Fragments and Reflections

On William Youn’s Recital Program

Katy Hamilton

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” This famous incantation (and its original German version, “Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand, wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?”) has been recited in bedtime stories across the world for more than 200 years. This evening’s program functions around an “axis of reflection”—works by Saunders and Ravel that deal specifically with magic mirrors of one kind or another. And mirror images, fragments, and reflections are also to be found in the remainder of the repertoire, by Mozart, Grieg, and Schumann. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall is one of Rebecca Saunders’s earliest published compositions. Completed in 1994, after several years of study in Karlsruhe with Wolfgang Rihm, it is a score as notable for its silences—the white emptiness on the page—as for the mysterious and colorful sounds that Saunders conjures from the piano. Saunders has spoken compellingly about the freedom of open spaces as a means of allowing the composer to find the perfect answer, the absolutely correct dots to add to the manuscript paper; and she is also fascinated with the timbral possibilities that can be drawn from a given instrument. Mirror, Mirror makes use of cluster chords, silently depressed keys, and several different percussive sounds derived from the operation of the sustain pedal. But each and every application of these feels utterly precise—a deliberate gesture, not a special effect. The result is remarkably dramatic: the movement of the pianist’s hands does not necessarily indicate that sounds are about to be made, and sometimes gestures cause noises when none are expected. The mirror of the title is not presented in obviously “reflective” or symmetrical passagework and textures, but we do hear the extremes of the keyboard register (most strikingly in the piece’s second section, with a flowing line of sextuplet chords in the middle of the piano from which the player must continuously jab outwards before darting back to the center). Sometimes melodic fragments are built from intervals that step through the looking glass, either in direction or in size—a seventh to a second, 13 semitones up to one semitone down. The tempo changes frequently, the percussive pulsing of pedal stamps giving way briefly to a furious dance before this subsides into an almost chorale-like texture and mood. One has the impression of the flickering movements of many different things passing in front of the mirror’s glass as the piece unfurls, stilling at last into silence as the final image fades.

Such colorful reflections are also characteristic of the final piece on the program, Robert Schumann’s Humoreske Op. 20. It was written during a particularly productive period in late 1838, in which he composed several of the Bunte Blätter Op. 99, the Arabeske Op. 18, and Blumenstück Op. 19. He wrote to Clara Wieck (whose hand in marriage he was still attempting to win, no thanks to her aggressively obstructive father), “The whole week I sat at the piano composing, writing, laughing and crying; this is what you will now find portrayed in my Opus 20, the great Humoreske.” Schumann was the first composer to apply this title to a musical work and spent some time explaining to a friend that to understand the music meant one must grasp the concept of “Humor, a notion deeply rooted in the German national consciousness… involving the happy union of easy-going cheerfulness and wit.” More crucially, however, Humor was an idea and approach important to Schumann’s favorite author, Jean Paul, who spoke of its ability to embody an infinity of contrasts, of dualistic traits and fragmentary ideas. By the time Schumann composed the Humoreske he had already written a number of other piano works inspired by the writings of both Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann, and despite the more abstract title of this piece, the idea of the fantastical character sequence—think of Carnaval Op. 9 and the multiple individuals whom we encounter in that swirl of people and color—is alive and well in this more substantial composition. Indeed, although it is nominally a single piece, Schumann deploys double bar lines throughout the score to demarcate various sections in different ideas and tempi, which conjure Eusebius (one of Schumann’s fictional alter egos) and Kreisler (a literary character created by E.T.A. Hoffmann and the inspiration for Schumann’s Kreisleriana), Bach and military marches. One early critic described it as consisting of a “natural and effortless alternation of the most diverse images, ideas, and sensations,” the tumbling together of fantastical and dreamlike images.

Between Saunders and Schumann come Maurice Ravel and Edvard Grieg. In the case of each composer we are provided with descriptive titles—although, nevertheless, Ravel’s Miroirs was considered to be weirdly incomprehensible by early listeners, and Grieg’s Lyric Pieces were very nearly called something else altogether. Ravel composed his set of five Miroirs between 1904 and 1905, at around the same time as his Sonatine for solo piano. Each piece was dedicated to a fellow member of “Les Apaches,” a close group of friends who sought out innovatory artistic ideas away from the highly conservative atmosphere of Parisian cultural institutions. However, even this close circle found itself somewhat baffled by the end result. In 1928, Ravel recalled that these pieces “mark a change in my harmonic development pronounced enough to have upset those musicians who till then had had the least trouble in appreciating my style.” Certainly the harmonic language of Miroirs seems strange when set alongside the contemporary Sonatine. Major, minor, and modal harmonies meet and bounce against each; high-rolling waves and murky depths are conjured in Une Barque sur l’océan (“A Boat on the Ocean”); the rapid repeated pluckings of guitar strings in Alborada del gracioso (“The Fool’s Morning Serenade”) led Walter Gieseking to number it one of the most difficult piano works ever written. These are the third and fourth pieces in the opus, dedicated respectively to the painter and talented amateur pianist Paul Sordes and the writer and critic M.D. Calvocoressi.

