“Peace at the Turbulent Heart of Storms”

Piano Works from Schubert to Ligeti

Richard Bratby

When Igor Stravinsky composed his Piano Concerto in mid-1923, his inspiration was not (as many contemporaries joked) a move “back to Bach,” but Carl Czerny—the dry, derided 19th-century piano pedagogue, whose repetitive patterns in the pursuit of brilliance, clarity, and pure technique, said Stravinsky, “gave me keen musical pleasure.” The encounter proved fruitful: after completing the Concerto, he stayed with the piano, and in Biarritz, in August 1924, he composed the first movement of a Sonata for piano. As he wrote (in his Chronicle): “I gave it that title without, however, wishing to give it the classical form that we find in Clementi, Haydn and Mozart, and which (as is generally known) is conditioned by the use of the so-called Sonata-Allegro. I used the term sonata in its original meaning, as being derived from sonare, in contrast to cantare and its derivation cantata. Consequently I did not feel myself restricted to the form that has become customary since the end of the 18th century.”

Stravinsky completed the remaining two movements in October, in Nice, and it is certainly possible to hear in the two swift, toccatalike outer movements a spirit that is closer to Scarlatti (or the brilliantly patterned contrivances of Czerny’s Etudes) than anything in the classical masters. And yet he admitted that the central

Adagietto emerged from a renewed engagement with Beethoven, whom he had worshipped and then rejected in his boyhood, and now recognized (after close study of his piano sonatas) as “the undisputable monarch of the instrument.” Stravinsky performed the Sonata at La Fenice, Venice during the September 1925 ISCM Festival, despite having an infected forefinger. He later claimed that it was healed the instant that he touched the keys: “a minor miracle.” Arnold Schoenberg, who was present in the audience, walked out.

Robert Schumann encountered Franz Schubert’s last three piano sonatas for the first time in 1838: “I cannot learn whether he wrote these sonatas on his sick-bed or not; from the music I rather surmise that he did… However it may be, these sonatas seem to me to differ from his others in their greater simplicity of invention, their voluntary resignation of brilliant novelty—where he formerly made such great demands on himself—and through a general spinning out of musical ideas, where he formerly joined phrase to phrase with new threads. It is as though there could be no ending, nor any embarrassment about what should come next. It flows on from page to page, ever more musical and melodious, as if it could never come to an end or lose its continuity, broken, here and there, by more abrupt impulses, which quickly subside…”

The publisher Diabelli had dedicated the three sonatas to Schumann: Schubert, had he lived, had intended to dedicate them to Johann Nepomuk Hummel, though Alfred Einstein believes that his inspiration (if emphatically not his model) was Beethoven. But by the time Schubert completed the final draft of this C-minor Sonata in September 1828, Beethoven had been dead for 18 months. We know, as Schumann knew, that its creator had only weeks to live. Schubert did not: he had enjoyed a successful year, with a lucrative and widely discussed concert in March, and had completed (as well as the three late piano sonatas) his E-flat Mass and C-major String Quintet since then.

But as so often, Schumann—while vague on biographical details—pinpoints some essential musical truths. His judgement on the “spinning out of musical ideas” is a natural response to the highly individual scale and structure of the first movement, a sonata

Allegro. If the first theme echoes that of Beethoven’s Variations in C minor (WoO 80), the way the movement proceeds is entirely Schubertian: letting its ideas find their own space in which to reflect, respond to, and play off one another over the movement’s turbulent but utterly individual course.

Schumann’s comment about the music’s seemingly inevitable unfolding precisely captures the inwardness and sense of space of the noble A flat–major Adagio (the key echoes that of the corresponding movement in Beethoven’s C-minor Symphony). With its hymnlike opening paragraph and agitated interludes, this slow movement outwardly mirrors the manner of Haydn at his most profound—but on a boundlessly different scale.

As if to prolong that mood (and in imitation of Beethoven’s C-minor String Quartet), a minuet takes the place of a scherzo. But it is a restless, shadowy minuet whose running accompaniment threatens to blow up into a storm that will sweep the whole delicate image away. The trio—alternating major and anxious minor—offers only the most qualified consolation. And the finale sounds at first like one of Schubert’s huge, whirling dance-finales, in the manner of the D-minor or G-major quartets. But not here: Schubert builds a vast, unflagging sonata-rondo that his biographer Brian Newbould has described as “a tour de force of vitality, stamina (for the performer as well as the composer) and color.” However limitless his vision, this is a composer whose feet are planted very firmly in this world, not the next.

