Pierre-Laurent Aimard Program Notes - Apr 2

Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad “In this program of works by great architects, I am impressed by how even a tiny musical germ can be revolutionary when integrated into the language and form of a composition.” Pierre-Laurent Aimard Five Pieces for Piano, Op. 23 [1920-23] ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Born September 13, 1874 in Vienna, Austria Died July 13, 1951 in Los Angeles, California Arnold Schoenberg remains a lightning rod in music, even now that a century has passed since he formulated his most groundbreaking ideas. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he stretched the chromatic possibilities of tonality to the breaking point, until he reached an intuitive approach to free atonality. Pressing on from there, he devised a methodical new system in the early 1920s that allowed each of the twelve chromatic pitches to hold equal importance by placing them in ordered rows. Schoenberg believed that this twelve-tone or serial approach would “guarantee the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years,” and for much of the rest of the twentieth century his prediction seemed to hold true, at least in academic circles.

Even though Schoenberg was not a pianist himself, he turned to writing short piano pieces in the midst of his most important stylistic transitions, using the limitations of the genre to his advantage. “Anyone writing for piano should never forget that even the best pianist has only two hands,” he wrote in 1923. “The only way is to write as thinly as possible: as few notes as possible.” Like the Three Pieces for Piano (Op. 11) that marked the real arrival of his intuitive atonality in 1909, the Five Pieces for Piano (Op. 23) composed between 1920 and 1923 helped him hone in on his serial approach, with the fifth piece considered the first true twelve-tone composition.

That said, formal analysis of Schoenberg’s tones should be left to the doctoral candidates who continue to write inscrutable dissertations on the topic, and we should trust our ears instead. In these brief vignettes, we can hear great whimsy and freedom of movement, and also an enduring respect for the types of phrasing and musical paragraphs that have always created a sense of order and flow across the passing of time. A casual listener would be hard-pressed to hear the twelve-tone rows that sets the fifth piece apart; more likely they will be transfixed by the herky-jerky deconstruction of the waltz, that threebeat dance that was so ubiquitous in Schoenberg’s birthplace, Vienna.

Piano Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10, No. 3 [1798] LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December, 1770 in Bonn, Germany

Died March 26, 1827 in Vienna, Austria In 1792, Beethoven left his hometown of Bonn so he could, as his patron put it, “receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.” Beethoven did study briefly with Haydn, but he abandoned his plan to return home once he saw that he could follow in the late Mozart’s footsteps and make a living as a freelancer in Vienna. Besides performing as a pianist, he taught lessons, cultivated private patrons, and wrote accessible music for the publishing market, all setting the stage for a composing career that flourished in the next decade.

After dedicating a set of three string trios in 1798 to Count Johann Georg von Browne, a Russian officer stationed in Vienna, Beethoven extended the same honor with his next opus to the count’s wife, who might have also been a piano student. When Beethoven’s publisher printed these three piano sonatas as Opus 10, the title page advertised that they could be played on harpsichord or piano, but that was just a marketing ploy to include customers who hadn’t yet upgraded their keyboard instrument at home. The dynamic markings in the Piano Sonata No. 7 in D Major (Op. 10, No. 3) show that Beethoven clearly intended this music to be played on a touch-sensitive keyboard capable of a wide dynamic range. And any artful performer would have wanted to take advantage of the newfangled sustain pedal to enhance the score’s expressive legato passages, especially in the “slow and sad” second movement that serves as this sonata’s emotional center of gravity.

Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57 (“Appassionata”) [1804-05] LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Compared to 1795, when his first piano sonatas (Op. 2) were published with a dedication to Haydn, Beethoven was in a wholly different state in 1805 when he completed his Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor (Op. 57). In the intervening decade, Beethoven’s growing stature as a composer had afforded him a new measure of independence, and opportunities to present symphonies and his debut opera had launched him onto the grand stage he had always dreamed of. At the same time, his ever-worsening hearing was starting to isolate him socially, and he was coming close to the point when he could no longer sustain a career as Vienna’s favorite pianist.

Beethoven was not responsible for nicknaming the F-minor Sonata the “Appassionata” (a publisher tacked the name onto a posthumous edition), but this Italian term for “impassioned” has stuck as a fitting label for the fiery sonata that Beethoven composed in the wake of his epic Third Symphony, and not long before beginning the Fifth Symphony. The “Appassionata” Sonata shares the former’s heroism and the latter’s obsessiveness, even hammering on the same unmistakable rhythmic motive of three short notes leading to a downbeat in the Allegro assai opening movement. The effect of the many low F’s (as in the fortissimo chords struck when the opening motive repeats) must have been especially impactful, since it was the lowest available note at the time on the latest pianos.

The central Andante con moto starts with a simple, stable theme, and the ensuing variations mostly stick to melodic elaborations in the original key. The level of restraint here constitutes its own form of boldness, extracting as much as possible out of limited materials. Instead of settling on a peaceful resolution, an unstable diminished chord links directly to the restless and searing finale.

Klavierstück IX [1955-61] KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN Born August 22, 1928 in Mödrath, Germany Died December 5, 2007 in Kürten, Germany The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen fascinated and agitated the art-music world for more than half a century, in works ranging from electroacoustic tape experiments to a 29-hour cycle of seven interrelated operas, and even a string quartet performed by four musicians in separate airborne helicopters. Acoustic music for solo piano might seem like an unlikely outlet for Stockhausen, but his Klavierstücke (“Piano Pieces”) appeared at pivotal moments in his musical development, allowing for new experiments in form and performance. After an initial set of four pieces from 1952, when Stockhausen was forging the disjointed early style he called “point music,” he wrote the next installments, V-X, in 1954-55. He revised Klavierstück IX in 1961, in advance of its premiere the following Spring in Cologne, Germany, the city where his musical training began after World War II, and which he fashioned into an avant-garde epicenter in the 1960s.

At the time he wrote Klavierstück IX, Stockhausen was grappling with how to reconcile his tightly controlled serial techniques with new experiments in chance and indeterminate factors being advanced by John Cage and others across the Atlantic. Stockhausen’s solution was to devise a structure that would use human imperfections and inconsistencies to the music’s advantage, and he even felt compelled coach the piece’s first performer to play less perfectly to enhance the effect.

In the first measure, the pianist plays the same four-note chord 140 times, in evenly spaced eighth notes, with each one getting imperceptibly quieter, creating a steady diminuendo from a dynamic of fortissimo (ff) to pianissississimo (pppp). But of course humans are not robots, and there is no way that four fingers can each decrease their pressure by a factor of precisely 1/140 in sync with each other. The effect then is that the tiny irregularities end up emphasizing different tones and harmonics, such that a highly attuned listener will hear a ghostly melody in those variations, one that is different with each performance. This repeated-chord theme develops in parallel with more active material, culminating in the flitting grace notes that bring this mind-bending, timestretching experiment to a close. © 2020 Aaron Grad.