STEPHEN HOUGH
PIANO
THURSDAY & FRIDAY I JANUARY 30 & 31, 2020 I 7:30 PM KIMBELL ART MUSEUM I RENZO PIANO PAVILION
PERFORMANCES SPONSORED BY
The Board of Directors of the Cliburn salutes with gratitude the generosity of
ATLEE CUNNINGHAM BERLENE & JARRELL MILBURN ROZ ROSENTHAL*
for supporting these performances of
STEPHEN HOUGH PA G E
26
*Made possible by a generous gift to the Cliburn Endowment
CLIBURN AT THE KIMBELL Kimbell Art Museum Renzo Piano Pavilion Thursday & Friday, January 30 & 31, 2020 I 7:30 p.m.
STEPHEN HOUGH
PIANO
J.S. Bach / Ferruccio Busoni Chaconne (from The Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Violin, BWV 1004) Ferruccio Busoni
“Berceuse” from Elegien, BV 252
Frédéric Chopin
Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, op. 35 Grave – Doppio movimento Scherzo Marche funèbre: Lento Finale: Presto
intermission Stephen Hough
Sonata No. 4 (Vida Breve)
Franz Liszt
Funérailles Mephisto Waltz No. 4 (Bagatelle sans tonalité) Mephisto Waltz No. 1
Recordings available on the Hyperion, BIS, Chandos, and Warner Classics labels. Stephen Hough appears by arrangement with CM Artists. Steinway & Sons is the official piano of the Cliburn. This concert is being recorded. Please silence all electronic devices.
STEPHEN HOUGH
piano
Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Stephen Hough combines a distinguished career as a pianist with those of composer, writer, and painter. He was the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the New Year’s Honours 2014. Concerto highlights in 2019–2020 include performances with the New York, Dallas, Toronto, Singapore, Iceland, and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestras, as well as the Slovak Philharmonic, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. With the Malmö Symfoniorkester and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Mr. Hough performs Liszt’s First and Second Piano Concertos, and in May–June 2020, he tours Beethoven’s Third, Fourth, and Fifth Piano Concertos in China, performing with the China Philharmonic and Shanghai Symphony Orchestras, among others. Recent appearances include the Cleveland and Minnesota Orchestras; Finnish Radio, City of Birmingham, and Tokyo Symphony Orchestras; London and China Philharmonic Orchestras; and the Wiener Symphoniker. Mr. Hough is a regular guest at festivals such as Salzburg, Mostly Mozart, Edinburgh, La Roque-d’Anthéron, and BBC Proms, where he has made more than 25 appearances. Recitals in 2019–2020 span the United States, Europe, and beyond, including performances at the Taiwan National Concert Hall, Cliburn Concerts, Caramoor, London’s Royal Festival Hall (International Piano Series), and Wigmore Hall. Mr. Hough’s extensive discography of over 60 CDs has garnered international awards including the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, several Grammy® nominations, and eight Gramophone Awards. Upcoming releases include Beethoven’s complete piano concertos (with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Hannu Lintu) and Final Piano Pieces of Brahms, while recent releases include solo piano works by Debussy, Hough’s Dream Album, and a live recording of Schumann and Dvořák’s piano concertos with Andris Nelsons and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, all for Hyperion Records. His award-winning iPad app The Liszt Sonata was released by Touch Press in 2013. As a composer, Mr. Hough has been commissioned by Wigmore Hall, Musée du Louvre, London’s National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, the Genesis Foundation, Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, Orquesta Sinfónica de Euskadi, and the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. His music is published by Josef Weinberger Ltd. Mr. Hough is an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple; an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society; a 2019–2022 Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; a Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music; the International Chair of Piano Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music; and is on the faculty of The Juilliard School in New York.
