THE PIANO

Copyright © 2021 Susan Tomes

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 CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Introduction

PRE-HISTORY: FROM HARPSICHORD TO PIANO

1 Johann Sebastian Bach, Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
2 Italian Concerto, BWV 971
3 Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord in E major, BWV 1016
4 Domenico Scarlatti, Sonata in E major, K380, and an overview of
other sonatas
5 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Freie Fantasie in F sharp minor, Wq.67,
H.300

FROM HAYDN TO SCHUBERT: MUSIC FOR THE

DEVELOPING ‘FORTEPIANO’
6 Joseph Haydn, Variations in F minor, ‘Un piccolo divertimento’, Hob.
XVII:6
7 Piano Sonata in E flat major, Hob. XVI:52
8 Piano Trio in G major, Hob. XV:25, ‘Gypsy Rondo’
9 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K448
10 Sonata for Piano and Violin in B flat major, K454
11 Piano Quartet in G minor, K478
12 Piano Concerto in A major, K488
13 Rondo in A minor, K511
14 Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata for Piano and Violin in F major, op.
24, ‘Spring’
15 Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 57, ‘Appassionata’
16 Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major, op. 58
17 Piano Concerto no. 5 in E flat major, op. 73, ‘Emperor’
18 Piano Trio in B flat major, op. 97, ‘Archduke’
19 Piano Sonata in A flat major, op. 110
20 Franz Schubert, Piano Quintet in A major, D667, ‘Trout’
21 Piano Trio no. 2 in E flat major, D929
22 Rondo for Piano Duet in A major, D951
23 Piano Sonata in A major, D959

FROM THE MENDELSSOHNS TO DVOŘÁK: THE

GROWING POWER OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
PIANO
24 Fanny Mendelssohn, Das Jahr
25 Felix Mendelssohn, Variations Sérieuses in D minor, op. 54
26 Piano Trio no. 1 in D minor, op. 49
27 John Field, Nocturne no. 14 in C major (and others)
28 Maria Szymanowska, Études (and other pieces)
29 Frédéric Chopin, Ballade no. 1 in G minor, op. 23
30 24 Preludes, op. 28
31 Mazurka in B flat major, op. 7 no. 1 (and others)
32 Robert Schumann, Kinderszenen, op. 15
33 Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 54
34 Piano Trio no. 1 in D minor, op. 63
35 Clara Schumann, Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 7
36 Franz Liszt, Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178
37 Nuages Gris, S.199
38 Bedřich Smetana, Piano Trio in G minor, op. 15
39 Johannes Brahms, Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor, op. 15
40 Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34
41 Sonata for Piano and Violin in G major, op. 78
42 Piano Pieces, op. 118
43 Camille Saint-Saëns, Piano Trio no. 2 in E minor, op. 92
44 Mily Balakirev, Islamey: Oriental Fantasy, op. 18
45 Georges Bizet, Jeux d’Enfants, op. 22, for Piano Duet
46 Modest Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition
47 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto no. 1 in B flat minor, op.
23
48 The Seasons, op. 37a
49 Antonín Dvořák, Piano Quintet in A major, op. 81

FROM GRIEG TO RAVEL: INTO THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY
50 Edvard Grieg, Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16
51 Lyric Pieces
52 Gabriel Fauré, Piano Quartet no. 1 in C minor, op. 15
53 Dolly Suite, op. 56, for Piano Duet
54 Leoš Janáček, On an Overgrown Path, Book 1
55 Isaac Albéniz, Iberia
56 Claude Debussy, Images, Series 1
57 Preludes, Book 2
58 Sonata for Cello and Piano
59 Erik Satie, Gymnopédies
60 Ferruccio Busoni, Fantasia after Johann Sebastian Bach, BV253
61 Enrique Granados, ‘Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor’
62 Amy Beach, Sketches, op. 15
63 Alexander Scriabin, Piano Sonata no. 5, op. 53
64 Sergei Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor, op. 18
65 Piano Concerto no. 3 in D minor, op. 30
66 Maurice Ravel, Miroirs
67 Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello in A minor
68 Piano Concerto in G major

FROM IVES TO GUBAIDULINA: ‘STAND UP AND TAKE

YOUR DISSONANCE LIKE A MAN!’
69 Charles Ives, Piano Sonata no. 2, ‘Concord’
70 Arnold Schoenberg, Five Pieces for Piano, op. 23
71 Béla Bartók, Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, op.
20/Sz 74
72 Contrasts, Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano, Sz 111
73 Alban Berg, Piano Sonata, op. 1
74 Sergei Prokofiev, Piano Sonata no. 7 in B flat major, op. 83
75 Francis Poulenc, The Story of Babar the Elephant
76 Dmitri Shostakovich, Piano Trio no. 2 in E minor, op. 67
77 Piano Concerto no. 2 in F major, op. 102
78 Olivier Messiaen, Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus
79 John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes
80 György Ligeti, Musica Ricercata
81 Pierre Boulez, Douze Notations
82 Luciano Berio, Wasserklavier
83 György Kurtág, Játékok, selected pieces
84 Tōru Takemitsu, Rain Tree Sketch II
85 Sofia Gubaidulina, Chaconne

THE JAZZ INFLUENCE

RAGTIME AND ‘SYNCOPATED’ PIANO MUSIC
86 Scott Joplin, Maple Leaf Rag (and other pieces)
87 Billy Mayerl, The Jazz Master (and other pieces)
JAZZ PIANO, JAZZ PIANISTS
88 Fats Waller, Handful of Keys (and James P. Johnson, Willie ‘The
Lion’ Smith and Stride Piano)
89 Art Tatum, Tiger Rag (and other pieces)
90 Bebop Pianists: Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and others
91 Bill Evans, Waltz for Debby (and other pieces)
92 Women Jazz Pianists in a Man’s World: Mazie Mullins, Lovie Austin,
Lil Hardin Armstrong, Mary Lou Williams, Hazel Scott and Marian
McPartland
JAZZ GOES CLASSICAL
93 George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue
94 Igor Stravinsky, Piano-Rag Music
95 Conlon Nancarrow, Studies for Player Piano 3a–e
96 Frederic Rzewski, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues

TODAY’S PIANO STYLES: MINIMALISM AND HISTORICAL

AWARENESS
97 Arvo Pärt, Für Alina
98 Philip Glass, Mad Rush
99 Judith Weir, The Art of Touching the Keyboard
100 Thomas Adès, Three Mazurkas

Tomorrow’s World: Where is Piano Music Heading?

Further Reading
Index
 AUTHOR’S NOTE

I finished writing the first draft of this book in March 2020 just as
lockdown began in the UK because of the coronavirus pandemic. Six
months later, I revised it while the country was still in various degrees of
lockdown. In the intervening period, when we were stuck in the house,
many people told me that they had been playing the piano a lot and finding
it good for their mental health. They must have been playing a range of
music, but the pieces they kept mentioning were the old classics – Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven. In June 2020, the New York Times reported that while
concerts might have disappeared, sales of pianos for the domestic market
had gone up. People kept reporting that they found piano-playing an
unexpected solace. Children were practising more; adults were embarking
upon piano lessons, and families were singing round the piano or playing
music together. For me it was heartening to think that the piano was being
such a good companion, and had probably entered upon a new chapter of its
history.
 INTRODUCTION

Writing this book has been a delight. It has made me realise that, as a
pianist, my focus is usually on the particular pieces I am preparing for
performance. There are always so many things to think about:
interpretation, fingering, memorisation, physical security and all the other
aspects of playing in public. Even though the pieces change regularly,
another batch of immediate preoccupations takes their place. I have not
often stepped back to take a conscious look at the history of piano music
and the collective achievement that it represents.
When I took the time to do so, I was deeply impressed by its quality. It
seems that for more than two hundred years the piano has been the
confidante of most of our greatest composers – many of them excellent
pianists, who composed at the piano. Aside from the human voice, can there
be any other instrument which has inspired such intense and personal
music? And can there be any other instrument which has been a constant
companion to so many people throughout their lives? In many homes, the
piano has provided an emotional outlet, an escape route, a hobby or a focus
of aspiration for millions of amateur pianists who, hour after hour, day after
day and year after year, sit at the piano, delving into and dreaming their way
through this wonderful music.
One of the great things about the piano is that a pianist can play melody
and harmony at the same time (not to mention layers of melodies and
harmonies). This means the piano is one of the few instruments that can
play ‘complete’ music. Many other instruments, no matter how glorious
their tone, play single lines intended to be put together with other lines to
form a whole. The piano is self-sufficient, and this is one reason why it has
been so successful. There are other keyboard instruments that can play
melody and harmony at the same time, such as the harpsichord and the
organ, but they are less likely to be in your living room.
Anyone who has acquired a degree of comfort on their chosen
instrument will know the extraordinary tactile sensation of producing music
from it, as if they are actually creating ‘the material of sound’ in the same
way that, say, bakers produce dough which they mould into different shapes
and forms, leaving the impress of their hands upon it. All musical
instruments can give their players this sensation, but the piano perhaps
more than most, because its music is complex and requires the pianist to
play different musical strands with their two hands, thus involving the brain
in a particular way. As there are so many notes in the typical piano part, the
pianist can have the feeling of interacting with and forming the sound at a
microscopically detailed level, a bit like an expert embroiderer whose tiny
stitches multiply to luxuriant effect.
Keyboard instruments go back many centuries, and a survey could
encompass Elizabethan music for the virginals, or seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century music for the harpsichord. However, I have taken as my
starting point the emergence of the piano as the leading keyboard
instrument. In simple terms, this change took place in the eighteenth
century when the plucking quills of the harpsichord and the metal tangents
of the clavichord were replaced by the covered hammers of the piano. This
produced a different ‘attack’ on the strings and new expressive possibilities,
because the pianist, unlike the harpsichordist, could vary the tone between
loud and soft at will (as one can with a clavichord to a limited extent). The
piano’s range of tone and tonal projection increased as piano makers found
ways to enlarge and strengthen the frames of their instruments.
Music written for the piano took on a different quality from that written
for earlier keyboards. The piano very quickly became popular with players
and audiences, and when it was made affordable for the general public in
the early nineteenth century it proved an essential item in many music-
loving homes. It was considered a desirable possession even in homes
where nobody played the piano. By the 1870s the French novelist Gustave
Flaubert in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas described the piano as
‘indispensable in a salon’, and in the early twentieth century the American
president Calvin Coolidge said that ‘We cannot imagine a model New
England home without the family Bible on the table and the family piano in
the corner.’ Even now, surveys show that the piano is still by some margin
the instrument that people would most like to be able to play.
Today, the piano still uses that basic mechanism, its hammers covered in
layers of compressed felt. In an era of electronic gadgets, it may come as a
surprise to people to look into the workings of a grand piano and see that it
still looks much as it would have to Beethoven. This is not because piano
makers have been lazy since Beethoven’s day, but because the design of the
acoustic piano is a classic. It has been continuously upgraded, its
mechanism refined but not essentially changed. Even the inventors of
modern digital keyboards have based their sound on that of the acoustic
piano, and have found ingenious ways to give the player the sensation that
they are playing a leading brand of concert piano.
One of the piano’s great blessings is its versatility. Solo piano music
gets most of the limelight, but the piano plays a huge role in the world of
collaborative music – duets for two players at one piano, duos for two
pianos, pieces for violin and piano, cello and piano, piano trio (piano with
violin and cello), piano quartets and quintets, piano with one or more wind
instruments, piano as a soloist with orchestra, piano as an orchestral
instrument, piano with chorus, piano with narrator, piano for ballet class,
piano in church, piano for opera rehearsals, piano in pop groups, piano in
hotel lounges . . . the piano plays its part in a vast range of activities.
It also plays a crucial role in song repertoire, a very important field
which tends to attract its own specialists, professional pianists who work
almost exclusively with singers. From the very beginning of music history,
songs have been of fundamental importance. The powerful combination of
words and music is enhanced by the natural human rapport we feel with
singers; their effortless primacy brings a particular dynamic to any musical
collaboration in which they are involved. This often leads to their pianists
being referred to as ‘accompanists’, and in fact many professional
accompanists have made their peace with this term, knowing that their role
is vital yet understanding that audiences cannot help responding first and
foremost to the singer. In purely instrumental music, however, the piano
does not face this unequal dynamic. Much as I would have liked to include
song cycles such as Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin or Winterreise, or
Schumann’s Dichterliebe, I decided to concentrate on instrumental
collaborations where the piano’s role is central or paramount.
I believe that the masterpieces of piano chamber music are at least the
equal of the greatest solo works. It has always seemed to me that composers
reserve some of their most intimate and searching thoughts for their
chamber music, so when deciding which 100 pieces represented the best of
piano music, it seemed obvious that some of my choices had to be
collaborative music. All the chamber pieces I have included are shining
examples of their composers’ work, in some cases outshining their music
for solo piano.
It has been fascinating and challenging to try to represent the piano’s
timeline with 100 choices. Obviously 100 is far too few – it might have
been more appropriate to write ‘a history of the piano in 5,347 pieces’, but
that would have tried everyone’s patience. Restricting oneself to 100 pieces
is a bit of a game, but it focuses the mind. My choice has inevitably been
guided by my own experience as a pianist and performer; a scholar or
academic might make a different selection for other reasons, but mine is
informed by my experience of learning, practising and playing this
repertoire across a wide range of solo and collaborative settings.
Sometimes, when I have had to choose between the playable and the
unplayable, I have chosen the playable for the sake of the home pianist, but
I have also picked out some of the most fiendish and dazzling examples of
virtuosity, because they are fascinating in their own ways, and show what
heights the pianistic imagination can reach. In other fields, the ‘100 Best’
has been a good way to give people an insight into a subject, and I hope the
same is true of piano music.
I quickly found it necessary, however, to allow myself to choose ‘sets’
or ‘works’ as well as single pieces. After all, famous sonatas and concertos
have three or four movements and can last for half an hour or more, yet
most people would agree that they should count as ‘one’. Beyond the field
of piano music, a symphony is regarded as one work, and so is an opera,
even though it may last for hours. So I have taken a flexible view,
sometimes choosing a single piece if it stands alone, sometimes taking a set
of pieces, and occasionally giving an overview of a genre such as Mazurka,
Étude or Prelude in a composer’s output. Some pieces were chosen because
of their musical excellence, others because of their historical importance or
their pianistic distinction. Some were chosen because I have fond memories
of rehearsing and performing them, or because I relished the way audiences
responded to them. Quite a few pieces represent several categories at the
same time.
I have included a fair amount about jazz, which I consider to be a
special and important chapter of piano history. A lot of jazz was never
written down, because it was improvised, using well-known tunes or songs
as the raw material. The piano was central to jazz from the start. Luckily,
we have recordings from almost the earliest days of jazz, from which it is
clear that the best of these improvised pieces are as interesting as any in the
classical field. They may not have been notated, but the recordings
themselves have been studied, copied and revered by several generations of
jazz pianists. These improvisations were not ‘compositions’ in the sense of
most of the other pieces in this book, but they were musical and intellectual
achievements nonetheless and deserve to take their place in the history of
piano music. Jazz has also inspired a lot of fabulous piano-playing; some of
the quickest thinkers and most stylish masters of the piano have come from
the world of African-American jazz.
The relatively small number of women composers on my list is
frustrating. Because of society’s attitudes through the centuries to women
making public careers, there have been relatively few women composers, or
at least relatively few whose work we know about. We do know that some
talented female composers were actively discouraged by their families or
husbands. Mozart’s sister Nannerl was said to be as good a pianist and
composer as he was, and they were taken on concert tours together by their
father Leopold when they were children. But her father did not think it
appropriate to encourage her talent in later years, and none of her
compositions have survived. It’s well known that Fanny Mendelssohn was
discouraged by both her father and her brother Felix from pursuing a career
as a composer, and Robert Schumann was only tolerant of his wife Clara’s
composing as long as it didn’t interfere with her running of the household.
Gustav Mahler made it clear to his wife Alma that she had to set aside her
ambition to compose in order to support him and his career. For these sorts
of reasons there are fewer women to include than one would wish. Over the
centuries many women have either doubted, or been made to doubt, their
right to compose music. When I was growing up, it was taken for granted
by my whole milieu, including me, that composing was – like conducting
and so much else – part of a man’s world. The climate for female
composers is better today, but I venture to suggest that women still have to
fight for the right to have ‘thinking time’ of their own, and for the
opportunity to be heard.
There’s an important point to be made about women pianists and their
relationship to piano repertoire – women tend to have smaller hands than
men do. Women have always played the piano, but they have had to play an
instrument designed by men. Earlier pianos tended to have narrower keys,
and occasionally in more recent times narrower keyboards have been
specially made for particular pianists. But there is no such thing generally
available as a woman’s size of modern concert piano. Women string players
may look for a small violin or cello, perhaps built for a female player, but
women pianists have to play the same piano that the men play. Of course
there are male pianists with small hands just as there are women pianists
with big hands, but the average male hand is bigger than the average female
hand. Not only have most composers been men, but the vast majority of
fingering printed in piano scores was devised by male composers and
editors, who probably took their own hand as the blueprint. Women pianists
will often find, as I do, that the recommended fingering – especially in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century repertoire – does not suit them because it
assumes a larger stretch between individual fingers. Women pianists have
proved ingenious in getting round these challenges, but it is undeniable that
physical comfort with large swathes of the piano repertoire comes more
easily to men.
Ethnomusicologists have suggested that in certain parts of the world –
Europe, the English-speaking countries – there is too much focus on the
composer. In their view, composers are there to provide something for
musicians to play. If so, these composers have done a brilliant job. Their
piano music has provided me with music which has reflected every aspect
of my experience and has provided a sort of running commentary to
everyday events. Whatever my mood, I know there is a piece of piano
music on my shelves which will transport me in imagination to somewhere
pleasing, and will make me feel better, or at least more philosophical. And I
know from conversations with fellow pianists of all kinds that the same is
true for them. These masterpieces of piano music provide us with puzzles
whose solutions involve working on ourselves. As we do so, other solutions
come into view, and it feels as though we and the music are evolving in
parallel.
As I worked on this book, one of the things which really struck me is
the tremendous amount of fine piano-playing out there. As well as
refreshing my memory of some of the great recordings of the twentieth
century, I have listened to recordings and videos made by professionals,
students, amateurs and talented children all over the world. Their devotion
to the instrument makes it clear that piano music is in good hands.
There are many paths that one could take through the great forest of
piano music. This is one path, in which I touch 100 favourite trees as I pass
through. I hope my chosen pieces will remind people of the wonders of
piano music and give them an insight into why the piano is the king of
instruments.
 JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750)

1. Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

In choosing 100 pieces of piano music, I’m aware that I could use up nearly
all my selections on the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Just his
48 Preludes and Fugues (The Well-Tempered Clavier, two sets of 24
preludes and fugues, published respectively in 1722 and 1742) could take
up almost half of my choices straightaway, and by adding some Inventions,
Partitas, English Suites, French Suites, concertos, duo sonatas and
transcriptions one could more or less use up the full hundred. There might
be some justification for this, because J.S. Bach is still, after 300 years, at
the top of most people’s choice of Great Composers.
What is so special about Bach? His mastery of compositional forms and
styles, his intellectual energy, his integrity, his sincerity and the consistently
high quality of his work are all admirable. Bach came at the end of a period
in which the craft of music, rather than the personality of the composer, was
considered of prime importance. Shortly after Bach’s time, the emphasis
moved to the drama of the composer’s feelings, the sense that composers
can give us of their grappling with fate and individual experience. Craft
remained essential, of course, but by Beethoven’s time the element of
drama had come to the forefront, whereas in Bach’s music, craft is still
paramount. His keyboard works are a testament to this kind of craft, the
result of hard intellectual work over many years combined with a keyboard
player’s love and understanding of what’s involved in playing an
instrument.
It should perhaps be admitted that many young pianists only know Bach
through his keyboard music and have not yet had a chance to encounter the
large-scale dramatic works on religious texts – the St Matthew Passion, the
St John Passion, the B minor Mass, and the rich cycle of church Cantatas
which gave Bach the opportunity to display to the full his insight into
human nature. His keyboard works, however, are not based on texts and
have no words or obvious story. For young pianists, this can make the study
of Bach a little dry. Bach was keenly interested in the art of combining
different musical lines so that they work wonderfully together without any
line having to sacrifice any portion of content or detail. This makes his
keyboard writing very ‘busy’; often there are two, three, even four lines
active at the same time, all with melodies to make smooth, and complicated
fingering to attend to. The rhythms are often quite straightforward, but the
rhythmic activity is lively and constant.
In Mozart’s writing, by contrast, there is often an intricate melodic line
in the right hand while the left plays a simpler bass line. Bach rarely does
this. In fact, he seems to make a point of giving every line of counterpoint
an equal share of activity, almost as if it were a moral principle to do so. For
the player, this demands a constant attention – there is hardly a moment
when one can coast along, taking one’s eyes off the detail, for there is
always something happening in one line or another, often in several lines
simultaneously, and the interweaving of strands calls for ingenious
fingering patterns. As a young pianist myself I remember finding this
laborious. At that stage I had only come across some preludes and fugues,
and a few Inventions. It was much later that I encountered Bach’s orchestral
and choral music, and when I had taken in its splendid architecture and
emotional sweep I then realised that I could hear echoes of it in the
keyboard music, which made me want to explore more of that music.
Bach’s life and the emergence of the piano only overlapped slightly –
the piano did not start to be developed until he was already a mature
composer. His main instruments were the harpsichord and organ; when
Bach used the word ‘clavier’ he probably meant a range of keyboard
instruments including harpsichord and clavichord, and sometimes such
music was suitable for the organ too. Bach would have played a range of
harpsichords, some with one keyboard or ‘manual’, some with two. The
sound was made by a plectrum plucking the string. This made the sound of
the harpsichord distinctly different from that of the piano, where a small
rounded hammer-head strikes the string from below. In the early days of the
piano, there was not much difference between the carrying power of the
piano and that of the harpsichord, but the piano gave the player more
control over the volume of each note, which opened up more expressive
possibilities.
As far as we know, Bach encountered the piano round about 1736, when
he was already fifty. In imitation of the Italian inventor Bartolomeo
Cristofori who first developed a prototype of the modern piano in the
1720s, the Dresden instrument maker Gottfried Silbermann had built a
piano, which Bach was asked to try. Bach admired the tone but found that it
was too weak in the high register, and too hard to play. Silbermann was
disappointed, but eventually set about making improvements. There is a gap
in our knowledge of Bach’s acquaintance with pianos until 1747 when he
went to Berlin to visit his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, then the official
harpsichordist at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Frederick had
bought a number of recent pianos made by Silbermann and J.S. Bach was
again asked to try them. Legend has it that the king himself composed a
very complicated theme and asked Bach to improvise upon it (although
some historians have thought it more likely that C.P.E. Bach, at his
majesty’s request, supplied the theme and took some delight in devising
something complicated enough to test his father’s famous powers of
invention). At any rate, this theme later became the basis for J.S. Bach’s
Musical Offering, the gigantic collection of fugues and canons which he
composed in his last decade. By then Bach was more focused on the art and
craft of composition than on the particular instruments which would play
his music, and we do not know whether his encounters with Silbermann’s
pianos were of lasting significance to him.
Although Bach’s harpsichord music continues to be played and
appreciated on the harpsichord, pianists have always claimed that his music
sounds just as good if not better on the modern piano. Many believe that if
the modern piano had been around in Bach’s time he would have liked
hearing his music played on it, and might have written new music to play to
its strengths (for example, experimenting with the sustaining pedal, which
his harpsichord lacked). We know that Bach, like many composers of his
age, was open-minded about exactly what instrument was used, and
famously some of his works (for example The Art of Fugue) don’t specify
the instrumentation. Nevertheless he was a practical person; his keyboard
music was written for the instruments he knew, not for some imagined
future development of them. We might guess that he would welcome the
sound of his Goldberg Variations on the modern piano, and so he might, but
the question must remain open.
It’s important that today’s pianists should have an idea of what the
harpsichord sounded like, so that they can factor it into their decisions about
how to play Bach’s music. For example, many pianists routinely use the
sustaining pedal to create the illusion of ‘legato’, the smooth linking of one
note to another. This was not an option on the harpsichord, where legato
had to be created by fingerwork alone, one finger not leaving a note until
the next finger has gone down on the next note. The resulting sound, dry but
smooth, is very different from the legato we customarily hear in today’s
piano music and is a sonority worth learning to create.
The argument for playing Bach on the piano received a boost in 1955
when the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould recorded the Goldberg Variations.
At the time, the piece was not part of standard piano repertoire and was
considered the specialist preserve of harpsichordists like Wanda
Landowska. Gould (then only twenty-two) persuaded his record company
to let him try his hand(s) at the Goldberg Variations on a Steinway piano.
The result made his name and set many pianists scrambling to bring Bach’s
music into the fold. Gould had a brilliant mind and a wonderfully nimble
technique and clarity of articulation, made even clearer by the rather dry,
close recording on which he insisted. He was keenly interested in the
editing process, and the result is a rare amalgam of old music sounding
sparklingly new on a modern instrument. (He recorded the Goldberg
Variations a second time in 1981, and that version also has many fans.)
Following his example, pianists everywhere descended confidently upon
Bach’s keyboard works and snatched them up for recital programmes. At
the time of writing there is a healthy spread of approaches to Bach’s
keyboard music, from historically aware performances on harpsichord to
piano interpretations using all the resources of the modern instrument,
jazzed-up versions with drums and bass, and performances on accordion,
electronic synthesiser and digital pianos.
Let us stay with the Goldberg Variations to consider why they have
become a staple of modern piano recital repertoire. Their origin is one of
the more charming legends of music history. Bach had an occasional pupil,
Johann Goldberg, who was in the service of Count Kaiserling, the former
Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony. Count Kaiserling was troubled
with insomnia and used to summon Goldberg to play the harpsichord to him
when he couldn’t sleep at night. The Count mentioned to Bach that he
would like some new and restful pieces which Goldberg could play to him.
Bach’s response was to compose a grand set of thirty variations on an ‘Aria’
which appears at the beginning and end of the set. How much of this story
is true, we are not sure. Bach was not in the habit of writing sets of
variations, and even after writing this magnificent set he didn’t adopt the
habit. It’s possible he was just taken with the idea on the spur of the
moment, or perhaps Goldberg suggested something interesting enough to
keep himself awake when he had to get up in the night to play harpsichord
music to his employer. Goldberg himself appears only to have been a
teenager at the time. But of course teenagers can be brilliant players, so
Goldberg’s age doesn’t rule out the truth of the story. At any rate, Bach
composed a real tour de force, almost a compendium of keyboard styles
from the graceful melodic sarabande which forms the ‘Aria’ to the rapid
acrobatics of the fastest variations.
The structure of the work is ingenious. All the variations are based not
on the melody but on the simple 32-bar harmonic progression we hear in
the bass of the Aria; these take the eight-bar phrases to cadences (resting
points) in G, D, E minor and G. The melody of the Aria is, however,
memorable. Its principal features are graceful downward-drooping phrases.
Although the bass line proceeds in units of eight bars, the melody divides
into units of four bars, so that each bass line unit has a pair of melodic
phrases above it. This remains the case until the last eight-bar unit, where
suddenly the right hand has a continuous eight-bar melodic line as well.
Most of it is in running semiquavers, which gives the effect of the music
gathering energy towards the end. Bach was particularly skilled at this
effect, a sort of musical friction derived from something which seems to be
speeding up as something else winds down to a close.
After the Aria and Variations 1 and 2, Bach embarks on a pattern of
variations grouped in threes. At the start of every group there is a canon (a
melody followed at a given distance by an imitative melody). The first
canon is ‘at the unison’, meaning that the imitative melody is at the same
pitch as the model melody. The second canon (three variations later) is ‘at
the second’, meaning that the imitation occurs a note higher than the model.
And so on: the third canon is ‘at the third’, the fourth ‘at the fourth’, all the
way to Variation 27 which is ‘at the ninth’. This set of canons alone is an
impressive achievement.
In each group of three variations, the middle variation is of independent
character. In these ‘middle pieces’ we encounter various Baroque dances, a
fughetta (a little fugue), an ‘overture’ with stately dotted rhythms in the
French style, and two of the loveliest pieces in this or any other
composition, Variation 13 in G major and Variation 25 in G minor – both of
them featuring intricate lyrical melodic lines, like the passionate violin solo
‘Erbarme dich, mein Gott’ which is a high point of the St Matthew Passion.
And in each group, the third item is a brilliant piece of writing to be played
on the two harpsichord manuals, keyboards one above and behind the other
on the same instrument, allowing for different sonorities to be contrasted
and enabling the hands to cross without hitting each other. This group of
variations naturally causes the most technical difficulty on the modern
piano with its single keyboard, for the pianist’s hands must often compete
for space when crossing over one another. So Bach’s design gives us nine
groups of three variations, each beginning with a canon and ending with a
display of brilliant fingerwork. This takes us up to the joyfully clattering
Variation 29.
Variation 30 is a ‘Quodlibet’, a form well known in the Bach family
with its many musicians; at the end of family gatherings they would have
fun playing and improvising on whatever instruments they had, often
incorporating folk songs. In this cheery variation, Bach reveals nothing
about what he might be quoting, but scholars have identified at least two
earthy songs which are woven into the melody line. ‘I haven’t been with
you for so long’ is one, and ‘Cabbage and turnips have driven me away’ is
another. Many have found it surprising that Bach decided to end such a
complex and dignified structure with folk song, but there is something
grounding about it too. After this, Bach simply writes: ‘Aria da Capo e
Fine’, meaning ‘play the Aria again and that’s the end’. The Aria itself is not
supplied again, which gives the pianist the curious sensation of turning back
to the beginning and starting all over again. Does the Aria sound different
because of all that we have heard? In a way it doesn’t, or at least not to me;
it feels more like some kind of supporting pillar being placed at the end of
the design.

