Program Notes

Sonata in E-flat major schubert

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

Owing to the immense body of work that Schubert produced in his short lifetime, one wonders at all that he might have done had he spent more than just thirty-one years on this earth. Like many of his compositions, this piano sonata in E-flat didn’t see the light of day until after his death, though its origin story begins much earlier. It is in fact a revision and expansion of an earlier sonata in D-flat which he never completed in its initial form for whatever reason (it was written when he was in his late teens). Interestingly, he took the time to refresh the work (while transposing it up by a full step in key) almost a decade later. At its core, it is distinctly classical, and even Mozartian in style, particularly in the opening movement. Well-balanced proportions, elegant thematic arcs, delicately ornamented melodies, flourishing scales and buoyant arpeggios abound throughout the work. We are fortunate that Schubert took the time to revisit this work, and that it has been preserved for us to hear today.

Études debussy

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

What is an étude anyway? On its surface, it is a “teaching piece,” meant for musicians to build upon their technical skills. Debussy had plenty of reasons and qualifications to write such pieces, as he was not only an inventive composer but a brilliant pianist, and these études from late in his life are a culmination of his expertise, and as he playfully described, “apart from the question of technique, a useful warning to pianists to not take up the musical profession unless they have remarkable hands.” These are expressive works, and by no means dry nor didactic: each is not only focused predominantly on a particular technical element but uses the very substance of that technique as an inspiration for musical character. The “octaves” (No. 5) are bold and monumental in tone. The “chromatic” study (No. 7) is sinuous and dizzying. The “repeated notes” (No. 9) are percussive and incessant. Lastly, the “chords” of the final étude explore the harmonic possibilities of both expansive sonority and gritty dissonance.

Humoreske schumann

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

A love of written language never left Robert Schumann, and the composer’s love of literature unquestionably shaped his musical identity. The son of a bookseller and publisher, Schumann grew up reading and writing. A favorite wordsmith of his was Jean Paul — the pseudonym of the inventive German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, chosen in honor of Rousseau — whose unconventional mix of humor and pathos coincided perfectly with the changing artistic trends of German Romanticism, yet, like Schumann, never quite fit in with even these conventions. Schumann’s literary conceptions of Florestan and Eusebeus, the dual personae of his own character, were likely inspired by themes in the writings of Jean Paul, who first coined the term “Doppelgänger,” an early literary incarnation of the psychological ego and id. Unsurprisingly, the writer and his style found their way into Schumann’s music, and perhaps their clearest intersection is in the Humoreske, a collection of strung-together miniatures of a variety of moods and psychological states. The work occupies an interesting place as the culmination of what may be called Schumann’s early “experimental years.”

Though it is called a work in B-flat, much of it occupies the darkened harmonic world of the relative minor. B-flat and G minor are, in some ways, modal manifestations of a split personality, one laughing and the other crying. Meandering between these two tonal areas shades the work with an unexpected instability and, to some degree, an ironic sense of humor. The title itself implies comedic wit, yet it more accurately refers to a sense of “mood.” Even from the very first chord of the work, Schumann places a poignant F-sharp in the right-hand melody within a harmonic context in which the note yearns upwards to resolve towards G, only to step down, one pitch at a time, to the tonic B-flat, before immediately leaping upward again. The melody strives and struggles against its own harmonic predestination.

The delicate opening piece gives way to a vibrant and humorous presto episode, marked by sudden, fleeting, and drastic shifts into minor mode. The fanfare-like figures provide an ironic contrast to the brief ventures into more sombre and grave melodic material. Almost in the blink of an eye, the lively central section relaxes into a brief restatement of the lyrical theme from the very beginning of the work. As of now, the listener can hardly perceive whether to hear the two opening “character pieces” as part of one larger form, or as two separate entities. The Doppelgänger is surely present.

The following piece, marked “Hastig,” is written in three staves for the piano. The two outer staves, for right and left hand, are busy with a rush of rhythmic energy. Yet within this, in the middle stave—which the composer marks “Inner voice”— Schumann buries a delicate melody framing the key of B-flat major, like a transplanted recollection of the opening theme of the entire collection. It is present, if not always the focus. Schumann literally intends for this inner voice to remain “within,” and it is not meant to be played, but rather “kept