The Ravel scholar Arbie Orenstein suggests that the overall title of “Mirrors” implies “an objective, though personal, reflection of reality.” There are few more appropriate natural surfaces to bring to such a concept than that of water—and this, after all, is the composer of Jeux d’eau—so the presence of the ocean, and the boat tossed about on it, should not surprise us. Une Barque sur l’océan is,

in Calvocoressi’s words, “a veritable small symphonic poem”: the swirling arpeggios of the opening, delicately colored with added sixths and sevenths, turn from gently lapping waves into great swells and sprays before subsiding once again into the rainbows of sunlight on water. Alborada del gracioso is a French reflection of a Spanish panorama: the piano acts variously as a guitar, a languid voice, and a full orchestra. The pointed opening is contrasted with an extended lyrical second section, before we return to the bounce and spin— now taken to new heights—of the piece’s opening mood. When Ricardo Viñes premiered Miroirs in January 1906, the audience immediately demanded an encore of this movement.

After such virtuosic Spanish partying, we return to a far less extensive canvas with Grieg, and a small selection of those short piano compositions published in ten books of Lyric Pieces between 1867 and 1901. Written with an audience of amateur pianists in mind, Grieg in these miniatures nevertheless manages to conjure the most wonderfully vivid and varied textures and colors from the instrument, all within the grasp of a good non-professional player. He also frequently included groups of these pieces in his own recitals and recorded several on Welte-Mignon piano rolls.

In 1886, Grieg completed his third collection of short piano pieces, which included both Sommerfugl (“Butterfly”) and Småfugl (“Little Bird”). He sent the set to Max Abraham, the director of his publisher C. F. Peters—but suggested that they might appear under the collected title “Frühlingslieder,” since most deal with the natural world and the signs and symbols of spring. Abraham was not convinced: he suspected that such a title would suggest to possible buyers that these were simply song transcriptions, rather than original piano works. He suggested a spectacular array of alternative, spring-related titles (“Frühlingsblumen, oder Frühlingsblüthen, Frühlingsblätter, Frühlingsbilder, Frühlingsgrüsse, Frühlingsklänge, Frühlingsträume, Frühlingsmärchen, etc.”)—to which Grieg responded laconically that Abraham should “cross out all spring stories and simply call the work Lyric Pieces, Book 3.” Sommerfugl is the first of this set, the butterfly pirouetting and fluttering in front of the listener as it circles up and down the keyboard’s compass in graceful chromatic flutters. Småfugl offers the most delightful range of readings for that trembling opening gesture: is the bird calling to others, or it is the ruffling of feathers that we hear between those liquid singing phrases? Quite what the answering bass melody is meant to represent is left unclear, though it seems not to be unduly dangerous: the little bird continues to hop and sing to the end of the piece. It is the great joy of descriptive titles that whatever reflections we may find of them in the musical staves is up to us. Bækken (“Brook”) comes from a later set of these miniatures, the seventh book of Lyric Pieces, published in 1895. It is easy to think of Grieg as a mid–19th century composer, but the strange churning harmonies of this piece—almost jazz-like at the conclusion—not to mention that quasi-Impressionist writing in Småfugl, reminds us that he lived and worked into the age of musical Modernism at the dawn of the 20th century. Indeed, he was very much alive, and still concertizing, when Viñes gave the premiere of Miroirs in 1906. (And what better mirror than a brook? It is, after all, the ultimate Romantic judge and confidante, from Grieg’s Haugtussa to Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.) Indeed, four months after the first performance of Ravel’s work, Grieg recorded in his diary a performance he gave with Pablo Casals in a concert that included the complete third book of Lyric Pieces. As they had lunch after the rehearsal that day, he wrote, “I made the colossal blunder of drinking a big cup of coffee. Consequently I didn’t get a single wink of the after-dinner nap that I so desperately needed, with the result that I shook from nervousness during the entire concert… After the Lyric Pieces people continued to shout ‘Hurrah’ and to call me out, but I was so nervous that I couldn’t play any more.”

It seems only appropriate, given tonight’s mirror images, that we should end with the first piece on the program. In August 1784, Mozart’s Op. 6 was published in Vienna, a collection of three keyboard sonatas. The second, the Sonata in A major K. 331, became particularly famous for its lively finale, a “Rondo alla turca,” which was subsequently sold as a separate piece and even “borrowed” by another musician for use as an operatic chorus of Turks in a London opera. The whole Sonata, however, is unusual: it is the only such work Mozart composed that begins with a set of variations (often a finale form—so another mirror image here). A strident minuet follows, the trio calling for hand-crossing and tiny grace notes that hint at the finale to come. Finally we reach the famous rondo. As several Mozart scholars have pointed out, there is very little in this music that sounds authentically Turkish, but that is not the point: the turns in the melodic line, the simple driving harmonies, and the rattling, percussive chords would have signaled that country well enough to Viennese audiences. Perhaps this is simply another reflection: our perception of others revealing more about the nature of our own musical heritage than theirs. What a relief that we can enjoy so many things in the mirror, fair and fantastic, without being forced to choose a single image above the rest.

Katy Hamilton is a writer and presenter on music, specializing in 19th-century German repertoire. She has published on the music of Brahms and on 20th-century British concert life and appears as a speaker at concerts and festivals across the UK and on BBC Radio 3.