For György Ligeti—born Hungarian and Jewish in a time and place where individual identity could mean the difference between security and annihilation—the provisional nature of civilized order was a fact of life. This existential experience found its musical expression in many of his compositions, including the Études pour piano, written between 1985 and 2001. Each of the 18 pieces focuses on a specific technical problem, while combining pianistic virtuosity with unique and profound expressivity. In Fanfares (No. 4), dedicated to the pianist Volker Banfield, a continuous eighth-note ostinato initially seems to set up a clear structure—but this is quickly obscured by irregular accentuation (in groups of 3+2+3 notes), swapping of the voices, and polyrhythmic shifts between the two hands, with dynamic contrasts between the left and right pushed to the extreme.

Ligeti was endlessly fascinated by the way the physical experience of playing the piano subverted and transformed his creative purpose. “I lay my ten fingers on the keyboard,” he wrote: “My fingers copy this mental image as I press the keys but the copy is very inexact… The result sounds completely different from my initial conceptions: the anatomical reality of my hands and the configuration of the piano keyboard have transformed my initial concepts.”

The Étude No. 5 dates from 1985 and seems to have taken shape as a Ligetian homage to the jazz pianism of Thelonious Monk— but strangely and beautifully transformed by its contact with a very different creative imagination and life experience. It serves as a sort of interlude in the first book of Études; like Debussy (in his Préludes), Ligeti gave it the title Arc-en-ciel (Rainbow) only after he had completed the music.

Even at the height of his celebrity as a virtuoso, Franz Liszt worked ceaselessly to stock his mind with the best that his era had thought and written. As he put it, in a letter to his friend Pierre Wolff in May 1832: “For the last fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working like two lost souls—Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber, are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury…”

Some of these names are more familiar than others to a 21st-century audience. Alphonse de Lamartine was a 19th-century French statesman, poet, and theologian whose fusion of Catholic thought and high-Romantic poetic imagery had won a Europewide readership for his Méditations poétiques (1820) and Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1830s). Liszt felt both a spiritual and a creative kinship with Lamartine, whose words inspired the symphonic poem Les Préludes as well as the piano cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, composed over some 20 years between 1833 and 1853 and dedicated to Liszt’s mistress Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude is the third and longest of the ten pieces in the cycle, and Liszt headed it with lines from the first volume of Lamartine’s cycle:

Whence comes, my God, this peace that floods me? Whence comes to me this faith, with which my heart overflows? To me, who but lately, uncertain, restless, And tossed to the four winds on waves of doubt, Sought good, and truth, in the dreams of the wise, And peace at the turbulent heart of storms.

This is divine love as an unmistakably sensual (as well as spiritual) pleasure: less a meditation than an emotional pilgrimage that travels from the opening evocation of tranquility through two impassioned episodes before coming full circle—transformed and transfigured— in music that echoes the resolve and quiet rapture of Lamartine’s final words:

Though scarce a few days have passed before my face, It seems to me that a century, and a world, have gone by; And that, separated from them by a mighty abyss, A new man revives within me, and begins again.

“I know that I am compromising myself by speaking up for Liszt,” wrote Alfred Brendel, as recently as 1961. The perception of Liszt as a keyboard showman still persists; in his lifetime, it colored reactions to almost everything he touched. Such was his artistry as a performer that Clara Wieck wrote to her future husband Robert Schumann that “after hearing and seeing Liszt, I feel like a student.” Yet when she received the score to Liszt’s B-minor Sonata on May 25, 1854, she confessed to her diary (after the young Brahms had played it to her) that it was “sheer racket—not a single healthy idea, everything confused.” Liszt had labored over the Sonata between 1849 and February 1853; he dedicated it to Schumann as the first of his own works that he considered worthy to stand beside Schumann’s Beethoven-inspired Fantasy Op. 17—which Schumann had dedicated to him as far back as 1839.

Misunderstandings have dogged this mighty work ever since. It is unquestionably the work of a virtuoso, and it equally unquestionably has an emotional narrative; the tempestuous grandeur of its climaxes, as well as its passages of lyrical sweetness, all seem to demand a poetic explanation. But Liszt never supplied any program—though pro- grams were not something of which the inventor of the symphonic poem (Les Préludes premiered in February 1854) fought shy. And although he could play it from memory, he made a point of always using the written manuscript—to the point that his student William Mason claimed that it was almost disintegrating.

Liszt’s point was clear: this was a composition, not an improvisation —and however brilliant its writing, however seamless its thematic and formal processes, and however unprecedented its 30-minute symphonic arc of music, from the somber opening to the final, radiant transfiguration of the opening motif—he expected it to be listened to as a work that stands on its own terms. The B-minor Sonata is a peak from which the whole of Romantic piano music, before and after, can be surveyed: but its creator knew (if his contemporaries did not), that even a great pianist cannot do it justice, unless they are a supreme artist as well. Brendel again, in 1986: “Anyone who plays Liszt without nobility passes sentence on himself.”

Richard Bratby lives in Lichfield, UK, and writes about music and opera for The Spectator, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and The Critic. He is the author of Forward: 100 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Classical Music: An Illustrated History