s c i s s a l
c
Fort Worth
Kelly Hart & Hallman LLP - Proud Sponsor of The Cliburn 817-332-2500 | kellyhart.com
A NOTE FROM THE ARTIST People are often reluctant to talk about death. Indeed, there is a superstition about the number four in Chinese culture because it shares the same spoken sound as that dark D-word. But in the world of the arts— in painting, literature, and music—death has always been a central subject resulting in the most exalted and inexhaustible expression. Indeed, the omnipresent image of a dead man hanging on a cross is arguably the foundational icon of Western culture. In this recital I wanted to explore some pieces, which have this theme as part of their identity or inspiration. Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata and Liszt’s Funérailles speak for themselves—and that the latter was written in the same month as the Polish composer’s death may or may not have been an accident. Bach’s Chaconne was apparently written in memory of his first wife and Busoni’s Berceuse acquired the subtitle “the man’s lullaby at his mother’s coffin” when he orchestrated it. My fourth piano sonata takes a more abstract if still melancholy inspiration from such ideas: life’s brevity, a “sonata” which ends sooner than expected. And in Liszt’s two Mephisto Waltzes we face the Devil himself—the cause of death and its terrors in traditional Christian devotion: the final fear for the final hour. Death: the only certainty in every life; the final piece on everyone’s recital programme. Ah, but what about the encores? –Stephen Hough
PURSUING YOUR PASSION. In TCU’s College of Fine Arts, we put our passion into practice. Our powerful academic community prepares responsible leaders who elevate the arts through their talent, intelligence and values.
The TCU School of Music presents more than 300 musical events each year, including several annual festivals and numerous guest artists.
JOIN US
finearts.tcu.edu/events
PROGRAM NOTES
BY WAYNE LEE GAY
Chaconne (from The Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Violin, BWV 1004) Johanne Sebastian Bach b. March 31, 1685 N.S. (Eisenach, Germany) d. July 28, 1750 (Leipzig, Germany) transcribed by Ferruccio Busoni b. April 1, 1886 (Empoli, Italy) d. July 7, 1924 (Berlin, Germany) BEHIND THE MUSIC As a Calvinist, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen, who employed J.S. Bach as Kappelmeister in 1717–1723, had little interest in elaborate church music of the sort Bach would later produce prolifically during his quarter-century as a church musician in Leipzig; Bach’s six-year stay in Cothen thus resulted in a period of concentration on secular instrumental music. The masterpieces of purely instrumental music completed by Bach at Cothen include a set of six partitas and sonatas for solo violin. Although works for unaccompanied violin were not unheard of in the 18th century, Bach’s pieces tower above the rest in creating a miraculously rich harmonic and contrapuntal texture on what is essentially a monophonic instrument. The set remained unpublished until 1802, but there may have been performances among Bach’s circle and family members before that time; one contemporaneous source indicates that Bach himself played the solo violin works on a clavichord with added, improvised harmonies. Interest in these works steadily rose during the 19th century, albeit with some unusual, typically Romantic-era reactions, as when Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn each composed piano accompaniments for the set in hopes of introducing the work to a 19th-century audience not quite prepared for the lean textures of the violin alone. Of the total of 30 movements in the entire set, the Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 is the longest, most grandly conceived, and most famous. The masterful musical content of this work has inspired various transcriptions and arrangements of that movement alone, including a transcription for the left hand alone on the piano by Johannes Brahms and a version for full orchestra by Leopold Stokowski, to name just two.
PROGRAM NOTES
BY WAYNE LEE GAY
But the most famous transcription of the Chaconne came from late Romantic, Italian-born, German-based pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni. The study of the music of Bach was a passion of Busoni from his early youth, and the creation of transcriptions as well as heavily reworked editions of Bach’s keyboard works remained a focus throughout Busoni’s career. Though Busoni was himself a prolific (and sometimes controversial) composer in his own right, as well as a busy theorist, pedagogue, and touring virtuoso, audiences in his own lifetime most readily identified him with his large body of piano transcriptions of works originally written by Bach for other instruments. In our time, his transcription of the Chaconne for piano remains the one work by Busoni that music-lovers are likely to encounter in live performance. Busoni produced his version of Bach’s Chaconne at a relatively early moment in his career, at the age of 26, while living in Boston for a oneyear appointment to the faculty of the New England Conservatory. While violinists—and many others—would disagree, Busoni had no qualms about tampering, albeit with great devotion and expertise, with Bach’s music: in 1915, he wrote in a letter to his wife, “It [the Chaconne] always sounds best transcribed for the piano...” FOLLOW THE MUSIC •
A chaconne is a contrapuntal work in which a short harmonic sequence becomes the basis of a set of variations; Bach’s version of this chaconne opens with a sober chorale-like melody, which Busoni transfers down an octave on the piano with slightly thickened textures.
