NINETY-FOURTH SEASON
Sunday, February 2, 2025, at 3:00
Piano Series
Alexandre Kantorow
BRAHMS
LISZT
LISZT
BARTÓK
INTERMISSION
RACHMANINOV
Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79, No. 1
Transcendental Etude No. 12 in B Minor (Chasse-neige)
Vallée d’Obermann from Années de pèlerinage, Première année: Suisse
Rhapsody, Op. 1
J.S. BACH
Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 28
Allegro moderato
Lento
Allegro molto
Chaconne in D Minor, BWV 1004 (arr. Brahms)
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany
Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria
Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79, No. 1
COMPOSED 1879
Brahms was a gifted pianist who toured and concertized extensively in northern Europe early in his career. He made his recital debut in Vienna in 1862 and returned there regularly until settling permanently in that city in 1869. By then, his reputation as a composer was well established, and he was devoting more time to creative work than practicing piano. Brahms continued to play, however, performing his own chamber music and solo pieces both in public and in private and even serving as soloist in the premiere of his daunting second concerto on November 9, 1881, in Budapest. His last public appearance as a pianist was in Vienna on January 11, 1895, just two years before he died, in a performance of his clarinet sonatas with Richard Mühlfeld.
Brahms composed his rhapsodies, op. 79, two of his most frequently performed piano pieces, during his lakeside summer retreat in 1879 at Pörtschach in the
Carinthian hills of southern Austria. Despite their scale and strong expression, Brahms had first thought of titling them simply Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces), then considered Capriccio for the first and Molto passionato for the second, but finally settled on the more ambitious Rhapsodies at the urging of his friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, a talented pianist, wife of composer and conductor Heinrich von Herzogenberg, and a trusted judge of his creative work. They were issued in 1880 by Brahms’s long-time publisher Simrock in Berlin as his Two Rhapsodies, op. 79. The Rhapsody no. 2 follows sonata form, though with a short exposition and extended development.
FRANZ LISZT
Born October 22, 1811; Doborján, Hungary (now Raiding, Austria)
Died July 31, 1886; Bayreuth, Germany
Transcendental Etude No. 12 in B Minor (Chasse-neige)
COMPOSED 1826 and 1837–38
In 1826, when, at the age of fifteen, Liszt was being presented in Paris as a child prodigy by his father, he composed a set of twelve etudes. The pieces were published in Marseilles as his op. 1 the following year with a dedication to Mlle Lydie Garella, then one of his most favored piano duet partners. Five years later, in 1831 in Paris, Liszt heard Paganini play for the first time, and he spent the next several years trying to find keyboard equivalents for the dazzling feats that the legendary violinist accomplished on his instrument. To that end, in 1837, Liszt undertook a thorough transformation of his old op. 1 etudes and produced one of the most awesome documents of instrumental virtuosity of the romantic century—the twelve Transcendental Etudes.
Liszt’s op. 1 etudes found their principal influences in the finger-exercising pieces of his teacher Carl Czerny and
the lyrical effusions of fashionable Italian opera. (Liszt’s dozens of arrangements, paraphrases, fantasias, and reminiscences on operatic themes were among the most popular numbers on his recitals.) He had originally intended to produce a cycle of forty-eight numbers, which, like the two books of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, would include two pieces in each major and minor key (C major, A minor; F major, D minor; B-flat major, G minor, etc.), but he completed only twelve movements, giving them no titles except for their tempo markings. He took up the etudes again in 1837, by which time his affair with Countess Marie d’Agoult, wife of the equerry to the dauphin of France, had progressed to the point of the imminent birth of their second child, an event that they chose to await among the Italian lakes; Cosima, later the wife of both Hans von Bülow and Richard Wagner, was born at Como on Christmas Eve.
