with historical forms, genres, and styles. Along with his Lied for orchestra and Octet for strings and winds, Idyll und Abgrund (“Idyll and Abyss”) is one of several pieces that he describes as Schubert “reminiscences.” Composed in 2009, it was designed as a prelude to the latter’s

valedictory Sonata in B-flat major D 960. The first of Widmann’s six short pieces, marked “unreal, from afar,” features a muffled, murky tremolo—alluding to the subterranean rumblings that punctuate the sonata’s first movement—while the “sad, desolate” finale recalls the sonata’s placid opening in its gently pulsing C-major chords. The intervening four sections, which flow into each other without clearly defined beginnings or endings, offer differently distorted takes on Schubert’s music, from the lethargic, off-kilter waltz of the third piece—which gets slower and slower, “like a music box about to run down”—to the capricious melodic arabesques of the fourth, anchored by simple repeating patterns in the left hand.

“Why am I so obsessed with Schubert’s music?” Widmann asks in a commentary he wrote on Idyll und Abgrund. “There is utopia in his music. Before Freud, Schubert was the one who knew something about our soul—something about the human psyche. Despair, and at the same time beauty, that is Schubert: Idyll und Abgrund, idyll and abyss… not only one at a time, but existing at the same time. Therefore, this piece is dangerously tonal. Though on the surface it looks (and is) tonal, it is no less a modern piece of mine. As always in my music, it is about… what you expect to hear, where you expect it to go, and where the music goes instead; as in Schubert’s piano sonatas, where he takes you to the most remote keys and you think, ‘How did we get here?’”

A French Connection

Having made his mark in Paris at the turn of the 20th century with a group of brilliantly crafted piano pieces, Maurice Ravel assiduously refined his art, pruning away superfluous notes and gestures in search of the “definitive clarity” that was his declared ideal. From an early age, Ravel was marked to succeed Debussy as the poet laureate of French music. The two men shared a poetic sensibility and a fondness for sensuous, impressionistic timbres and textures. Unlike the older composer, however, Ravel was a classicist at heart. Many of his works evoke composers and styles of the past, even as they incorporate ultramodern harmonies and compositional styles. The Sonatina dates from 1905, the same year in which Ravel put the finishing touches on his piano cycle Miroirs and the Introduction and Allegro for harp, string quartet, flute, and clarinet. Despite his burgeoning fame, the 30-year-old composer had experienced his fourth rejection in the annual competition for the Prix de Rome. But his repeated failure to win the coveted prize, a rite of passage for French composers seeking establishment approval, merely stiffened his resolve to blaze his own path.

Ravel’s Sonatina, or “Little Sonata,” departs from 19th-century norms in its concision, its rhetorical restraint, and its flexible handling of thematic material. The abbreviated three-movement structure was well suited to his search for clarity, of both form and texture. The opening Modéré features a pair of alternating themes—the first restlessly swooning, the second tender and wistful—each occupying its own neatly delineated musical space. The second movement, with its rolled chords and grace notes, evokes the refined delicacy of a classical minuet; Ravel cautioned that it should not be played “with too much of a lilt.” An unexpectedly full-throated coda serves as a bridge to the propulsive, toccata-like finale, marked “Animé.” Amidst the raging torrent of notes, Ravel brings back the winsomely beautiful first theme of the Modéré, recalling the cyclical structure of his recently premiered String Quartet. Four decades separate Boulez’s Douze Notations (“Twelve Notations”) from Ravel’s Sonatina. Yet the two works share acommon lineage in their formal lucidity, shapely melodic contours, and crystalline, sharply etched textures. Composed in 1945, while Boulez was studying at the Paris Conservatoire, these dozen highly compressed miniatures reflect the competing claims of his teachers Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. The latter, a staunch champion of Schoenberg’s still-controversial twelve-tone technique (based on the twelve notes of the chromatic scale), introduced Boulez to the serial procedures that would form the backbone of his later work. But the young composer, by his own account, “soon rebelled against the hero worship” that characterized his mentor’s classroom sessions. Douze Notations was motivated in part by a desire to “make fun of Leibowitz’s dogmatism.” The number 12—a “sacred number” to the high priests of serialism—informs the work at various levels: each of the twelve pieces is twelve bars long, and each employs a different version of the work’s underlying twelve-note tone row. Parsed in that way, Douze Notations sounds suspiciously like a compositional exercise (which may help explain why Boulez withheld it from publication until 1985). By his own later admission, the budding master opted for an aphoristic, Webernesque format because “I couldn’t master long works, for the technique was still new to me.” Moreover, “I was 20 years old at the time, and unless your name is Rimbaud you can’t invent anything new at the age of 20.” At the same time, Boulez saw his “benevolent critique” of the Schoenbergian method as a necessary step toward formulating his own, conspicuously undogmatic musical language. In its combination of formal rigor and expressive spontaneity, spiky eruptions and soft, seductive surfaces, Douze Notations anticipates the alluring complexity of Boulez’s mature works. If the influence of Leibowitz and Schoenberg is ubiquitous, Messiaen’s spirit is no less apparent in the music’s multifarious timbres, metrical freedom, and precisely measured note durations, to say nothing of expressive markings like fantasque (capricious), hiératique (solemn), and puissant et âpre (powerful and harsh).

“Chaos and Uncertainty Rein”

Sergei Prokofiev rose to fame before World War I on the strength of such driving, acerbically dissonant works as the Scythian Suite and the Second Piano Concerto, both written in his early 20s. During the war he tapped a more poetic vein in smaller-scale works like the delicately impressionistic Visions fugitives for solo piano, while anticipating the clear-textured neoclassicism of 1920s in his effervescent “Classical” Symphony. The Sonata in B-flat major was born of the traumatic upheavals of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Safely sequestered in the Russian hinterland, Prokofiev labored over the score for more than three years as the Nazi Wehrmacht besieged Leningrad and the Soviet Union mobilized for total war. A few of the works he composed during this period, such as the lighthearted Sonata in D major for flute or violin, reflect his insulation from the conflict. Not so the Seventh Sonata. Sviatoslav Richter, who played the premiere in Moscow on January 18, 1943, warned that “with this work we are brutally plunged” into a world in which “chaos and uncertainty reign.”

Both the sonata’s turbulence and its emotional intensity are signposted in the tempo markings of the three movements: inquieto (“troubled, restless”), caloroso (“warm”), and precipitato (“headlong, rushed”). The Allegro inquieto, a macabre dance of death, contains some of the most dissonant and aggressively percussive music Prokofiev ever wrote; even the slightly fantastical lyricism of the quiet interludes is more unsettling than comforting. The Andante caloroso, with its yearning cantabile theme swaddled in softly pulsating chords, is as gentle as the first movement is bombastic. The music surges to an anguished climax, characterized by slashing dissonances and bravura passagework, before collapsing in exhaustion. For a finale, Prokofiev gives us a short, breathlessly propulsive toccata with a distinctly jazzy feel in both its harmonies and its irregular 7/8 meter.

A former music editor for Yale University Press, Harry Haskell is a program annotator for Carnegie Hall in New York, the Edinburgh Festival, and other venues, and the author of several books, including The Early Music Revival: A History, winner of the 2014 Prix des Muses awarded by the Fondation Singer-Polignac.