•
Following the conventions of his day, Bach left no expression marks or tempo indications; Busoni liberally supplies both, while adding thicker harmonies and often doubling Bach’s melodic line in octaves, in keeping with the spirit of Romantic-era pianism. After a vigorous opening group, Busoni follows up with a contrasting group of variations marked as dolce and molto expressivo. These in turn quickly give way to a section in which Bach’s passage work for violin is transformed by Busoni into grand octaves and virtuoso scale passages con bravura.
•
A relatively quiet pair of variations follows before launching into a rapidfire group of variations in which Busoni recasts Bach’s solo lines as a complex set of pianistic technical devices, drawing the first part of the Chaconne to a close with grand chords, spread across the keyboard in Busoni’s version.
•
The quietly resonant statement that follows (marked quasi tromboni, or “like trombones”), surely one of the most breathtaking moments in all of music, quickly rises to a grand fortissimo, followed by a passage ebbing and flowing before arriving at yet more grand and, in Busoni’s version, richly pianistic statements.
•
A double octave trill and a sudden shift of tonality announces another calmly reflective passage, giving way to a soft variation in which Busoni returns, under the designation dolcissimo, to the lean textures of Bach’s version.
•
The softer section tugs inexorably toward a final fortissimo statement in thick chords for the final apotheosis. In the closing measure, Bach’s version leaves the listener with a final, profoundly lonely D, implying a D minor tonality; Busoni chooses to harmonize this with a full chord, placing a parenthetical sharp sign (#) in front of the F in the chord to give the performer the option of closing in either a dark D minor or a triumphal D major.
“Berceuse” from Elegien, BV 252 Ferruccio Busoni b. April 1, 1886 (Empoli, Italy) d. July 7, 1924 (Berlin, Germany) BEHIND THE MUSIC The first decade of the 20th century marked the beginning of a new musical era, as composers born into the heyday of Romanticism began laying the foundation of what came to be thought of as “modern” music. The 19th
PROGRAM NOTES
BY WAYNE LEE GAY
century had expanded the possibilities of traditional harmony; the young pioneers of modernism would bend the rules of tradition and eventually revolt, creating the huge array of styles and techniques available to composers during the 20th century and into the 21st. By 1907, Busoni had established himself as a leading figure on the international musical scene, at least partly because of his transcription of Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin. Berlin was now his home and the base of his tours as a concert pianist in the grand romantic tradition. As a composer, however, he joined the movement toward dissonance and polytonality epitomized by Arnold Schoenberg. A set of six “Elegies,” composed in 1907 (each dedicated to a friend of Busoni), marked one of Busoni’s first major efforts in that new direction; in 1909, back in Berlin, he added the “Berceuse” to the set before publication. “Berceuse” and “elegy” are contradictory terms: the former specifies a lullaby, the latter, a lament or memorial to one who has died. But there is a rationale behind the contradiction: Busoni’s mother died a few months after the completion of the Berceuse for piano, after which Busoni made an expanded version, the Berceuse elegiaic for full orchestra, which he subtitled Des Mannes Wiegenlied am Sarge seiner Mutter (“The man’s lullaby at his mother’s coffin”). Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of the orchestral version with the New York Philharmonic in February 1910, in his final public performance. After a rousing ovation, including curtain calls for Mahler onstage while Busoni bowed from the box, the ever-pragmatic Busoni remarked to Mahler, “The audience doesn’t like the piece, but they like me.” FOLLOW THE MUSIC •
The Berceuse opens with standard gestures of a Romantic-era berceuse: a rolling accompaniment in the left hand supports a floating melody line. But several aspects immediately remove this Berceuse from the romantic norms: the rolling accompaniment stretches over four octaves, and the melody, in a low range for the right hand, barely expands beyond that narrow range.
•
A spooky polytonal chordal section follows, drifting at last into a more traditionally romantic passage, with a harmonized melody above the rolling bass, but hardly comforting in a traditional sense.