2. Italian Concerto, BWV 971

There are many Bach keyboard works one could explore, but for contrast,
here is one which shows him in ebullient, outward-looking mood: the
Italian Concerto, or more properly the Concerto nach italiänischem Gusto
(Concerto according to Italian Taste). Bach was an admirer of the Italian
concerto grosso style of Corelli and Vivaldi, where a soloist or soloists
engage in musical debate with an orchestra in episodes which make great
play with the contrast between solo and ‘tutti’ (‘all’, meaning the orchestra).
Bach had transcribed a number of these Italian works for keyboard, taking
advantage of the two-manual harpsichord to create the effect of ‘soloist’ and
‘orchestra’.
Eventually Bach decided to write an ‘Italian concerto’ of his own. He
included it in the second part of his Clavierübung (Keyboard Practice), a
collection of works which came out in 1735. Clearly he wanted to dispel
any notion that he was just a provincial Kapellmeister (director of music),
for he includes not only this Italian concerto but also a French overture,
both evidence of a cosmopolitan outlook. The Italian Concerto was an
immediate success and even the hard-to-please critic Johann Adolf Scheibe,
who had previously complained that Bach’s style of writing was ‘heavy and
sophisticated’, changed his mind and decreed that the Italian Concerto was
‘a perfect model of a well-designed concerto . . . Mr Bach has taken almost
single-handed possession of the clavier.’
The concerto is an example of Bach trying his hand at the lighter, more
melodic, ‘galant’ style of composition favoured by his sons Carl Philipp
Emanuel and Johann Christian, who were composers too. The piece is
notable for its good humour and high spirits. It is in three movements, two
cheerful outer movements framing a glorious slow movement. Bach has
written ‘forte’ and ‘piano’ over certain passages to tell the harpsichordist
which bits to play on the lower (grander) manual and when to use the upper
manual. On the modern piano, there is only one keyboard, so the
harpsichord’s built-in layers of sound must be imitated on the piano by the
player’s tone control and ability to vary the dynamic. When one attempts to
follow Bach’s ‘forte’ and ‘piano’ indications, however, one discovers that
they are not the entire solution, because some passages could be imagined
as either ‘orchestral’ or ‘solo’ or both, and sometimes one hand appears to
be ‘the soloist’ while the other is ‘the accompaniment’. Moreover,
sometimes the orchestra must be loud while the soloist is soft, and
occasionally it is the other way round. This, after all, was written as a
keyboard piece and not a collaboration between harpsichord and orchestra;
we are in the realm of the imaginary, and with these fluid musical lines it is
as well not to be dogmatic.
 With the crisp articulation of the harpsichord, it is easier to convey the
expressive meaning of the rests. Bach has a wonderful way of making his
rests ‘tell’, and pianists should make an effort not to pedal through them or
lazily hold down the keys too long so that the rests don’t speak. For
example, at the end of the first four-bar phrase, there is a one-beat rest.
Played correctly, this rest contributes a rhythmical silence charged with
excitement. The rest is almost as important as the notes themselves, and
there are many other such examples. Clearing away the notes immediately
their prescribed duration ends will allow other lines to come through, for
example when the ‘orchestra’ enters with more rapid notes as the soloist is
just finishing off a phrase. Bach doesn’t give an overall tempo indication
for the first movement, but the bars with especially rapid figuration (those
with demisemiquaver movement) would suggest that the tempo should be
steady enough to allow this fast decoration to register in all its sparkling
precision without becoming gabbled.
Bach indicates ‘Andante’ for his D minor slow movement, which
probably means he doesn’t want it to be too slow (‘andante’ means ‘moving
along’ in Italian). This is a marvellous structure wherein the bass follows a
repeating rhythmical pattern throughout while the melody line weaves and
embroiders a most beautiful design in the air above it. The movement
divides more or less into two equal sections, the first half moving from D
minor to F major, the second half starting again in D minor and, making
some slight detours to other keys, winding its way back to a D minor close.
In both halves, the lead-up to the final settling on a key is done by means of
‘pedal notes’ in the bass; that is, low notes which repeat in every bar and
build up our expectation of what is going to happen harmonically. It is easy
to imagine these low notes, in this case repeated quavers (C in the first half
leading towards F major, A in the second half leading towards D minor),
being played ‘pizzicato’ on cellos or double basses.
Above the hypnotically steady rhythm of the bass, the right hand
superimposes phrases of various lengths, entering after only three
‘orchestral’ bars and gradually extending its phrases, so that by the time the
pedal notes enter in the bass, the melody is embarking on a very long phrase
which goes all the way to the cadence. In the second half, the soloist
continues to spin very long phrases, dipping and weaving without ever
coming to rest until the cadence into D minor a few bars before the end.
Although the melodic line may seem to have the character of an improvised
embellishment, such as a gifted player might be able to undertake with
some indication of the underlying harmonies (e.g. ‘figured bass’), Bach
goes to the trouble of writing out exactly what he wanted to hear, and
indeed his line is so lovely that it is impossible to imagine an improvisation
could match it. After we arrive back in D minor, five bars before the end,
there is a little coda or tailpiece in which the soloist inflects the intricate
melody line with some unexpected and poignant chromatic notes, another
example of how Bach can make us feel that music is somehow gathering
internal energy at the same time as it is drawing to a close.
If played as he wrote it, the final bar of the slow movement may seem
shockingly abrupt, for Bach cuts off the music after only one beat, followed
by two beats of silence. It takes nerve to do it, but is worth trying, because it
illuminates the fact that the music ends as the architectural design is
completed. A self-indulgent effect of lingering on the final notes, letting
them ring ‘sadly’ on, is no part of his design.
The final Presto is an unstoppable display of great good humour as well
as contrapuntal invention. It’s composed almost entirely in running quavers
and crotchets, and it moves mainly between F major and its most closely
related keys, but gives the impression of having an inexhaustible fund of
ideas about what to do next. The tempo should not be allowed to run away
and get faster and faster, as often happens in performance, because the
charm of this Presto is enhanced by its dance-like poise. The musical
interest keeps swapping from one hand to the other, so that rather like one
of Bach’s two-part Inventions, there seems to be good-natured competition
between the hands to grab musical ideas from one another. Sometimes a
third strand is introduced, so that for example the right hand plays both
melody and descant, while the left hand marks out the crotchet beats (often
marked ‘forte’) like jolly double-bass pizzicatos. There is not a single silent
beat in the movement; each time a long phrase comes to an end in one
voice, another voice rushes to fill the potential gap with a scale passage
introducing the next motif. Bach had certainly mastered the vivacious
‘Italian style’ of Vivaldi and Corelli, almost outdoing them in wit and
ingenuity.
 3. Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord in E major, BWV 1016
Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord are not as well known as, say, his
sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, but they are at least as fine.
Written during 1717–23 when Bach was employed at the court of Cöthen in
Germany, they are amongst the first duo sonatas where the instruments are
treated as equal partners. Before Bach’s time it was the custom to have the
violin part written out and the harpsichord part consisting only of a bass line
with ‘figures’, that is, little numbers below the notes which told the
keyboard player what chord to play above any given bass note, leaving the
player to add any other tasteful elaborations which came to mind. In his
sonatas for violin and harpsichord, Bach moved on from this custom; both
parts are completely written out (apart from a few passages with ‘figured
bass’), a decision essential when the interplay of parts is so intricate.
Musically, Bach makes it absolutely clear that he regards the two
players as equal. He treats the violin and the harpsichordist’s right hand as
conversational partners, swapping ideas and chasing one another through
the movements. The harpsichordist’s left hand generally plays the role of a
viol or cello, laying out the bass line in steadier rhythms. In this sense,
Bach’s duo sonatas are modelled on the ‘trio sonata’ made famous by
Corelli, where two treble instruments (violins, perhaps, or flutes or
recorders) would take the starring roles while the bass line was played by a
bass viol player or a cellist, with a harpsichord or organ duplicating that
bass line and adding appropriate chords. (As there were four players
involved, one might think that this would be more accurately called a
‘sonata a quattro’, but ‘trio’ refers to two melody parts plus a bass line.) But
here Bach upgrades the keyboard part and gives it both solo and
accompanying roles, so that the player is supplying two of the three roles in
a ‘trio sonata’.
A quarter of a century after J.S. Bach’s death, C.P.E. Bach (a leading
composer of the next generation) sent his father’s six violin and harpsichord
sonatas to Johann Forkel, who was preparing a biography of J.S. Bach.
C.P.E. Bach said of the sonatas that ‘they still sound very good, and give me
a lot of pleasure, even though they’re over fifty years old’. If fifty years
seemed a long time to C.P.E. Bach, how astonished would he be to learn
that three hundred years later they are still giving pleasure? Today one hears
them played with violin and harpsichord and with a modern piano; each
instrument brings out different facets of the music. In a larger hall it may be
difficult to hear the harpsichord with clarity. On the other hand, its crisp
articulation can bring life and air to dance-like movements especially. The
modern piano with its superior sustaining sound is in some ways a better
partner for the violin, but incautious use of the pedal can pour a thick sauce
over tasty little details.
My favourite in this set of sonatas is no. 4 in E major, BWV 1016. It is a
substantial four-movement work based on the Italian style of a slow
movement, a fast movement, a slow movement and a fast finale. Right from
the start one feels Bach’s superb control of his musical ideas. The opening
Adagio could have come from the St Matthew Passion or one of Bach’s
church cantatas. As the piano sets up a steady tread with repeating rhythmic
motifs, the violin traces a rhapsodic line, subtly moving against the piano
part in phrases of irregular length. In the bass of the piano part, a low octave
E tolls through the first seven bars, building up tension until in bar 8 a shift
of just a semitone feels like a major departure. Throughout the movement,
the tension between the steady keyboard part and the virtuosic violin part is
beautifully wrought, each part obviously needing the other, as though
representing a parent walking stoically onward while a child joyfully runs
rings around them.
The second movement brings a change of mood; the pianist bursts out
with a cheeky tune which sounds almost like one of the folk songs Bach
quotes in the Goldberg Variations. As the violin enters with an echo of this
tune (and the piano moves on to a counter-theme) it becomes clear that this
is going to be an imitative movement, and not just between the violin and
the pianist’s right hand: the left hand is also drawn into the debate, leaving
its bass line duties to become an active third partner in the back and forth.
This is one of many movements where, employing only the most basic
rhythms (mainly crotchets and quavers, and hardly a dotted note in sight),
Bach finds it easy to weave together theme, counter-theme and other motifs
in all kinds of ways which fit perfectly and never seem strained.
In the second slow movement, now in the more melancholy key of C
sharp minor, the roles of soloist and accompanist are continually swapped
between the two players (in contrast to the opening movement, where the
roles are fixed). Again, there is beautiful balance between the simple
‘walking’ crotchets of the bass line in their four-bar units, the pulsing
quaver chords (always with the first quaver of the bar missing) and the
lilting triplets of the ‘vocal’ line, which passes from one instrument to the
other. C.P.E. Bach had remarked to Forkel when sending him the sonatas
that ‘there are some Adagios here, which even today one could not compose
in a more singing style’. C.P.E. Bach sometimes found his aged father’s
liking for complicated fugues a bit trying and preferred the graceful melodic
style of his own era, so this is a compliment from him. As the movement
progresses, the singing lines move against one another in canon, in opposite
directions, and weaving around one another. Compared with the rhapsodic,
virtuosic quality of the opening movement, however, this second slow
movement is more like an intimate conversation between two people who
know the value of expressing themselves with restraint.
The final Allegro is another feast of three-part imitative writing, the left
hand liberated from the steady path it walked in the previous movement.
Often it supplies punchy rhythmic motifs, but eventually it joins in with the
chase as scurrying semiquavers are passed from one voice to another. The
movement divides into three big parts: an opening section which recurs at
the end, and in the middle a development that begins with a delightful shift
into triplets on the violin, echoed by the piano. Triplet and semiquaver
figures start to compete for attention, until at the midpoint of the movement
the triplets suddenly vanish, the lilt vanishes with them, and the rest is an
energetic tussle between quavers and semiquavers. Most pianists will find it
tricky to work out a good fingering for some of the rapid passages, and it
would certainly be useful to have a sixth finger on each hand. We must
remember, however, that our modern obsession with smooth legato
fingering was not shared by the harpsichordists of Bach’s time. In playing
such fiddly passages, they probably jumped around the keys, lifting their
hands as necessary rather than passing the thumb under. This is tricky in a
different way, but can give a pleasant feeling of improvisation.

DOMENICO SCARLATTI (1685–1757)

4. Sonata in E major, K380, and an overview of other sonatas
Domenico Scarlatti, the son of opera composer Alessandro Scarlatti, was an
Italian harpsichord composer of the Baroque era whose career also brought
him into contact with the early piano. At first he followed in his father’s
footsteps, concentrating on vocal works, but the second half of his life
brought him travel opportunities which changed his musical outlook.
Scarlatti moved to Lisbon in 1719 as a court musician and became the
music master of Princess Maria Barbara of Portugal; a decade later when
she married Crown Prince Ferdinand, the future King of Spain, Scarlatti
moved with her royal entourage to Seville and later to Madrid. The
influence of Portuguese, Spanish and Moorish music made its way into his
compositions. His pupil, the princess, was a talented keyboard player who
held regular musical evenings in her royal apartments. For a period of
seventeen years she and her husband Ferdinand were ‘in waiting’ to ascend
to the throne of Spain. This was a stressful period, for the ailing and
depressive King Philip V led a dysfunctional life. The whole court was
required to rally round and support him in, for example, his eccentric wish
to rise at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, dine at 3 a.m. and go to bed at 5 a.m.
Even when Ferdinand VI succeeded his father, the gloomy atmosphere
of the court was not entirely dispelled, because the new king had inherited
his father’s tendency to depression. Queen Maria Barbara often asked
Scarlatti to come and improvise for her on the harpsichord and it is not
difficult to imagine how earnestly Scarlatti must have wished to cheer her
up and distract her. The queen possessed a number of keyboard instruments
including a fortepiano; we don’t know how much notice Scarlatti took of
the piano, but he would certainly have tried it and might well have
envisaged some of his sonatas being played on it. Scarlatti was also a card
player who liked to gamble. In his sixties he ran up gambling debts which,
allegedly, the queen offered to pay off in exchange for some written-out
copies of the keyboard sonatas she had so much enjoyed. Whether or not
this is strictly true, we know that this was the golden era of Scarlatti’s
keyboard writing.
When Scarlatti moved to Spain he spent the first few years based at the
Alcázar palace in Seville, surrounded by magnificent Moorish decorations
whose colour and detail found echoes in his music. He must also have heard
the popular music of Spain with its Moorish, flamenco and gypsy
influences, and its guitars, mandolins, castanets and drums. Such music
often uses a mode, or type of scale, known as the Phrygian mode; we can
find it by starting on the note E on a keyboard and playing all the white
notes up to the next E. Several of the notes may seem exotically sour to ears
accustomed to the traditional major scale (C to C on the white notes). In
particular, the second note of the Phrygian mode (if starting on the note E,
this second note would be F) has a ‘flattened’ sound which Scarlatti
sometimes combined with an E major chord to add spice to the chord, a
device used to this day by flamenco guitarists.
Scarlatti’s use of this mode gave his music a piquant flavour which set it
apart from the music of his exact contemporaries Bach and Handel (all
three great composers were born in 1685). In fact, most of Scarlatti’s
sonatas were not published or known until long after his death. They found
a wider audience only in the mid-nineteenth century when Clara Schumann
and Liszt began including some Scarlatti in their recital programmes, but it
was only really in the twentieth century that they became part of standard
piano repertoire. In 1906 the Neapolitan pianist Alessandro Longo
published the first complete edition of the sonatas in a numbering system of
his own devising, and in 1953 the American historian and harpsichordist
Ralph Kirkpatrick published a chronological catalogue, whose K numbers
are now the standard way of identifying the sonatas. To a modern reader,
‘sonata’ may suggest a longer work, but Scarlatti used it simply to mean an
instrumental piece, something played (or ‘sounded’) rather than sung. Most
of his sonatas take no more than a minute or two to play.
Scarlatti favoured lively tempos, and many of his sonatas are little
nuggets of vivacity. They are generally in two halves, structured like the
dance movements of a Baroque suite: the first half moves to the dominant
key (say, from C major to G major) and the second half, musing on the
same musical material, works its way back to the home key. Within this
simple formula Scarlatti produced a huge variety of moods: lively,
melancholy, manic, graceful, exuberant and thoughtful. He skilfully deploys
bittersweet flavourings with the result that many of his major-key sonatas
have a vein of melancholy running through them, while many of his minor-
key pieces vibrate with alertness. The physical pleasure of darting about the
keys, using the fingers with jeweller-like precision to put a sparkle on the
musical surface, communicates itself vividly to the player.
 In piano competitions, I have often heard Scarlatti sonatas played at top
speed to show off rapid fingerwork, but to rattle them off in this way is to
lose their savour. It may be true that some of them were designed to be
played in settings where aristocratic guests could lend only an occasional
ear to the music; perhaps as a result Scarlatti allowed his own facility at the
keyboard to steer his compositions, but he always took care to sculpt their
pleasing surface into delicate loops and curves. Moreover, the player who
takes Scarlatti for granted may find that they trip over his elegantly
contrived distortions of expected phrase lengths.
The ‘ping’ of the harpsichord’s plectrum on the string is very different
from the sound of a piano’s felt hammer. When we play Scarlatti on the
modern piano, should we imagine that we are playing a harpsichord, or
should we rejoice that the piano offers more dynamic possibilities? As
usual, different instruments bring out different qualities and offer different
advantages. Many of his delicate effects are best appreciated on the older
instrument whose plucking mechanism could be used to create delicious
scrunches on chords and glittering, silvery scale passages, reminiscent of
Spanish guitar technique (e.g. the Sonata in D major, K492, or the Sonata in
C minor, K56). Scarlatti often writes in a fluent two-part style, left and right
hand working in lively counterpoint (for example, the Sonata in D minor,
K1), but he frequently incorporates passages of ‘Iberian’ or ‘Moorish’-
sounding music where important notes are decorated with rapid ornaments
such as a flamenco singer might use to emphasise a word (e.g. the Sonata in
G minor, K426). I’m fond of the wistful Sonata in B flat, K273, a two-part
design where a lilting dance in 3/8 time gives way to a plaintive ‘jig’ whose
melodic figures, repeated over slowly shifting Spanish-guitar-flavoured
chords in the bass, are hypnotic.
Scarlatti often seems to think in terms of contrasts between solo and
tutti passages, as though imagining how he might orchestrate the piece (e.g.
the ‘fanfares’ and ‘mandolins’ of the Sonata in D major, K96). He
frequently uses fast repeating notes (e.g. the Sonata in A major, K24, the G
major, K455, or the D minor, K141), a glittering effect on the harpsichord
but one which can seem strenuous on the heavier mechanism of the modern
piano. In earlier sonatas he makes gleeful use of hand-crossing (such as the
Sonata in B minor, K27), but in later years, when he became stout and no
longer found it easy to cross his hands in front of him at the keyboard, this
effect is quietly dropped. In rapid passagework he often makes the hands
compete for space on the same key, for example in the Sonata in F major,
K17, or the Sonata in A major, K24. Sometimes he just delights in making
the hands chase one another about the keyboard, for example in the
exuberant Sonata in E major, K20.
Some of his slower, more cantabile sonatas make one feel he might have
improvised them on the piano; the Sonata in D minor, K9, the Sonata in G
minor, K8, and the languorous Sonata in A major, K208, all share a pensive
mood well suited to the piano. A particular favourite of mine is the Sonata
in E major, K380, which seems to evoke a royal person proceeding in
stately but good-humoured fashion down the palace corridor to the sound of
distant fanfares. Repeated notes and chords are a feature of the sonata, but
somehow Scarlatti’s use of them suggests buoyancy and poise rather than
lack of invention, and their cumulative effect can be quietly mesmerising.
Wanda Landowska, recording Scarlatti in Paris in the 1930s, used all the
resources of her modern Pleyel harpsichord to evoke a procession coming
towards us and passing on into the distance, a version which made the
Sonata in E major famous and attracted the attention of pianists, who by
contrast have tended to adopt a more delicate, tender approach when they
play it on the piano. Altogether Scarlatti wrote 555 keyboard sonatas, so
there is plenty to explore.

CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH (1714–1788)

5. Freie Fantasie in F sharp minor, Wq.67, H.300
C.P.E. Bach was the second surviving son of J.S. Bach and his first wife
Maria Barbara. Today we tend to think of C.P.E. (known as Emanuel) Bach
as less important than his famous father, so it comes as a shock to learn that
in the second half of the eighteenth century it was C.P.E. Bach who was the
better known. Mozart once said that ‘Bach is the father – we are the boys!’
People coming across this quote might naturally assume Mozart was talking
about the great Johann Sebastian, but in fact the Bach he was referring to
was Emanuel, whose work was highly esteemed by Haydn and Beethoven
as well as Mozart himself. Fifty years later, their reputations changed place
once more. Mendelssohn and his generation revived the works of J.S. Bach,
who has never looked back, and Emanuel Bach moved to a quieter place in
history’s estimation.
Emanuel Bach ‘had no other teacher than my father’ and his first pieces
were in the style favoured by J.S. Bach. However, Emanuel lived at a time
when taste was changing. Italian opera was becoming popular in Germany
and would soon be all the rage. The complexity and formality of late
eighteenth-century music was being gradually replaced by a new ‘galant’
style characterised by its elegance, simplicity and immediate appeal. The
religious feeling which inspired J.S. Bach’s music was not the driving force
for his son – Emanuel Bach grew up at a time when secular values were
becoming more important, and he engaged with scholars and philosophers
of the German Enlightenment. Musicians were starting to feel that instead
of (or as well as) directing their performances in the service of God, they
could aim to communicate directly with listeners, letting audiences
understand and share their musical emotions.
Emanuel Bach was appointed court harpsichordist to Frederick the
Great in Berlin. Emanuel himself preferred the clavichord with its greater
range of delicate expression, but he was an excellent harpsichordist too. The
king was a keen flute player who liked to play chamber music in the
evenings. Emanuel, who shared his job with another harpsichordist, was
only required on alternate months, so he had plenty of time for composing
and teaching. During his years in Berlin he wrote an extremely influential
treatise on The True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1753), which is
still an important source for students of historical style. At the time, the use
of the thumb when playing was not common; it was used when the pattern
of notes made it the only obvious choice, but most passages were played
with fingers 2, 3, 4 and 5. Emanuel advocates the method of ‘passing the
thumb under’ to extend the hand’s range.
He also talks about the importance of the musician feeling the emotions
of the music. ‘Since a musician cannot move others unless he himself is
moved, he must of necessity feel all the emotions he hopes to arouse in his
listeners.’ Emanuel also talks about the importance of being able to
improvise, commenting that nothing is a better indication of a musician’s
potential for composing. Improvisation was not new, of course, but what
was new was the sense that when improvising, a musician was deliberately
letting us in on a stream of consciousness, aiming to show us not just how
their mind was working but also how they were feeling. From this
standpoint it’s easy to see that not many steps were required to get to the
powerfully ‘personal’ utterances of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
Emanuel Bach wrote large numbers of keyboard works – principally
sonatas and concertos, but also fantasies in which he could give free rein to
whatever thoughts and feelings were occurring to him. In the short
autobiography he wrote in the 1770s, he says that among his keyboard
works there are ‘only a few that I composed in complete freedom and for
my own use’. One of the most remarkable is the Freie Fantasie (Free
Fantasy) in F sharp minor which he wrote in 1787, the year before he died.
In a way it resembles the sort of writing in J.S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy
and Fugue, but Emanuel makes a point of unpredictable and startling
changes of key, mood and volume which his father would probably have
considered unfocused. Even the Free Fantasy’s appearance is interesting –
there are long passages where the duration of notes is indicated but without
bar lines, leaving the player to decide where the music needs to ‘breathe’.
There are several recurring themes – a solemn, slow opening Adagio
passage; an Allegretto featuring virtuoso flourishes; and a lyrical Largo in
12/8 which appears in several different keys and also brings the piece to a
close. This Largo theme may be a private tribute to his father, for in its first
bar it incorporates the melodic motif that J.S. Bach used to represent his
own name (BACH in German music notation is our B flat, A, C, B natural,
here transposed into the key of B minor) and in the second bar it quotes
from J.S. Bach’s aria ‘Es ist vollbracht’ (It is fulfilled) from the St John
Passion.
Between these helpfully recurring themes, we pass through uncharted
territory as Emanuel veers from one key to another, constantly changing
volume levels and moods, letting his musical lines twist and turn as though
searching vainly for a place to rest and interrupting their progress with
sharply snatched chords like exclamation points. Sometimes it feels as if he
is writing the kind of dramatic ‘recitative’ of which his father was such a
master, where a singer tells us something in rhythms closer to speech than
to singing. Towards the end, Emanuel seems to be getting more and more
worked up, but he interrupts himself with a final quote from his Largo/J.S.
Bach theme, as if sighting home from a choppy sea.
 This intriguing piece gives us a chance to experience for ourselves the
way in which Emanuel Bach improvised at a time when ‘expressing
yourself’ started to be fashionable. The English writer Charles Burney, who
travelled through Germany in 1772 to collect his impressions of musical life
on the continent, was keen to meet C.P.E. Bach, whom he regarded as ‘not
only one of the greatest composers who ever existed, for the keyboard, but
the best player, in point of expression . . . He is learned, I think, even
beyond his father’. One night after dinner, Burney had the chance to hear
C.P.E. Bach improvising for several hours. ‘During this time he grew so
animated and possessed, that he not only played but looked like one
inspired. His eyes were fixed, his under lip fell, and drops of effervescence
fell from his countenance.’ Clearly this was no mere improvising to
entertain the dinner guests; Emanuel Bach had a powerful desire to
communicate his inner feelings, and luckily Burney was listening.
Haydn and Mozart are the first great composers who wrote specifically for
what we now think of as the piano. At first the ‘fortepiano’ was scarcely
more powerful than a harpsichord, but the players’ ability to control the
speed of the hammers gave them the possibility of subtle expressive
nuances, from softer to louder. This suggested a different way of writing,
immediately grasped by these composers. Their greatest keyboard works,
those with the widest range of expression and sonority, were written for the
piano.
When Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, he did not yet own a piano. At
first he lodged in the home of the Weber family, who had a harpsichord. He
used it until he got his first fortepiano, built by Anton Walter around 1782;
it is not known exactly when Mozart bought it, but we know that by 1785
he owned and played the instrument in his concerts, having it carried down
the stairs from his second-floor apartment on each occasion (it must have
needed a lot of tuning). Haydn too first encountered the piano in the 1780s.
There is some evidence that his employers, the aristocratic Esterházy
family, had a piano from about 1781. Haydn himself did not own a piano
until about 1788, and did not encounter the Broadwood pianos he
particularly liked until he went to London in the 1790s. Vienna was
relatively late compared with England and France in adopting the piano. At
the start of the 1780s the piano was still a novelty in Vienna, but by the end
of the century the city had enthusiastically embraced the new instrument.
It is a curious fact that although Haydn and Mozart obviously never
heard the piano of today, their music often seems – at least to modern ears –
to breathe more easily on the keyboard instruments which developed after
their own era. What does this mean? Did those composers’ vision extend to
being able to imagine and compose for a day when pianos would have a
more sustained singing tone, a more velvety sonority, a bigger range of loud
and soft, and more tonal projection? Or would those composers be
surprised, even displeased, if they heard their music played on a twenty-
first-century Steinway, Yamaha, Bösendorfer or Fazioli?
Many pianists who have had the opportunity to try playing eighteenth-
century music on instruments of the day have found it an enlightening
experience. Some have sworn allegiance to playing that music on those
instruments and no other, but others have come away convinced that the
great music of the eighteenth century sounds even greater if the pianist has
a wider range of sonority, and therefore of expression, at their command.
Ideally, every pianist should know how keyboard instruments sounded in
Haydn’s day, and how those instruments felt to play, for that is an important
part of a player’s sensory response to the music. The delicacy of eighteenth-
century keyboard instruments is just right for certain pieces and can teach
us to be sensitive to tiny nuances, but other aspects of the music may feel as
if they need a bigger colour palette.
Since Haydn’s day, not only the instruments have changed; our whole
sonic environment has changed, and so have our expectations. Ambient
noises are different, halls are bigger, listeners sit further away. We have got
used to amplified music – to the extent that unamplified music can seem
underpowered. We may have less patience for sitting and paying attention
to the quiet detail of acoustic instruments. To reconstruct, say, Beethoven’s
experience of hearing a particular piano it may not be enough to get hold of
that piano and listen to it ourselves, because the sound of his piano was an
ingredient in the sound-world of his day. All this makes historical
reconstruction a subtle matter, in which facts and guesswork must
intertwine. And although enthusiasts for ‘period instruments’ might
disagree, I feel that for many listeners one of the charms of hearing
historical instruments is that they sound ‘antique’ – which of course they
didn’t to people of that era.

JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809)

6. Variations in F minor, ‘Un piccolo divertimento’, Hob. XVII:6
Haydn’s Variations in F minor are probably his single greatest work for a
keyboard instrument. Their grandeur and dignity come as a surprise to those
brought up on the image of ‘Papa Haydn’ as a jolly court composer. Written
in 1793, the Variations were dedicated to Mozart’s pupil Barbara von Ployer
with the enigmatic subtitle, ‘Un piccolo divertimento’. If this was a joke,
perhaps it was in the same ironic vein as when Brahms described the titanic
second movement of his B flat piano concerto as ‘a wisp of a scherzo’.
Haydn was unhappily married to a woman who was not musical. He
once said that ‘it was all the same to her whether her husband was a cobbler
or an artist’. In his personal life he was lonely, and isolated also because of
his posting as court composer to the Esterházy palaces in Eisenstadt and
Esterháza (now in Hungary). As a ‘house officer’ in the palace, he had to
keep other employees in line and was prevented by his status from
socialising with them. When he did have the opportunity to visit Vienna and
attend social gatherings of music-lovers, he was very drawn to the several
high-born women pianists who did take an interest in his music and
welcomed his friendship.
One such was Marianne von Genzinger, twenty years younger than
Haydn, who had written to him in 1789 to say that she had arranged a
movement from one of his symphonies for piano, and would he like to
correct it if she had made mistakes? From this correspondence developed a
friendship between Haydn and Marianne’s family in Vienna. On his
occasional visits to the capital, he attended the von Genzinger’s Sunday
music soirées, where Marianne made sure that Haydn’s favourite dishes
were prepared. After Haydn returned to Esterházy, he asked Marianne ‘not
to shy away from comforting me with your pleasant letters, for they cheer
me up in my isolation, and are very necessary for my heart, which is often
very deeply hurt’.
It was a shock when Marianne died unexpectedly of a lung condition
shortly after Haydn returned from his triumphant visit to London late in
1792. His friends noticed a change in his mood. He became short-tempered
and seemed preoccupied. In fact, Marianne’s death was not the only
absence Haydn had to confront. His friend and fellow composer Mozart had
also died while Haydn was away. In London, Haydn had heard the rumours
but had not wanted to believe them. When he got back to Vienna, where
Mozart and Haydn had met regularly to play chamber music, he must have
been struck by the reality that Mozart was no more.
Both Mozart and Marianne von Genzinger were pianists, and perhaps it
is not entirely fanciful to think that the F minor Variations were in some
sense a tribute to one or both of them. The Variations have not one theme
but two – a theme in the minor, and a theme in the major. The double-theme
variation form was one which Haydn had used also in his symphonies. Here
two themes have different characters, the first stern and sad, the second
softer and more vivacious. At one time these contrasting themes might have
been characterised as ‘his’ and ‘her’ themes, a not inappropriate idea in this
case.
The F minor theme, which has a sober tread almost like that of a funeral
march, uses phrases which have a downward pull. The dotted repeated
notes in the right hand add to this effect, like an implacable little drumbeat.
It’s notable that the theme doesn’t come in until the end of the first proper
bar, as if it’s reluctant to start. Few of Haydn’s piano pieces have this
feature – most of his themes ‘lead from the front’. Unpredictable phrase-
lengths – 6 bars, 6 bars, 5 bars, 5 bars, 7 bars – keep the listener slightly off-
kilter. Towards the end of the theme, a sudden jolt into G flat provokes a
moment of silence before the right hand tentatively climbs down a G flat
arpeggio before swerving back just in time to the home key of F minor.
The F major theme is contrasted in character, more melodic, with
phrases that reach and sometimes fly upwards in a graceful spray of notes in
the treble. It softens the austere effect of its partner. After we have heard
them both, there are alternating variations on each, the variations becoming
more and more decorated and gradually more agitated in mood.
Haydn evidently planned to end the piece in F major after the second of
the F major variations. But he later added, in another ink, a startlingly
different ending which raises the piece from a skilful set of double
variations to something with the feeling of a personal testimony. The F
minor theme returns for a final statement, but comes to an unexpected halt.
Then it launches into an impassioned outburst, much more daring in
harmony, more virtuosic in style and more emotional in mood, like a
personal declaration which has been held back until now. It is almost as if at
this moment of disjunction between the theme and the coda we see Haydn
straddling the Classical and the Romantic eras. He seems to begin in the
eighteenth century and end by looking ahead to the nineteenth – only seven
years away, in fact – with its more adventurous ‘free-associating’
harmonies.
There are reminders here of Mozart’s poignant Rondo in A minor, K511,
whose two opening bars (a falling fifth in the first bar, a four-note rising
motif in the second) may find echoes in Haydn’s two variation themes (the
minor one and the major one). A conscious echo? Perhaps it is; or perhaps it
is more that Mozart’s great Rondo had been transformed in his friend’s
imagination into this new form.
 Haydn’s generous evaluation of Mozart as ‘the greatest composer
known to me either in person or by name’ is often quoted. Mozart’s opinion
of Haydn is less well known, but after hearing the F minor Variations we
may appreciate Mozart’s tribute: ‘He alone has the secret of making me
smile and touching me at the bottom of my soul. There is no one who can
do it all – to joke and terrify, to evoke laughter and profound sentiment –
and all equally well: except Joseph Haydn.’

7. Piano Sonata in E flat major, Hob. XVI:52

In the 1790s, Haydn made two triumphant visits to London, where he was
acclaimed as the leading composer of the day and found himself on every
important guest list. After lonely years of serving as court composer in
Esterházy palaces quite remote from his home in Vienna, Haydn basked in
his English popularity. London had a thriving musical scene which included
many private ‘salons’ hosted by arts-loving socialites. There he met the
German pianist Therese Jansen, one of Clementi’s star pupils and one of
several female pianists whose sympathy and admiration Haydn appreciated.
Therese was the daughter of a well-known dancing master, whose dancing
school she and her brother eventually took over and ran successfully. In
1794 on his second visit to London, Haydn composed the Piano Sonata in E
flat major, Hob. XVI:52, and dedicated it to Therese. The sonata is Haydn’s
finest, and to judge from its technical difficulty, Therese must have been a
very fine pianist.
In Haydn’s day, there was no standardisation of pianos; each maker had
their own style, and the style varied from country to country, from city to
city, and even within the output of a single maker. When he first went to
London, Haydn was impressed with the big Broadwood grand pianos he
encountered. In the majestic and virtuosic E flat sonata we see the bravura
with which he responded to these English pianos with their full tone and
their extended range (just that year, Broadwood had produced a six-octave
grand piano). The piano’s qualities also seem to have inspired Haydn to
write with daring harmonic freedom, for the music travels through an
unusually wide range of keys.
Haydn once said that during the years when he was court composer,
living in the remote Esterháza palace in rural Hungary, cut off from news
about what was happening in Vienna, he was ‘forced to become original’.
This originality can be seen on full display in the E flat sonata. Even a
glance at its notation will show that there is constant variety of texture and
keyboard technique. In the first movement there are grand chordal passages,
delicate singing lines in inner parts, rattling superfast virtuoso passages,
sudden pauses on long chords. There are capricious lurches into remote
keys.
One of the most striking things about the movement is the way it
suddenly cuts from one mood, texture, theme or tempo to another without
warning. For example, the skipping second theme which bursts upon us in
the high treble after about a minute is a move we didn’t see coming. Is it a
sly reference, perhaps, to Therese’s dancing school? Haydn was a regular
visitor to the family home and may well have observed her female pupils
skipping across the floor like this. We hear the skipping theme again at the
start of the development section, preceded by a mock-solemn introduction
of three slow, quiet chords opening the door to the new key of C major. And
we hear it once more near the end of the development section, this time
preceded by a pause on a bass chord which clearly suggests that what’s
coming next will be in C major again. But no: in skips the cheeky key of E
major, one of the least predictable.
And just before the final dash to the ending of the first movement come
two quiet, slow and mysterious bars of octaves, an obvious echo of the
equivalent gesture at the same point in the first section. Here it is
shockingly extended downwards so that we seem to step off the secure
ladder of E flat into the thin air of A minor. It isn’t notated as A minor
(Haydn uses flats and double flats to keep the music looking like E flat), but
the innocent ear perceives it as such. Haydn and Mozart both enjoyed this
kind of subverting of expectations, but Haydn’s way of doing it is all his
own. He has an extraordinary ability to turn on a dime and change from fast
to slow and vice versa, from sparkling demisemiquaver cascades in the high
treble to portentous slow chords in the bass, an effect almost like modern
film techniques, juxtaposing the sharp edges of things which don’t normally
go together.
Having been startled by the skipping motif in E major in the first
movement, we aren’t perhaps as puzzled as we might have been by finding
that the slow movement is also in that remote key. This movement seems
almost like a free improvisation, its stately opening giving way in short
order to passages of decoration, elaboration, rushing scale passages in the
middle section, and Haydn’s characteristic stop-start technique where
unexpected rests and silences puncture a fluid line. The mood is an unusual
hybrid of dignified and volatile, as if the main character in a tragic play is
attempting to state their case while a slightly hysterical commentary is
provided alongside.
The Finale opens with another witty gambit: we end the slow movement
in a peaceful E major, but are jolted back to E flat in a move which feels a
bit like the height of one’s adjustable seat suddenly collapsing by an inch.
Does the chatter of repeated notes at the start of the theme contain a hint of
merry laughter? Haydn gives full rein in this movement to his love of
humorous lateral moves, tiny shifts of key, unexpected pauses. In the
middle section, a long running passage lulls us into thinking that the
momentum has now been securely established, but no: as soon as it comes
to a pause, we find that the opening theme is back in fragmented form.
Haydn tries it out in various keys and guises, from loud with defiant offbeat
accents to quiet and wistful with a menacingly smooth chromatic bass line.
(This technique of chopping up the main theme into fragments and looking
at the fragments in new lights is also used by Beethoven and Schubert,
possibly inspired by Haydn’s example.)
Finally he plucks this chromatic bass line into the treble, marks it
‘Adagio’, and writes a soprano-like tiny cadenza that asks the player to
descend a chromatic scale which, with suspicious melodrama, is marked
‘più forte’, ‘fortissimo’, then suddenly ‘piano’ on the decorative turn, as if
showing off the performer’s technique. It’s a striking gesture, perhaps
designed to make Therese smile. Does it recall, for example, an operatic
soprano over whose platform manner they had laughed together? The
cadenza heralds the return of the opening theme in fast tempo. In his sudden
stops and starts, in his dashes from one location to another, Haydn
sometimes seems like a lizard scuttling at speed across a sunny wall, halting
when we least expect it, obeying impulses of which we know nothing.

8. Piano Trio in G major, Hob. XV:25, ‘Gypsy Rondo’

To understand Haydn’s trios, we need to know a little about the vanished
world of domestic music-making in his day. In the late eighteenth century,
there were many firms of piano manufacturers vying to produce bigger and
better keyboard instruments. The piano became more and more popular in
the drawing rooms of London, Paris and Vienna. Most cultured households
aspired to have a piano, and included piano lessons on the list of
accomplishments which young persons, especially young ladies, should
acquire in order to be even more eligible. There was already a tradition of
using keyboard instruments such as the harpsichord and clavichord to
accompany a violin or other melodic instrument, but in Haydn’s day the
fortepiano rose to prominence in its own right and became the centre of
domestic music-making.
In 1789 a Viennese newspaper printed the following advertisement:
‘Wanted by nobleman: a servant who plays the violin well and is able to
accompany difficult piano sonatas.’ What did they mean by ‘accompany
difficult piano sonatas’? The reference was probably to the kind of works
which Haydn and other composers were writing for chamber music
gatherings: principally conceived for the keyboard instrument, they also
included lines for melodic instruments such as violin and cello. Sometimes
these lines were mere doublings of what the pianist was playing with their
right or left hand, but sometimes they were independent lines, and as time
went on they became more and more so.
Some musicologists have suggested that Haydn’s chief motive in
providing parts for violin and cello was to magnify and give added
dimension to the keyboard sonority. Even if the strings were only doubling
the piano lines, they were in effect creating a big meta-instrument, operated
by three players simultaneously. Haydn certainly uses the strings like this in
his trios, but he goes further, often liberating the violin and cello from the
piano line and giving them important and provocative roles of their own. He
went on to develop this approach, ultimately leading to some of the
innovations of his late piano trios where from time to time the violin, and
more rarely the cello, grabs the limelight from the piano with dramatic
flourishes.
Haydn’s Piano Trio in G major, Hob. XV:25, is his best-known and
most popular trio, known as the ‘Gypsy Rondo’ because of the style of its
finale. It was written in 1795 during his second successful visit to London
and dedicated to Mrs Rebecca Schroeter, a pianist who took music lessons
from Haydn and became a close friend. (In his old age, Haydn told a
biographer that Rebecca was a beautiful and charming woman and that he
‘would have married her very easily if I had been free at the time’.) There
are three movements, all very appealing. The first movement is a set of
variations on a courtly theme announced by piano and violin together.
Haydn varies the theme by putting it in the minor, by writing ever more
elaborate accompaniment for it, and by disguising it in flowery piano
figuration. He also inserts an episode in E minor where the violin is invited
to leap about in a passage of tricky string-crossing. Such moments occur in
other Haydn trios and have always made me wonder whether he wrote them
with particular violinists in mind, perhaps smiling to think of their
discomfiture when they discovered what he had written for them to play.
In the beautiful slow movement, in the unexpected key of E major, the
melodic honours are shared between piano and violin. The piano begins the
story, but in the middle section the violin takes up the tale in a melting turn
to the key of A major. In the reprise, piano and violin sing the melody in
duet for a while, but it is the piano which has the last word. It is worth
pointing out that the cello line, though more sparse on the page, has its own
harmonic importance and gives a sensitive player the chance to provide
counterweight to the high violin line by offering support and commentary in
the bass.
The finale, called ‘Rondo in the Gypsies’ stile’ [sic] in the first London
edition, evokes a type of playing which Haydn would certainly have heard
during his years in rural Hungary. In H.C. Robbins Landon’s magisterial
volumes on Haydn there’s an engraving of a parade in the courtyard of
Esterháza palace in 1791, around the time that Haydn was in residence. In
the courtyard we see a group of gypsy musicians, the fiddle players holding
their violins low on their chests in traditional style. Bands of gypsy
musicians were used by the Austrian authorities to play dance music in
order to entice unwary peasants to the marketplace where they would be
offered strong drink, invited to dance and later recruited into the army.
Haydn was one of the first to include such gypsy tunes in his compositions.
At first the piano launches the whirling dance we hear at the start, then the
violin takes over, and then all three instruments relish a stamping passage
which alternates two bars of soft with two bars of very loud music, and
seems to invite some holding back of the tempo here and there to make the
contrasts more telling. Episodes in the minor are introduced to darken the
mood. For much of the reprise, the violin plays in octaves with the piano,
though intriguingly it is the piano which has the upper octave and the
leading voice. The final bars do not contain the composer’s permission to
dash to the finish, but such a solution is often irresistible, if not in rehearsal
then in the adrenalin-fuelled atmosphere of performance.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)

9. Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K448
Mozart wrote a number of duets for two players at one piano, but only one
piece for two pianos, the three-movement Sonata in D major, K448. Works
for two pianos have always presented practical difficulties, because it is not
often that one can hope to find two equally good pianos in the same room.
Even if a concert hall has two good pianos, there is still the problem of
where the pianists can practise together during the lead-up to the concert.
This was also true in Mozart’s day – the only setting in which two pianos
were available would probably have been in the homes of wealthy patrons,
although Mozart sometimes took his own piano with him.
From childhood, Mozart had played piano duets (two players seated at
one keyboard) with his sister Nannerl, a fine pianist. (She was a composer
too, but none of her works survive.) In 1779 Mozart wrote a concerto for
two pianos and orchestra, thought to be designed for his sister and himself
to perform. Some years later, when giving lessons to aspiring virtuosi in
Vienna, he acquired another piano duo partner, Josepha von Auernhammer.
He rated her piano-playing skills highly, but was less taken with her
personal charms, which he described in an outspoken letter to his father: ‘If
a painter wanted to paint the devil accurately, it would be her face he’d have
to choose. She’s as fat as a farm wench, sweats so much that it makes you
sick and goes about so scantily clad that you can read it as plain as
anything: “Please look here”.’ However, he clearly respected her
musicianship. On 24 November 1781 he and Josepha gave a concert at her
house in which they performed the two-piano concerto and also gave the
premiere of the sparkling D major two-piano sonata, ‘written expressly for
the occasion’. In fact, the two-piano sonata is really a kind of concerto
without orchestra, written for two players with virtuoso techniques.
Playing duos for two pianos presents the players with many tricky
problems of co-ordination, partly because the size of pianos (especially the
modern piano) means that the players are much further apart than when
playing four-hand music at one piano. Indeed, if the two pianos are grand
pianos placed nose to tail, the two players are unable to see one another’s
hands. Nor can they hear one another breathing, which takes away a
valuable layer of information about exactly when one’s partner is going to
launch into the next phrase. Unless you are used to it, the sound of two
pianos mixes in the air above the instruments in a slightly confusing way,
making it difficult to know who is producing which sound, and this seems
to unnerve pianists. Even without intending to be competitive, the effort of
each player to discern their own thread in the pianistic tapestry by
pronouncing their part more clearly often leads to an increase in volume,
producing the strenuous clattering that too easily characterises a concert or
recording of two-piano music. Passages marked ‘softly’ are often the
casualties of this phenomenon. Especially in fast passages, the presence of
another pianist playing exuberantly can also provoke a desire to play even
more exuberantly, pushing the tempo up. Considerable experience is
required to keep the expression within the framework that one had imagined
when practising alone. It is an art to hold one’s nerve, refuse to be scared
into playing competitively, and keep a part of one’s concentration available
to listen to and respond with proper humility to the other pianist; fortunately
there are a few who can do it, and their recordings of K448 are treasured.
Perhaps one should not be surprised that in his only attempt at the two-
piano sonata, Mozart immediately saw all the ways in which two pianists
could collaborate. One hears them all in the first movement: playing the
same music simultaneously; one pianist proposing a phrase, the other
answering it; one pianist being ‘the soloist’ while the other is ‘the
orchestra’; the two players trying to outdo one another; one pianist making
witty little comments on the other’s charming melodic line; taking over one
another’s roles seamlessly in one-bar interchanges; both pianists combining
to make a symphonic effect. Sometimes Pianist 1 will play a four-bar
phrase, answered by Pianist 2 with another four-bar phrase. Sometimes the
two players will exchange ideas at two-bar intervals; at other times they
chase one another at half-bar distances.
In the slow movement, there are longer passages where Pianist 1 seems
to play the role of a concerto soloist while Pianist 2 supplies the supportive
flowing accompaniment that the strings might play in a concerto.
Sometimes the second pianist echoes the first exactly so that one is not sure
which is which, and often they divide long phrases between them, taking
over from one another a bar at a time, which for the listener produces the
effect of a single musical thought coming at them stereophonically. On
balance, Piano 1 is honoured with more of the musical invention, which
may simply have been a gallant gesture from the composer towards his
talented student.
The famous theme of Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla Turca’, the boisterous finale
of his Piano Sonata in A, K331, finds an echo in the third movement of the
two-piano sonata, whose opening theme is almost like the ‘alla Turca’
theme turned upside down. In this movement, the two players create the
effect of ‘solo’ and ‘tutti’ passages from a concerto, joining together for
passages of great brilliance. Mozart seems to know just when to give the ear
a rest from such scintillation, effortlessly sailing into a new and tender idea
in a minor key, or pausing on a trill and then gracefully settling into a quiet
chorale theme. Sometimes the two pianists play virtuoso passages in
octaves or in thirds, requiring perfect rhythmic alignment; at other times
they abandon the virtuoso style and chirp sweetly like Papageno in The
Magic Flute.
The D major sonata has been used in a number of scientific studies to
do with ‘the Mozart effect’: the idea that listening to Mozart’s music on a
regular basis can improve concentration, problem-solving skills and even
epileptic symptoms. In every experiment the two-piano sonata has proved
therapeutic, though we can’t know whether other works by Mozart would
have done the trick just as well. One study in the journal Psychology of
Music (1987) found that ‘Mozart’s music neither bores the listener with low
cognitive demand nor over-stimulates the listener with high cognitive
demand.’ Mozart himself would probably have smiled in agreement. As he
wrote to his father in 1783 about his piano concertos, K413–15: ‘The
concertos are in fact midway between too difficult and too easy – they are
very brilliant and fall agreeably on the ear, without of course becoming
trivial. There are passages which only connoisseurs will fully appreciate,
yet the ordinary listener will find them satisfying as well, without knowing
why.’

