Nathalia Milstein

The Many Worlds of the Piano Miniature

Richard Bratby

The World in a Dewdrop

The art of the miniature contains multitudes. “The world in a dewdrop” was how it was described by the Viennese cultural historian Hilde Spiel, and that idea—that a small artistic form can distil vast truths—was elegantly articulated by the great Viennese essayist (and friend of Alban Berg) Peter Altenberg. “I put store in the little things of life, in neckties, parasol handles, cane handles, discrete remarks, pearls that roll under the table and no-one ever finds!” he wrote in 1909. “The momentous things have no significance at all!”

Did Arnold Schoenberg have Altenberg’s words in mind when, in 1924, he wrote a preface to the newly published score of Anton Webern’s Six Bagatelles of 1913? They had frequented the same cafés, after all. Certainly, in doing so, he neatly summarized Webern’s mature aesthetic—as well as an entire philosophy of the artistic miniature: “Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. You can extend every glance into a poem, each sigh into a novel. But to express a whole novel in a single gesture, a joy in a single indrawn breath—such concentration is only possible when there is a corresponding absence of self-indulgence.”

Novels, poems: such are the worlds that have been perceived to lie behind the few perfectly-chosen notes of a musical miniature. By the time of Webern’s Variations of 1936, the idea was so wellestablished that a set of variations—the form which, in the hands of Bach and Beethoven, could fill more than an hour—could plausibly be accommodated in slightly more than four minutes of music. There were precedents aplenty: while the pianist Anton Rubinstein compared Chopin’s 24 miniature Preludes Op. 28 (1839) to “pearls,” other pianists have sought to open out these condensed worlds by giving them poetic titles. Alfred Cortot heard “Homesickness” (No. 6), “Funerals,” and “Water Faeries” (No. 23). Hans von Bülow detected “The Dragonfly” (No. 11), “The Polish Dancer” (No. 7) and, most famously, “Raindrops” (No. 15).

There’s no documentary evidence to suggest that Chopin ever thought anything of the sort. But the idea of a miniature as a key to an imaginative universe quickly took root, with Chopin’s Preludes as hugely popular exemplars. It could be a metaphor for the evanescence, beauty, and intensity of life itself (an interpretation that fit rather well with Chopin’s own famously tragic and truncated biography: and if he ever was spitting blood onto the keys, it was during the winter of 1838, while he composed the Preludes in the damp and chilly climate of Majorca). Take the lines by Alphonse de Lamartine that Franz Liszt, in 1854, appended to his most celebrated symphonic poem, tellingly called Les Préludes: “What is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown song of which the first solemn note is sounded by Death?”

Divine Comedies

Liszt might seem at first like the odd man out in this program. Après une lecture du Dante (subtitled “Fantasia quasi Sonata”) was originally published in 1858 as one of a series of poetic miniatures, the second set of Années de pèlerinage, but it quickly acquired an independent life of its own. This 17-minute span of music, as epic in its demands upon the performer as it is in emotional range, sits oddly, perhaps, alongside the supreme concentration of Webern, or Chopin’s perfectly placed brushstrokes. The subject, too, is immense. But Liszt had been refining and performing the work in various forms since 1839. Two movements had been condensed into one. And it was Victor Hugo’s vision of Dante, rather than the Divine Comedy itself, that supplied the final title: “When the poet painted hell, he painted his life, / His own life, a shade pursued by harried phantoms…”

Some commentators have heard a narrative in this tempestuous music: the anguish of the Inferno set against memories of Liszt’s own passion for Marie d’Agoult. Liszt offered no explicit clue. He is distilling a mood and crafting the single-movement form—“Fantasia quasi Sonata”—that it suggests. In 1854, the single-movement sonata or symphony was still a revolutionary concept. And compared to Liszt’s later expansions of the concept and the theme—the B-minor Sonata (1854), the orchestral symphonic poems, and the massive Dante Symphony (1857)—it is a miniature of sorts: condensing the epic into the bare minimum of notes required to imply a still vaster and deeper world, just as Hugo’s poem condenses Dante’s 34 cantos into 31 lines. It’s a powerful imaginative springboard.

Supreme Concentration

Webern’s Variations for Piano might actually have been an enlargement of the composer’s original conception. He composed the three movements in the house in the quiet outer-Viennese suburb of Maria Enzersdorf where he and his wife had lived since early 1932. The third movement was completed first, on July 8, 1936; it had taken him nearly ten months. A few days later, he wrote to his publishers, Universal Edition: “The completed part is a variations movement; the whole will be a kind of ‘Suite.’” With that resolution, the remaining two movements seem to have followed swiftly: the first was finished on August 19 and second on November 5, 1936. The exact form of Webern’s “suite” has prompted divergent interpretations, not helped by his decision to describe the entire work as Variations. The truth, of course, is that Webern’s meaning lies in whatever these three painstakingly crafted sonic jewels reveal to the individual listener and performer; whatever facets catch the light. That ambiguity, as well as that precision, fulfils the traditional role of the miniature: to open up huge imaginative worlds. In preparation for the premiere, Webern travelled for several weeks into Vienna to coach the young Austrian pianist Peter Stadlen (Eduard Steuermann, the work’s dedicatee and Webern’s preferred interpreter, was Jewish, and had already fled Austria). Stadlen recalled that, “Even when I asked [about the Variations’ structure], he refused to talk about it—what mattered, he said, was to learn how the piece ought to be played, not how it is made.” It is enduring advice. Meanwhile the premiere, on October 26, 1937, would be the last occasion that Webern’s music was performed in public in Vienna in his lifetime.