•
The floating melody finally rests, followed by a mysterious closing section with slowly moving syncopated chords over soft ostinato octaves in the left hand, before dying away—not with a sense of rest, as in a lullaby, but of resignation.
Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, op. 35 (“March funèbre”) Frédéric Chopin b. March 1, 1810 (Zelzola Wola, Poland) d. October 17, 1849 (Paris, France) BEHIND THE MUSIC Frédéric Chopin and the notorious cross-dressing, cigar-smoking author George Sand (née Aurore Dupin) first met in the salons of Paris in the autumn of 1836. She fell in love with him the moment she heard him play the piano; although it took months of Sand’s stubborn pursuit of the shy, already frail Chopin, they began one of the most romanticized affairs of the 19th century in the summer of 1838. Personal misery and disappointment shadowed their liaison, but their partnership resulted in a period of intense creativity for both, including the creation, among other masterpieces, of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, (“Marche funèbre”). As Chopin’s health began to fail in 1838, Sand decided that a warmer southern climate would aid his recovery. Thus, Chopin joined Sand and Sand’s young daughter and son on a hopeful journey to Marseille, Barcelona, and the Mediterranean island of Majorca. Hope dissipated quickly when they found themselves engulfed in civil war in Barcelona, and suffering in a cold, wet winter in Majorca. Sand continued to write, incidentally denying an obvious diagnosis of tuberculosis for Chopin, while Chopin, without his piano for long periods, managed to finish a number of major works when his piano finally arrived, while mentally forming others.
PROGRAM NOTES
BY WAYNE LEE GAY
Thankfully returning to Sand’s pleasant country estate at Nohant, 180 miles south of Paris, both settled into a calm creative pattern in 1839. And the previously sexually profligate Sand became no longer a mistress, but the caretaker of a patient, providing Chopin with a peaceful setting in which to give birth to the works already percolating in his mind, including the repurposing of a “funeral march” he had composed two years earlier into the keystone of full-length, multi-movement sonata. Thus, in the Sonata No. 2, Chopin steps out his mode as a brilliant creator of miniatures, here clearly aiming at—and achieving—a monumental effect in a broad, extended four-moment structure that can hardly be thought of as less than symphonic in scope. FOLLOW THE MUSIC •
Four bold, starkly dark measures provide a succinct introduction to the first movement, launching a wildly racing opening theme in B-flat minor; this in turn gives way to D-flat major and one of Chopin’s most soaringly beautiful melodies. Initially serene, this theme quickly rises to intense passion, before giving way to a passage in which triplet figures (still in D-flat major) chase each other across the keyboard. This entire exposition then repeats, after which Chopin begins a development of the main theme, exploring its possibilities, before repeating the lyrical and triplet themes and landing in B-flat major for an exhilaratingly triumphant final cadence.
•
The second movement, a scherzo in E-flat (reminiscent of some of Beethoven’s stormier orchestral passages), opens with another dark, galloping main theme, including a set of striking rising chromatic scales. A gentle extended waltz in G-flat major ensues, which gives way to a repeat of the movement’s opening theme and a final, brief recall of the waltz theme.
•
One of the most well-known tunes in all classical music follows to open the Marche funèbre movement. Universally recognized as an aural symbol of death and mourning, this passage swings from somber sorrow to raging grief. The sober B-flat minor funeral theme gives way almost ironically to a sweetly gentle middle section in D-flat major, followed by a repeat of the funeral march, disappearing at last into the distance.
•
Famous as the “Marche funèbre” movement may be, it is in the quick, brief final Presto that Chopin makes his most remarkably innovative statement. Parallel arpeggios sweep across the keyboard, transcending traditional harmony and suggesting to at least one commentator a wind blowing over a grave; a final B-flat minor exclamation closes this movement and the Sonata. Chopin’s contemporaries, as well as many commentators in the generations that followed, found this movement bewildering; in the context of the rise of 20th-century musical styles, it became evident that the work represents a revolutionary gesture on Chopin’s part, and a fitting close to one of the greatest of all piano sonatas.
