The Improvisatory Muse

Yefim Bronfman Plays Beethoven, Salonen, Debussy, and Brahms

Harry Haskell

In a sense, most composition is an act of improvisation—the spontaneous interaction between a composer’s sensibility and technique and the musical material at hand. But for the four composers whose music we hear tonight, improvisation was and is key to unlocking the storehouse of artistic creation. “Real improvisation,” Beethoven wrote not long after composing his C-minor Variations, “comes only when we are unconcerned [with] what we play, so— if we want to improvise in the best, truest manner in public—we should give ourselves over freely to what comes to mind.” In the same spirit, one of Brahms’s friends remarked that he played the piano “like one who is himself creating, who interprets the works of the masters as an equal, not merely reproducing them, but rendering them as if they gushed forth directly and powerfully from the heart.” Schumann’s indelible image of the young Brahms having sprung forth “like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove” is mirrored in accounts of Debussy as a conservatory student, improvising on the piano “successions of weird, barbarous chords” that would revolutionize music’s harmonic vocabulary. For Beethoven, ever more dependent on his mind’s ear as his physical hearing failed, freely embracing “what comes to mind” was both an artistic imperative and a practical necessity. Yet a similarly improvisatory impulse lies behind the “capricious and dream-like” music of Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Throughout his life, Beethoven amused himself (and supplemented his income) by writing variations both on his own themes and on popular tunes, from patriotic tub-thumpers like “Rule Britannia” to operatic arias by Mozart and Salieri and an unpretentious waltz by Anton Diabelli. As a young tyro, he dazzled audiences with his no-holds-barred approach to the keyboard, which wreaked havoc on the light-framed Viennese fortepianos of the day. In 1803, however, Beethoven acquired a heavier-duty British-style instrument from the French piano maker Érard. This gave fresh impetus to the “entirely new manner” of composing that he had proudly claimed for two sets of piano variations he had published the year before. These impressively original works—Six Variations on an Original Theme Op. 34 and the masterful “Eroica” Variations—marked a watershed between the polished classicism of Beethoven’s early music and the rawer, more elemental romanticism of his so-called middle period.

Composed in 1806, the 32 Variations in C minor attest to Beethoven’s disciplined approach to musical structure: his newly minted triple-time theme has the majestic character of a chaconne, with a telltale stress on the second beat of the bar and a repeating harmonic sequence that descends methodically by half-step, in the manner of a Baroque lament. At the same time, the work exemplifies Beethoven’s formidable prowess as an improviser, a key test of musicianship in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as a vital element in his creative process. Extemporizing at the keyboard had become increasingly important after his incipient deafness forced him to curtail his performing activity around 1805. The C-minor Variations display a dazzling array of bravura, quasi-improvisatory techniques —rapid-fire repeated notes, scintillating passagework, grandiloquent flourishes, finger-twisting tremolos and trills, tricky cross-rhythms and rhythmic displacements. Beethoven highlights the enhanced tonal resources of the Érard piano by exploring extremes of register, dynamics, and sonority: gossamer skeins of notes alternate with sonic thunderclaps, crisp staccato articulations with gauzy legato textures. Each of the first 31 variations adheres to the theme’s simple eight-bar phrase structure. At the end, however, Beethoven cuts loose in what is, in effect, a 50-bar-long set of variations all its own.

Salonen’s Sisar belongs to a series of short piano preludes in which the Finnish composer-conductor has either road-tested new musical ideas or revisited old ones. The title of the miniature tonal essay is a bilingual double-entendre: sisar, Salonen explains, is Finnish for “sister,” while the cognate Spanish verb means “to steal or filch.” Both meanings apply in this case: “Sisar is the little sister of my orchestral piece Nyx (a mysterious and obscure goddess figure in Greek mythology) and it steals some of its material from the bigger relative.” Salonen characterizes Sisar as “capricious and dream-like, with sudden bursts of kinetic energy interlaced with more static, calmer music. Sometimes characters and gestures mutate gradually into something new, sometimes a new identity is introduced suddenly, like a montage or an edit in a film. I have long been interested in juxtaposing the musical metaphors of organisms and mechanisms in my music. Sisar plays with these ideas in a very concentrated form.” Yefim Bronfman—for whom the piece was written in 2012—concurs. “It’s just six minutes, but it seems like an hour,” the pianist says. “You can immediately hear Salonen’s handwriting, so to speak. It has very rhythmic and also introspective elements to it. It’s a short piece but with definite structure to it.”