10. Sonata for Piano and Violin in B flat major, K454

Mozart played both piano and violin, so perhaps it is not surprising that his
duo sonatas for the two instruments are full of mutual recognition and
friendly give and take. His Sonata in B flat, K454, is a good example of
how magnificently he could rise to the occasion when time was short. In
April 1784, Vienna was keen to hear the Italian violinist Regina
Strinasacchi, a graduate of the girls’ school in Venice where Vivaldi had
built up a splendid orchestra and a tradition of female string playing. When
she was in her early twenties, Strinasacchi went on concert tours as a solo
violinist at a time when such an enterprise was very unusual for a young
woman. Arriving in Vienna to play a much-anticipated concert in the
Kärntnertor Theatre in the presence of Emperor Josef II, she was introduced
to Mozart who offered to write a new work for the two of them to perform
together.
Mozart wrote to his father: ‘We now have here the famous Strinasacchi
from Mantua, a very good violinist. She has a great deal of taste and feeling
in her playing. I am this moment composing a sonata which we are going to
play together on Thursday at her concert in the theatre.’ But although he
may have planned the sonata in his head, Mozart left it so late to write it
down that by the night before the concert he had only managed to notate the
violin part, which Regina had to learn at lightning speed (she must have
been a very good musician). At the concert, Mozart put some blank sheets
of paper on the music desk of the piano and played the piano part from
memory, a subterfuge the Emperor was said to have spotted through his
opera glasses. The manuscript of the sonata shows the piano part added
later in a different ink and squashed in to the already-ruled bars, where
Mozart had not left enough space for all the flourishes he had invented for
the piano.
The B flat sonata is surely one of his most beautifully balanced works
for piano and violin, a model of how to share material even-handedly
between the two instruments. Right from the slow introduction to the first
movement, we see how piano and violin take over one another’s thoughts
and complete one another’s sentences like the proverbial old married
couple. The very first bar shows the subtle interlocking of the parts: the
piano has the leading voice because it is the higher in pitch, and the violin
nestles within the piano’s full chords (it was a violinist, Sándor Végh, who
pointed out to me that the violinist must know they are not the leading voice
here). The chordal opening gesture is followed by a graceful reply for piano
alone, but when the device is repeated in the next bars, it is the violin who
replies. The piano then breaks into a delightful gentle chugging rhythm over
which the violin enters with an ethereal high note and a beautiful drooping
phrase. This may remind today’s listeners of the famous moment in Peter
Shaffer’s play Amadeus when Salieri talks reverently about a similar
moment in the Gran Partita, K361, for thirteen wind instruments: ‘On the
page it looked nothing . . . Just a pulse – bassoons and basset-horns – like a
rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly – high above it – an oboe, a single note,
hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a
phrase of such delight!’ In the B flat sonata, the instruments swap roles
again, the violin taking over the ‘chugging’ while the piano discourses most
eloquently on what it has just heard.
In the main body of the movement, the Allegro, this courtly sharing of
musical themes continues. This is no ‘violin sonata’, nor an accompanied
piano sonata, but a true musical partnership. As soon as one player has been
given a flourish, it’s the turn of the other one, and if one gets to pose a
question, the other gets to give an answer. Sometimes it seems as if there
are three musicians taking active roles: the violin line, the pianist’s right
hand, and the pianist’s left hand. In the brief but beautiful development
section, the mood becomes more plaintive; piano and violin swap little
phrases with a particularly terse little dialogue leading us back to the
reprise.
The Andante slow movement is one of Mozart’s most profound. Here
the violin is invited to play long cantabile lines (apparently a speciality of
Regina Strinasacchi’s) with the piano supporting and elaborating on what
has been sung. The middle section of the movement begins in the minor
key, the violin’s opening bar of the movement now subtly displaced to
become the second bar of a new phrase. From B flat minor Mozart slides
the music imperceptibly sideways into an impossibly remote B minor and
from there into C minor before finding the path back to the home key of E
flat for the reprise. This passage is so smoothly engineered and yet so
adventurous that it seems to gather elements of Classical and Romantic
music into the space of a few bars. When the main tune returns, we find that
it and its accompaniment are now alternated two bars at a time between the
players, as though neither can bear to be out of the limelight for longer than
a few seconds. This sharing continues to the end, where even in the last bars
we hear the two instruments duetting with first the piano occupying the
higher line, and two bars later the violin taking over.
The final Allegretto is almost like a scene from a comic opera, with
contrasting themes of smooth demeanour and bouncy rhythmic verve. There
are little themes that could have come from the mouth of Papageno in The
Magic Flute, but also sad little episodes where a quiet and hesitant theme of
repeated notes, stated first on violin and then on piano, is allowed to
fragment gradually and drop in pitch until the final fragment is played by
the piano alone at the very bottom of its register (F was the lowest note on
Mozart’s piano). It’s a moment which has a typically Mozartian blend of
pathos and humour.
In the closing section, the two instruments seem to come to the end of
their mutual politeness: the violin attempts one final statement of the Rondo
theme only to be interrupted by the pianist banging out impatient octaves in
the right hand. The two instruments engage in some repartee until suddenly
the violin breaks free and expresses its independence in a florid triplet
passage; underneath, the piano is given an insultingly simple crotchet
accompaniment. Naturally, the piano is able to cap this impudent display of
virtuosity with an even more sparkling reply in semiquavers (it’s important
here for the pianist to have a secure fingering so that the effect of effortless
superiority is not lost). The two instruments unite in rhythm for the final
bars, but they compete for the highest voice until the very end.

11. Piano Quartet in G minor, K478

This wonderful work is considered the first real piano quartet – a chamber
group of piano, violin, viola and cello. Mozart’s G minor piano quartet was
written in 1785 when he had been living in Vienna for four years, during
which his own keyboard performances had helped the Viennese public to
develop a taste for piano music as opposed to harpsichord or clavichord
music. The piano quartet in G minor must have been aimed partly at the
amateur music market, but as with many other works by Mozart, amateur
musicians of the day found it very difficult. Mozart’s quartet was admired,
but proved beyond the technique of all but the most accomplished players.
In 1788 a reporter from the Weimar Journal of Luxury and Fashion
complained that all winter, and just because this or that princess had been
said to own the new quartet or to play it, he had been forced to listen to
amateurs trying to play it at noisy gatherings: ‘Everyone yawned with
boredom at the incomprehensible racket.’ ‘What a difference’, it concluded,
‘when this oft-mentioned work is performed with the greatest accuracy by
four skilled musicians in a quiet room, where the suspension of every note
cannot escape the listening ear, and in the presence of only two or three
attentive persons!’
It’s interesting that the reporter noticed how much there was to gain
from hearing the detail of the music in a quiet room, for indeed the detail is
evidence of the clarity and thoroughness of Mozart’s thinking. Not many
composers bother to notate, for example, a chord in which some of the
notes are to be held longer than others, but Mozart sometimes does, and if
one follows his instructions faithfully one finds that there is a reason for
them (he doesn’t want the thick block of the whole chord to ring on, but
only certain notes which have a special role to play). His slurs and staccato
marks, if actually followed (which they often aren’t), show how sensitive he
was to the ‘speaking quality’ of a line. Likewise, if one is careful to observe
his rests, one finds that they are never random, but always used to highlight
something that happens in the silence, even if it is the rhythmical effect of
silence itself. There are innumerable places where the left hand plays (for
example) a crotchet followed by several beats rest. One often hears these
bass notes played with random length, the pianist not bothering whether
they hold the bass note or chord for one, two, three or even four beats and
often keeping the pedal down for added blurring. Yet if one observes the
rests as written, one can notice how other things spring to life. (This is not
only the case with Mozart, but he uses rests with particular finesse.) It turns
out that Mozart’s rests can be like the tiny dot of white in the corner of the
eye in an oil portrait: from a distance you don’t notice it consciously, but it
gives a sparkle to the expression.
 For the pianist, playing a piano quartet is surprisingly different from
playing a piano trio (piano, violin, cello), where the pianist often has to fill
in the incomplete duo of stringed instruments. A string trio (violin, viola,
cello) can easily provide three-part harmony, so the piano is freed from that
duty and can assert itself in all kinds of different ways. Composers have had
very different ways of taking advantage of this relationship between the
piano and the string group. For Mozart, it was an opportunity to create
something almost like a miniature piano concerto, in which the string trio
and the piano are in dialogue with each other. In fact, Mozart did not treat
the piano very differently whether he was composing a concerto or a
chamber work, for his piano concertos often seem like large-scale chamber
music, while his writing for the piano in chamber works is often soloistic.
The piano part of the G minor quartet is indeed very like the writing in
Mozart’s piano concertos of the same period, and it matches the late
concertos too in its powerful, challenging mood. From the very beginning
there is passionate dialogue between the piano and the strings, giving
‘question’ and ‘answer’ in lively succession. The gauntlet is thrown down in
front of the pianist at the very beginning, for the pianist’s virtuoso answer to
the severe opening bars is technically very hard to play with the required
combination of power and accuracy, especially in the high repeated notes.
The uncompromising first theme is eventually followed by a quirkily
phrased quiet second theme in B flat which, over a rocking bass, makes us
doubt for a moment where the main beats are. The development section
opens with an unexpected modulation into E flat and from there into C
minor for a new and sorrowful theme announced by the piano.
The elements of this theme are treated with fascinating skill, passed
around between the instruments and eventually transformed into rushing
scale passages. Sometimes the piano seems to play the cello’s role, and vice
versa. Eventually the rushing scales sweep in the opening theme for the
reprise. But we are not finished with development, because after the main
themes have been heard again, Mozart marks a repeat sign, and we hear the
whole of the development and reprise once more (in practice this repeat is
not often observed, because it makes the movement very long). In the
dramatic coda, he continues to develop his main theme by having the piano
answer its second phrase in a different way, jumping up an interval of a
minor tenth from C to E flat instead of merely up an octave. This late twist
in the tale provides an anxious moment for most pianists, for it is difficult to
jump the tenth accurately at speed while also conveying the heightened
emotional tension.
The opening theme of the slow movement feels like a poetic extension
of the second theme in the first movement. Here again we feel bar lines
being elided by subtle co-operation of melody and harmony. Repeated notes
feature in the second subject, first on the cello and then more prominently
in the piano’s answer, a couple of bars which challenge the pianist’s ability
to play repeated chords in the manner prescribed: quiet, semi-staccato,
linking the repeated chords through the phrase like a dancer moving on
tiptoe. Throughout the movement, melodies and accompanying figures are
passed between all four instruments; sometimes it seems as if the pianist is
playing the ‘cello line’ with their left hand, while at others the stringed
instruments echo the piano’s decorative flourishes. In fact, each of the
strings takes on the role of ‘coloratura’ at some point, and just as we are
thinking the cello might never have the chance, it emerges with the
decorative figuration towards the end of the movement, handing it over to
the piano for the final bars. A high degree of technical skill is needed for
each player to deliver these final decorative scales quietly and beautifully,
with a fingering which doesn’t cause bumps in the gently descending line.
The Rondeau has the feeling of Mozart’s late piano concerto finales,
with the pianist centre stage in almost every episode. There is a profusion of
melodic invention, most of it extrovert in character, though Mozart manages
to find several different shades of extrovert: happy, cheeky, demonstrative,
and so on. Occasionally the string trio is allowed to come up with a new
theme, but their themes are on the subdued side, as though they feel
conscious of their subordinate role in this ebullient finale. There is more
dialogue between piano and strings in the stormy E minor episode, but it is
the piano which drives everything forward with its rolling triplets. Mozart
saves his biggest surprise for the last page, where a final appearance of his
Rondeau theme suddenly derails into the shocking key of E flat. Muttering
between themselves, the participants take a few bars to recover, but the
piano pulls them upwards and onwards. In the last two bars, Mozart makes
the piano quote one of the earlier themes; when we first heard it (bars 71–
2), it was the beginning of a phrase, but here it is the end. This is one of
those Mozartian gestures which, as he wrote to his father about his piano
concertos K413–15, ‘only connoisseurs will fully appreciate, yet the
ordinary listener will find them satisfying as well, without them knowing
why’.

12. Piano Concerto in A major, K488

Mozart’s piano concertos, especially his later ones, are so masterly that one
might find oneself wondering why anyone else bothered to write piano
concertos. Mozart was both a celebrated pianist and a famous composer of
orchestral music; in his concertos he uses his experience of both to achieve
a wonderful dialogue between piano and orchestra, the balance shifting
constantly between them in a very believable way and giving his concertos
the feeling of chamber music on a grand scale. Although he uses the
conventional orchestra of his day, his choice of instrumentation for each
piano concerto shows how sensitive he was to the specific sound-world he
wanted for each piece.
The Concerto in A major, K488, has always been one of his most
popular. There are darker, more dramatic piano concertos in his output, but
the A major seems to capture the essence of A major – sunny, good-natured,
lyrical. People often wonder how composers choose the keys for their
compositions. Sometimes the answer is obvious because the instrument for
which they are writing – for example, a violin with strings tuned to G, D, A
and E – might ‘ring’ better and be easier to play in keys which allow ‘open
strings’ to be used. On the face of it, the piano does not have equivalent
factors which would make one key more attractive than another. There may
be issues of fingering, easier in some keys than others, and matters of
notation, easier to read if there are no thickets of flats and sharps. If the
piano is playing with other instruments, then their technique or construction
may influence the choice of key.
But if the piano is the only instrument involved, how does the composer
choose a key? Those with perfect pitch, that is, the ability to identify
exactly what note is being played just by hearing it, maintain that each key
has its own distinctive character, even on the piano. But that is a
complicated claim, because pitch in Mozart’s time was slightly different
from now, varying even from region to region. What today’s pianists hear as
‘A major’ is not quite the A major that Mozart would have known, and
therefore it may be misleading to claim that his K488 concerto captures the
essence of A major, because his A major was a touch lower than today’s.
There may be a sense in which the feel of the key of A major under the hand
on the keyboard – a feel which has not changed since Mozart’s day –
encapsulates something unique about a key. Every key has its own
distinctive pattern, and somehow provokes in the pianist a sensory
experience in which pitch, sound and character are bound up with the
pattern. In any case, despite the fact that pitch has risen slightly since the
eighteenth century, there is some piano music which seems to capture the
essence of a particular key, and the A major concerto, K488, is a prime
example.
It was written early in 1786 at around the time he was finishing The
Marriage of Figaro, and shares that opera’s remarkable combination of joie
de vivre and poignant tenderness. The outer movements of the A major
concerto are sparkling and extrovert, but the slow movement is a searching
aria with almost tragic qualities, a cousin perhaps of the Countess’s arias in
Figaro.
This was the first Mozart piano concerto I learned as a child and was an
unforgettable introduction to the kind of music which deepens as you get to
know it. I learned it from the German edition my then piano teacher insisted
on. Its preface tells us something about our changing attitudes to good
Mozart playing. ‘My main endeavour,’ wrote the editor in 1925, ‘has been
to modernise the Solo Pianoforte Part . . . I have arranged the slurs to obtain
longer phrases, the fingering has been improved, and the marks of
expression have been amplified.’ The score is littered with instructions
which Mozart himself refrained from putting in, from speeding-up and
slowing-down indications to crescendos and diminuendos, long slurs,
indications of mood (peaceful, excited, fiery), pedal marks, and
rearrangements of octaves. All this led to a more ‘Romantic’ style of
playing than Mozart envisaged.
When the period instrument movement got going in the 1970s, such
editorial interference came to be thought old-fashioned, even misleading.
Now it is considered important to work from an ‘Urtext’, a score which
shows us what the composer actually wrote. Looking at a copy of the
autograph of K488, which these days we can do online, we find that
Mozart’s markings are remarkably sparing. There are few expression marks,
dynamic markings, and no pedal marks or long slurs (curved lines which
aim to show which bars should be played smoothly in a single ‘breath’).
The first movement is simply marked ‘Allegro’ rather than the ‘Allegro
amabile’ I encountered in the 1925 edition. And the slow movement, far
from being ‘Andante semplice ma molto espressivo’ as I encountered it, is
simply ‘Adagio’ in Mozart’s score. He marked the last movement ‘Allegro
assai’ (very lively), not ‘Presto grazioso e brillante’.
The change from ‘Andante’ to the composer’s original ‘Adagio’ for the
slow movement raises interesting questions about the meaning of those two
terms. ‘Adagio’ is often taken these days to mean very slow, but is an Italian
word meaning ‘at ease’. Even the term ‘Andante’, which is usually taken to
mean rather slow, means ‘moving along’ in Italian, and is an indication of
mood and/or character rather than a straightforward tempo marking. Neither
term in fact signifies ‘very slow’ and probably didn’t to Mozart, who (let’s
not forget) also spoke Italian.
The first movement opens in contented mood with an orchestral tutti, its
sound mellowed by the inclusion of two clarinets, and the main themes of
the movement are announced. Sometimes in Mozart’s piano concertos he
makes the soloist enter with yet a new theme, but here it seems that the
piano is happy to go along with what the orchestra has proposed. The first
theme is smooth and lyrical, the second theme delicate and lively, with
characteristic use of repeated notes and a little dotted rhythm, the kind of
thing that suits the piano so well. Part-way through the movement the
orchestra sneaks in a new little theme, also with a dotted rhythm, and this is
taken up by the piano in the development section. There is a short cadenza
for the piano by Mozart himself, which pauses in the middle to give some
hesitant ‘asides’.
The second movement, Adagio, is a slow ‘siciliano’ in the same rhythm
as Mozart’s A minor Rondo, K511. Like the Rondo, it is a poignant blend of
sadness and graceful dance rhythm. The opening theme is played by the
piano alone, as if the pianist is thinking aloud with no notion that there is an
orchestra nearby. The syncopated melody line in the right hand weaves
gently back and forth across wide intervals, almost like the mediaeval
device of ‘hocket’ (‘hiccup’) in which a musical line alternates note by note
between different voices. Here, however, the effect is of a sadly wandering
treble line, restrained by quiet lilting in the bass. The orchestra replies with
a richly scored lament whose long lines make the hesitant phrasing of the
piano’s opening all the clearer in retrospect.
The central episode in A major brings a lighter mood, but it is not long
before the return of the opening theme and the elaboration of the orchestral
reply. Against a passage of pizzicato string accompaniment near the end, the
piano enlarges upon the wide intervals of the opening theme. Notated very
simply by Mozart, the wide intervals used to be played with equal
simplicity until scholars suggested that Mozart probably intended them to
be filled in with some kind of arpeggio or appropriate decoration. Both
versions can work in the right hands. The very end of the movement sees
the piano almost stuttering as the orchestra sings a gentle close. It takes
nerve to end as simply as Mozart indicates, with the final piano chord no
longer than a quaver, but the effect of eloquence suddenly stilled is worth
the effort.
The opening of the ebullient finale may be an allusion to the three notes
which open the first movement, or a speeded-up version of them, with
wider intervals. In a mood of high spirits, various cheerful themes are
announced and tossed back and forth between piano and orchestra.
Eventually the orchestra suggests a quieter, more pensive theme which the
piano snatches up and makes the excuse for some virtuoso display.
Characteristically, this passage ends with Mozart subsiding cheekily into a
little ‘afterthought’ theme which could be one of Papageno the bird-
catcher’s good-natured tunes from The Magic Flute. Things get stormy in
the next episode in F sharp minor, with the piano forcefully declaiming and
the orchestra replying plaintively. But there is also room for a gentle tune
played in D major by the clarinets and passed seamlessly back and forth
between orchestra and piano in the manner of jazz musicians ‘swapping
eights’. Earlier episodes are reprised in the home key, but almost the last
word is given to the tootling ‘Papageno’ figure, bouncing onto the stage just
before the final curtain to bid us a cheery farewell.

13. Rondo in A minor, K511

Many composers have used the term ‘Rondo’ to denote a lively and
energetic final movement, usually in a major key. In this piece, Mozart uses
the term Rondo neutrally to mean a piece in which the main theme ‘comes
round’ several times, punctuating a series of episodes in contrasting moods
and keys. If the title leads us to expect something cheerful, however, we are
in for a surprise, because this is probably the most heart-searching and
sorrowful of his solo keyboard works. It was written in March 1787, shortly
after his opera The Marriage of Figaro had been premiered with huge
success in Prague. Mozart, who visited Prague himself in January 1787 and
stayed until mid-February, was the talk of the town, enjoying unprecedented
acclaim both for his composition and for his piano-playing. Outwardly,
there is no reason why he should have felt like writing something as
introspective as the A minor Rondo at this time. But he had developed a
habit of interspersing cheerful and outgoing works with others of a
brooding character, which has led some writers to wonder whether he
struggled with feelings of depression. Perhaps his inclination to write a sad
piece at a happy time is, however, simply an indication of his extraordinary
emotional range, which demanded expression regardless of his outward
circumstances.
Describing the piece as ‘heart-searching and sorrowful’ may imply that
it is to be played very slowly, but this is probably not what Mozart intended;
as discussed in relation to K488, ‘Andante’ is a marking that indicates
fluency. The modern piano with its more resonant tone tends to encourage
slow tempi for many thoughtful pieces, because there is no difficulty in
sustaining the tone at slow speeds, but it is helpful to remember that
Mozart’s piano had a lighter, drier tone; an excessively slow tempo would
emphasise this quality, to the disadvantage of the music. Played fluently, the
seriousness of the music acquires a different character, one where the
sadness is not overt but instead steals gradually over the listener. In a
curious way this can make it more poignant than a deliberately slow and
tragic performance.
The A minor Rondo has a very complex structure, like a mosaic whose
recurring pieces are not symmetrical in the design, yet strike us as being
placed with mysterious beauty. The opening theme, with its suggestion of a
waltz rhythm in the left hand, has a beguiling lilt, but the melody line is
hesitant, venturing upwards in little half-steps before falling back down
again. The dotted rhythm of this opening melody reappears later in the
contrasting section in A major, halfway through the piece; its character is
more serene, but the sense of unity is preserved by the use of the now
familiar dotted rhythm.
Throughout the piece, there is a seamless ebb and flow between
troubled and peaceful states of mind, never starkly juxtaposed but rather
flowing and developing from one to another in a way that a modern writer
might describe as ‘organic’. Just as we have immersed ourselves in one
mood, we realise that the sun has come out to lighten the scene, or that just
as we have settled to enjoy the serenity, clouds drift over to cast the
landscape into shadow. Melancholy is the prevailing emotion, but even
melancholy turns out to have its consoling aspects, and it becomes clear that
there can be more pent-up sadness in little fragments of melody than in a
page of anguished arpeggios. Passages of dense chromatic movement, such
as in the second (F major) episode or the central (A major) section, bubble
up out of nowhere, carrying us on the current of their intensity. In works by
Mozart of a more extrovert character, such ‘bubbling-up’ passages are
intended as virtuoso display and to be enjoyed by the player as such, but
here the swirling flourishes are a sign of inner turbulence. Each time the
opening Rondo theme in A minor returns it is a little more florid in
character, as if it has more to assert on each appearance. The approach of
each return is managed with extraordinary subtlety, so that sometimes we
feel it is inevitable, whereas at other times its reappearance feels like a
magical sleight of hand. The full intricacy of the structure becomes clear if
you try to memorise it – it is a very daunting task.
Finally, in a Coda which fully displays Mozart’s genius, the bass line
wells up from a dark place while we hear the Rondo theme, now
rhythmically displaced so that it begins not with a quaver upbeat before the
bar line, but halfway through the bar, a variant it maintains until the end.
This has the effect of throwing the emphasis onto the keynote (A) which
now appears on the main beat, giving an effect of finality. The wave of
energy passes from the left hand to the right and rises into the high treble.
Under this we hear, for the first time, the theme played by the left hand in
the bass. In the final bars of the piece, we hear two fragments of the theme
in the treble and high treble, while below, the rippling left-hand figuration
underpins an almost Schubertian ‘tenor’ line which curls sadly around A, B
flat, A and G sharp like a mist closing in. After so much emotion, the final
two pianissimo chords may seem too short and too simply written to sum up
what has gone before. With careful placing, they can seem like a gesture of
acceptance.
I have a friend, a professor of advanced mathematics, who once tried to
explain to me what he was doing when he sat with his eyes closed and his
head in his hands imagining mathematical structures in numerous
dimensions. Although this kind of exercise is beyond me, I feel I have a
parallel experience when contemplating the musical structures devised by
my favourite composers, among whom Mozart is pre-eminent because of
the multi-dimensional beauty of his creations.
*
Earlier on, when discussing Haydn’s Variations in F minor, I mentioned a
possible link between them and Mozart’s Rondo, and here are a few more
words on the subject. Mozart and Haydn knew one another socially in
Vienna and met to play chamber music; sometimes Haydn played the violin
while Mozart played the viola, and sometimes they both played viola, as in
Mozart’s string quintets which have two viola parts. Haydn was twenty-
three years older than Mozart, but they were united in friendship by a great
appreciation of one another’s work, and despite the age difference they
called each other ‘Du’, the familiar form of address in German.
When Haydn departed for his celebrated visit to London in 1790, he and
Mozart had dinner together and Mozart is alleged to have teased Haydn
with the suggestion that he would probably soon feel like returning to
Vienna: ‘You are no longer young.’ ‘But I am vigorous and in good health!’
replied Haydn (aged fifty-nine). At the moment of parting, the mood turned
serious. Mozart is supposed to have said to Haydn, ‘We are probably saying
our last farewell in this life’, and they both had tears in their eyes. Judging
from Mozart’s reference to Haydn’s seniority, we may suppose that Mozart
thought it was Haydn who would depart this life first. But in fact it was
Mozart who died while Haydn was in London. When the news reached
Haydn, he was distraught: ‘For some time I was quite beside myself over
his death, and could not believe that Providence should so quickly have
called away such an irreplaceable man into the next world.’
On his return to Vienna, Haydn must have been struck anew by
Mozart’s absence. Was he thinking of Mozart when he conceived his
Variations? There is no direct proof, but several things in the music suggest
it. Haydn creates two themes, one in the minor, one in the major. The minor
theme features a dotted rhythm, repeated notes and a falling fifth. The major
one features four notes rising by a semitone each time. In the same
sequence, these two patterns are found in the opening two phrases of
Mozart’s A minor Rondo. Is this coincidence? Perhaps it is more a matter of
Haydn’s having absorbed the material of Mozart’s composition, which
resurfaced in his imagination in a new context. Similarly, just as Mozart
intensifies the emotion in the Coda of his Rondo, Haydn creates an
extraordinary upsurge of emotion in his, going even further than Mozart
does and giving the impression that he is letting us listen in to a painful
personal outburst. We know that Haydn at the time of writing the Variations
was upset about the death of his friend Marianne von Genzinger, so this is
one possible explanation for his mood. Are his variations also an undeclared
tribute to Mozart? He never said so in so many words, but of course there
are other ways of declaring what you mean, and his music bears witness.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)