Sonata No. 4 (Vida Breve) Stephen Hough b. November 22, 1962 (Heswall, England) BEHIND THE MUSIC There’s no getting around that the heyday of the piano solo sonata arrived and passed two hundred years ago. The leading as well as the lesser composers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries found the relatively new genre congenial in providing a structural foundation and sense of expectation within which there was plenty of room for experimentation and innovation, and composers of the day enthusiastically took to the form. Mozart left 18 piano sonatas, Beethoven 32, Haydn 62, Schubert 21, and Clementi a whopping 110. But the monumental sonatas of Beethoven’s middle and final style periods cast an intimidating shadow on the rest of the 19th century, as the major Romantic composers limited their efforts to, at most, a handful in the genre of the solo piano sonata. Where Beethoven had left 32, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, and Mendelssohn each left only three—each, however, on a grand scale. The era of tossing off a three- or four-movement sonata in a few days or weeks gave way to an attitude that any effort in the sonata genre would be mercilessly compared to Beethoven—as when Schumann infamously derided the Second Sonata of his friend Chopin.
5 CONCERTS
4 DAYS A REVOLUTION
IN MUSIC
Beethoven 2020 CLIBURN FESTIVAL:
at 250
FEBRUARY 27–MARCH 1, 2020
MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH
ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE KENNY BROBERG
SEAN CHEN
FILIPPO GORINI
2017 CLIBURN SILVER MEDALIST
2013 CLIBURN THIRD-PRIZE WINNER
2015 TELEKOM-BEETHOVEN FIRST-PRIZE WINNER
VERONA QUARTET
JONATHAN ONG & DOROTHY RO, violins; ABIGAIL ROJANSKY, viola; JONATHAN DORMAND, cello
SPONSORED BY
TICKETS ON SALE NOW
CLIBURN.ORG I 817.212.4280
PROGRAM NOTES
BY WAYNE LEE GAY
That situation continued for many composers into the 20th century: Copland, Barber, and Berg—among others—were content to take on the genre only once, often in a single-movement or two-movement structure, with at best a tip of the hat to traditional internal structure. Others, however, opted to make the creation of sonatas a major part of their output: Scriabin left 10, Prokofiev 11, and American Vincent Persichetti 12. Bridging into the 21st century, Russian-Ukrainian Nikolai Kapustin has combined jazz idioms with sonata form for a canon of piano sonatas that recently reached 20 in number. If the golden age of the piano sonata is long past, the genre continues to provide, as it did in the Classical era, a foundation for serious, extended musical expression. Stephen Hough, having built a major career as a performer, along with a sideline as a writer of philosophy and fiction, now hovers on the edge of being a major player in the piano sonata game with his fourth sonata. Hot off the presses, and with a title at once somber and humorous, it declares serious intent combined with an expert performer’s insight into the sonorities and possibilities of the piano. A NOTE FROM THE COMPOSER This piece is comprised of an assemblage and manipulation of five tiny motivic cells lasting a few seconds each. After a page of doodling we hear them lined up in a slow, expressive fugato. This builds up to a climax restating the opening improvised whisper in shouting octaves at the top of the piano after which there is another fugato, this time energetic and rhythmic. The next climax places the fifth of the motivic cells centre-stage in a sudden passionate outburst where we hear it more clearly as a quote from the popular French chanson “En Avril a Paris” made famous by Charles Trenet. The final section allows all the cells to take on a whirling, anarchic life of their own leading to a headlong conclusion, the opening page’s hazy questioning answered with six irate octaves at the bottom of the keyboard. I like subtitles. Vida Breve has no reference to Manuel de Falla’s piece of the same name, but rather is meant to evoke the melancholy of life’s short duration as well as to prepare the listener for a sonata lasting only around 10 minutes.
