Wilde plays Beethoven
Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2
Sonata No. 21 in C, Op. 53 ‘Waldstein’
Sonata No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110
Wilde plays Beethoven
Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2
Piano Sonata No. 21 in C, Op. 53 ‘Waldstein’
Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
David Wilde piano
Piano Sonata No. 21 in C, Op. 53 ‘Waldstein’
1 Allegro con brio [10:48]
2 Introduzione: Adagio molto: attacca [4:19]
3 Rondo: Allegretto moderato – Prestissimo [10:12]
Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, ‘The Temptest’
4 Largo - Allegro [10:33]
5 Adagio [8:39]
6 Allegretto [7:05]
Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110
7 Moderato cantabile molto espressivo [6:43]
8 Allegro molto [2:12]
9 Adagio ma non troppo - Arioso dolente [4:08]
10 Fuga: Allegro ma non troppo [7:06]
Total playing time [71:50]
Recorded on 11 September 2009, 29 November 2009 and 27 March 2010 at the Reid Concert Hall, University of Edinburgh
Producer & Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Paul Baxter & Adam Binks
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Piano: Steinway Model D Grand Piano, 1995, serial no 527910
Piano technician: Norman W. Motion,
Photography © Delphian Records
Photograph editing: Dr Raymond Parks
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: Andrew Caskie
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
With thanks to the University of Edinburgh
These three piano sonatas represent a progression from the despair of the Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, written at the same time as the start of the famous ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, when Ludwig van Beethoven’s realization that his deafness was complete and permanent drove him to contemplate suicide, via his courageous fight back, brilliantly expressed in the irrepressible optimism of the Piano Sonata No. 21 in C ‘Waldstein’, Op. 53 towards the lofty spiritual aspirations of the Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110.
It was in 1802 that Beethoven looked out of the window of his house in Heiligenstadt, a suburb of Vienna, and realized that he wasn’t hearing the church clock, although it was the appropriate hour. For years this naturally convivial man had been covering his increasing deafness, professionally fatal to his career as the most brilliant pianist since Mozart, by a show of irritability and bad manners. But on this terrible day in 1802 it was clear that there could be no hope of his playing ever again. Also, rehearsals for the premier of Fidelio, conducted by the composer, were in full swing, and he struggled on until the leader, or ‘Konzertmeister’, handed him a note saying, ‘Please don’t go on.’ Beethoven’s friends found him afterwards, lying on a couch and sobbing. After this he began what he intended as his last will and testament, but while writing it his courage returned, and he rallied. His playing
and conducting days were over, but not his composing: like every serious musician he heard the music in his mind before it actually became sound. Of course, there were no copyright laws at that time, but Beethoven was an astute business man and had already invested in several properties, which now became his principle means of subsistence.
As early as the next sonata after the D minor, his Piano Sonata No. 18 in E flat, Op. 31, No. 3, his irrepressible optimism had reasserted itself - the last movement could almost have been from a comic opera by Rossini - and by the time he wrote the popular and brilliant Piano Sonata No. 21 in C, dedicated to his friend and patron Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, only two years after the D minor, there was no holding him.
This sonata, Op. 53, is one of his two best known large-scale virtuoso sonatas – the other being the Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, known as the ‘Appassionata’. The ‘Waldstein’ sonata’s three movements represent a new burst of confidence in his middle period, an opening up of both his piano style and his ever-widening view of tonality. Beethoven’s feeling for the piano ran deep, and this work is a masterpiece of sheer pianistic invention. Apropos the sonata’s tonal adventures, in the first movement it dispenses with the dominant G as the pivotal counterbalance to the tonic C, substituting the mediant key of E. And, though the beautiful slow movement (his second attempt) is, more
traditionally, in the subdominant key of F, within its first four bars it takes us to the edge of the tonal universe, turning the harmony aside only just short of the farthest point (the tritone) from the home key. So Beethoven was already writing ‘for a later generation’ as he remarked of his String Quartets, and pointing the way for the Romantic masters of the nineteenth century.
There are two special points of interest in the concluding Prestissimo to the finale. One is the 8ve glissandi. I take the view that practicality is what counts. In some urtext editions the octaves are fingered 5/1. In others, such as Kalmus, which I use, there is no fingering, and so far as I know, nowhere does Beethoven actually mark glissando. On the other hand, wrist-staccato octaves are, as Sir Donald Tovey points out, unsatisfactory. I am not ashamed to admit that my attempts at glissandi have never sounded as I wished, so I now use the adaptation between the hands that Tovey recommends. However, Sir Donald’s analytical description of the music here gives rise to the second point of special interest. He calls this passage a ‘strict time Cadenza’, but a reference in Kalmus suggests to me that had Sir Donald had access to sources discovered after his death in 1942 he would have left out the words ‘strict time’. It seems that there is a note on the autograph score, in Beethoven’s handwriting, about the execution of the difficult trills accompanying
the melody of the subject a few bars after the octaves. The composer insists that they need not be played very fast, and by way of making life easier, notates two possible versions that he recommends, of which, in the Prestissimo tempo, one is a fast trill, and the other, at twice the speed, would be totally impossible. I conclude that he was thinking in terms of a ‘free’ cadenza, and assuming that the performer would play this theme at the original tempo of Allegretto moderato. This also enables the modulations through which the melody is transfigured at this point to bloom in all their other-worldly beauty: surely what Beethoven intended. The music following these trills, which conclude the ‘cadenza’ in traditional style, functions like the final Tutti of a piano concerto.
