Paul Lewis: Notes on the Program
Beethoven Pathétique
Between French and English, there are often les faux amis, false cognates, and thus we must not get snooty with someone who imagines that Beethoven wrote a “pathetic” sonata. In fact, he didn’t even give this piece that nickname; it was a subsequent publisher who appended the title Grande Sonate Pathétique, probably mostly to stimulate sales of the printed score. (It was an immediate huge success.) That fancy title actually just indicates by grande that the work is large and important enough to be published as a separate piece rather than as part of a collection and pathétique in French just means “moving or “affecting.” In fact, the dictionary of the Académie française notes that the word just connotes “qui émeut les passions,” that which excites the emotions. The careful listener will certain find that to be the case with this sonata.
It comes from a remarkably prolific time in Beethoven’s life; the same year of its composition also saw three string trios, three other piano sonatas, and three violin sonatas. The big thing about the Pathétique is that it is an exceptional example of the Romantic tendencies in German literature of that time, translated into the medium of music. Its astounding emotional power, via great contrasts of ideas, violent energy, and adventuresome harmonies, was recognized early on. In fact, the splendid pianist-composer Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870), when young, was forbidden by his teacher to study or play the “crazy” music of Beethoven. Of course, Moscheles loved the Pathétique and pretty much all the rest of Beethoven’s music. He grew up to be one of the most admired pianists of his time and milieu, oftentimes playing that forbidden stuff!
About that power of expression, one of Beethoven’s biographers, Barry Cooper, wrote that this sonata “surpasses any of his previous compositions in strength of character, depth of emotion, level of originality, range of sonorities, and ingenuity of motive and tonal manipulation.” What the focused listener may gain from hearing the Pathétique is Beethoven’s uncanny knack for articulating difficulty and suffering, but at the same time, through remarkable musical devices, managing to suggest that difficulty can always be overcome. This art, like other great works, conveys a sense of resistance to the inevitability of despair, to the indomitability of the human spirit, even towards joy.
Today’s audience of piano lovers will have heard the Pathétique many times and, thus, musicological explanations of its three movements would probably be superfluous. In the first movement, the intense pathos is evident from the very beginning statement. The second movement contains one of Beethoven’s most beautiful melodies, an especially beautiful contrast to the first movement. The third movement, a rondo, opens with a cheerful melody, perhaps not letting the listener know right at first of the drama that will unfold. Its explosive ending in a minor key can be unsettling.
Sibelius, Six bagatelles op. 97 (1920).
"One has to combine things great and small, symphonies and songs." – Jean Sibelius, in his diary in 1910
Throughout his distinguished and turbulent adult lifetime, Sibelius came in for excessive criticism because of his frequent creation of “miniature” pieces, many of them for piano and violin. Critics too often wrote about how they wanted/expected him to concentrate more on big orchestral pieces. But, Sibelius kept an eye on which of his published music returned the best revenues, for, indeed, he had a large family to take care of. (Too, he loved spending money on life’s luxuries.)
By contrast, those who study and play his piano music all seem to admire its originality and how well it suits the instrument. Many also find it challenging, albeit masterful in approach. Of it, the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould said, "Sibelius never wrote against the grain of the keyboard. ... In Sibelius's piano music everything works, everything sings - but on its own terms. Sibelius was able to make a significant addition to the far too limited piano repertoire of late Romanticism."
Within op. 97, we find, among other things, a tender song in the spirit of Grieg, a humorous march that reflects style characteristics from Beethoven to Prokofiev, moments that seem like they could have come from Schumann, even a little orientalist influence. A bagatelle, of course, is a short piece of music, usually of a light character, unpretentious. These beguiling small pieces may even be a welcome relief from the intense drama of the music preceding them in this program.
Debussy, Children’s Corner
Most folks in today’s audience will know that Debussy wrote this piece for his daughter, Claude-Emma, whose nickname was Chouchou (yes, its means “little cabbage”), a lively child whom he adored. The dedication in the score even reads, “To my dear little Chouchou, with tender apologies from her father for what follows.” Such sweetness from a brilliant man who was more typically thought to be acerbic and quite difficult! He was so often very critical of others and sometimes of himself.