Liszt retained the thematic materials and key structures of his earlier pieces (he added a title to only one— Mazeppa, associated with Victor Hugo’s swashbuckling poem about
opposite page, from top: Johannes Brahms, ca. 1872 | Pörtschach on the Wörthersee in Carinthia, Austro-Hungary. Engraving and print by the Oester Lloyd Art Institute in Trieste after a drawing by Markus Pernhart (1824–1871) | this page: Franz Liszt, in Hungarian costume, watercolor by Josef Kriehuber (1800–1876), 1838
COMMENTS
the sixteenth-century Polish hero) but created in his Études d’exécution transcendante piano works of almost symphonic breadth whose difficulty of performance led Robert Schumann to call them “Sturm- und Graus Etuden [Studies of Storm and Dread], suitable for perhaps only ten or twelve players in the whole world.” Hector Berlioz believed that “no one else in the world could flatter himself that he could approach being able to perform them.” Liszt returned yet again to the Transcendental Etudes in 1851, when
FRANZ LISZT
he alleviated some of their technical difficulties, tightened their formal structures, and added poetic titles to all but two of them. Even in this “simplified” final form, the version usually heard today in the concert hall, the Transcendental Etudes remain among the most imposing technical and interpretative challenges in the piano’s realm.
Chasse-neige (Snow Swirls) is an almost impressionistic evocation of a winter landscape.
Vallée d’Obermann from Années de pèlerinage, Première année: Suisse
A great man’s reputation precedes him, and Liszt followed where his led. One of Europe’s most famous and sought-after personalities in the nineteenth century, Liszt traveled the length and breadth of the Continent, astounding audiences with his piano wizardry. His biographer Sacheverell Sitwell wrote,
There was hardly a country in Europe to which his journeys did not extend. We find him in Seville, in Lisbon, in Copenhagen, all over
Poland and Russia, in Hungary, and at Constantinople. The scope of his voyages was without precedent in the history of music.
Liszt collected musical images as he traveled, much as did Aaron Copland in the 1930s when he wrote, “Other tourists will pull out their snapshots to show you what a country looks like, but a composer wants to show you what a country sounds like.” Liszt’s most famous “tonal snapshots” are the three volumes of his Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), souvenirs of his travels in Switzerland and Italy in the 1830s. The nine pieces comprising volume 1, Première année: Suisse (First Year: Switzerland), were originally
composed in 1835–36 and first published in 1842 as a collection titled Album d’un voyageur. Liszt thoroughly reworked them between 1848 and 1853 and published them in their final form in 1855. The most substantial movement in the “collection is the Vallée d’Obermann (Obermann’s Valley), inspired by the epistolary novel Obermann (1804), set in Switzerland by the French writer Étienne Pivert de Senancour (1770–1846), who lived in Fribourg during the years following the French Revolution. Both the author and his title character
were melancholy, skeptical, and solitary, qualities that Liszt sought to capture in this tone poem for piano, which he prefaced with quotations from the novel:
What do I wish? What am I? What shall I ask of nature? Every cause is invisible, every end is deceitful; all forms change, all lengths of duration finally come to an end. I feel; I exist only to waste myself in unconquerable longings, to drink of the seduction of a fantastical world, to remain a subject to its voluptuous
opposite page: Franz Liszt, oil portrait by Miklós Barabás (1810–1898), 1847. Hungarian National Museum | this page: Franz Liszt Fantasizing at the Piano. Painting in oil by Josef Danhauser (1805–1845), 1840. Others depicted include George Sand, Niccolò Paganini, Marie d’Agoult, and Hector Berlioz. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
illusion. . . . Inexpressible sensibility, the charm and the torment of our futile years; vast consciousness of a nature that is everywhere incomprehensible and overwhelming; universal passion, indifference, the higher wisdom, abandonment to pleasure—all needs and profound and tedious cares that the heart of man can know; I have felt and experienced them all on that memorable night. I have made a sinister step toward the period of feebleness. I have consumed ten years of my life.