PROGRAMNOTES NOTESBYBYSANDRA WAYNEDOAN LEE GAY PROGRAM Funérailles Franz Liszt b. October 22, 1811 (Doborján, Hungary) d. July 31, 1886 (Bayreuth, Germany) BEHIND THE MUSIC Revolutions swept across Europe periodically during the first half of the 19th century; 1848 brought the most violent, climaxing in a virulent rebellion in which Hungary attempted to free itself from the burden of the Austrian Hapsburg regime. Franz Liszt, at the height of his career and one of the most prominent Hungarians of the day, sat out the turmoil, safely ensconced in Weimar, Germany, which remained (thanks to a progressive and, incidentally, musicloving ruling family) untouched by the violence that embroiled much of the rest of the continent. While serving in the largely honorary position of Kapellmeister to the tiny Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Liszt spent much of his time in Weimar in a villa rented by his longtime mistress, the eccentric, cigar-smoking (like George Sand), very wealthy, and apparently— according to contemporaneous sources—irresistible Polish-Russian princess Carolyne Wittgenstein. This affair, as well as the news from Hungary, provided Liszt with a plentiful supply of anxiety during the late 1840s, which multiplied when the army of the Russian czar came to the aid of Austria in crushing the Hungarian forces, relsulting in the execution of leaders of the revolution, several of whom were personal friends of Liszt. Meanwhile, Liszt had been at work, since 1846, on his Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (“Poetic and Religious Harmonies”), a set of piano pieces inspired by a volume of poetry of the same title by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, who was particularly renowned for the direct emotional content of his work. Liszt, who sought to emulate the poet’s unfiltered passion in the cycle, responded to the tragic outcome of the Hungarian revolution by adding a substantial movement in honor and memory of his fallen compatriots. The resulting Funérailles was first published as part of the complete Harmonies poétiques et religieuses in 1853; it remains the most frequently performed movement from the set.
FOLLOW THE MUSIC •
In the introduction, a lumbering ostinato in the lower registers suggests a horse-drawn hearse, while a mournful theme rises above, finally bursting into fanfare-like octaves, before dissolving into a long pause.
•
A low, tersely mournful melody in the bass follows, sotto voce, punctuated by chords in the right hand; the right hand then takes over the melody while the left hand accompanies.
•
A gently elegiac passage follows, gradually building from pianissimo to an impassioned fortississimo.
•
A triumphal march emerges, pushing forward over a relentless, nervously energetic left hand before landing on explosive octaves.
•
Liszt closes this tribute to a revolution and its leaders with a reiteration of the themes of the three main sections, rising once again to a fortissimo before closing with whispered chords for the final cadence.
PROGRAMNOTES NOTESBYBYSANDRA WAYNEDOAN LEE GAY PROGRAM Mephisto Waltz No. 4 (Bagatelle sans tonalité) Franz Liszt BEHIND THE MUSIC The final years of Liszt’s long career included his taking minor orders in the Catholic clergy, presumably either repentant of or exhausted by his years of erotic adventure. A pattern emerged in which he spent parts of each year in Rome, Budapest, and Weimar, where, in the small city with a grand artistic history, he presented master classes to a body of students from Europe and America. The period also produced a surprising shift in compositional technique in at least part of his compositional output. In a remarkable anticipation of 20th-century modernism, his longstanding tendency to override traditional harmonic practice evolved into constant chromaticism, abandonment of key relationships, and surprisingly lean textures. The brief Bagatelle sans tonalité exemplifies this change of direction. Liszt wrote the Bagatelle in Weimar in 1885, a year before his death; he initially designated it, in the manuscript, as a Mephisto Waltz No. 4, though he shortly afterward wrote a more conventionally romantic work which now bears that designation. After Liszt played the Bagatelle at home for a group of pupils, one of then, San Francisco native Hugo Mansfeldt, quietly copied the manuscript by hand while Liszt was preoccupied in a card game during the same evening. Mansfeldt then surprised Liszt a few days later by performing the work as an encore in a recital, a gesture that Liszt actually appreciated. Although the title may seem to suggest atonality, it actually refers to a constant change of key centers, with no main home key. And, while the harmonic vocabulary can seem tame to 21st-century listeners, the application of that vocabulary to an economical texture remains intriguing, especially within the context of Liszt’s generally opulent use of the piano in most of the rest of his oeuvre.
FOLLOW THE MUSIC •
A brief introduction suggests, as does the opening of the more famous Mephisto Waltz No. 1 of 25 years earlier, a fiddle being tuned. We know that it is Mephistopheles holding the fiddle, since the diminished fifth, long identified as a demonic interval (and known as “the devil in music”) plays a prominent role.
