Marc-André Hamelin: Notes on the Program
In any good piano recital, listeners most typically are offered both what the musicologists call “programmatic” and “absolute” music; that is, music which in a sense, tells a story (programmatic) and, conversely, that which is just the music that one hears, without reference to something else (absolute.) Even better, or at least more vividly, sometimes, is music that is purposefully a reaction or response to a specific stimulus, whether from literature (vis. Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliette) or visual art (Liszt’s Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d’Este), or even another piece of music (Bach’s organ chorale-preludes on hymn tunes.)
This impulse to create music that seeks to reveal more of the inner nature of another kind of creative output was, as we know, a strong driving force in musical composition in the Romantic period. As well, there is much Romantic music, particularly in song forms, that praises nature, albeit often casting it as metaphor for many other things. (Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde, etc.)
Much of music, hence, comes from an often more profound, even sensuous, exploration of the crux of an artistic output, or, as Ravel said about Gaspard, to be heard today, “My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words.” Today’s recital by the incomparable Marc-André Hamelin is comprised of three of the greatest piano works whose genesis came from visceral responses to works of literature (Concord Sonata, Gaspard de la Nuit) and nature, albeit imagined (Waldszenen.) One does not necessarily need to have the material of the original inspirations at hand – as all of these compositions are already quite vivid – but it can help take one a little deeper into the soundscape if one knows something about what spurred on today’s composers to write these astonishing pieces.
IVES Concord Sonata
“Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently, when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.” – Charles Ives
“Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.” – Ives
The Concord Sonata is decidedly a startling and challenging work, particularly for the first-time listener, and requires time and repeated listenings to absorb its complexity and beauty. I hope that everyone in today’s audience will have had a chance to listen to Concord at least once through a recording before coming today. For, within its remarkable dissonances, non-sequiturs, digressions, and strivings, we can find simple and lyrical themes (including frequent quotations of the main theme from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example, and an original theme now called the “Human Faith Theme”) that are poignant and quite moving.
The Sonata’s first and greatest promoter, John Kirkpatrick, a student of Nadia Boulanger in France in 1927, having asked Ives for a copy of the score, then going on to performing it hundreds of times in myriad locations, wrote later that it “. . . treats its subjects in great free round shapes of music that move or plunge into each other with obvious spontaneity, and yet when one gets off at a distance and looks at it in perspective, there is no aspect of it that does not offer an ever fresh variety of interesting cross relations and beautifully significant proportion.”
The origins of Concord lie in Ives’s work to make a worthy homage to five greatly admired American writers, all of whom lived in and are buried in Concord, Massachusetts: Ralph Waldo Emerson (“The Conduct of Life”), Henry David Thoreau (“Walden; or, Life in the Woods”), Louisa May Alcott (“Little Women”) and her father, Branson (“The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture”), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (“The House of the Seven Gables.”) The influence of these several writers on a then still-young nation, gathered loosely by some under the rubric of “transcendentalism,” was huge. Substantial parts of their writings remain very popular in our own age.
Ives, as many in today’s audience know, was quite an unusual man. Very successful at his “day job” selling insurance through his own company, Ives and Myrick (eventually part of the Mutual Life Insurance Company in New York), he was a composer in the evenings and at other free time. Son of a Civil War Union bandmaster, he was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874 and began composing at age 13, then went on to study at Yale with famed American composer Horatio Parker, composing his first piano sonata beginning in 1901.
Today’s Second Sonata came from the most productive period in Ives’s compositional life. Having married one Harmony Twichell in 1908, she being full of optimism and enthusiasm for literature and social commitment, he began work on Concord in about 1911, incorporating and re-working much material from his own earlier compositions. Originally dubbing it “Men of Literature,” Ives revised the composition over many years and, indeed, the score contains several deliberate moments of ambiguity for the performer, even opportunities for improvisation. Ives was well aware that the piece was unusual in many respects. While there were until then very few piano sonatas based on extramusical sources, none had been written about local authors alive in a composer’s childhood, as were Emerson and Alcott. Moreover, it was unique in not being concerned with the authors’ characters or theses, but with the authors themselves. Of this approach, Ives remarked:
“Some nice people object to putting attempted pictures of American authors and their literature in a thing called a sonata, but I don’t apologize for it or explain it. I tried it because I felt like trying it, and so, good night shirt!”