Vallée d’Obermann uses as its generative process the continuing transformation of a somber descending theme given at the outset, a procedure that was later to become the essential working method for Liszt’s orchestral tone poems. In a 2002 essay on Liszt’s early piano works, University of Kentucky faculty member and Liszt authority Ben Arnold gave the following description of the Vallée
d’Obermann’s deeply impassioned, expressive path:
The transformations of the first section are of the contemplative type, but at the Recitativo, the restless and energized quest begins with its turbulent tremolos and impressive octaves. A contrasting transformation begins and conveys the peaceful assurance that something meaningful has been found. The original melody is inverted to create a sublime and glorious moment leading directly into a blissful state. . . . This joy is cut tragically short by a dramatic pause and an abrupt descending restatement of the opening theme. This epiphany proves to be an illusion since the final descending statement creates a heartbreaking close to this incredible pursuit. Obermann almost finds life’s answer and the happiness he seeks, only to realize that it is a mirage.
BÉLA BARTÓK
Born March 25, 1881; Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary
Died September 26, 1945; New York City
Rhapsody, Op. 1
COMPOSED 1904
When he was seventeen, Béla Bartók was admitted to the Budapest Academy of Music to become a concert pianist, with composition as a sideline. However, dedication to his piano studies, a teacher’s disapproval of some faux-Brahms pieces he wrote for composition class, and a bout of serious ill health discouraged Bartók from composing, and it was not until he attended the Budapest premiere of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra in February 1902 that he again became excited about creative work. Bartók was also influenced at that time by the rising tide of Hungarian nationalism that demanded full independence for the nation from Habsburg Austria, and he took to wearing national dress for a time and criticized his family’s everyday use of German. When he started to compose in earnest, he consolidated the Straussian and the Hungarian aspects of his creative nature in the tone poem Kossuth, inspired by the hero of the Hungarian revolt of 1848. His next important work was a quintet for
above: Béla Bartók, The Budapest Bartók Archives
piano and strings, begun soon after he graduated from the Budapest Academy in the summer of 1903, which he followed with the Rhapsody for Piano, written late in 1904. He regarded the quintet as the closing document of his student apprenticeship and designated the rhapsody as his op. 1.
The twenty-minute rhapsody summarizes the training and sympathies of Bartók’s youth: its ambitious scale, motific development, and full textures trace to Brahms; its imposing virtuosity, form, and style to Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies; its advanced harmonies to Strauss (and even, in a few passages, to Debussy). He gave the premiere in Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) in November 1906, by which time he had arranged the rhapsody for piano and orchestra and performed it in Paris; he also made a version for two pianos as well as an edition that shortened the piece by almost half.
Like Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies, Bartók’s Rhapsody, op. 1, is built around the performance method of the Hungarian national dance, the czardas, which alternates between a slow movement—Lassu—and a fast one—Friss. The rhapsody opens with dense, dramatic music (Mesto—“sad”)
that allows the performer much freedom of interpretation. Some transitional phrases lead directly to the Friss, modeled on Hungarian dance idioms and played vivacissimo. The rhapsody closes with a reprise of the dramatic opening Mesto.
SERGEI RACHMANINOV
Born April 1, 1873; Oneg (near Novgorod), Russia
Died March 28, 1943; Beverly Hills, California
Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 28
COMPOSED
1907–08
Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata no. 1 originated in a plan for a large-scale work inspired by Goethe’s Faust, something along the lines of Franz Liszt’s hour-long, three-movement Faust Symphony of 1857. Rather than an orchestral work, however, Rachmaninov settled on an ambitious piano composition, which, like Liszt’s Symphony, would devote one movement to each of Goethe’s three protagonists—Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. Though the sonata turned out not to be overtly programmatic, it did evoke the characters and moods of Goethe’s drama and grew to symphonic scale and complexity. Rachmaninov had doubts about its forty-five-minute length and musicality, however, and he shared his concerns with Nikita Morozov, a classmate at
above: Sergei Rachmaninov, portrait, early 1900s
the Moscow Conservatory, and then went to Moscow to play his draft for composers Nikolai Medtner and Lev Conus and pianist Konstantin Igumnov. They all agreed with his assessment, so he made sufficient cuts to shorten the score by ten minutes, sharpened its content and form, and enlisted Igumnov to premiere the sonata in Moscow on October 17, 1908.