14. Sonata for Piano and Violin in F major, op. 24, ‘Spring’
By the turn of the nineteenth century, the piano had developed greater
power and expressive range. There were many competing virtuosi who
exploited its possibilities, but Beethoven was the figure who came to
dominate the field as both a great pianist and a profound composer.
Beethoven’s influence on other composers has proved to be immense and
far-reaching. The way he saw himself as an artist, too, changed many
musicians’ perception of themselves. The story is well known that at one
point in Beethoven’s life, when he was taking part in a court case in an
attempt to gain custody of his nephew Karl, he was asked by the court
whether he was of noble birth. ‘My nobility is here and here,’ replied
Beethoven, striking his head and his heart. This radical and instinctive
promotion of the creative artist to a status where spirit and intellect were as
important as inherited privileges of ‘birth’ gave courage to later generations
of musicians.
 In this same period, ideas of ‘the sublime’ were developed by English
poets such as Wordsworth, the German philosophers Kant and
Schopenhauer, and expressed by the painters Caspar David Friedrich and
J.M.W. Turner. To have a sense of ‘the sublime’ was to perceive the
grandeur and immensity of Nature, or Time, with delight and appreciation
rather than terror. Crossing the Alps had once been considered by sensitive
travellers to be an uncivilised encounter with nature in the raw, but in
Beethoven’s lifetime such experiences came to be seen as noble and
uplifting, a chance to bask in the presence of Infinity. By analogy, certain
works of art came to be perceived as possessing sublime qualities and
Beethoven’s ‘mountainous’ music was a prime example.
With some of Beethoven’s early work, however, we are not so much in
the mountains as in the gentle foothills. Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and
violin (the order he gave those instruments on the title pages) are a
delightful facet of his output, showing his deep interest in the art of
conversation between two instruments he played himself. Beethoven was
known primarily as a pianist, but he also played the violin, and in his early
twenties he had lessons several times a week from the violinist Ignaz
Schuppanzigh (himself only eighteen years old at the time), who later
founded the first professional string quartet and led the first performances
of many of Beethoven’s quartets.
So when Beethoven started to compose for piano and violin, he was in a
good position to understand what it felt like to play both instruments. His
duo sonatas are notably genial, as if he regarded violin and piano as friends
and co-conspirators rather than adversaries or opposites. Inevitably, because
of the piano’s ability to play harmony, the piano part is the broad river on
which the violin part floats along, but both instruments share the musical
honours. Violin and piano swap thematic material, sometimes with the
violin leading and sometimes with the piano taking charge. At times the
piano is treated as two separate voices, the right hand and the left hand, and
we might find the violin in duet with the piano’s bass line, or the pianist’s
two hands in counterpoint with one another while the violin supplies the
accompaniment. The textures are remarkably transparent, almost Mozartian,
and we can always hear exactly who is doing what.
The Sonata in F major, op. 24, was written in 1801. Its nickname,
‘Spring’, seems to acknowledge its freshness of outlook, but the name was
not given to it by Beethoven. It is the first of his piano and violin sonatas to
consist of four rather than three movements, and the extra movement, the
Scherzo, is a little gem. At this period, Beethoven was still writing in a late
eighteenth-century style influenced by Mozart and Haydn. As we listen, we
may feel that it is easy to follow the steps of his musical thought process; in
contrast to his later and more compressed style, he takes care to lay the
steps out for us.
The famous opening theme, first heard on violin, is a melody which
descends from on high like a branch with clusters of blossoms gently
drooping from it. The second main theme is a bouncy rhythmic figure
presented alternately by violin and piano. The difference in character
between the two themes presents the players with a challenge, for if the
opening theme is taken at a relaxed tempo, the second theme may seem
laborious. Conversely, if the second theme is allowed to dictate a sprightly
overall tempo, the graceful curls of the first theme may seem rushed.
Scholars tell us that in Beethoven’s day it was the custom to be flexible
about the tempo, with players naturally speeding up or slowing down if the
music seemed to demand it. Modern taste has veered towards finding a
unified tempo that works for every theme, but not every piece of music
lends itself to this approach and the ‘Spring’ sonata is a good example.
In the B flat slow movement it is the piano’s turn to present the main
theme, a beautiful melody whose outline seems to share some of the
characteristics of the first movement’s opening theme. A truly slow tempo is
needed to accommodate the Chopinesque decorative turns and runs without
making them seem trivial. After they have each declaimed the theme, piano
and violin embark on a closer conversation, breaking up phrases between
them. The second ‘verse’ of the theme sees even more flowery decoration
and a turn to the minor, which in turn sinks beautifully into the unexpected
key of G flat major. In the coda, violin and piano swap phrases which
become shorter and shorter, dissolving in quiet oscillations as scraps of the
opening theme flutter to the ground.
The theme of the Scherzo is subtly derived from the opening theme of
the first movement, and itself presages the theme of the finale. Almost the
whole Scherzo is quiet, including the ‘Trio’ which mutters along with
subdued energy, rising to a few brief bars of forte. The piano has the main
Scherzo theme, a rhythmic figure which leaves many of the third beats
empty. Then the violin joins in but immediately ‘misunderstands’ the shape
of the theme and leaves the first beat blank by mistake, resulting in the two
instruments being a beat apart when we expect them to be in unison. The
effect is comical in a disconcerting way. The tripping Trio makes it clear
that they know exactly how to play together, but the return of the Scherzo
brings back the ‘mistake’, a course the poor violin is compelled to pursue to
the very end. (I once heard a performance in which the violinist ‘got out’ in
such a way that they ‘got in’ and played in rhythmic unison with the piano,
an effect which either ruined Beethoven’s joke or made it even funnier, I’m
not sure which.)
The Rondo finale recalls the mood of Mozart’s leisurely Allegretto
movements, in which nothing ever seems hasty. The piano takes the lead
with a gentle theme which alludes to the opening theme of the first
movement. Piano and violin take turns with eight-bar phrases, then with
four-bar phrases, and then break up the phrases between them. After a
return of the Rondo theme there is a stormy section in D minor with tricky
triplet figures for each instrument, accompanying a passionate syncopated
theme. The next time we hear the Rondo theme it is in the ‘wrong’ key of D
major, from which it winds back to a reprise in the home key. At the next
appearance of the Rondo there is a delicious variant where the piano breaks
the theme into skipping triplets with the first of each triplet missing, a
moment which recalls the violin’s predicament in the Scherzo. But the
violin is not embarrassed, and even caps the effect with its own cheeky
dotted-note version of the theme. In great good humour the two instruments
weave their way to the end, each trying to outdo the other with virtuosic
flourishes (a gambit Beethoven may have admired in Mozart’s Sonata for
Piano and Violin in B flat, K454).

15. Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 57, ‘Appassionata’

The Sonata in F minor, op. 57, was Beethoven’s own favourite among his
piano sonatas, at least until he came to write his ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata,
op. 106. The F minor sonata has long been one of his most celebrated piano
sonatas, famous for its brooding energy and defiant contrasts. The title
‘Appassionata’ was not the composer’s idea; it was bestowed in 1838 by a
publisher bringing out a version for piano duet, and the public took to the
name. Beethoven wrote the F minor sonata in 1804–5 when he was coming
to terms with his deafness. He had recently been given a piano with a
compass of five and a half octaves, the lowest note being F, two and a half
octaves below middle C. Perhaps this prompted him to write his new sonata
in the key of F minor, and to use the very bottom note of his new piano in
the first bar (and the last).
Beethoven improvised magnificently at the piano, and his piano music
must to some extent be an attempt to write down ideas and shapes that came
to him in the immediate flow of inspiration. There’s more to it than that, of
course: when he worked on a manuscript he expended tremendous effort on
developing, enlarging and refining his first ideas, and his written works
have a stature that improvisation can hardly match. All the same, when we
play his piano music it’s helpful to remember that it links us to Beethoven
the inspired improviser. This is easy to imagine with a piece like the
‘Appassionata’ with its air of thoughts being caught on the wing.
Beethoven marks the first movement ‘Allegro assai’ (very lively). His
quiet opening theme contains long notes linked by passing notes of very
short duration. Often the movement is taken too fast for these short notes to
be accurately played (they are frequently played as lazy quavers). If the
pianist can find a tempo at which the rhythm of these little notes can be
crystal clear, then they will more faithfully convey the nervous excitement
which dwells within the outwardly controlled phrases. Beethoven exploits
contrasts of several kinds in this movement: at the beginning, for example,
he springs a harmonic surprise when the opening phrase in F minor is
immediately followed by one a semitone higher in the distant key of G flat,
as though trying to destabilise us. (This fondness for moving things up or
down a semitone to create an otherworldly effect was shared by Schubert.)
There are contrasts between sparse keyboard writing and virtuosic passages.
There are many examples of what we now think of as ‘typical Beethoven’,
such as sudden unpredictable contrasts between loud and soft or vice versa:
several examples occur within the first minute of the piece. And there are
contrasts between long lyrical lines and bursts of energetic passagework
from which melody has been burned away. All of this creates an impression
of someone driven by turbulent inner forces to express volatile emotions.
Some of the writing – for example the fortissimo chords at the ‘Più Allegro’
near the end – is very difficult to play accurately and at the prescribed speed
unless you have a big hand. Debate will always continue about whether
Beethoven imagined a pristine performance of such passages, or whether
the sense of barely controlled hysteria is part of his design. Undoubtedly,
conveying a sense of pent-up energy is more important than clinical
accuracy, but splashing around will do nothing to endear you to the listener,
so it is important to practise slowly until your hands feel secure enough to
reach cleanly for the chords even amid the excitement.
The ‘Andante con moto’ is a set of variations. Its dignified theme is a
chorale-like procession of chords not openly amounting to a melody;
Beethoven famously used this gambit a few years later in the slow
movement of his Seventh Symphony. Here and there he again includes
some dotted notes of very short duration. Because of them, pianists often
take this movement too slowly in order to avoid the unwanted impression of
‘skipping’ at these points, but as the prevailing dynamic is ‘piano e dolce’
(soft and gentle) it is possible to aim at a way of playing the short notes of
chords lightly and punctually without distorting the musical line. In each
variation the decoration gets faster and the theme slowly rises from the
tenor register into the high treble, like a hot-air balloon taking to the sky. A
quiet reminder of the original theme is brutally interrupted by a sinister
diminished chord, at once repeated fortissimo an octave higher and leading
straight into the final movement. Beethoven has conceived this moment
with great care, as we see from the trouble he takes to notate the loud chord
‘arpeggio’ (like a harp) in the left hand and ‘secco’ (dry) in the right, an
effect which is like a sudden shout or cry.
Beethoven’s piano pupil Ferdinand Ries, who left valuable recollections
of his friendship with Beethoven, has described how the last movement of
the ‘Appassionata’ came into being. They had been for a walk:

. . . in which we went so far astray that we did not get back to

Döbling, where Beethoven lived, until nearly 8 o’clock. He had
been all the time humming and sometimes howling, without singing
any definite notes. In answer to my question what it was he said, ‘A
theme for the last movement of the sonata has occurred to me.’
When we entered the room he ran to the pianoforte without taking
off his hat. I took a seat in the corner and he soon forgot all about
 me. Now he stormed for at least an hour with the beautiful finale of
the sonata. Finally he got up, was surprised still to see me and said:
‘I cannot give you a lesson today, I must do some more work.’

It is interesting that Ries described the gestation of the finale as ‘humming

and sometimes howling, without singing any definite notes’, for it does
have something of this feeling, muttering and swirling, with agitated
rhythmic fragments sprinkled through the texture, like birds calling in a
forest. It’s pleasing to imagine that we might be getting to overhear seven or
eight minutes of the hour that he spent ‘storming’ at the piano (still wearing
his hat). The first section is not repeated but, unusually, he tells us to repeat
the development section. This instruction is not always followed, because
the movement is long and the pianist’s stamina may already be under
pressure (let’s not forget that the mechanism of the modern piano is heavier
and more tiring to play than Beethoven’s piano).
One of the hardest things for the player to convey is the sense of friction
resulting from subterranean energy under iron control. The fast
passagework is often marked piano or pianissimo; the little two-note ‘alarm
calls’ we hear now in the bass, now in the treble, are difficult to play in
correct rhythm with the necessary feeling of coiled energy. The mood is
held back until the final page, Presto, where Beethoven abandons himself to
a demonic stamping dance and a grim dash to the finish. It is amazing to
think that Beethoven was writing such music while his old composition
teacher Joseph Haydn was still Kapellmeister at the Esterházy palace. In its
marriage of virtuosity with emotional power, Beethoven’s F minor sonata
was extending the boundaries of piano music.

16. Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major, op. 58

Beethoven’s fourth and fifth piano concertos, the G major, op. 58, and the E
flat ‘Emperor’, op. 73, are the most celebrated of his five splendid piano
concertos. Numbers 4 and 5 are very different in character, a tribute to
Beethoven’s ability to ‘be himself’ in a huge variety of styles. The E flat
concerto is heroic, virtuosic and muscular, rather like the piano part of
Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ piano trio. By contrast the G major concerto is
serene and thoughtful, the soloist enjoying dialogue and partnership with
the orchestra rather than engaging them in combat.
G major was a key which seemed to find Beethoven in genial mood: the
piano trio in G, op. 1 no. 2, the piano sonata, op. 31 no. 1, the piano and
violin sonata, op. 96, for example. In his G major concerto the piano writing
is often more like a line drawing than an oil painting, sparingly scored
without massive blocks of chords. Interestingly, the pianist spends a lot of
time playing in the high treble register, as though Beethoven had planned to
leave the bass registers to the orchestra, with the pianist playing the part of
a silver-tongued poet.
The premiere of the Piano Concerto no. 4 in the Theater an der Wien
just before Christmas in 1808 was Beethoven’s last public appearance as a
piano soloist with orchestra. The programme was colossal and the concert
lasted for over four hours; as well as the premieres of the G major concerto
and the Choral Fantasy for piano and orchestra (both with Beethoven as
soloist), there were also the premieres of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies,
with Beethoven supervising the disgruntled orchestra. Rehearsal time had
been inadequate, and in Viennese winter weather the theatre was freezing
cold. Naturally these two symphonies were the outstanding events of the
evening and the G major piano concerto, though admired by critics at the
time, was quietly forgotten. It was rescued some twenty years later by Felix
Mendelssohn, who performed it himself to great acclaim and established it
as an important piece of the repertoire.
There are many aspects of the G major concerto which make one
imagine Beethoven improvising at the piano. The character of the piece is
clear at the very beginning, where the pianist alone pronounces the opening
theme, its delicate repeated chords perhaps evoking speech rather than
song. The note B, the third of a simple G major chord, begins the melody
line. And now comes one of Beethoven’s startling moves: the orchestra
quietly takes up the same theme, still with B as the first note, but
harmonises it quite differently, in the key of B major instead of G. The
effect is of something familiar removed suddenly to a great distance, from
which it works itself back to the home key via an extensive passage for the
orchestra alone. When the soloist enters again it is not with a flourish but
with a gentle continuation of what the orchestra has been saying. It is, in
fact, the orchestra which announces most of the principal themes in the
movement, the piano happy to supply comments, enhancements and
decorative arpeggios of filigree beauty. There are only one or two moments
where the piano really asserts itself: first, the reprise of the opening theme,
which begins thunderously but can only sustain the heroic mode for a few
bars before gracefully subsiding. Second, Beethoven’s own long and intense
cadenza, the one still most often performed, which amplifies the feeling that
we are hearing a written-out version of the composer improvising. For some
minutes it feels as if the pianist has forgotten the orchestra is there, but at
the end of the cadenza the pianist winds down to a long quiet trill, under
cover of which the orchestra creeps in with a beautiful extension of the
musical thought.
The slow movement is another of Beethoven’s wonderful innovations: a
series of exchanges between a loud, grumpy orchestra and a quiet, eloquent
piano determined to calm things down. An early biographer of Beethoven
described it as ‘Orpheus trying to calm the Furies on his journey to the
underworld’. Beethoven tells the pianist to use the ‘una corda’ pedal, which
we know as the soft pedal; on Beethoven’s piano this meant that each
hammer only struck one string, creating a truly delicate effect. Each time
the orchestra, moving in rhythmic unison, speaks its mind the piano replies
with long, conciliatory lines of melody. The length of the exchanges gets
shorter; the pace of the conversation speeds up and the pitch of the piano
part rises. About halfway through the movement there is a subtle exchange
of roles. After a particularly poignant phrase in the piano, the orchestra
starts to simmer down and subside into muttering. In parallel, the piano
becomes impassioned and gradually works itself up into a short but
despairing cadenza. The orchestra is completely subdued by this; when it
next enters, it is pianississimo, very, very quiet. Even the piano seems to
have exhausted itself, and makes only two more brief but telling comments:
a simple three-chord phrase, and a final quiet arpeggio of benediction.
The Rondo opens with another of the radical harmonic twists Beethoven
used on the opening page of the concerto. The slow movement ends in E
minor, and E is the last note we hear. The Rondo tune starts with that same
E, but the bass has dropped from E to C: the E has become the third of a C
major chord, evoking an instant change of scene. (In fact, C major turns out
to be a stepping stone en route to the home key of G major, which returns
soon after.) The merry theme is presented quietly and gets a quiet reply, but
after a couple more exchanges the orchestra bursts out with a joyful
fortissimo statement of the theme, a brilliant moment of energy release.
Once again the orchestra leads with the presentation of new themes and
figures, the piano replying with more elaborate versions of them. Twice
when leading up to the return of the Rondo there are long down-and-up
virtuoso scales with which the piano guides us back to the familiar theme;
the conductor must be poised to bring the orchestra in at the perfect moment
to overlap the pianist’s final note with the first note of the orchestral theme.
It’s a moment which often comes adrift in performance and makes one
wonder whether Beethoven wrote it as a sort of dare. After a brief piano
cadenza the movement ends in high spirits, but even here it is notable that
the mood is good-natured and the piano writing elegant rather than
exhibitionist.

17. Piano Concerto no. 5 in E flat major, op. 73, ‘Emperor’

Even today, if you asked someone to name a famous piano concerto, they
would probably say Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’. Beethoven’s legendarily bad
temper would have been roused if he knew that we are still calling his fifth
piano concerto ‘The Emperor’. He supported the ideals of the French
Revolution and had intended to dedicate his third symphony, ‘Eroica’, to
Napoleon Bonaparte, the military leader who rose to prominence during the
Revolution. But in 1804 when Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor,
Beethoven was so upset at this betrayal of progressive ideals that he
scratched out Napoleon’s name on the cover of the ‘Eroica’ symphony. He
reworded the dedication: ‘to celebrate the memory of a great man’. Why
then is the fifth piano concerto, written in 1809, known as the ‘Emperor’, at
least in English-speaking countries? It seems to have been the idea of the
German pianist Johann Baptist Cramer, who may have been responding to
its majestic, quasi-military character with a shrewd marketing suggestion
(Cramer also owned a publishing firm in London). It worked: the handy
nickname ‘Emperor’ is probably one important reason why the Piano
Concerto no. 5 in E flat, op. 73, is the best known of Beethoven’s concertos.
In 1809, Vienna was under invasion from Napoleon’s forces. Beethoven
was living in lodgings close to the city wall, and when the noise of artillery
got too loud he fled to his brother’s house and continued to compose,
holding pillows over his ears to protect his limited hearing. ‘What a
disturbing, wild life around me!’ he wrote. ‘Nothing but drums, cannon,
men, misery of all sorts.’ In those circumstances it is perhaps hardly
surprising that the themes which came to him for his fifth piano concerto
were of a proud, martial kind. The E flat concerto is the first of the
‘barnstorming’ piano concertos unleashed during the Romantic era. It is
very different to its predecessor, no. 4 in G major, which re-imagines the
roles of pianist and orchestra in a number of ways and whose quiet, gentle
opening on unaccompanied piano was a revelation to audiences. The fifth
concerto takes the opposite approach. The pianist is cast in the role of a
great actor whose opening perorations thrill the audience with their power
and eloquence. That the soloist is able to play this role is partly due to the
developing mechanism of the piano itself, which had reached the point
where the instrument could project a large amount of volume. Beethoven
was the first composer to take full advantage of the enhanced range of piano
tone. Because of the fifth concerto’s assertive and muscular character, it has
traditionally been championed by men; even today, lists of recommended
recordings are either entirely of male pianists or dominated by them.
Beethoven was not the soloist at the first performance – his increasing
deafness made it impossible. Instead, his patron and friend Archduke
Rudolph played the piano part at a private performance in 1811, and the
soloist at the first public performance in Leipzig was the twenty-five-year-
old Friedrich Schneider. The Leipzig audience and critics were delighted. ‘It
is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative and effective but also
one of the most difficult of existing concertos’, wrote the Allgemeine
Musikalische Zeitung. The first Vienna performance was given in 1812 by
Carl Czerny, composer of the well-known piano studies, who was not only
Beethoven’s pupil but also a lifelong friend and champion of his music.
In his On the proper performance of all Beethoven’s works for the
piano, Czerny writes that ‘It is most advisable to conduct the orchestra from
a separate copy of the pianoforte part, as the mode of performance cannot
be gathered from the part belonging to the violin.’ This comment tells us
several things: firstly, that it was the custom for the leader of the orchestra
(a violinist) to direct the performance using only his violin part as a guide,
no other conductor being present; secondly, that a conductor might have
worked from a copy of the piano part (not a full score); and thirdly, that full
orchestral scores were not yet routinely available. Any conductor
attempting to direct the orchestra from a single part, even the piano part,
would have been at a serious disadvantage because they would not have
known who was playing what in the orchestra. Naturally a conscientious
conductor could discover it by looking and listening, but it would have
taken time, probably more time than rehearsals allowed for.
One of Beethoven’s achievements in this concerto is to write for the
orchestra so that when playing alone, for example in the long ‘tutti’
exposition of the main themes near the beginning, it sounds grand and
powerful, but when in dialogue with the soloist it is used with delicacy, not
drowning the piano. In a good performance, these passages of give and take
between piano and orchestra seem like the meeting of remarkably equal
forces, a tribute to Beethoven’s sensitive scoring. Yet when the piano falls
silent, the power of the orchestra is on thrilling display.
The concerto has the reputation of being huge, loud and bombastic, but
this is only partly true: in fact, a glance at the score will show how often
Beethoven tells the pianist to play ‘dolce’ (gently), ‘leggiermente’ (lightly)
and pianissimo. Even the dramatic moment near the end of the first
movement where the orchestra hands over to the pianist, as if expecting
them to play a mighty cadenza, is carefully controlled; Beethoven tells the
soloist ‘Don’t play a cadenza, but go on immediately with the following.’
‘The following’ is essentially a passage of musing on the second theme,
played quietly and lightly. Beethoven reserves the barnstorming for the
moment when the orchestra reprises the first theme and the piano exultantly
decorates it with fiery arpeggios.
The heart of the work is the slow movement, with its hushed and
prayerful orchestral opening. Czerny tells us that Beethoven had in mind
‘the religious songs of devout pilgrims’. The contemplative atmosphere is
like those of some of Beethoven’s most beautiful slow movements in his
duo sonatas, for example the Sonata for Piano and Violin in C minor, op. 30
no. 2, or more particularly the Sonata for Piano and Violin in G major, op.
96. Here at last in the E flat concerto the soloist is allowed to show the
lyrical quality which so distinguishes the piano writing in the previous
concerto. Elaborating on the orchestral theme, the piano takes flight in a
gentle fantasia, eventually decorating the theme with quiet arpeggios when
the orchestra reprises it. At the end of the movement is a striking moment:
having come to a close in the key of B, with a long-held bass note B, the
whole thing slips down a semitone to B flat (the dominant of the home key,
E flat). Here, the piano quietly explores a few rising chords, as if planning a
new excursion. But suddenly the mood changes and the final Rondo bursts
upon us in E flat major.
The rising chords are transformed into the Rondo theme, a kind of
peasant dance with defiant, almost clumsy offbeat accents. Once more the
soloist is cast in the role of the warrior-hero, demonstrating their prowess in
a series of virtuoso episodes linked by statements of the Rondo theme in
various keys. The mood is spacious, though it is possible to tire of the
‘kicking’ theme before it has finished inspecting all its outlying territory.
Towards the end, the dance-like element wins out over the boisterous one.
The orchestra falls silent while, in an unusual duet, the timpanist quietly
beats out the dotted rhythm of the dance and the piano bids us farewell with
a series of gently sinking chromatic chords. The tempo slows and reaches
Adagio. What next? Suddenly the pianist seems to realise that the finishing
line is in sight, and makes a determined sprint for it, cheered on by the full
orchestra.

18. Piano Trio in B flat major, op. 97, ‘Archduke’

Beethoven’s B flat Piano Trio, op. 97 (for piano, violin and cello), is one of
his most majestic works, with a heroic piano part fully the equal of those in
his piano concertos. Sometimes chamber music is thought to be domestic
music on a small or intimate scale, but the B flat Trio shatters that notion.
Its instrumental demands put it beyond the reach of all but the most
advanced amateur players, and tax the stamina of professionals. It is
intriguing to consider why Beethoven wrote such a grand and ambitious
work for just three people to play. Wouldn’t it have been better as a
symphony, with seventy or eighty musicians combining their forces to
produce an appropriately enormous sound? Actually, the friction between a
small group of players and the enormous scale of the music is an important
part of its impact. The sight and sound of three people, just one on each
part, working hard to deliver one of Beethoven’s most masterly
compositions cannot help but be impressive.
 The Trio was written in 1810–11 and got its nickname from its
dedicatee, the Austrian Emperor’s youngest son Archduke Rudolph, a
patron of Beethoven’s and the only person he ever took on as a composition
pupil. Rudolph was a good pianist to whom Beethoven dedicated several
important works (e.g. the fourth and fifth piano concertos, the Triple
Concerto), but it is not known whether Rudolph attempted the fearsome
piano part of ‘his’ Trio. The composer himself played the piano (with the
violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh and cellist Joseph Linke) in its first
performance at a hotel in Vienna in 1814, but his deafness made it an
ordeal. The composer Louis Spohr was in the audience and reported: ‘On
account of his deafness there was scarcely anything left of the virtuosity of
the artist which had formerly been so greatly admired. In forte passages the
poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings jangled, and in piano
he played so softly that whole groups of notes were omitted, so that the
music was unintelligible unless one could look into the pianoforte part. I
was deeply saddened at so hard a fate.’
Despite this inauspicious premiere, the piece itself was greatly admired
and has gone on to become one of the pinnacles not only of the trio
repertoire but of Beethoven’s whole output. Speaking from personal
experience I can say that even when one knows the trio well, preparing to
play it remains a challenge akin, I imagine, to what an athlete or cyclist
might feel when training for a mountain race. Beethoven asks a lot of all
three players but especially of the pianist, who is playing more or less
continuously for forty minutes, often at full stretch. One needs to learn to
pace oneself, for some of the severest demands come near the end. Not only
does the pianist need physical stamina, they must also have an intellectual
grasp of the music’s architecture in order to convey it to the listener. Just
playing the notes on the page, arduous though that may be, is not enough:
the musicians must dive into Beethoven’s imagination so that the outline of
the composition emerges from its torrents of notes.
It’s debatable how important it is for the listener to know that certain
themes and elements of themes are used throughout, forming a kind of
DNA of the composition. For example, the opening section of the first
movement contains three such elements: (a) the four-note melody in the
first bar; (b) the six-note rising scale which begins with the dotted notes at
the end of bar two; and (c) the ‘decorative’ turn played by the strings when
they enter. A little later comes (d) the lightly bouncing second theme in G
major, with its characteristic repeated notes. These four elements are
constantly used throughout the four movements. Element (a) drives a large
part of the development in the first movement. The theme of the second
movement is a recollection of element (b), the rising scale. The theme of the
slow movement, which appears delightfully new, is probably an allusion
both to (c) and (d). The theme of the finale is a deliberately distorted
version of (b). There are hundreds of instances of the principal elements
being pressed into service as secondary elements in an ongoing process of
variation. It is entirely possible to love the piece without ever having
noticed that musical cells are used as building blocks throughout. But to be
aware of the cross-references adds a new dimension to our appreciation,
because we are better able to understand that Beethoven’s genius lies not
just in the invention of one heart-stirring tune after another, but in his
profound grasp of how atoms and molecules of musical material can be
arranged and combined to build intricate structures.
The four movements are like the acts in a tremendous play. In the first
movement, dignified and expansive, the piano has the task of introducing
most of the important material before it is taken up and discussed amongst
all three instruments. The opening theme is ruthlessly taken apart in the
development section and at some moments reduced to rhythmic pulsation.
Just before the reprise there’s a nerve-racking moment for the pianist when,
at the end of a long crescendo in staccato quavers, the violin and cello drop
away, leaving the pianist to make the final fortissimo ascent to the summit
alone. Characteristically, Beethoven follows this moment with an
immediate change of tone and mood: from declamatory B flat chords he
switches to soft, mysterious chromatic fragments which dissolve into
pianissimo trills on all three instruments, almost in the manner of a
cinematic ‘fade’ (a technique he first used at the equivalent moment in the
first movement of his Sonata for Piano and Violin, op. 24, ‘Spring’). From
these quiet trills, the opening theme emerges once more, not triumphantly
(that is reserved for the very end of the movement) but innocently, as
though awaking from a strange dream.
In the second movement, an extended scherzo, it is the turn of the
strings to introduce a theme which develops into a genial dance reminiscent
of an Austrian Ländler. We are familiar with the scherzo-and-trio format, in
which the main body of the movement is contrasted with a (usually) more
relaxed section; here, Beethoven turns the tables by making the ‘trio’
section the most dramatic part of the movement. It is introduced in five flats
and in sinister style by the cello, creeping along a chromatic rising line as if
moving towards a strange quiet fugue. But suddenly there is another of
Beethoven’s volatile changes of mood as the chromatic line heaves itself up
to deliver a grand, mock-heroic waltz that is repeated in various keys before
finding its way back to the reprise.
The slow movement is a set of variations on one of Beethoven’s
loveliest themes, again given first to the piano, who presents it quietly in the
middle register of the keyboard. Across the movement there is a gradual
increase in the complexity of the decoration of the theme and in the
intricacy of its internal pulse. The piano takes charge of this rhythmic
process, wreathing the theme in more and more elaborate and graceful
accompaniment. As the texture becomes denser and the pulsation more
hypnotic, we are lulled into an extraordinary meditative, indeed
mesmerised, state. Without bringing the slow movement to a conclusion,
Beethoven has the strings bid it farewell over gently pulsing piano triplets
with a graceful ‘turning’ figure which, suddenly and brusquely, he
transforms into the defiant theme of the fourth movement, wrenching the
music back into B flat.
The finale’s character is that of an awkward yet powerful dance, kicking
and stamping, with the hint of a twinkle in its eye. As the movement
develops there is fiendishly difficult writing for all three instruments, for
example the lengthy passage requiring the pianist to play fast oscillating
‘tremolo’ chords pianissimo while the strings menacingly whisper the
opening theme. In the final Presto and Più Presto, Beethoven again makes
instrumental demands that feel nearly impossible to achieve without losing
control, a predicament he would probably have dismissed just as he
rebuffed a complaint of that kind from Schuppanzigh: ‘Do you think I
worry about your wretched fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?’