At the same time of composing Concord, Ives also wrote an accompanying book, a sort of very extended program note, titled Essays Before a Sonata. Interestingly, it says almost nothing about the Concord Sonata – no musical examples, no references to any specific passages. Rather, he wrote much about the authors his music would represent and what he thought could make music great. One can easily imagine that he thought himself as doing something quite revolutionary.
Of the music itself, I must write painfully brief comments to orient you (and myself!) to this monumental work. First, if you are new to the Concord Sonata, I invite you to surrender yourself to the first minute of the piece without trying to understand it, because Ives seems to have wanted to scare the listener away by playing all the themes of the first movement (“Emerson”) at once. It’s quite a jumble. In fact, throughout the work, in decided contrast to “normal” compositional practice, it moves from complicated/developed to simpler, often revealing key ideas late in a movement.
In “Hawthorne,” serious complexity continues, but differently from “Emerson,” with its generous chords, counterpoint, and themes, in that it is a series of textures, with little repeated figures, probably inspired by scenes from Hawthorne’s stories. Listen for the famous passage in which the pianist must use a stick to play large, quiet tone clusters on the black keys.
In “The Alcotts,” the shortest and simplest movement of the sonata, we hear the aforementioned “Human Faith Theme” interrupted, sometimes tensely, with outbursts of that theme from Beethoven’s Fifth. It is a “portrait” of both Louisa May and her father, but leaves the listener wondering whether the soft sections portray Louisa May and her books for children and the loud bits are about Bronson’s fierce philosophical pronouncements. Or, vice-versa.
“Thoreau,” as might certainly be expected, seems to open with the mists over Walden Pond, then proceeds to reveal three of Thoreau’s walks around the Pond. Each “walk” starts quietly, then goes into a decidedly walking rhythm, then becomes more and more vigorous. Of the three-note phrase that runs through the second half of the movement in the bass, Ives wrote that it represents the tempo of nature, for Thoreau realized that “he must let Nature flow through him and slowly; he releases his more personal desires to her broader rhythm, conscious that this blends more and more with the harmony of her solitude.”
Finally, a tiny musicological note: in Concord, we see many of Ives’s characteristic experimental tendencies. Much of it is written without barlines, the harmonies are very advanced, and, in the second movement, as mentioned above, there are cluster chords created by depressing the piano’s black keys with a 37 cm piece of wood, as well as clusters marked “Better played by using the palm of the hand or the clenched fist.” What fun it would be to have known Ives personally!
“It is a beauty of high and remote things . . . . It is informed with the stark and ascetic beauty of lonely and alien reaches of human imagination.” – Henry Bellamann, American author and music educator, on the Concord Sonata.
SCHUMANN Waldszenen
"The titles for pieces of music, since they again have come into favor in our day, have been censured here and there, and it has been said that 'good music needs no sign-post.' Certainly not, but neither does a title rob it of its value; and the composer, by adding one, at least prevents a complete misunderstanding of the character of his music. What is important is that such a verbal heading should be significant and apt. It may be considered the test of the general level of the composer's education." -- Schumann
This splendid cycle of musical fragments, written in just a matter of days in 1849, when Schumann had already endured many cycles of terrible mental illness that would shortly later lead to his voluntary commitment to an institution, is his last major cycle for solo piano. It is easy to imagine that, with their gentle sub-titles, they comprise a series of charming woodland souvenirs, without any dark bits. But, even Clara, Schumann’s beloved wife, found some of the movements to be unsettling and chose not to play them. Some of the movements were inspired by favorite poets, particularly Friedrich Hebbel, with his melancholy notes even in his “Forest Pictures;” others are lighter, dealing only with the wonders of time spent in the woods. We hear horn calls, birds flitting about, and can imagine hunters waiting in ambush, or anticipate the comfort of lodgings where a wanderer (a favorite Romantic trope) can find some rest.