•
Rapid chromatic passage work follows the introduction, leading into an intoxicated syncopated waltz, succeeded by a traditional quasi cadenza section with typical Romantic-era arpeggios.
•
The introductory diminished fifths return briefly, leading into a slightly varied repeat of the chromatic passage work (this time with the left hand taking the melody); a variation of the syncopated waltz, with added brilliant accompaniment figures, follows. A closing pair of diminished seventh chords deliberately leaves the listener surprised and possibly slightly disoriented.
PROGRAMNOTES NOTESBYBYSANDRA WAYNEDOAN LEE GAY PROGRAM Mephisto Waltz No. 1 Franz Liszt BEHIND THE MUSIC The legend of Faust—the scholar who sells his soul to the devil, in exchange for renewed vigor, adventure, and love—has long been a focus of fascination and artistic inspiration in western civilization. Literary and dramatic manifestations range from the play Doctor Faustus by Shakespeare’s doomed English contemporary Christopher Marlowe to 20th-century German author Thomas Mann’s acclaimed novel Doctor Faustus (in which Faust is an atonal composer) to the Broadway show Damn Yankees of 1955, in which the Faust figure appears as a real estate agent whose pact with the devil transforms him into a baseball prodigy. But the authors and composers of the Romantic era brought Faust fascination to its highest fever pitch, most famously with Goethe’s monumental twopart play Faust. Composers of the era joined in the Faust-mania, exemplified by Gounod’s opera Faust, Boito’s opera Mefistofole, Berlioz’s hybrid operacantata Le Damnation de Faust, and Mahler’s setting, in his Eighth Symphony, of an excerpt from Goethe’s play. Few composers matched Liszt, however, for repeatedly turning to the Faust legend as a source of inspiration. Along with a “Faust” Symphony (and possibly the Sonata in B Minor, which seems to many observers to refer to the story of Faust), Liszt produced four different compositions titled “Mephisto Waltz.” He composed the first of these in 1859–1862, during his final years in residence at Weimar, simultaneously creating a slightly different version for orchestra. Drawing not on Goethe’s version, but instead on an episode in the play by Nikolaus Lenau, Liszt paints a scene in which, according to Liszt’s own preface note to the first published edition: There is a wedding feast in progress in the village inn, with music, dancing, carousing. Mephistopheles and Faust pass by, and Mephistopheles induces Faust to enter and take part in the festivities. Mephistopheles snatches the fiddle from the hands of a lethargic fiddler and draws from it indescribably seductive and intoxicating strains. The
amorous Faust whirls about with a full-blooded village beauty in a wild dance; they waltz in mad abandon out of the room, into the open, away into the woods. The sounds of the fiddle grow softer and softer, and the nightingale warbles his love-laden song. FOLLOW THE MUSIC •
The opening passage suggests, albeit extravagantly, a fiddle tuning up.
•
The first waltz theme immediately follows, decorated by glissandos, thunderous octaves, and brilliant scale passages.
•
A syncopated lyrical theme takes over, developed into a brief set of variations connected by a brilliant trill-like passage.
•
The opening theme returns, this time even more passionately developed, and punctuated by wave-like arpeggios.
•
Sheer pianistic madness follows, as the syncopated lyrical theme returns in lightning-like octaves, evolving into grand, roiling arpeggios.
•
The trill-like passage returns, leading into a surprisingly calm—perhaps exhausted—restatement of the lyrical theme. The respite is short, however, and, after a brief ritardando, the Mephisto Waltz explodes in a final burst of octaves.
A NEW STEINWAY EXPERIENCE HAS ARRIVED IN FORT WORTH, TEXAS Steinway Piano Gallery of Fort Worth, a family-owned and operated showroom, brings the legendary Steinway commitment of quality and customer satisfaction to the Fort Worth area. Located in Sundance Square across from Bass Hall, our showroom offers the finest collection of Steinway & Sons and Steinway-Designed Boston and Essex pianos set in a unique environment for an exceptional selection process.
STEINWAY PIANO GALLERY 501 Commerce St. Fort Worth, Tx 76102 T E L . (817) 665-1853 WWW.STEINWAYPIANOS.COM