19. Piano Sonata in A flat major, op. 110

Like other late works of Beethoven, this sonata has a feeling of
compression about it, as though the composer had neither the time nor the
patience to explain anything at great length for our benefit. Very little is
allowed to unfold at leisure; there is often a sense of transitions between
one section and another being made quite curtly and swiftly, as if the
composer does not really care whether we are following or not, and is
anxious to move on because of the pressure of ideas. Its aura of being
‘private music’ has, of course, inspired many people to immerse themselves
in it in the hope of following Beethoven’s train of thought and entering his
world.
The autograph score of the A flat sonata, op. 110, is dated ‘25 December
1821’, evoking the poignant image of Beethoven working alone on
Christmas Day. By this date he had been deaf for five years and had long
since given up playing the piano in public. He still composed at the piano at
home in Vienna, but sometimes pounded on the keys in frustration because
he could not hear himself play. He was said to have experimented with
some kind of rod which allowed him to hear vibrations through bone
conduction if he bit down on one end of the rod while pressing the other
end against the soundboard. Clearly, however, most of the sounds had to be
heard in his imagination.
During this period Beethoven, who had never been in the habit of
attending church, turned to thoughts of religion. His notebooks of the time
are full of prayers and theological commentary. Alongside the A flat sonata
he was also composing his Missa Solemnis, his solemn mass. In fact,
sketches for this sonata were found among the manuscript pages of the
Missa Solemnis, and arguably the sonata’s opening bars are linked to the
opening of the Mass. The music is abstract and has no need of association
with words to work its effect, but it is interesting to note that the first ten
bars of the sonata could be sung to the opening words of the mass: ‘Kyrie
Eleison . . . Christe Eleison’ (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy).
After the main theme is heard, arpeggios ripple from treble to bass and
back again. These arpeggios are a feature of the whole sonata and seem to
saturate the keyboard with sound and energy. Is it perhaps like an artist
covering the page with cross-hatching? Throughout the sonata there are
countless examples of Beethoven reaching into the high treble, as though
the upper register of the keyboard is a goal for him with some emotional
meaning. In his middle period, when he first became seriously deaf, he
seemed to prefer writing for lower registers of the piano which he could
hear better. In later years, despite his deafness, he returned to writing in
very high registers of the piano. Although he couldn’t hear them, his
imagination demanded them and these upper regions may have had some
spiritual association for him, like angelic music.
The second movement, Allegro molto, is at first glance a rough and
earthy scherzo, with a lot of stamping in the bass, often off the beat
(particularly in the middle section). It is written in plain rhythms of
crotchets and quavers as though in deliberate contrast to the sinuous lines of
the first movement – and, as it turns out, to the last movement also. At first
the character of the second movement seems brusque and defiant, an
unbeautiful peasant dance with alternating soft and loud phrases. But all is
not as it seems. The theme of the first four bars will later reappear,
completely transformed, as the lament of the third movement, ‘Arioso
dolente’.
The third movement is the heart of the work and has a powerful
structure of its own, with alternating episodes of sorrowful lament and
stately fugue. In performance it often seems like a theatrical scene
unfolding at different distances, one close and personal, one far away and
impersonal, like a study of the movement of the stars.
The Adagio opens with a short passage giving a strong impression of
condensing a long modulation into a few bars. The Recitativo imitates a
solo singer as we might hear them in a church oratorio. What is the meaning
of the mysterious repeated A’s, marked Adagio, played by the right hand?
They seem to suggest words, though they also conjure up a vision of
Beethoven pounding a single note in the effort to hear it. With a few concise
chords we move into the ‘Arioso dolente’ or, as Beethoven translated it,
‘Klagender Gesang’ (song of complaint). This piercingly sad lament is
based on the aria ‘Es ist vollbracht’ (It is fulfilled) from Bach’s St John
Passion, which Beethoven had studied in preparation for writing his own
Missa Solemnis. The same theme, we may gradually realise, was used for
the earthy stamping dance of the Scherzo, a startling example not only of
thematic transformation but of character transformation too.
The influence of Bach becomes even clearer in the Fugue, a complete
change of mood from personal and despairing to peaceful and organised.
The theme of the first fugue, in the home key of A flat, seems familiar; in
fact it is a distillation of the opening theme of the first movement. In
retrospect, the opening movement may seem to have been a foreshadowing
of, and preparation for, this moment. After the first fugue, the Arioso returns
in the key of G minor, marked ‘Ermattet’ (exhausted), its theme broken into
effortful fragments. The fragmentation continues in rhythmic as well as
melodic terms, leaving only a chain of mysterious offbeat chords in G
major (here the pianist must consider whether it is possible to make the
listener understand that the chords are off the beat, for the sense of pulse
has become so fragile that it is difficult to define where the beats are). There
follows a second fugue which begins in G with the fugue theme turned
upside down. Is this a joke, an example of Beethoven mocking his own
seriousness? Or is it perhaps another answer to the lament, given from a
different angle?
In the second fugue, the theme undergoes various translations of speed.
Sometimes we hear it at different speeds simultaneously, and we scarcely
have time to grasp that the little chattering descant figures are speeded-up
fragments of the fugue theme. By now, the theme has turned itself the right
way up again, and has found its way back to A flat. With new confidence, it
works its way from low bass to high treble, reaching a triumphant ending in
the home key. But the effect is tantalising, because the sense of ultimate
resolution is only achieved at the last minute. After reaching the climax the
music breaks off with a precisely notated final crotchet chord and no pause;
the quaver rest after the chord confirms that there is to be no prolongation.
The sudden silence which follows the final chord seems to come like a
punch in the chest. The sound stops, but the emotional momentum hurtles
on.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828)

20. Piano Quintet in A major, D667, ‘Trout’
Schubert, unlike Beethoven, was not a great virtuoso at the piano, and in his
lifetime had a limited reputation, principally as a composer of songs and
dances. Some of his most powerful works of piano and chamber music were
not published until after his death. They built on the daring innovations of
Beethoven, but with a strong lyrical drive that is entirely Schubert’s own.
Schubert had the reputation of being a sociable and modest person with an
effortless talent, but his music contains some of the most piercing insights
any composer has found a way to write down.
Schubert’s ‘Trout’ quintet is one of the most popular pieces in the
chamber music repertoire. It shows a different side of Schubert from the
searching, visionary works of his later years; this is genial domestic music
from the plump young man known to his friends as ‘Schwammerl’ (Little
Mushroom).
In 1819 the twenty-two-year-old Schubert was spending a summer
holiday with his friend, the singer Johann Michael Vogl, in the
‘inconceivably lovely’ countryside around Steyr in Upper Austria. In Steyr
there lived a wealthy patron of the arts, Sylvester Paumgartner, an amateur
cellist who held musical evenings in his home on the town square.
Paumgartner loved Schubert’s song, ‘Die Forelle’ (The Trout), and asked
the composer to write him a chamber work incorporating a set of variations
on the song. He requested that the new piece should have the same
instrumentation as Hummel’s piano quintet arrangement of his own Septet,
op. 74. Hummel’s quintet arrangement had the unusual scoring of piano,
violin, viola, cello and double bass – a sort of glorified piano quartet, its
sonority enriched by a double bass (presumably Paumgartner’s friends
represented just such a group of players). Schubert agreed and produced a
work whose good nature and endless supply of delightful tunes has made it,
as Alfred Einstein said, ‘music we cannot help but love’.
Schubert’s solution to the question of how to work his ‘Trout’ song into
a piano quintet is ingenious. We don’t hear the song until the fourth
movement, but ‘fishy’ motifs swim around us from the start, from the
upward-leaping arpeggio with which the piano launches the first movement
to the bouncy dotted rhythms and rippling piano figurations of the second
theme and of the slow movement. Dotted-note motifs and purling triplets
abound in the fifth movement’s piano part, evoking fish leaping and darting
through the water.
Having boosted the bass sonority with two deep-voiced instruments,
cello and double bass, Schubert creates balance by writing for the piano in a
higher register than usual, treating the piano part almost like the upper half
of a piano duet where, because the two players are sharing the same
keyboard, the pianist sitting on the right spends most of their time playing
in the treble region, quite often playing in octaves to reinforce the carrying
power of the high notes. This scoring gives ‘The Trout’ a special sonority,
light and transparent. In this respect Schubert outdoes his model, Hummel’s
quintet, which treats the piano part like a concerto, glittering runs and
arpeggios flying hither and thither while the other players keep a lower
profile. One can’t help imagining that Schubert heard a performance of it
and realised that there was something more subtle to be done with the same
instruments.
As soon as the first movement opens, we are made aware of Schubert’s
genius for melody. An important element is the way he colours those
melodies by dipping in and out of adventurously distant keys. Right near
the start we hear one such change of harmony after the piano’s third upward
arpeggio, where instead of landing on a bass note A as it does the preceding
times, the double bass suddenly takes over the lowest line with a
delightfully unexpected drop to F. A similar shift is heard at the end of the
first half as the development begins.
Subtlety of harmony is also an important element in the slow
movement. Schubert’s passagework moves us step by gentle step through a
succession of keys which show the finest ear for gradations of harmony. We
are carried forward on the long, long lines of his melodies while underneath
them the harmonic ground shifts and settles gently without disturbing our
concentration. Schubert has been mildly rebuked for taking an easy way out
in structuring this movement. The first half comes to a peaceful close in G
major; the second half merely shifts the music up a semitone into A flat and
restates all the same material. So the second half is a virtual copy of the
first, employing simple key changes to give the illusion of new material.
But the quality of Schubert’s invention is so enchanting that only a pedant
could possibly complain at hearing everything a second time round.
The Scherzo and Trio is the shortest movement, often played as an
encore. It’s a romp in lightning-fast triple time requiring some extremely
nimble string playing. Schubert doesn’t mark any change of tempo for the
more relaxed Trio, but Viennese colleagues have assured me that it would
have been customary in Schubert’s day to adopt a slower tempo here.
In a sense, the fourth movement, the Variations on ‘Die Forelle’, is the
heart of the work. It is probably the first time that Schubert used a song of
his own as the basis for an instrumental piece: later examples include his
‘Death and the Maiden’ string quartet, his ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy for piano,
and his three-movement Fantasy for piano and violin, whose slow
movement quotes his song, ‘Sei mir gegrüsst’. In the ‘Trout’ we first hear
the song (its rhythm slightly spiced up with a few dotted notes that aren’t in
the original) played by the strings alone, quietly and almost sadly as though
pretending that it is nothing to do with chasing and catching. Rippling
figures start up in the first variation, with the piano singing the theme in
high octaves. Next, the violin decorates the theme with virtuosic arpeggios.
In the third variation the piano takes a leaf out of Hummel’s book and
bursts forth in exuberant concerto-style demisemiquavers. This inspires the
strings to join in with energetic demonstrations of their own in the fourth
variation. Variation five opens with another of those melting changes of
key, this time from D minor to B flat. The cello is the soloist of this lyrical
variation, which moves dreamily through gentle shifts of harmony with
rippling viola figures and ‘water droplet’ chords from the piano. (The cello
part must have proved quite demanding for an amateur cellist like
Paumgartner.) Just as we are sinking into reverie, the final Allegretto
bounces in with the ‘Trout’ song in its original good-humoured form, with
the playful ‘leaping fish’ motif on the piano. Violin and cello swap bits of
the song between them, with the cello finally taking over the leaping motif
for a couple of bars before the end.
The genial last movement opens with a ‘call to attention’, a long E
played in octaves by piano, viola and cello. (Schubert repeats this device at
the start of the last movement of his final piano sonata, in B flat, D960.)
Although much of the finale is in a brisk, almost toe-tapping rhythm
Schubert characteristically finds space to turn aside for a moment here and
there, as if he feels a change in the air and looks up to see clouds passing
across the sun. In performance, the midpoint of the finale is a tricky
moment, for the first half ends decisively and the audience often bursts into
applause, only to find that the musicians are ploughing on. (In my
experience, a bit of body language is helpful at this point to indicate that the
tale is not yet ended.)
As in the slow movement, Schubert uses the simple device of making
the second half of the movement almost identical to the first half, apart
from its keys. The second half simply shifts up a fifth and restates the
material of the first half, rather as if the trout is being flipped over and
grilled on the other side. In the hands of a less imaginative composer, this
simple repetition would be disappointing. But, as in the slow movement, the
quality of Schubert’s musical invention is such that it is a delight to hear
everything again. The subtle shifts of mood, from cheerful to wistful, pass
by as before, and even close to the end there is a touch of melancholy in the
piano’s farewell, as though it is sad that the summer is over.

21. Piano Trio no. 2 in E flat major, D929

Schubert’s Trio in E flat was written in late 1827. It was described by the
composer Robert Schumann, a great champion of Schubert’s late works, as
‘spirited, masculine and dramatic’ in contrast to Schubert’s B flat Trio
(written in the same year) which Schumann found to be ‘passive, lyrical,
feminine’. Today we might resist his masculine-feminine characterisation,
commonplace at the time, but there is no doubt that the two trios are
surprisingly different. The blissfully tuneful B flat trio has always been
more popular, but the E flat trio is arguably the more visionary.
Beethoven’s late trios had enlarged the piano trio’s territory well beyond
its usual domestic habitat. His ‘Archduke’ trio, op. 97, in particular re-
imagined the piano trio almost as a mini-symphony. ‘After Beethoven, who
can dare to do anything more?’ Schubert wondered when the great man
died. The following year, it seems that Schubert felt ready to answer the
question himself. In the final year of his life, he composed an astonishing
range of ambitious and far-seeing works, none more so than his E flat trio.
It takes around fifty minutes to perform and easily matches the ‘Archduke’
not only in its technical demands, but in the emotional commitment needed
from the players to bring its enormous cast of characters alive. It is touching
to learn that the first performance of Schubert’s E flat trio was given at a
private party with the same string players who gave the premiere of
Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’: violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh and cellist Joseph
Linke, who would surely have been amazed to know that they had
christened two trios still considered as pinnacles of the trio repertoire.
Why did Schubert write in a style which put his new pieces beyond the
reach of most instrumentalists, amateur or professional? Did he not realise
he was doing so, or did he not consider it important? Was he writing with an
eye on the future? Even today the prospect of performing the E flat trio is
daunting; in many years of concert-going I don’t think I have ever heard an
amateur group perform it, and even professional performances have been
rare. Many of Schubert’s late works give the impression that he was
responding to an idealistic and imaginative imperative he could not ignore.
Being considered worthy to be Beethoven’s successor was probably part of
it, but one often feels that Schubert was listening to otherworldly voices.
The first movement begins with a brusque, austere theme which seems
almost military despite being in triple time (more commonly associated
with dance music). After this theme, we hear the first melodic figure on the
cello, and this turns out to be hugely important, because it is the seed from
which important motifs and themes develop. The second main theme is in
the unexpected key of B minor, possibly a recollection on Schubert’s part of
the Menuetto movement in his G major piano sonata, D894, of 1826. This is
the first use of a theme which relies on repeated notes, and gradually we
discover that they are scattered throughout the work, bringing a
distinctively delicate and almost tentative character, with a hint of distant
drumming. The development section sees enormous blocks of material
transposed into distant keys, each time heaving themselves up from a
pianissimo beginning to a fortissimo climax. At the end of the reprise, we
arrive at what seems to be the fiery conclusion (virtuoso scale passages for
the piano), but typically this moment of affirmation lapses almost
immediately into a mood of hesitancy as the delicate repeated-note theme is
allowed the last word. After such a big movement it comes as a surprise that
Schubert notates the quiet final bars precisely and unsentimentally, as if he
is merely noting that this is the end of chapter one.
The slow movement is the best-known part of the Trio and has been
used in a number of films. Allegedly its theme was inspired by a Swedish
song, Se solen sjunker (The sun sinks), which Schubert heard sung at a
social gathering. Certainly he has borrowed some small melodic fragments
from the song, notably a striking bit in the middle where the singer twice
sings ‘Farewell!’ over the two notes of a descending octave, echoed in the
accompaniment. Schubert includes this in his trio, along with the bars
which follow in the song. Apart from this, however, Schubert’s version far
outstrips the original. For a start, he has the inspired idea of introducing an
accented dotted rhythm on the last quaver of the bar in the piano part at the
beginning. This gives to the trudging chords of the accompaniment a
strange little kick which, for some reason, adds to rather than subtracts from
the feeling of sadness. In parallel with composing this trio, Schubert was
working on his song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) and a similar sense
of loneliness pervades his instrumental writing.
The second theme of the slow movement is a gently lilting tune in E flat
major which refers to the ‘farewell’ motif. It is developed into a grand
fortissimo climax, but this is nothing compared with the climactic episode
which follows the return of the ‘folk song’ theme. Over menacing tremolo
figures in the piano part, the theme is twisted until it reaches an almost
hysterical climax, all three instruments under great pressure and the cello
most of all. The octave leap, ‘Farewell’, is screamed out by all the players.
Schubert reprieves us from this torment with a welcome return of the
second theme in C major, and this is developed to another majestic climax.
Has positivity won? Alas, no; the cello reminds us that there is always a
dark side, and in a slower coda the opening theme trudges onwards, the
piano giving a great sigh at the end before the strings say ‘Farewell,
farewell’.
The third movement is a Scherzo and Trio which lowers the temperature
with a kind of Austrian Ländler played in canon between piano and strings.
The second theme, in E major, is another repeated-note theme, beautifully
extended in a lyrical waltz. The Trio section, in A flat, opens with a hint of a
distant regimental band. As with other Schubert scherzos and trios, little
elements of themes from other movements find their way into the texture.
The repeated-note theme appears, and in the second half of the trio the cello
sings a lyrical tune which alludes to the opening of the first movement.
The beginning of the fourth movement looks suspiciously simple on the
page but is a moment of anxiety for many pianists. Three enormous and
taxing movements have been played, and now there is an even bigger
mountain to climb, for the final movement is one of Schubert’s mightiest,
with matching technical demands. From the bouncing rondo theme and a
contrasting theme of tinkling repeated notes, he crafts a huge structure.
Even with the ninety-eight bars of cuts he made from his original version,
the movement is still colossal. From the main themes it passes through an
exuberant dance section in which all three instruments toss virtuoso scale
passages to one another. The repeated-note theme drives the next phase of
development, and we move into the distant key of B minor where Schubert
has one of his most striking inspirations: the return of the slow movement’s
song theme, now accompanied by ghostly, almost jazzy offbeat figures in
the piano, with rhythmic pizzicato chords on the violin, creating a strange
complicated feeling of energetic melancholy. Schubert was evidently
pleased with the effect, for after a huge reprise he brings the song back at
the end of the movement, this time in a mournful E flat minor. The song
starts quietly, but after one verse it suddenly bursts out into the major key, a
transfusion of energy which propels the movement to an exultant end. Even
at the end of this epic journey, there is no lingering: the work finishes with a
crisp, almost military salute.