It is good to remember that artists in the Romantic era, whether in music, literature, or visual art, sought many metaphors to describe mystery in life and the unconscious, very often taking the landscape or simply nature as a best way to describe the ineffable. In Waldszenen, we encounter the forest not only as a beautiful place, but also an unknowable one. It reveals not merely nature-as-nature, but inquires about a human’s place in it and how looking at the wilderness can affect one’s own perception of oneself. This is no stroll in a pretty place but is, rather, a very personal reaction to an imagined and metaphorical landscape.
Much could be said about the compositional finesse of various movements – gentle first themes, energetic passages, quick mood switches, consoling and reassuring moments, real seriousness at times, a poignant farewell in the ending. Perhaps, though, any listener is best advised just to let the charms of the nine movements evoke whatever mental images and racings of the heart they might.
“Why hurry over beautiful things? Why not linger and enjoy them?” – Clara Schumann
RAVEL, Gaspard de la Nuit
There is a three-story mural on a building in downtown Minneapolis that reproduces exactly part of the score of “Scarbo,” the last movement of Gaspard and I think that’s completely a hoot. Is it a monument to the piece that Ravel strove to make more difficult than anything composed before? Does someone in an upper floor apartment two blocks away use it for practicing? (Tee-hee.) In any event, I just love it that someone thought it important to remind the world about this exceptionally valuable piece and didn’t get in trouble for it!
“Gaspard has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems.” – Ravel
Composed in 1908, Gaspard requires super-human effort from the pianist, it being in a way the zenith of Ravel’s composing for piano, particularly those compositions inspired by poems, as he had done before (Alborada del gracioso, Jeux d’eau.) Although he was reputed to be a modest pianist himself, Ravel had exceptional mastery of writing for the instrument, flaunting scales and arpeggios, polyrhythms, and vague key signatures and harmonies, combined with his renowned obsession with compositional detail.
Thus, with all that incomparable skill, aided by his significant attraction to fairytales and fantastic things, even the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Ravel struck out “ . . . to say with notes what a poet expresses with words . . .” via the prose poem collection, Gaspard de la Nuit, of Aloysius Bertrand (1807 – 1841), Italian-born French poet, the originator of “prose poetry” in French literature. In Gaspard (published in 1842), Bertrand effectively defined the shadowy and grotesque, filling the book with nightmarish, hallucinatory fantasies, even going so far as to suggest that Satan, going by the pseudonym “Gaspard” (translated from Persian meaning “a man who guards mysterious, jewel-like treasures”), as the true author of the collection.
So, Ravel invites us to a wild journey, one that slightly reminds me of the Faust legend in a way, first pulling us into shimmering splashes and flowing currents of water, in “Ondine.” The brief of the story is that Ondine, a beautiful water nymph, tries unsuccessfully to seduce a man, as he is married. She “dissolves in tears and laughter” and vanishes, as though a fleeting dream. Listen for a bazillion tinkling, quiet notes.
In the second movement, Le Gibet (The Gallows), the music evokes the image of a solitary corpse of a hanged man on the gallows in the middle of a desolate desert landscape, as does the poem. Tolling bells from a distant city can be heard in a persistent ostinato. Amid music filled with mystery and lament, time seems to stand still.
And, then, “Scarbo” erupts with shocking, demonic virtuosity. One can hear influences from Liszt’s “Transcendental Études,” with Ravel striving to push the piano to its limits of technique. Describing this excessive bravura, Ravel wrote, “I wanted to make a caricature of Romanticism. Perhaps it got the better of me.” The nut of the story behind this movement is that it depicts an evil dwarf who appears in the dead of night to play terrifying tricks on the mind of the narrator while he lies in bed. The listener will be rewarded with stupefying virtuosity, jagged, even violent, dissonance, and indescribable pianistic techniques. It salutes the original poem’s surreal nature in being almost psychotically frenetic and bizarre, something relentless and preternaturally intense.
“Part of the great difficulty of the piece is that none of its complications are gratuitous – every note is part of a precise effect, and the textures are generally very transparent. In other words, there’s nowhere to hide.” – Steven Osborne, pianist.