The suite was premiered in Paris in the year it was published, 1908, and three years later was orchestrated and published again. Since then, its charm and popularity have seemed never to have faded.
The titles of the six movements, all noted in the score originally in English, probably as a nod to Chouchou’s English governess, denote light-hearted matters, all seemingly made to delight a little girl. Here are brief notes on each:
Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum is a spoof on the exercises by Clementi that so many young piano students have suffered and benefited from. Debussy hated orthodoxy and here quite makes fun of (necessary) pedantry.
Jimbo’s Lullaby, with its deliberate mis-spelling of Jumbo, a famous elephant who briefly lived in the zoo in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, also commemorates Chouchou’s stuffed elephant toy. The score indicates “gentle and a bit clumsy” and even quotes a popular French lullaby, “Do, do, l’enfant, do.”
In Serenade of the Doll one may hear the happy playfulness that evolves any time children get to play with their dolls. Note the pentatonic scale and the use of the soft pedal throughout.
The Snow is Dancing is another piece, along with his Footsteps in the Snow from his first book of Préludes may have been inspired by actual snow falling or, perhaps, from a snow globe, an object which were first introduced in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878.
The Little Shepherd opens with an unaccompanied single line, much like the opening to Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and in a short time reveals wistfulness that a solitary shepherd might feel.
Golliwogg’s Cake Walk, too, is about dolls, this time probably about the play of a number of them, most of all, “Golliwoggs,” dolls then fashionable and popular in Paris. With our modern eyes, this can seem troublesome because, indeed, Golliwoggs were stuffed Black dolls with red pants and bow ties and wild hair – something we might now think racist. It can be hoped that we rather might think of all that as history. It would probably be best to reflect on the strong influence of American minstrel and cabaret music, then increasingly popular in France, and of “cakewalks,” a dance or strut that rewarded the fanciest dancer with a cake, as in, “well, that takes the cake!” This final movement of Children’s Corner even satirically invokes a bit of the opening of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, marked “with great emotion,” albeit often interrupted by the persistent cake-walkers!
Chopin Polonaise-Fantaisie
“I’d like to finish something that I don’t yet know what to call.” – Frédérick Chopin, in a letter about the Polonaise-Fantaisie.
In the vast repertory of the piano, it can be reasonably argued that no one has mattered more to the history of the instrument, nor changed composing for it quite so much, nor so enhanced its stature than Chopin. His is music that is immediately recognizable, even from just a few measures. His harmonies set him apart from almost all others in the way they infuse the music with such unprecedented color. An admirer of the bel canto style of singing from opera, so popular in his time, he created piano music that made pianists rethink their approach entirely, in order to gain a similar, singing style.
Chopin was tempted in his young years to pursue the route of virtuoso pianists, but took the probably wiser path of composer. (Actually, Chopin played only about 30 public performances in his whole career.) Apart from three sonatas and a few sets of variations, Chopin’s compositions are mostly short, but within each of them there we find a whole world of feelings, often contrary ones.
Polonaise, of course, simply means “Polish,” both an acknowledgement to his country of birth and also to stirring rhythmic patterns characteristic of Polish dances of the same name. Fantaisie, likewise, indicates that the piece will not adhere to strict compositional “architecture” such as a sonata, rather exploring ideas and effects more freely. Thus, in this piece, we hear the unspooling of wonderful musical ideas in a nearly stream-of-consciousness manner.
There may be some poignancy to this as 1846, the year of its composition, was a time of estrangement between Chopin and his long-time companion, George Sand, a matter no doubt marked by unhappiness and possible disillusionment. Nonetheless, he wrote maestoso in the score, which for him indicated most of all, “with dignity and pride.”
Thus, here is an especially noble example of his characteristic lyricism, shimmering sonorities, exploitation of the resources of the piano, and vivid expressiveness. Chopin’s music, as we know, would go on to be a huge influence for the remainder of the 19th century.