The lyrical opening bars of the Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110, already outline the subject of the fugue in the fourth movement, and two other notable points of this sonata are the exquisite series of modulations that lead us gently into the recapitulation of the first movement, and the demonic scherzo, which is in duple, instead of the usual triple, time, and with an astonishingly original middle section, in which the hands cross like a great ‘X’, the right hand playing eighth notes, and the left syncopated quarters. However, it is in the interlocking third and fourth movements that Beethoven deals directly with the ultimate subjects of death
and resurrection, and proceeds to a searing musical expression of Christ’s suffering and triumph over death. After the long introduction to the third movement, marked Adagio ma non troppo, Beethoven steps straight into the world of oratorio by composing a recitative. This leads to an Arioso dolente, or, as he also writes in German, ‘Klagender Gesang’ (‘Song of Suffering’), which begins by directly quoting J.S. Bach’s setting of Christ’s last words on the cross in his Passion According to St John: ‘Es ist vollbracht’ (‘It is finished’). The threepart fugue that follows takes us to a variation on the Arioso, this time marked Perdendo la forze, dolente and translated as ‘Ermattet, klagend’, meaning ‘Exhausted, full of pain.’ The fragmented phrasing, the frequent crescendi - diminendi express perfectly the gasping of a suffering man close to death, and if we follow this process to the last four measures of this passage, we arrive at the entombment: ten slowly syncopated chords of G major, marked crescendo, followed by a rising arpeggio, diminuendo, also in G major, which leads to the inversion of the fugue subject. Those syncopated chords seem to ask the question,
‘Who moved the stone?’ and Beethoven marks the inverted fugue very heavily, as if he wants us to be in no doubt what he means, thus:
– ‘L’istesso tempo della Fuge’ (‘The same tempo as the Fugue’), followed by
– ‘Nach und nach wieder auflebend’ (‘little by little coming to life again’) above the staves, and between them the Italian equivalents;
– Poi a poi di nuovo vivente (‘little by little with renewed life’), then,
– sempre una corda (‘always with the ‘soft’i.e.’una corda’ pedal’), and then,
– L’inversione della Fuga [Umkehrung der Fuge] (‘inversion of the Fugue’).
So, by expressing the resurrection so clearly, the music itself has crossed the great line to the other side and, as it leads us back to the home key of A flat, it soars to ever greater heights of exaltation.
© David Wilde 2011
‘Superb performer, magnificent musician’
– Nadia Boulanger
Pianist and composer David Wilde was born in Manchester in 1935. A busy wartime career as ‘boy pianist’ brought him to the attention of the legendary pianist Solomon, who arranged for Wilde to study with his pupil and assistant Franz Reizenstein. Later, from 1949, Wilde studied composition with Professor Richard Hall at the Royal Manchester College of Music (precursor of the Royal Northern College of Music), of which he was elected a Fellow in 1953. In the same year he was awarded the prestigious Walter Dayas Gold Medal.
In 1961 Wilde won a first prize at the LisztBartók competition in Budapest. The legendary Nadia Boulanger was a jury member, and invited him to visit her in Paris at any suitable time, so when in the same year Wilde was awarded a senior scholarship by the Caird Foundation of Dundee he wrote to accept her invitation and ask if he might work with her. She responded most encouragingly, and Wilde joined her in Paris and at the Conservatoire Americain in Fontainebleau (of which Boulanger was then Musical Director) in 1963, and again in 1964 and 1968, remaining in close touch with ‘Mademoiselle’ for the rest of her long life.
Wilde is a passionate teacher, and his pupils include Jack Gibbons, now pursuing a brilliant career in the USA; Christopher Oakden, now Professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover; Thomas Hell, winner of the European Competition for contemporary Music in Orleans, and Bulgarian pianist Irina Georgieva. Wilde taught at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover from 1981 to 2000, and was made a Professor Emeritus of the State of Lower Saxony in 1983. He has given many lectures in both English and German, including his paper on psychology and the meaning of music, ‘Listening to the Shadows’. His Jungian analysis of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, which he read and illustrated at London’s Analytical Psychology Club (of which he and his wife are elected life members), was originally written as a contribution to the book Analectia Lisztiana, ed. Michael Saffle (publ. Virginia Tech, USA).
During the 1990s, having travelled to besieged Sarajevo to support his heroic colleagues there, Wilde composed several works protesting against human rights abuses in our time, notably The Cellist of Sarajevo (1992), the Suite for Violin and Piano, Cry ‘Bosnia Herzegovina’, the String Quartet (of which the last movement is a ‘Threnody for the Unknown Victim of War and Oppression’), and the opera London under Siege, after an idea by Bosnian poet Goran Simic. The Cellist of Sarajevo, dedicated to Vedran Smailovic, is played the world over and
was recorded by Yo-Yo Ma for Sony Classical, and the opera London under Siege was produced by the State Theatre of Lower Saxony in 1998. The then Governor of Sarajevo travelled to Germany to attend the first performance.