In the notes for his 2017 Onyx recording of Sonata no. 1, pianist Rustem Hayroudinoff, a professor of piano at London’s Royal Academy of Music who has made acclaimed recordings of Rachmaninov’s sonatas, preludes, Études-tableaux, and cello and piano music, reconciled the dramatic inspiration of the work with its classical forms:
Faust [first movement] is characterized by five motifs, which, for ease of reference, I have assigned names: the opening motif of Questioning expresses Faust’s soul-searching; the motif of Sighs
creates the atmosphere of weariness and disillusionment; the motif of Temptation depicts the turmoil of Faust’s restless soul; the Russian Orthodox chant-like motif of God describes Faust’s pursuit of the divine; the motif of Ascent rises toward “the high ancestral spaces.” Within the development section, it constantly pushes and pulls “toward heaven” and “down to earth.” At the point of the most violent conflict at the end of the movement, the resolution comes in the form of a new theme, the motif of Gretchen from the following movement, as if to say, “Only love can offer salvation.”
The Gretchen movement is built around the interval of the fifth, derived from the motif of Questioning. The fifth, the most acoustically pure of all intervals, may also have been used to express Gretchen’s innocence. The motif of Gretchen is repeated over and over
as if relentlessly speaking the words of love.
The finale is the realm of Mephistopheles, but Faust is never far away: his motifs from the first movement are devilishly metamorphosed. The Dies irae [Day of Wrath], the medieval chant from the Catholic mass for the dead, is transformed here into a sinister march. A much darker, vulnerable version of Gretchen’s motif corresponds to the vision of her spirit at the Walpurgis Night [Witches’ Sabbath]. The coda is the final decisive clash between the infernal and divine forces. Faust’s time on the earth is up, and we hear his agonizing soul in the throes of death. The motif of God in augmentation reaffirms its power with colossal, terrifying force. The ending of the sonata is ambiguous: Mephistopheles has the last word, but is it a cry of defeat or triumph?
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born March 21, 1685; Eisenach, Germany
Died July 28, 1750; Leipzig, Germany
Chaconne in D Minor, BWV 1004
(Arranged for Piano Left Hand by Johannes Brahms)
COMPOSED 1720
Though it is known that Johann Sebastian Bach composed his three sonatas and three partitas for unaccompanied violin before 1720, the date on the manuscript, there is not a letter, preface, contemporary account, or shred of any other documentary evidence extant to shed light on the genesis and purpose of these pieces. They were written when Bach was director of music at the court of AnhaltCöthen, north of Leipzig, and represent the pinnacle of achievement in the unaccompanied string repertory. The greatest single movement among these works, and one of the most sublime pieces Bach ever created, is the majestic chaconne that closes the Partita no. 2 in D minor. The chaconne is an ancient variations form in which a short, repeated chord pattern is decorated with changing figurations and elaborations. Bach subjected his eight-measure theme to sixty-four continuous variations, beginning and ending in D minor
but modulating in the center section to the luminous key of D major. Johannes Brahms revered Bach’s music (he was an advisor for the first complete edition of that master’s work) and arranged the chaconne for piano left hand in 1877. Of the chaconne, the noted Bach scholar Philipp Spitta wrote,
From the grave majesty of the beginning to the thirty-second notes that rush up and down like the very demons; from the tremulous arpeggios that hang almost motionless, like veiling clouds above a dark ravine . . . to the devotional beauty of the D major section, where the evening sun sets in a peaceful valley: the spirit of the master urges the instrument to incredible utterances. This chaconne is a triumph of spirit over matter such as even Bach never repeated in a more brilliant manner.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
above: Johann Sebastian Bach, circa 1720, from the painting by Johann Jakob Ihle in the Bach Museum, Eisenach, Germany