22. Rondo for Piano Duet in A major, D951

Schubert is unusual among great composers in having written large
numbers of piano duets for four hands at one piano – he wrote them all
through his composing life, and in many different forms: dances, variations,
fantasies, sonatas, marches, fugues and rondos. We know of course that
Schubert was a fan of amateur music-making with friends who would sit
round a piano in someone’s home to sing, play and listen to one another.
Schubert’s friends were a loyal and supportive group, and they met for
‘Schubertiades’, evenings of Schubert’s music, for about seven years from
1821 until 1828, the last year of his life. At these evenings Schubert played
the piano, occasionally sang, and played piano duets with various friends.
His fondness for these sociable gatherings seems lovable to us now, but
it is worth noting that some of his contemporaries saw such gatherings as
essentially un-serious. The sociable drawing room was associated with
women, and could not therefore be a serious forum for great music or
musicians. Schubert clearly didn’t feel that way – he loved domestic music-
making and although he did not have a refined piano technique, his playing
was greatly appreciated. His friend Joseph Lanz wrote that Schubert
‘certainly didn’t have a beautiful finger action or even good fingering, but
in spite of this, his playing conveyed such clarity in the presentation of
ideas, especially in his own compositions, that one would have to have
heard him oneself to get a true idea of it’. The music Schubert wrote for
such gatherings, or which had its first outing at such gatherings, was in no
way trivialised. This in fact is one of the most admirable qualities of
Schubert’s duet music, that he expressed himself unstintingly and gave to
two (often amateur) pianists the chance to bring music of the highest
imaginative quality to life.
Piano duets had been part of Schubert’s repertoire since as a young man
he had a summer job tutoring two young ladies, with whom he played
duets. In Schubert’s day, the piano keyboard was narrower than it is now,
with the result that two duet players had to sit quite close together – an
opportunity for a kind of controlled intimacy which all duet players will
have encountered, willingly or otherwise. Indeed, Schubert (like all writers
of piano duets) sometimes seems deliberately to write in such a way that the
right hand of the ‘bass’ player becomes lightly entangled with the left hand
of the ‘treble’ player, and skilful fingering is needed in order not to put
one’s hand on top of the other person’s. If one’s duet partner is a good
friend, one may hardly notice it, but if playing with a stranger or a teacher it
can feel quite odd; as we know from the novels of Jane Austen (a
contemporary of Schubert’s), even the slight touching of hands can seem
fraught with meaning. Another intimate aspect of playing piano duets is that
one is aware of the other person’s breathing. This can be used to improve
co-ordination between the players, for example, by breathing audibly to
indicate an upbeat or the end of a rest or pause. In a less favourable setting,
the sound of the other person’s breathing can be distracting. Such problems
do not exist with duos for two pianos, where the players are much further
apart. However, Schubert never wrote duos for two pianos, so we can
assume that he liked the proximity.
In the last year of his life, Schubert wrote some of his finest music for
piano duet – the Fantasy in F minor, the single-movement Allegro in A
minor, and the Rondo, sometimes called the Grand Rondo in A major,
D951. Scholars have suggested that the last two of these, the Allegro and
the Rondo, may have been intended as the first and second movements of a
sonata for four hands – possibly a two-movement sonata modelled on
Beethoven’s E minor piano sonata, op. 90. At least, the Rondo in A major
seems to be modelled on the second movement of Beethoven’s op. 90,
which has a similarly serene mood and a similar design of four- or eight-bar
phrases with ‘answers’ supplied an octave higher. Beethoven’s marking of
‘Nicht zu geschwind’ (not too swift) finds an echo in Schubert’s ‘Allegretto
quasi Andantino’. Like all Rondos, Schubert’s introduces a theme which
returns several times in the course of the piece, interspersed with
contrasting episodes and subsidiary themes derived from aspects of the
main theme.
Schubert cannot resist departing from his model in ways which make
his Rondo even more touching – with little dotted-note upbeats, and
characteristic little major/minor pivots which seem to throw a shadow over
what we have been enjoying as an unclouded melody. For a while all is
calm, but when the piece moves into C major, a sterner mood awakens, with
rapid semiquaver triplets in the upper part and a dotted-rhythm theme in
octaves in the bottom part. Here one can easily imagine that the piano duet
represented to Schubert a means of compressing an orchestral score into a
small and practical format, for in one’s mind one starts to ‘hear’ orchestral
instruments playing different lines. This is especially true in the masterly
episode near the end when the music moves into F major with the most
important subsidiary theme in the ‘cello’ part, while in the treble part there
are rapid pattering chords, marked ‘ppp’, for all the world like a
miniaturised orchestral woodwind section. The main theme makes its final
return in the ‘cello’ register too, giving the pianist on the lower part a
moment of glory.
Although so much of Schubert’s late music had to wait years to be
discovered and published, the Rondo in A major was published just a month
after his death, which probably indicates how confident the publisher was
that it would sell in large numbers. Despite its popularity, however, there
remains something mysterious about it, like so much of Schubert’s music
which seems outwardly happy yet inwardly wistful. Some years later,
Robert Schumann wrote with characteristic insight to his piano teacher and
future father-in-law Friedrich Wieck: ‘I remember having played this
Rondo for the first time at a soirée at Probst’s. At the end, players and
listeners looked at each other for a long time and did not know what they
sensed or what Schubert intended. . . . Apart from Schubert there is no
music that is so psychologically remarkable in the sequence of ideas, their
inter-relationships and in the seemingly logical transitions. How few have
been able, like Schubert, to impress one single individuality onto such a
diversity of tonal images.’
 23. Piano Sonata in A major, D959
Schubert’s last three piano sonatas were written in the final months of his
life. He wanted to dedicate them to Hummel, but died before the sonatas
were published. In due course the publisher dedicated them to Robert
Schumann who, ten years after Schubert’s death, had worked hard to make
Schubert’s late music known to the public.
Schubert’s late works – such as the piano trios in B flat and E flat, the
String Quintet, the song cycle Winterreise, the Ninth Symphony, the three-
movement Fantasy for violin and piano – are remarkable for their
spaciousness, their sense of leisurely exploration. Robert Schumann put a
positive spin on this by saying that they had ‘heavenly length’, and indeed
the word ‘heavenly’ seems apt. At the beginning of the year in which
Schubert wrote the epic compositions we now recognise as his greatest
works, he was highly esteemed as a composer of songs and of many tiny
and charming dances, such as the Deutsche Tänze (German Dances), played
at social and domestic occasions. His miniatures have mastered the art of
packing a lot of meaning into a short space, and he was loved for it. On
looking through some of his song scores, the mighty Beethoven had said,
‘This Schubert has a divine spark’. Why then in 1828, when his own health
was fragile, did Schubert suddenly feel the need to grapple with long
instrumental compositions?
Beethoven’s death in 1827 may have had something to do with it. There
was a lot of talk in Vienna about who would take Beethoven’s place, and
Schubert (who had been a torchbearer at Beethoven’s funeral) had
wondered aloud whether he would ever be able to write a work worthy to
stand beside Beethoven’s. In fact, Schubert was not always a fan of
Beethoven. As a teenager he had confided to his diary that Mozart was his
role model and that music should rid itself of the bizarre German ideas
which were corrupting it (a coded reference to Beethoven). Later, however,
he revised his view and came to revere Beethoven. After the great man died,
one can imagine that Schubert may have felt that he had the field to himself
and should do something to prove that he could paint on the large as well as
the small canvas.
Another explanation for his late obsession with long instrumental works
might be to do with his own health. From his mid-twenties Schubert had
known that he had contracted syphilis, a condition that would probably
curtail his life. In his late compositions it often feels as if he is fighting
against this feeling by creating a serene and endless flow of music in which
time is at his disposal and under his own control. It seems as if he cannot
bear to let go, always wants to look around another corner, always wants to
have time to dream.
The A major sonata is less well known than the B flat sonata, perhaps
for the simple reason that its opening theme is less obviously singable. Its
opening six bars are more like a chorale in which, however, the top line is
not a melody but a sequence of repeated notes. As it turns out, repeated
notes are a feature of the whole sonata: the second subject of the first
movement, the thematic material of the Scherzo, the second subject of the
Finale, as well as many of the energetic development passages all use
repeated notes to hammer home their points. This use of repeated notes
gives to the music a sense of chanting, or even of speaking, and shows how
much value Schubert attached to the piano’s ability to articulate. Obviously
there are no words attached to his themes, but there is a sense of him telling
us something rather than simply singing melodies for us.
Within the first eight bars of the first movement Schubert introduces the
three main drivers of the musical argument: repeated notes in the treble,
jumping octaves in the bass, and in bar 8 the mysterious rising semitone in
the bass which recurs throughout the sonata to signal that something is
stirring and the mood is changing.
Schubert ends the first section with a characteristic touch. We hear the
second theme stated for the third and final time, followed by a little two-bar
decoration or echo which seems a mere afterthought. It is, however, this
little two-bar phrase which turns out to be the main material of the
development section. Wandering from the key of C to B and back again, it
seems to have nothing more on its mind than a dreamy meditation.
Beethoven in a parallel place would probably have caused his main themes
to clash together, producing sparks to drive the music onward. Schubert
doesn’t engage with any such argument. He goes where the wind blows
him, his goal to be in the moment. In its own way this has as much impact
as anything Beethoven might have written.
The slow movement was possibly inspired by an earlier Schubert song,
Pilgerweise, in the same key of F sharp minor and with a very similar lilt.
Its lyrics tell how the narrator is a wanderer on the earth, going silently
from house to house. The basic shape of the slow movement is A-B-A, with
two outer ‘lullaby’ sections of great sadness, almost hopelessness. In the left
hand Schubert has marked the low bass notes to be quiet and staccato,
giving the character of a muffled drum beat and removing any sense of
comfort.
These two lullabies frame one of the most extraordinary outbursts in all
of Schubert’s music. This stormy middle section, which blows up out of
nowhere, has been variously described by leading pianists as ‘the greatest
mad scene ever written’ (Mitsuko Uchida), ‘the musical equivalent of a
nervous breakdown’ (Alfred Brendel), ‘a composed hallucination’ (Jonathan
Biss), ‘one of the most bizarre and anarchic explosions in all of music’
(Paul Lewis). It may seem like a storm surge, even a scream of fear. Some
listeners find this nightmare totally convincing, while others sense a touch
of melodrama which doesn’t seem entirely natural to Schubert. Is it an
attempt to out-Beethoven Beethoven? Certainly it may seem that when the
music calms down and finds its way back to the opening lullaby, Schubert’s
gentle character reappears to touching effect. The return of the theme is
accompanied by a new little triplet figure, repeated C sharps in the treble,
like someone tapping quietly at the door with a warning.
The Scherzo is a cheerful, jumpy movement which passes around
various fragments from other movements under quick review. For example,
the rushing C sharp minor downward scale from the ‘nightmare’ of the slow
movement makes a sudden appearance, and immediately afterwards the
third bar of the lullaby is transformed into a wisp of dance music. In the
slower Trio section, there is a quiet chorale in the middle register. Its
rhythm harks back to the rhythm of the slow movement’s lullaby, subtly
continuing Schubert’s meditation on that movement. The first movement is
also recalled: the third and fourth bars of its second theme are outlined in
the lowest line of the chorale (and this same motif is to be an ingredient of
the final Rondo’s second theme). Around the chorale, meanwhile, the
jumping octaves of the first movement reverse their direction and enlarge
their compass.
The Finale must have been inspired by the equivalent movement of
Beethoven’s G major piano sonata, op. 31 no. 1, because Schubert follows
its pattern closely: a Rondo in Allegretto tempo, with a sixteen-bar theme in
the treble which then moves into the left hand to be heard again against a
background of running triplets in the right hand. Schubert takes a more
leisurely course than Beethoven does through the long episodes of the
Rondo, but just before the Coda he again follows Beethoven in the device
of breaking up his theme into fragments as though turning each fragment
this way and that to the light, bidding it farewell before the final Presto.
Whereas Beethoven keeps the original character of his thematic fragments,
however, merely changing the tempo of some of them and introducing the
mildest of twists to their harmonies, Schubert goes further. His fragments,
separated by painful silences, look outside the frame to hint at other
possible directions, or perhaps to regret that they have not been taken. We
understand they could have gone into the minor, into other keys, or to be
coloured by other harmonies. The final fragment, which seems to get us
back on track, is denied its resolution by an emotionally charged pause in
which Schubert seems to decide there is nothing for it but to follow
Beethoven’s example and make a dash for safety.
As the piano continued to develop in sonority and expressive possibilities, it
became the vital instrument for a succession of Romantic composer-pianists
based all across Europe. Germany was still the centre of this musical
culture. Felix Mendelssohn was the darling of the Victorian drawing room,
but with a brilliance that transcended the sentimental. His sister Fanny
Mendelssohn, her public career confined by society’s expectations, was a
fine composer in her own right. Robert Schumann, introverted by nature,
developed a highly personal way of writing for the instrument that is
closely related to his songs. His wife Clara was a precocious composer of
piano music in her youth. The Schumanns’ great friend, Johannes Brahms,
synthesised all these developments in music of satisfying depth and
complexity.
Chopin, from Poland, and Liszt, from Hungary, were rival virtuoso
celebrities of the 1830s and 1840s who developed their careers in western
Europe: Chopin mainly in France and Liszt primarily in Germany. Chopin’s
performances were mainly restricted to intimate salons by temperament and
frail health, while Liszt commanded the public platform like a rock star. In
France, Camille Saint-Saëns enjoyed a long and prolific career, attentive to
French musical tradition and the craft of beautifully finished melodic
composition. Georges Bizet was an outstanding pianist who chose not to
perform in public and whose composing career was based more on
orchestral music and opera than on piano music, but his Jeux d’Enfants for
piano duet seems as fresh today as when he wrote it.
In Russia, mighty talents were starting to flourish. Balakirev, following
the efforts of Glinka, strove to work Russian folk music into his own. The
strikingly original Modest Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition, in
its original form for solo piano a redoubtable challenge to the pianist.
Tchaikovsky, whose piano concertos are still in huge demand, was the first
major Russian composer to establish a reputation across the world. The
Czech composers Smetana and Dvořák, not principally known for their
piano music, nevertheless contributed some beloved works of piano
chamber music – a soulful piano trio from Smetana, and a splendid lyrical
array of piano trios, quartets and a wonderful piano quintet from Dvořák.

FANNY MENDELSSOHN (1805–1847)

 24. Das Jahr
Fanny Mendelssohn (later Hensel), the older sister of Felix Mendelssohn,
was a superbly gifted musician who composed nearly 500 works and played
the piano well enough to have been a celebrated virtuoso, had she been
permitted to have a public career. Like many women of her time, however,
it was assumed that music could never be a profession for her; as far as we
know, she only played the piano once in public, and that was to perform a
piano concerto of her brother’s.
In 1820 her father told her that ‘for you, music can and must only be an
ornament, never the basis of your being and doing’. And despite the fact
that her brother Felix respected her judgement so much that he nicknamed
her ‘Minerva’ (the Roman goddess of wisdom), he too fought against the
idea of her publishing her compositions: ‘From my knowledge of Fanny I
should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She
is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house,
and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music
at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in
these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.’ So Fanny confined her activities
to the home, organising house concerts and composing in private. At one
point her brother Felix agreed to publish several of her songs under his own
name. When he visited Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace in 1842, the
queen (who was a good singer) asked whether she and Mendelssohn could
perform a song that she particularly liked. After they had performed it
Mendelssohn had to admit – ‘I found it very hard, but pride goeth before a
fall’ – that the song had actually been written by Fanny, which must have
made her proud.
Although Fanny had to watch from the domestic front while her
younger brother rose to eminence as a composer and a major figure in
German cultural life, she had the good luck to marry a painter, Wilhelm
Hensel, who encouraged her to go on composing. With him as a companion
she was also able to undertake some of the foreign travel she had always
longed to do. In the summer of 1839 the Hensels set off for a year in Italy.
Although it had a slow start (Fanny was unimpressed by the dirt and
disorganisation of some Italian cities) their trip had a very happy ending. In
Rome, they were included in the social life of the Villa Medici where Fanny
met some French intellectuals including the composer Charles Gounod,
who admired her and praised her musicianship. Gounod remembered:
‘Madame Henzel [sic] was a first-rate musician − a very clever pianist,
physically small and delicate, but her deep eyes and eager glance betrayed
an active mind and restless energy.’ Fanny introduced the Villa Medici
circle to much German piano music by playing it to them, sometimes from
memory. Far away from the disapproving comments of her family in
Germany, she blossomed. She confided to her diary: ‘I will not conceal it
from myself, that the atmosphere of admiration and respect with which I am
surrounded has partly contributed to it. In my early youth I have never been
so courted as now, and who can deny that this is very pleasant and
gratifying.’
On her return to Leipzig in 1841, Fanny set about composing a cycle of
twelve pieces inspired by her year in Italy. As Tchaikovsky was to do thirty
years later in The Seasons, she wrote a piece for every month. They were
not intended for public consumption (and were not published until 1989),
but they amount to one of the most substantial piano ‘cycles’ of the
nineteenth century, in some ways the equal of the piano works Robert
Schumann was writing at the same time, and in fact longer than any of his
(the whole set takes around fifty minutes to play). In style they are very like
Felix Mendelssohn’s piano writing, passionate and virtuosic with noble
long-line melodies and rippling accompaniments. Fanny is not afraid to
show her emotions, which gives an added dimension to her music.
As a young teenager, Fanny had memorised all forty-eight of Bach’s
Preludes and Fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier, and she was part of
the household when Felix was studying Bach’s St Matthew Passion in
preparation for his renowned revival of this masterwork in 1829, on the
centenary of its first performance. Fanny incorporated into Das Jahr (The
Year) several of the Lutheran chorales that J.S. Bach had set; her brother
followed her example in the finale of his Piano Trio in C minor.
Das Jahr is the work of a very confident and accomplished pianist.
Almost every piece in the cycle is virtuosic at some point, and much of the
writing – octaves in both hands, full chords jumping about in the left hand,
flying arpeggios, rapid syncopated octaves between the hands – requires a
high level of technique. The influence of Bach is striking, no more so than
at the austere beginning of ‘January’ where Fanny quotes from Bach’s aria
‘Es ist vollbracht’, the same poignant theme that Beethoven had used
twenty years earlier in the last movement of his A flat piano sonata, op. 110.
Fanny quotes Bach again in ‘March’, this time his Easter chorale ‘Christ ist
erstanden’ (Christ is risen), which she states at first simply and then
decorates with arpeggios and chords so that it builds to a triumphant climax.
In ‘December’ she repeats the procedure, this time using Bach’s ‘Vom
Himmel hoch, da komm ich her’ (From heaven above to earth I come). And
in the Postlude, a baker’s dozen of a thirteenth piece, she bids the year
farewell with a quiet reflection on Bach’s ‘Das alte Jahr vergangen ist’ (The
old year now has passed away).
Some of Fanny’s other ideas make one wonder whether Tchaikovsky
could have known her piano music (unlikely): her ‘February’ is a bustling
Roman Carnival, similar to Tchaikovsky’s own February portrait, and her
‘August’ is a hunting scene with strenuous dotted-rhythm fanfares, quite
akin to Tchaikovsky’s September. Elsewhere, one feels the influence of
other composers on her: Fanny’s ‘November’ has a hint of Schubert’s
famous song Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the spinning-wheel), and
the tremulous opening of ‘December’ recalls Liszt’s virtuoso Feux Follets
(Will-o’-the-wisps) of 1837. Because her brother Felix’s piano style is well
known, it is easy to jump to conclusions and say that her piano style was
influenced by his, but of course it could be that it was Felix who learned his
piano style from Fanny during their years of listening to one another play in
the family household.
When I first encountered these pieces, my initial impression was that
some of them are over-long, as though Fanny Mendelssohn was not the best
judge of how much mileage she could get out of her musical material. But
then I realised that I sometimes feel exactly the same about her brother
Felix’s piano music. Perhaps one can say of them both that their piano
pieces show a comfortable confidence in a circle of listeners who loved
them and would indulge them in wherever their imaginations took them.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809–1847)

25. Variations Sérieuses in D minor, op. 54
Felix Mendelssohn was an extravagant talent, a handsome, charming and
cultured man who seemed to be good at everything. When he was only
twelve, his piano teacher took him to play to the elderly Goethe, who
remembered hearing the seven-year-old Mozart but claimed to be even
more impressed by Mendelssohn (who was, however, five years older). In
1829, at the age of twenty, Mendelssohn was a prime mover in organising
and conducting a centenary revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which
had scarcely been performed since Bach’s death. It was a huge success and
a cultural landmark in Germany which launched Mendelssohn on a high-
profile career as composer, conductor, pianist, founder and director of the
Leipzig Conservatoire. He enjoyed drawing and painting, was a good
administrator, played chess, had many artistic friends, wrote amusing
letters, and was what we would probably call ‘a great networker’. Unlike so
many composers, Mendelssohn did not have money worries; his family was
wealthy and he could afford to devote himself to his artistic projects.
Mendelssohn’s interest in Bach was in part a consequence of his
family’s assimilation into the Christian church. The Mendelssohns were of
Jewish ancestry, but regarded the two faiths as being close to one another in
many respects; his grandfather Moses Mendelssohn, a philosopher, was the
model for the title role in Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise, which advocates
religious tolerance. Felix, though proud of his Jewish ancestry, was a
practising Christian. His high reputation as a composer was only punctured
when, three years after his death, Richard Wagner accused him in his
infamous 1850 essay Das Judentum in Musik (Jewishness in Music) of
writing music which was ‘sweet and tinkling without depth’. Mendelssohn
was accused of having borrowed German culture and pretended that it was
his own. The growth of anti-Semitic culture, in which Wagner played his
part, led to a reappraisal of Mendelssohn’s music. Just how vulnerable he
was to shifting prejudices is indicated by an experience I had as late as the
1980s when I went to Germany to perform Mendelssohn’s piano quartets
with the group Domus and was told by a member of the audience that ‘it
was nice to hear Mendelssohn’s chamber music being played in Germany
again.’
Mendelssohn’s piano music has gone in and out of fashion. To some
listeners it is charming, tuneful and refined. To others, it is sentimental and
conservative. Even his admirers admit that there are ‘too many notes’.
Detractors have said that his music reflects the tranquillity and even
complacency of a life spent in comfort, but his letters show that he worked
hard to master fits of temper, fatigue and nervous irritability (he sometimes
apologises for having been ‘a screech-owl’). Perhaps he never bettered the
gloriously effortless compositions of his teenage years, such as his Octet for
strings, but his work is beautifully crafted and balanced.
His Variations Sérieuses were commissioned in 1841 for a ‘Beethoven
Album’ of piano music designed to raise funds for a statue of Beethoven in
his home town of Bonn. Many piano virtuosi of the day (Liszt, Chopin,
Moscheles, Czerny, Thalberg, Henselt, Taubert) agreed to contribute new
pieces. Perhaps anticipating that one or two of them would provide frothy
confections of little nutritional value, Mendelssohn called his own piece
‘Serious Variations’. Variations had not always been considered all that
‘serious’; it was probably Beethoven who first showed that they could be a
profound exploration of how musical material can be transformed, and
perhaps the great variation movements in Beethoven’s last piano sonatas
were on Mendelssohn’s mind here. Or perhaps he himself was feeling
serious at that time; certainly his Variations feel more intense than some of
his salon music.
His slow theme with its sighing pairs of notes may be another instance
of him referencing Bach. The theme seems to recall Bach’s cantata Weinen,
Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (Weeping, lamenting, worrying, fearing) – perhaps a
sombre allusion to Beethoven’s death. The first four variations treat the
theme with increasing rhythmic animation. No. 5, with its syncopated left-
hand chords, could have been composed by Mendelssohn’s friend Robert
Schumann. Variations 6 to 9 commence another process of speeding up the
internal complexity of the decoration. At variation 10 we suddenly get a
little passage of fugue (different ‘voices’ entering in canon) and no. 11 is
another dreamy Schumannesque variation.
Variation 12 sees the theme broken up into loud, staccato pairs of chords
rapidly alternated between the hands, almost like the kind of percussive
writing that we meet much later in the piano music of Prokofiev. Variation
13 employs the so-called ‘three-hand’ effect made famous by the virtuoso
Sigismond Thalberg in his transcriptions: a melodic line in the middle of the
keyboard is split between left and right hand, with busy decoration above
and below the line being allocated to the spare fingers, making it seem as
though a third hand has been enlisted to play the melody. After this there is
a pause, maybe to allow the listener to recover from the brilliant effect of
variation 13 before the Adagio chorale in D major. This is the only
appearance of the major key, a little island in a stormy sea of D minor. It too
ends with a pause, as at the end of a prayer.
Variation 15 is the most harmonically adventurous, a quiet pulling apart
of the theme which almost erases its outline. The final three variations
ratchet up the tension with brilliant figuration, culminating in a grand
statement of the theme over an operatic tremolo in the low bass. The Presto
coda is a whirlwind of energy, but Mendelssohn resists the easy solution of
a triumphant final cadence; the final few bars end quietly and thoughtfully
in a manner not unlike that of the first movement of Beethoven’s own D
minor sonata, op. 31 no. 2, ‘The Tempest’.

26. Piano Trio no. 1 in D minor, op. 49

In August 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to his friend and fellow
pianist/composer Ferdinand Hiller, ‘A very important branch of piano
music, and one of which I am particularly fond – trios, quartets and other
pieces with accompaniment, genuine chamber music – is quite forgotten
now and I feel a great urge to do something new of this kind . . . I am
thinking of writing a couple of trios next.’ Just over a month later he had
completed his first piano trio. He played the piano in its 1840 premiere
when the piece was acclaimed by Robert Schumann as ‘the master-trio of
our time, even as Beethoven’s in B flat and D and Schubert’s in E flat were
the masterpieces of their day; it is an exceedingly fine composition that,
years hence, will still delight our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.’
The piano trio had not been ‘quite forgotten’ – after all it was only a few
years since the publication of Schubert’s two great trios – but
Mendelssohn’s D minor trio is a major contribution to the genre and shows
him at his most powerful and focused. It has resisted the ups and downs of
his popularity to remain one of the keystones of the trio repertoire. It flows
so naturally that it comes as a surprise to learn he revised the piano part
when Hiller advised him that the writing was old-fashioned when compared
with the latest novelties. Mendelssohn made some changes to the piano part
and later remarked that ‘pianists would enjoy playing it because it gives
them the opportunity to show off’.
This nonchalant remark belies the demands of the piano part, one of the
trickiest in the repertoire. It can only be mastered with intense study, yet its
full effect can only be achieved if it sounds effortless. When I first learned
the part as a student I doubted that it was possible to play all the notes at the
speed required. It took some years before I felt that I had digested the
fingering patterns enough to be confident of accuracy under concert
conditions, and even now that I know it from memory the prospect of
performing it always makes me sigh at the thought of the practising that
awaits me. Except for a few key moments in the music, the noble long lines
of melody are given to the violin and cello. The piano’s role is to provide
depth, direction, texture, brilliance and the impression of unstoppable
energy. All this is made even more challenging by the fact that
Mendelssohn often asks for the music to be played quietly; as all pianists
know, it is hard to play quietly and fast.
A touching glimpse of Mendelssohn’s character has been given to us by
Joseph Joachim, the great violinist who played in a performance of this trio
in London in 1844. Joachim, only thirteen at the time, had been brought by
Mendelssohn to London to perform the Beethoven violin concerto. While
they were there, they agreed to play the D minor trio in a mixed programme
shared with other musicians. Arriving at the concert venue, they found that
the organisers had put only the string parts on the music stands: there was
no piano part on the piano. ‘Mendelssohn was rather cross about this,’
Joachim recalled in 1898 when interviewed by the Musical Times, ‘but he
said “Never mind, put any book on the piano, and someone can turn from
time to time, and then it need not look as if I play by heart”.’ As Joachim
said, ‘this might be considered a good moral lesson of a great musician’s
modesty’.
The first movement has an unforgettable opening when the cello begins
a long sweeping melodic line, played quietly with the piano simmering
underneath. Gradually the energy builds up as the piano part bursts into
arpeggios. The more relaxed second theme provides most of the musical
material for the development. At the reprise there is a particularly
imaginative touch where, over the return of the first theme, the violin enters
on a high note and descends with one of those ethereally descending lines at
which Mozart was so good. Not only is this a descant of genius, it turns out
to be the important second theme of the slow movement.
The piano begins the slow movement with a ‘song without words’, a
lovely hymn-like melody with each half echoed by the strings. In the
middle of the movement the serene mood is suddenly interrupted by a turn
to the minor; here we encounter once again the ‘descant’ from the first
movement’s reprise, now promoted to the status of a soprano aria. It
develops into an ardent dialogue between violin and cello. Eventually it
subsides into a return of the first theme, most beautifully embellished by the
piano with filigree decoration which needs gentle handling to produce a
gossamer effect.
Mendelssohn marks an extremely fast metronome mark – dotted
crotchet = 120 – for the Scherzo. Did he really want it to be played so fast,
or was his marking a mistake? Undoubtedly a rapid tempo would have been
easier on the pianos of Mendelssohn’s day with their lighter action, but
modern pianos make it very challenging to play so fast and quietly. The
violinist Sándor Végh pointed out to me that the ‘lilt’ is a vital part of the
charm. In a time-signature of 6/8, each bar contains two lilting units of a
crotchet plus a quaver: ‘tum-ti, tum-ti’. Today one often hears the piano part
played with such ruthless momentum that the lilt is squashed out of
existence and we hear only the two main dotted-crotchet pulses: ‘tum, tum’
(without the intervening ‘ti’). Once the character of the lilt is understood
and the players find a tempo which makes it possible, there is space for the
bars to breathe, even at a fast tempo. If this means that Mendelssohn’s
metronome mark must be disobeyed, then so be it. The priority is to evoke a
Midsummer Night’s Dream of fairies dancing weightlessly in the forest,
rather than teenagers riding through it on motorbikes.
The opening of the finale seems surprisingly leaden after the fairy world
of the Scherzo, but soon builds up into a virtuoso display. This is the
movement which Mendelssohn upgraded with flashier figuration, and
indeed it is a showcase of flying arpeggios and chromatic runs. There is a
welcome change of pace when the cello introduces a beautiful new lyrical
theme in B flat; to modern ears this moment has just a touch of Victorian
sentimentality, but any doubts are swept away by the élan of the
instrumental writing. The opening theme ventures back on tiptoe and
develops confidence amid further cascades in the piano part. Just as we
sense the end must be approaching, the lyrical theme swings back in the
home key, and in the final pages we feel as if Mendelssohn is striving to
fold together the two wings of his composition, the lyrical and the virtuosic.