Beethoven, Appassionata
“If Beethoven, who was so fond of portraying scenes from nature, was perhaps thinking of ocean waves on a stormy night when from the distance a cry for help is heard, then such a picture will give the pianist a guide to the correct playing of this great tonal painting.” – Carl Czerney, noting the finale of Opus 57.
To conclude this recital – full, as it is, of drama, pathos, wit, charm, the whole works – Mr. Lewis has chosen another sonata that got its nickname from someone other than the composer, but a nickname that certain describes its character, full of passion. Most listeners to Appassionata hear it as emblematic of Beethoven’s explosive temperament. We remember that this comes from a composer who by then was completely deaf. Undoubtedly, this is an expression of defiance against everything conspiring to overcome his irrepressible will. In all the fury, we might hear much that can render puny our own day-to-day annoyances.
F-minor is the carefully chosen key, for that allowed Beethoven to explore every note of the piano of his day, F1 in the base to a high C7 in the treble. (Both notes are in the score.) The opening is ominous with its descending arpeggio of the tonic triad, full of latent energy, setting up plenty of expectation. Suggestive silences, pretty much unparalleled in music of that time, add drama. With its exceptional technical challenges, Beethoven himself considered this to be his most tempestuous piano sonata until the Hammerklavier.
The second movement is a beguiling set of variations based upon a theme remarkable for its melodic simplicity. A special cadence after the fourth variation lends an immediate transition to the final movement, a matter of nearly perpetual motion, spurred on by an even faster coda, then the introduction of a new theme for the finale. Of that ending, the scholar Donald Francis Tovey remarked that this is one of only a handful of Beethoven’s works in sonata form that ends in tragedy. Others have compared its dark power to Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
SUNDAY
“Schubert’s piano melodies are not involved with struggles, metamorphoses and chasms, they wander along with gentle corpulence – likenesses of their creator – through the musical keys as through countrysides, changing by means of an apparently abrupt harmonic inflection, appearing suddenly in another light and assuming a new countenance from one measure to another.” – pianist Jörg Demus
“Schubert may well be the most astonishing phenomenon in musical history. The richness of what he accomplished in a life of merely thirty-one years defies comparison.” – Alfred Brendel
In significant contrast to yesterday’s marvelous, varied recital, Mr. Lewis today presents an equally marvelous and profound exploration of a profound composer, one of which he is a world-renowned master. It is a rare treat to get such a good Schubert-soaking!
Plunging into all that lake of melody and thrills, it is good to quote the late music critic of The Ottawa Citizen, Jacob Siskind, who wrote that “the difficulty with most of the music of Schubert, and this is especially true of his piano sonatas, is to reconcile the seeming simplicity of the structure and the endless flow of melody with the emotional tension generated by the provocative key relationships of the various sections. In lesser hands, the music can sound merely pretty, or puzzlingly disjointed. In the hands of one who has the emotional depths to identify completely with the mysteries of the music, these scores have the capacity to heal the deepest emotional wounds.”
Schubert was only 18 when he wrote his first piano sonata and by that same year, Beethoven had already published 27 of the 32 sonatas he composed. That must have been a bit overwhelming! A lesser talent, hearing Beethoven’s compositional revelations, might have thought that everything that could be said in a sonata had been, but not Schubert. He paid close attention to his own muse and tended to fill the prevailing Classical forms with melody after melody and to rely upon splendid, evolving harmonies rather than depictions of struggles and storms. His sudden shifts of key, for dramatic effect, are among music’s miracles.
Sonata No. 7 in E-flat Major, op. 122, D 568
Interestingly, this E-flat sonata is a revision and completion of the (unfinished) D-Major Sonata, D. 567 that Schubert composed in 1817, with the newer version, a half-step higher, to be heard today, being published in 1829, after Schubert’s death, hence the indication “posthumous” with the Opus number. This E-flat version was probably finished in 1826.
In examining the E-flat’s history and form, it is good to remember that Schubert was only 19 or 20 when he wrote and later revised this sonata. Its opening movement is easy to enter into right off, something that might strike the ear as quite “Classical” in nature – balanced, engaging. The movement proceeds in a sparkling way, the development section (the churning of multiple musical ideas before the grand restatement of the themes toward the end) is very polished, more even than in some of his other early sonatas.