Salonen has described his music as the offspring of mixed Scandinavian and French parentage, noting that his 2009 Violin Concerto “could be a child or grandchild of Ravel and Sibelius with an American accent.” Debussy’s 1890 Suite bergamasque is a different kind of hybrid—a “slightly precious mixture of the modern and the antique,” in the words of the pianist Alfred Cortot. An early work, the four-movement suite takes both its title and its fragrantly evocative atmosphere from Verlaine’s poem Clair de lune, which begins: “Votre âme est un paysage choisi / Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques…” (Your soul is a choice landscape / Over which run charming masques and bergamasques…). The authentic bergamask was an Italian peasant dance rooted in the soil of Renaissance Bergamo. For the 28-year-old Debussy, however, the word conjured more refined images of French courtly dances and arcadian revels. By the time he revised the Suite bergamasque for publication in 1905, he had shed the last vestiges of his youthful romanticism. Yet the music’s Janus-faced character remains the source of much of its charm. From the opening flourish, traversing more than four octaves in a single bound, the listener is immersed in Debussy’s unmistakable sound world, a fantasyland of shimmering harmonies, sinuous roulades, and richly embroidered melodies. The Prélude’s stately, measured pace and transparent textures recall the harpsichord music of the 18th-century French claveciniste composers whom Debussy greatly admired, and whose spirit animates the playful delicacy of the Menuet as well. The ever-popular Clair de lune (Moonlight), by contrast, speaks the sensual, impressionistic language of pure feeling. (Debussy’s original title was “Promenade sentimentale.”) The suite ends with a crisp, march-like Passepied, another affectionate valentine to Baroque dance.

Brahms’s “Circles of Enchantment”

“Sitting at the piano, he proceeded to reveal to us wondrous regions. We were drawn into circles of ever deeper enchantment. His playing, too, was full of genius, and transformed the piano into an orchestra of wailing and jubilant voices. There were sonatas, rather veiled symphonies—songs, whose poetry one would understand without knowing the words … single pianoforte pieces, partly demoniacal, of the most graceful form—then sonatas for violin and piano—quartets for strings—and every one so different from the rest that each seemed to flow from a separate source.” Thus did Robert Schumann introduce the 20-year-old Brahms to the world in a famous article published in Europe’s leading music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, on October 28, 1853. Brahms had been Robert and Clara Schumann’s house guest ever since he arrived in Düsseldorf at the end of September, and Robert’s initial estimate of their visitor had been amply confirmed. “You and I understand each other,” the older man remarked after listening to Brahms play a sampling of his early piano music, including the first two sonatas, in C major and F-sharp minor.

Brahms may also have taken that opportunity to audition the second and fourth movements of his piano sonata in progress. In any event, the other three movements of the F-minor Sonata were speedily drafted during the month Brahms spent under the Schumanns’ roof, and on November 2 he performed the entire work for his captivated hosts. After leaving Düsseldorf, he continued to tinker with the piece virtually up to the time the printed score appeared in early 1854. Schumann had been instrumental in bringing Brahms to the attention of publishers in Germany and Austria.

Shortly thereafter, however, the senior composer began his tragic descent into madness and death. With characteristic prescience and magnanimity, he declared that he had seen the future of music and his name was Brahms. The Sonata in F minor is indeed a work of breathtaking confidence and maturity, from the thunderous opening of the Allegro maestoso, with its massive symphonic textures, to the rolled major-key chords that bring the final Allegro to a majestic close. The Sonata is conceived on a grand scale, and although much of the keyboard writing was tailored for Brahms’s exceptionally large hands, equally many passages call for great delicacy and tenderness. The two slow movements, in particular, show Brahms at his most poetic. (The Andante bears an epigraph from the German Romantic poet Christian Sternau that begins, “Dusk is falling and the moonlight shines…”) In the finale, Brahms further endeared himself to his host by incorporating the musical motto F–A–E, standing for “Frei aber einsam” (Free but lonely), the rallying cry embraced by Schumann and his fellow musical progressives.

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.