Wilde was twice honoured by the Bosnians: in 2003 he was awarded a diploma by the International Peace Committee of Sarajevo ‘for services to human rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina and throughout Europe’, and in 2005 he was presented with the ‘Symbol of the Open Door’, representing honorary Bosnian Citizenship.
David Wilde has given many concert tours of the UK and played frequently with all the major London orchestras, all the BBC orchestras, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Scottish National and Hallé Orchestras. He has appeared regularly at the Henry Wood Proms with conductors such as Horenstein, Boulez and Downes, and has toured New Zealand and played and taught in Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, India, Russia, the USA, most countries of Western Europe and, of course, Hungary. His recordings include all of Beethoven’s Sonatas for violin and piano and the Sonata by Reizenstein with violinist Erich Gruenberg, Alan Bush’s Variations, Nocturne and Finale on an English Sea Song (in a version for piano and orchestra which Wilde had premiered at the Cheltenham Festival), and concertos by Thomas Wilson (especially
composed for Wilde) and by Sir Lennox Berkeley. In his recently published diaries Berkeley, who was present at the recording of his concerto, wrote simply: ‘David Wilde was first class.’
More recently, Wilde commissioned a sonata from Gabriel Jackson with funds from the Scottish Arts Council, the Britten-Pears Trust and the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, and premiered it at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh in 2007. He gave the European premiere of this work during a recital in Braunschweig, Germany in October 2008. Also in 2007 EMI reissued Wilde’s 1968 HMV Liszt recital, coupled with Liszt recordings by Earl Wild. Wilde now records exclusively for Delphian Records: in addition to the present repertoire, a Chopin recital (DCD34010), the complete piano works of Luigi Dallapiccola (DCD34020), a highly acclaimed Liszt Sonata coupled with the seven Elegies of Busoni (DCD34030), a Schumann recital (DCD34050) and a Brahms recital (DCD34040) are available.
David Wilde has two children by his first marriage and now lives in Bathgate, near Edinburgh, with his second wife, writer and historian Jane Mary Wilde.
Wilde plays Chopin at the Wigmore Hall
David Wilde piano (DCD34010)
In this exciting live recording, David Wilde presents a view of the vast emotional range of Chopin’s music. Passionate, tender, challenging, consoling, from the Sonata in B Minor, Op 58 to the Polonaise-Fantasie, Op 61, Chopin is revealed as a universal man and musician.
‘Wholeheartedly committed, authoritative and at times dazzlingly virtuosic’ – Gramophone, November 2002
Wilde plays Brahms
David Wilde piano (DCD34040)
David Wilde’s power and individuality make a separation between composer and performer, between creator and re-creator unrealistic. He sees the simple grace and lyricism favoured by many pianists as an evasion of a deeper poetic truth, and if he gives us all of Brahms’ exulting strength in the fugue from the ‘Handel’ Variations, he is no less responsive to darker nights of the soul in Op. 117. David Wilde may be true to the composer, but he is a pianist to make you think again. – Bryce Morrison
‘… the most impressive aspect of this disc is the beautiful sound Wilde coaxes from his superbly voiced Steinway … pliant treble and richly resonant bass’ – Gramophone, July 2009
Luigi Dallapiccola: a portrait
David Wilde piano, Susan Hamilton soprano, Nicola Stonehouse mezzo-soprano, Robert Irvine cello (DCD34020)
Luigi Dallapiccola is one of the most celebrated Italian composers of the twentieth century. This disc features chamber music and songs alongside his complete works for solo piano. Whether drawing on the music of the past to nourish the contrapuntal organisation of his own, or concentrating on the opportunities for gentle lyricism afforded by bell-like vocal and instrumental sonorities, Dallapiccola’s commitment to traditional expressive nuance has been seen by critics as a powerful aspect of his Italian insistence upon cantabilità – songfulness.
‘a marriage of discipline and imagination of which Wilde is fully aware … [Nicola Stonehouse] is eloquence itself in the Goethe-Lieder’ – Gramophone, April 2007
Wilde plays Schumann
David Wilde piano (DCD34050)
The original first-movement manuscript of Schumann’s Fantasie in C has a number of differences from the editions commonly used today – significant tempo and textual changes which David Wilde has reinstated in a revelatory reading of this tumultuous love-poem to the young Clara. In contrast, Kinderszenen, a touching and vernal evocation of childhood, is given a performance of artless innocence that chimes with Wilde’s conviction that ‘it shouldn’t sound mature’. Carnaval’s colourful cast of characters is viscerally and imaginatively brought to life, culminating in Wilde’s fearsome ‘March against the Philistines’.
‘performances of mature insight spiced with caprice, and an iconoclastic spirit.’ -- MusicWeb International, February 2010