A lovely Andante molto follows and then a Minuet, the trio section of which, in fact, is the very same music used for the trio of the second of the Two Scherzos, D. 593.
The finale is splendid, particularly from among the works of Schubert’s earliest years. The main theme is charming, but, as he did so often, Schubert spent more time focused on the second theme. The development stirs these good ingredients well and even puts out some new melody, just for a bit of spice.
Sonata No. 14 in A Minor, D 784, op. 143 psth. (“Grande Sonate”)
The year of Schubert’s death, 1828, saw the birth of an extraordinary number of masterpieces: the “Great” C major Symphony, the Mass in E-flat, the String Quintet in C, thirteen of his finest songs, and the final trilogy of great piano sonatas. Like the final works of other composers, these reveal much about their composer’s years of suffering and were written in a period of great despair and deprivation. Yet, somehow, a sense of “finality” pervades so that we can hear something borne of a meditation on the inner meaning of life, an expression of its highest and lowest moments.
Schubert died before the sonatas were published. Diabelli published them only in 1838, with the dedication going to Schumann, an apt choice in light of his championship of Schubert’s music.
This “Great Sonata,” thus, comes from a particularly grim time in Schubert’s life, when he was hospitalized for the disease that would ultimately kill him at a young age. It was finally published 11 years after Schubert’s death, given the opus number 143 and a dedication to Felix Mendelssohn by the publishers. Many hear it to be exceptionally profound and almost obsessively tragic.
The first movement is characterized unusually by the use of a new, sparse texture not found in his earlier writing. Indeed, more than a fifth of the movement is in bare octaves and with much less modulation than usual.
Of the second movement, Pianist Stephen Hough has written: "The second movement is strangely unsettling for three reasons: because of the almost enforced normality of its theme after the bittersweet bleakness of the first movement; because this theme is doubled in the tenor voice, a claustrophobic companion seeming to drag it down; and because of the constant, murmuring interjections (ppp) between the theme’s statements. "
The finale is simply wild, its crazy impetus driven by running triplets, full of constant energy, made even more urgent by furious imitation between the two hands. A more melodious idea breaks in now and then to interrupt the fury in such a wonderful Schubertian way. The conclusion, with its breathtaking ascending octaves in the left hand and final, assertive chords in the lower part of the keyboard is, in a word, devastating.
Sonata No. 17 in D Major, D 850, op. 53 (published 1826)
The nickname of this sonata, the Gasteiner, comes from Schubert’s having stayed and composed in the spa town of Bad Gastein in August of 1825. One of the only three of his 12 piano sonatas that was published in his lifetime, it is one of the longest and most ambitious of Schubert’s solo works.
The history of this sonata, compared to the one heard immediately before in this program, is a bit happier. After a period of ill health, in 1825, Schubert had traveled to spa towns away from his native Vienna and the spectacular scenery of mountains and lakes inspired an explosion of compositions, including the “Great” C-Major Symphony. It was a happier time that, apparently, allowed the pursuit of musical grandeur.
The opening is anything but tentative. Hurried and torrential, it is soon interrupted by a change of tempo, mood, and theme. Such interplay, leading to triumphant moments is what we most await in Schubert’s writing and he delivers here with panache.
Although one could reasonably expect something slow for the second movement, we rather get something con moto, with movement. Within, we get what might be the most lyrical and touching stuff in all of his music. (Meet me in the hallway at intermission if you want to argue this point.) Here is flowing and yearning, passion and vigor. And, in it is his sole indication in a sonata for triple fortissimo (fff). Schumann wrote of loving its “heavenly length.”
Dance and light-heartedness mark the Scherzo that leads to the simplicity of the concluding rondo. But, one errs to imagine that simplicity as showing what will happen in the unfolding of the movement. The simple tune is transformed suddenly into explosions of virtuosity, a bazillion notes a minute. In such a long work of such scope, one might anticipate an exultant climax, a real thriller. But, Schubert here knew that he had already scaled the heights majestically and, so, lets us glide into gentle release. The sonata and this program end quietly.