The very title of Sergei Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, suggests fragments or glimpses—flashes of something elusive and vast. It was not original, and it was added only after the composition was complete. In August 1917 Prokofiev had played the new suite at a soirée attended by the Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont. He recalled how Balmont, after hearing the music, rose to his feet and, in what Prokofiev termed “a magnificent improvisation,” declaimed a sonnet: “In every fugitive vision I see worlds, / Full of the changing play of rainbow hues…”

It wasn’t actually an improvisation; the poem was several years old. But then, St. Petersburg in the years immediately before the Bolshevik Revolution was a place of dazzling illusions and dark prophecies—the era of Rasputin, of Fabergé and of Scriabin’s impossible, apocalyptic Mysterium. As the young Prokofiev cut his brilliant, bristling swathe through late imperial society, small pointed forms seemed to come naturally to him. The steel-toothed Toccata Op. 11, the Five Sarcasms Op. 17 of 1912—the names say it all. The Visions fugitives (1915–17) share the conciseness of his earlier piano works, as well as their eccentricities (expression markings like “Ridicolosamente” were intended to tweak whiskers).

Yet there is also a new melancholy and gentleness to much of this music—a wistful, dreamlike quality, as well as Prokofiev’s trademark grotesqueries. After the fall of the Tsar in February 1917, Prokofiev had retreated to the countryside where, confronted with the terrors of real revolution, the young radical experienced depression. He became obsessed with stargazing. Only the 19th of the Visions fugitives, he wrote later, directly reflects what he had witnessed in 1917: “more a reflection of the crowd’s excitement than of the inner essence of revolution.” The music’s instability, as well as its haunted sense of transience, is the true inner reflection of an era of dissolution and change. These miniatures, once again, offer a glimpse into a bigger, stranger, and more uncertain world.

To the Regions of the Ideal

Might Prokofiev—had he not met Balmont—have called them Preludes? His sense of classical propriety would surely have rebelled against it. “Preludes to what?” asked André Gide in his Notes on Chopin. It is a valid question. The piano prelude predates Chopin’s Op. 28, and it had a particular meaning and function. It was the warming-up exercise of the virtuoso: the preliminary flourish before the main work was performed. In the 24 Preludes that Joseph Kessler had dedicated to Chopin a decade earlier, the essential form was that of a short improvisatory piece, concluding with a shift of tone as the final cadence approached—ready to move on into another work.

Chopin dedicated his own 24 Preludes to Kessler (the German edition, that is; the French edition was inscribed to the French piano-maker Camille Pleyel, who had commissioned the set for a handsome fee of 2,000 francs). There is every sign that he, too, intended them as literal preludes to other works, and that he used them as such in his own recitals (he certainly never played them as a cycle, despite the skill of contemporary musicology in finding motivic links between the 24 miniatures). But while Chopin frequently retained key elements of the traditional romantic keyboard prelude—such as the numerous tiny postludes, or the fingersacross-the-keys figuration of, say, Nos. 3, 12, and 23—he was also working from a different model: the self-contained preludes of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which he took with him to Majorca in the autumn of 1838.

And there is also the fact that as he finalized the Preludes— and a he and George Sand found themselves first evicted from the draughty and murderously unhealthy house at So’n Veut, and then settled at the smaller but more comfortable Valldemossa—he was for a long period without an adequate piano. His imported Pleyel piano was impounded by Spanish customs for the best part of a month. When it was released in mid-January, the Preludes were all but complete, though on January 22, 1839 he wrote, tactfully, to Pleyel that “I am sending you my Preludes. I finished them on your little piano, which arrived in best condition despite the sea.” In reality, he was imagining the Preludes—a form traditionally born out of the touch of fingers on keyboard—from a wholly free perspective: each piece a potent, unenlargeable embodiment of a mood, an emotional world.

So it is valid enough to let the imagination roam: to remember that Nos. 4 and 6 were played on the organ at Chopin’s funeral; to savor the delicate Polish flavor of No. 7; to hear No. 24 as both tempest and call to revolution; and to imagine the winter raindrops trickling gently down the panes of Frédéric and George’s troubled Majorcan idyll in the insistent repeated notes of No. 15. These are works of emotion and imagination, first; of the keyboard only second. “I confess I imagined them differently,” wrote Robert Schumann in September 1839, momentarily baffled by a collection of works whose shortest item was just 12 bars long. “They are sketches, beginnings of Etudes, or so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions…” He at least sensed Chopin’s new conception of the keyboard miniature: as gateways to limitless imaginative possibilities. But it took Franz Liszt, as early as 1841, to perceive their full, transcendent scope: “They are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams and elevates it to the regions of the ideal.”