JOHN FIELD (1782–1837)

27. Nocturne no. 14 in C major (and others)
We’re jumping back a few years in chronology now, because John Field
may seem to belong more to the era of Beethoven, but I wanted him to
begin a trio of composers which ends with Chopin. Field was an Irish
composer and pianist who moved to London, studied piano with Clementi,
became a successful pianist and went into partnership with his teacher in
the business of selling pianos. Clementi and Field travelled widely,
eventually reaching St Petersburg where Field was so taken with the rich
cultural life that he decided to stay and make his home in Russia.
Field is credited with being the first person to write nocturnes for piano.
The tradition of writing ‘night music’ was an old one; Mozart had written
‘Nachtmusik’ and Haydn had written ‘notturni’, but those titles refer rather
to the time of day the piece was intended to be played. Field’s nocturnes
were an innovation in that they were not meant necessarily to be played at
night but rather to evoke night’s atmosphere and the kind of dreamy,
regretful thoughts associated with the hours of darkness. His nocturnes
served a double purpose: they were self-contained piano pieces, but he also
used them as ready-made slow movements for his sonatas and concertos,
for which he rarely supplied a slow movement. In performance, he just
chose one of his nocturnes to play between the two fast movements.
Field’s nocturnes are sometimes compared with Chopin’s and found
wanting, but it’s important to remember that Field was only twelve years
younger than Beethoven and developed his style in an era when Romantic
effusiveness was not yet fully in vogue. When Field published his first
nocturnes in 1814, Chopin was only four years old. Field had evidently
thought of calling his pieces ‘Romances’, but he settled on ‘Nocturne’, this
being the French word for ‘nocturnal’: of the night. One of his innovations
was to treat the nocturne as a sort of wordless song in which the pianist
imitated the kind of vocal line familiar to audiences from opera, particularly
the art of bel canto (‘beautiful song’, an expressive style which featured
graceful decoration). A ‘song without words’, then, although Mendelssohn
did not use that term until around 1830.
Field’s nocturnes are very varied in style, but his early nocturnes feature
a ‘singing’ line for the right hand and a gently flowing accompaniment in
the bass. They are graceful and poetic, mildly adventurous in harmony but
never wrenching the listener out of a pleasant reverie. Nocturne no. 7 is the
first which varies the approach: here, the focus moves to the left hand,
which carries the melody line through a series of rippling chords, some of
them widely spaced (and reminiscent of the rippling chords in Chopin’s
Étude in E flat, op. 10 no. 11), while the right hand is chiefly occupied with
elaborate decoration. The ninth nocturne, in E flat, will irresistibly remind
most listeners of Chopin’s famous nocturne op. 9 no. 2 in the same key,
partly because the left-hand pattern is very similar. Nocturne no. 10 is brief
and melancholy, one of Field’s rare minor-key nocturnes. His own copy
shows the fingering he recommended: for example, the nine-note
descending scale for the right hand just after the reprise was all to be played
with the fourth finger, an effective approach that would separate the notes
and bring out their ‘speaking’ quality, as if they were words.
At this point, Field took a nine-year break from writing nocturnes.
When he returned to them in 1832, he had become more interested in
developing his themes, and less in operatic decoration.
No. 11 in E flat opens in mysterious fashion, the left hand playing
repeated B flats which dissolve into hazy harmonies always with that same
B flat at the bottom. It becomes clear that B flat is the fifth of the chord, not
the root, which gives the harmony a floating quality; when the right hand
comes in, it begins with those same repeated B flats, which this time turn
out to be the start of the main melody. Just a glance at the score shows that
much of the decoration has gone; Field is now keen to colour his themes
with moves to other keys.
The finest of Field’s nocturnes is probably no. 14 in C major, written in
1835 when he was on his way back to Russia from his last European
concert tour. He had been very unwell during the tour, so unwell that he had
to spend nine months in hospital in Naples before continuing his northward
journey. Unsurprisingly, the tone of this extended nocturne is serious. At the
beginning the hesitant treble line, over pulsing quaver chords in the bass,
evokes the similar opening of Chopin’s E minor Prelude (written a few
years later). The style is vocal and operatic, even including some cadenza
passages which could almost be recitative, as though the composer is
recounting a painful episode. The central G major section features a lyrical
theme in thirds and sixths over flowing bass triplets, like a duet between
two lovers. As it dies down, Field makes a subtle return to his opening
theme by bringing it back not in the expected key of C but in A flat major, a
delicious effect. The main reprise is full of intricate decoration, finally
dissolving into shimmering sextuplets in the high treble (an effect which
Ravel used a century later in the slow movement of his G major piano
concerto). Pulsing quavers return in the last bars, triggering a final ‘sigh’
from the right hand, and an unexpectedly dry ending with two staccato
chords played pianissimo, almost like someone quietly saying ‘The End’.
In 1832 a distinguished audience gathered at the Paris Conservatoire to
hear the renowned John Field play the piano. Chopin, who had given his
own triumphant debut concert in Paris that year, was in the audience.
Unfortunately, Field was by then in declining health, and his piano
technique was declining too; Chopin judged him ‘feeble – incapable of
executing difficulties’ and even Liszt, a fan of Field’s, thought his playing
was ‘sleepy’. Nevertheless, Chopin was motivated to get his piano students
to learn some of Field’s music. As for Field, he once said that Chopin was
‘nothing but a writer of Mazurkas’, which must indicate that he never knew
Chopin’s mature works. Critics were divided in their opinion of who wrote
the better nocturnes: the Berlin music critic Ludwig Rellstab once
complained that ‘Where Field smiles, Chopin makes a grimace . . . and
where Field puts some seasoning into the food, Chopin empties a handful of
cayenne pepper.’ Posterity has decided that Chopin’s cayenne pepper is
more to its taste, but Field’s milder recipe has always had admirers.

MARIA SZYMANOWSKA (1789–1831)

28. Études (and other pieces)
When we discuss the composers who influenced Chopin, John Field is often
mentioned, but rarely the Polish female pianist and composer Maria
Szymanowska. Schumann described her as ‘a Field amongst women’, but
somehow she slipped from sight. I certainly never came across her music
when I was learning the piano, and the dictionaries I used as a student do
not include her, but I was brought up to date by reading Sławomir
Dobrzański’s research material about Szymanowska on the website of the
Polish Music Center based at the University of Southern California.
Maria Szymanowska was a most unusual figure, a published composer,
a pianist whose playing was admired all over Europe, and a woman who
made her living by concert touring at a time when society was only too
ready to frown on independent women. Another of her claims to a place in
the history books is that she was one of the first pianists to play from
memory in a public recital.
Szymanowska grew up in Warsaw where her parents’ home was a
meeting place for literary and artistic visitors. She showed early talent on
the harpsichord and clavichord, graduating to the piano when that
instrument became widely available. Because she was a girl, she was not
eligible to study at the Warsaw Conservatory. She was tutored at home, but
seems to have developed a piano technique largely through her own efforts.
Her family supported her wish to be recognised as a solo pianist and in
1810 arranged for her to perform in Paris, where Cherubini was so
impressed that he dedicated a Fantasy to her. Szymanowska returned to
Poland, married, and had three children. Her marriage broke up in 1820,
partly because her husband was not in sympathy with her wish to be a
concert pianist. After her divorce she determined to earn money for herself
and her children. Her parents agreed to look after her children, and she set
about organising her own concert tours.
This was only possible because her family was able to gather letters of
introduction from respected musicians and aristocratic music-lovers to their
counterparts in foreign cities, people able to smooth their path when they
arrived somewhere new. A brother and sister of Maria’s went on tour with
her to take care of practical aspects. In each city, they made social calls,
deploying their letters of introduction. These often led to Maria being asked
to give piano lessons, for which she charged quite a high fee. Her brother
would arrange to rent a hall for her recital (sometimes this was done for
them as a gesture of support by an upper-class well-wisher), prepare
posters, sell tickets and gather up the money after the concert. Her sister
helped with domestic arrangements. The three of them were an efficient
unit, carefully noting their income and expenses.
Astoundingly, the first tour lasted four years, from 1822 to 1826, during
which Szymanowska played in Russia, Germany, France, England, Italy,
Belgium and Holland. After playing in Marienbad, she met the great
Goethe, who was delighted with her. Goethe at the time was tormented by a
love affair, but his heart was soothed by Maria’s playing: ‘Madame
Szymanowska, an incredibly fine pianist, affected me just as powerfully,
though in quite a different way. I fancy she might be compared to our
Hummel, only that she is a lovely and amiable Polish lady.’ Later in the
year they met again in Weimar, where they may have been lovers. Goethe
reported: ‘Her charming presence and priceless talent had already been a
great joy to me in Marienbad, and now for a fortnight my house was the
rendezvous of every music-lover, drawn there by her art and her lovable
nature. Inspired by her, both Court and town lived on in an atmosphere of
music and joy.’
In Italy, the Polish diplomat and composer Prince Ogiński wrote: ‘I
watched her again with an unspeakable pleasure in Florence. It was then
that I learned that the constant work on her talent during her travels have
incredibly perfected her way of playing which seems to be impeccable even
in the eyes of the harshest critics.’ Szymanowska was aware of the need to
look good as well as play beautifully. After a Paris concert, she wrote to her
parents, ‘I would like to let my sisters know that the dress was a success. It
was a white barège [gauzy silk] gown with wide sleeves, draped, my pin
with antique ornamentation, bayadère [striped fabric] on my neck, white
barège with blue and gold trim. I wore a superb blue barège turban.’ As a
Moscow music critic later wrote of her, ‘A painter saw in front of him the
beautiful epitome of a woman, one that matched the ideal of a Greek
goddess.’ The Tsar attended one of her concerts and bestowed on her the
title of ‘First Pianist of their Highnesses the Tsarinas Elizabeth
Alexandrovna and Maria Fiedorovna’. Feeling warmly appreciated in St
Petersburg, Szymanowska decided in 1827 to settle there with her children.
She played, composed, taught, and built up an artistic salon visited by John
Field, Glinka, Hummel, Pushkin and Chopin’s favourite Polish poet, Adam
Mickiewicz, who became Maria’s son-in-law when he married her daughter
Celina. Sadly, four years later Maria Szymanowska died in the 1831 cholera
epidemic.
Chopin was twenty years younger than Szymanowska. While he was
growing up in Warsaw, Symanowska’s Vingt Exercices et Préludes, a set of
pieces exploring and testing many aspects of piano technique, were widely
played and admired. Her ‘exercises’ were interchangeably known as
‘Études’, probably by analogy with Chopin’s. Chopin very likely studied
them, particularly as his teacher Józef Elsner was a great friend of
Szymanowska’s parents. We know that Chopin probably attended Maria’s
‘farewell’ concert in 1827 before she left for St Petersburg.
At any rate, as Dobrzański has pointed out, there are numerous
similarities between Szymanowska’s ‘exercises and preludes’ and Chopin’s
later Preludes and Études. For example, Szymanowska’s Étude no. 1 in F
major has rapid arpeggiated figuration and left-hand chords very like
Chopin’s F major prelude or his F major Étude, op. 10 no. 8.
Szymanowska’s bouncy ‘Anglaise’ in E flat from Eighteen Dances seems to
find an echo in Chopin’s ‘Écossaise’, op. 72 no. 3 (a shift northwards from
England to Scotland). Szymanowska’s third Étude has figuration quite like
that of Chopin’s C major Étude, op. 10 no. 7. Her Étude no. 12 has parallels
not only with Chopin’s A minor Étude op. 25 no. 4 but also with one of his
op. 2 Variations on Là ci darem la mano. Szymanowska’s Waltz no. 3 in F
major reminds one a little of Chopin’s posthumously published A flat waltz.
Several of Szymanowska’s mazurkas resemble Chopin’s. And so on. In
every case, Szymanowska was first with the idea. This is not to say that
Chopin intentionally stole her ideas, especially since his compositions are
always more complex and imaginative. In the case of the mazurkas and
polonaises, indeed, one might contend that they both drew on folk material
which is part of every Polish musician’s heritage. Nevertheless there are
enough similarities of detail and texture between Szymanowska’s études
and Chopin’s to prove that her piano music was a source of inspiration for
him.
Chopin didn’t talk about the Polish musicians who influenced him when
he was growing up. The fact that Szymanowska was a woman (and a
woman of the older generation) might have made a young man even less
likely to admit to being influenced by her. But it is interesting that the
genres in which Szymanowska composed – preludes, études, waltzes,
écossaises, nocturnes, mazurkas, ballades and polonaises – were all genres
embraced by Chopin. One of Szymanowska’s last compositions was the
beautiful Nocturne in B flat (1831) written in St Petersburg. In melodic
outline, decoration and formal shape it has things in common with Chopin’s
Nocturne in A flat, op. 32 no. 2, of 1837. Is it likely that a piano piece
written by Madame Szymanowska in Russia had come to Chopin’s
attention in Paris? Maybe it had – or perhaps each of them was drawing on
the pianistic language they had both helped to create.
In 1836, Robert Schumann, always generous in paying tribute to other
artists, wrote of Szymanowska’s études: ‘Thanks to their creative ingenuity
and uniqueness, we deem these études the most remarkable of all that has
been created by women musicians thus far. One must not forget that they
were written many years ago, and therefore, much of what would later
come to be seen as ordinary should be perceived here as new and
outstanding.’

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810–1849)

29. Ballade no. 1 in G minor, op. 23
Chopin was the first major composer to stake his reputation almost entirely
on piano music. All his 200+ compositions are for solo piano, or involve the
piano in some way, such as piano and orchestra, piano and cello, or piano
and voice. Other composers of the nineteenth century have given the
impression that their piano music could equally have been cast as an
orchestral work, or might equally have enjoyed life as an opera scene or a
song, but Chopin’s creative interest was focused on the solo piano. Even his
piano concertos with orchestra have a hint of ‘duty’ about them, as though
he knew it would be sensible to write something with orchestra, but wasn’t
really interested in orchestral sonorities. His compositions for solo piano
expanded the public’s idea of what the piano was capable of doing, both in
terms of technique and in poetic expression. Chopin suffered from
tuberculosis which ended his life at the age of only thirty-nine, and his
fragile health contributed to his mystique. Many people imagine Chopin as
he looks in the famous photograph taken by the French photographer
Bisson in 1849: pale and exhausted, he fixes us with a haunted look.
Chopin was born in Poland, but left Warsaw in 1830 at the age of
twenty to seek success and artistic fulfilment in the capitals of Europe. His
first piano teacher had given him a silver urn full of Polish earth to take
with him as a keepsake: ‘May you never forget your native land wherever
you go, nor cease to love it with a warm and faithful heart.’ On his way to
Paris, Chopin learned of the failure of the Polish uprising against Russian
occupation, and realised he could not return home. From that point onward
his music was haunted by the sadness of exile and by nostalgia for his
native land. He may not have been the first person to bring Mazurkas,
Polonaises and their characteristic ‘modes’ into the concert hall and the
classical repertoire, but he gives an exceptionally vivid impression that he
knew how they were really played and danced in Poland.
Chopin’s piano music has become a vehicle for virtuoso display and
theatrical presentation, but his own playing was very subtle. He was a frail
man, and those who heard him often described him as playing quietly and
delicately, with frequent use of the ‘soft’ pedal to make the sonority even
more muted. Of course, listeners’ impressions of his playing must have
been dependent on the pieces he played; if he were playing his own
Polonaises, for example, he must have enlarged at least his expressive
effects, and probably the palette of pianistic colours too. Chopin was a
wonderful improviser, and people who heard him improvise maintained that
he was at his best in this context. Moreover, when he played his own
notated pieces he kept an improvisatory spirit, always varying the way he
played them according to his mood and how strong he was feeling.
He himself was not a fan of public performance and once said (rather
terrifyingly) that one cannot expect to hear real music at concerts. Today,
when concert pianists are under pressure to give 50–100 concerts a year, it
is astonishing to think that in Chopin’s whole career he gave only around 30
public performances. He preferred to play to invited audiences in private
drawing rooms, and the transcendent effect is clear from his listeners’
reminiscences. In 1838, Sir Charles Hallé heard Chopin play his own music
at a private dinner in Paris. He reported: ‘I sat entranced, filled with
wonderment, and if the room had suddenly been peopled with fairies I
should not have been astonished. The marvellous charm, the poetry and
originality, the perfect freedom and absolute lucidity of Chopin’s playing at
that time cannot be described . . . I could have dropped to my knees to
worship him.’
This description should give heart to those who wonder whether they
will ever be advanced enough to tackle Chopin’s piano music. It seems
likely that Chopin himself would not have approved of the barnstorming
and egotistical way his music has sometimes been performed in the modern
concert hall and the recording studio. It is encouraging to realise that the
qualities mentioned in Hallé’s description of Chopin’s playing – poetry,
charm, freedom, lucidity – are not restricted to pianists with superlative
techniques, and therefore pianists of every age and stage should feel that
they have their own authentic relationship with Chopin’s music. Although a
lot of his piano music requires an advanced technique, there are plenty of
technically simpler pieces (some of the Preludes, Waltzes, Mazurkas,
Polonaises) which allow less advanced pianists to start exploring Chopin’s
world.
In 1831, Chopin sketched the first of his four Ballades, the G minor,
which remained his own favourite. It was inspired by the romantic and epic
poetry of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, though he never said whether
there was a particular narrative behind it. He finished writing it in Paris in
1835, by which time he had become a celebrated pianist, composer and
teacher. The first ballade lasts around eleven minutes in performance, but
that brief span feels symbolic of something much bigger. Its structure seems
fluid and almost improvised, and yet the sense of a powerful drama
unfolding is unmistakable. Chopin has a marvellous gift for creating themes
that appear distinct but are nevertheless related. Even the opening arc-like
phrase, which seems like a mere introduction to the main melodic material,
turns out to contain the ‘cells’ of several motifs which reappear in the main
themes. All of these bear some relation to one another, which gives the
feeling of organic development.
Like Mozart, Chopin knows how to compose seamless transitions, so
that there is a sense of inevitability about the arrival and departure of the
main events. New themes sail in on tides that have been caught at just the
right moment to float them towards us. Melodic lines accelerate into
exquisite tendrils of decoration without interrupting the musical thought.
Beneath or around these beautiful tunes are inner parts with rich
independent lives, which require the pianist’s fingers to be intricately
active, keeping all the elements in play. Chopin makes full use of his seven-
octave piano, sweeping across the whole keyboard as though nothing could
be more natural than to ‘sound me from my lowest note to the top of my
compass’, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet says.
Over the years, the G minor ballade has acquired its own performance
traditions, some of which might surprise the composer. Chopin’s notation is
very clear, yet it has become traditional (for example) to play the final page
more theatrically than he prescribed. Clearly, the last page is crowded with
rhythmic and melodic elements being thrown onto the bonfire at the same
time. As notated by Chopin, everything happens quite swiftly, with only the
briefest of rests separating the contrasting elements, and the length of long
notes being restricted. Yet many pianists of later generations have felt that a
lot more breathing space is needed for the dramatic contrasts, from the
rushing chromatic scales to the dark warning signals of the three-note
dotted-rhythm motif, and the final despairing cries of the six-note figure we
first heard as an upbeat to the main melodic theme at the beginning. Long
notes are elongated, so that they resonate grandly in the concert hall. Silent
beats are extended for maximum suspense. Even the famous final bars,
where the right and left hands rush at each other from opposite directions at
the extremes of the keyboard, are quite clearly marked with the instruction
to hold the tempo back for a few moments and then accelerate to the end.
This instruction is often ignored or altered for dramatic effect. My guess is
that Chopin would have preferred a more fluid approach to the final page,
one that allows us to glimpse its various elements ‘en passant’ in a
kaleidoscope of energy and emotion.

30. 24 Preludes, op. 28

When we hear the word ‘prelude’, we might think of stand-alone pieces of
the type written by Chopin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff and Gershwin. But
there was also a tradition of improvised ‘preluding’ long before the birth of
the piano. Organists and harpsichordists would improvise, and published
‘preludes’ developed into a genre of their own. The improvising tradition
carried over into piano-playing, and lasted through to the beginning of the
twentieth century. It has so thoroughly fallen out of use that we can scarcely
imagine a time when piano recitals would have contained more music than
just the pieces itemised on the programme. It was customary for pianists to
begin the concert and to link the pieces with short improvised passages of
music. This preluding had several functions. It was a way of trying out the
piano, checking that everything was working and testing the acoustics of
the room; it gave the audience a chance to settle down, and it offered a
window onto the pianist’s own creativity. Skilful pianists could link pieces
together by improvising in the key of the piece they had just played, and
working round to the key of the one which came next. Preluding was almost
like the custom of introducing people at a social gathering: a bit of musical
etiquette which smoothed the way for someone new.
To this day, church organists continue to improvise, but among pianists
the habit of preluding has lapsed. Why? No doubt the advent of recording
had something to do with it, because as listeners got used to hearing
performances on record, they went along to concerts expecting to hear
exactly what they had heard on their records. The habit of improvising
seemed to pass from ‘art music’ to the field of jazz and popular music.
Making stuff up on the spot was something the concert-going public began
to associate with non-classical performers. Conversely, classical pianists
(influenced probably by the shock of hearing their mistakes and slips
immortalised on disc) developed a mania for accuracy and a cult of fidelity
to the notated score. As a consequence, most of us today have never heard
the type of preluding which was routine in Chopin’s day and well into the
twentieth century (the light-music pianist Alberto Semprini used to
‘prelude’ in his popular BBC radio shows in the 1960s and 1970s).
For the benefit of pianists reluctant to improvise in public, many
nineteenth-century composers brought out collections of preludes. One of
these was Hummel, who composed twenty-four brief preludes covering
every major and minor key. They do give the impression of being
improvised, but he gave each key a distinctive character. Chopin must have
known these pieces, because his own set of 24 Preludes, written between
1835 and 1839, map onto Hummel’s preludes in a number of ways (such as
the character of individual keys, and the overall design of the key scheme).
In terms of musical invention, however, Chopin’s are a landmark in the
history of the genre and a quantum leap forward. His preludes are complete
in themselves and musically commanding. It would be ludicrous to use
them as introductions to something else; in fact, it’s pretty clear that if any
of his preludes were used in that way, the ‘something else’ would lose by
the comparison. Today the whole set of twenty-four is often performed and
recorded, but as far as we know Chopin himself never played more than
four of them in a single concert. Although the preludes can be performed
singly, they also link to one another in a subtly satisfying way.
Chopin and Schumann, two of the greatest Romantic composers of
piano music, knew one another slightly. We know that Schumann admired
Chopin, but there is no indication that Chopin admired Schumann or ever
played his music. This was in my mind one day when practising some
Chopin preludes. Struck by their special amalgam of brevity and intensity, I
found myself thinking that Chopin, with his power of compressing musical
thoughts, would have been impatient with Schumann’s tendency to ramble.
And Chopin’s ability to create beautiful little structures packed with
musical incident was probably never more striking than in his preludes.
The very first prelude, in C major, is a good example. In a mere thirty-
four bars of agitated triplets it creates a powerful arch-shape of rising and
falling tension (fans of musical mathematics and ‘golden sections’ will be
pleased to find that the climax comes on bar 21 out of 34, two numbers near
the start of the Fibonacci sequence). Most of the bars begin with a one-
triplet rest for the right hand before it joins in, creating a delicious offbeat.
As the tension rises, the right hand suddenly plays on the beat for a few
bars, an effect like stepping on a car’s accelerator pedal. Yet at the moment
of climax, the right hand jumps back to the offbeat at the very moment
when one might think that a thwacking fortissimo downbeat would be the
obvious thing. (In my introduction, I referred to the issues facing women
pianists with smaller hands, and bar 21 is a classic example: the obvious
fingering, which Chopin no doubt expected, requires a wide stretch between
the third and fifth fingers on the interval G-D in the middle of the bar – a
moment when maximum strength and expression is needed, but where most
female pianists probably have to use a complicated fingering which makes
it hard to relish the simple exuberance of that moment.) There are only three
more melodic bars where the right hand plays on the downbeat (plus the
final chord). Chopin’s placing of these few but telling downbeats is not
predictable, but feels mysteriously right.
 No. 2 in A minor (which doesn’t actually attain A minor until almost the
end) has a stern, fateful character. Over a slowly writhing bass, we hear
three sad phrases echo one another in the right hand. In the dotted rhythm
that ends each phrase, is there a hint of the funeral march which he used a
few years later in his second piano sonata? No. 3 in G major sends the left
hand flying up and down G major arpeggios while scraps of jubilant
melody blow about in the right.
No. 4, the famous E minor prelude, is another striking example of
economy of means but not of expression. This sparingly written piece of
twenty-five bars, played at Chopin’s funeral at his own request, has found a
rich afterlife in many films, books and songs – a charming example is
Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova song Insensatez (How Insensitive). A
simple melodic line gradually sinks down, underpinned by a sadly pulsing
bass line with slowly developing changes to the chords which colour and
intensify the melody. There are two simple ‘verses’, the second
unexpectedly heaving itself up from its inexorable descent to lament for
three passionate bars, quickly extinguished. The harmonic progression in
the final bars seems to have been inspired by Hummel’s own E minor
Prelude, op. 67, but Chopin makes a masterful alteration to one of the
chords – the one we hear before the pause – so that the seventh of the chord
is at the bottom, a poignant effect.
No. 5 in D major encourages the pianist to use lateral movement to
weave across wide intervals, occasional tiny sighing figures heard here and
there in the inner parts. No. 6 in B minor is one of the many preludes to use
repeated notes like tiny tolling bells, here given to the right hand while the
left hand develops a yearning cantabile melody. No. 7 in A major is just
sixteen bars long and simple in outline, a lovely waltz whose bass line
keeps to the most obvious harmonies (chords of A and E major) until the
high point of the melody, when Chopin allows one piquant sideways move
to a melting seventh chord with F sharp in the bass.
No. 8 in F sharp minor is a brilliant example of Chopin’s use of rapid
piano figuration to provide ‘atmosphere’ around a melodic line. On the
page, the notation looks fearsome. Approached gently, it reveals itself to be
a fascinating task for the right hand in particular. Most of the fast figuration
lies within the natural span of the hand (that is, an octave) and can be
played without awkward stretching. A dark, turbulent line is played mainly
by the thumb, while the other fingers swiftly and quietly explore
surrounding harmonies, rather in the way that an artist might use cross-
hatching to give shade and depth to an outline. With repeating rhythms and
a consistent texture throughout, Chopin constructs a piece rich in harmonic
nuance and satisfying in narrative arc.
No. 9 in E major again seems to echo the dotted-note ‘funeral march’
motif, here used in a mellow piece scored mainly for the lower registers of
the piano. In the final phrase, the semiquaver in the dotted-note motif
tightens to become a tense demisemiquaver. No. 10 in C sharp minor
intriguingly alternates two bars of flying triplet semiquavers with two bars
of slow-moving chords in the bass. Just as we think the pattern is completed
after four iterations, Chopin adds a painful octave A in the right hand and
repeats the two slow bars. In no. 11 in B major, Chopin ripples along in a
cheerful Vivace, its regular phrases extended near the end in a pleasingly
irregular final phrase. The same uncanny ability to ratchet up tension
through tiny changes to melody and harmony is found in no. 12 in G sharp
minor and no. 14 in E flat minor, which seems to look ahead to the finale of
his B flat minor piano sonata with its restless undercurrents of almost atonal
motion.
Around this point in the preludes, the duration of the pieces tends to
become longer. No. 13 in F sharp major, with its three-part structure, could
almost be one of Chopin’s nocturnes. No. 15 in D flat major was later
christened ‘Raindrop’ by the German conductor and pianist Hans von
Bülow, in homage to a description that Chopin’s then partner George Sand
(the pen name of the female writer Aurore Dupin) left us in her memoirs. In
the winter of 1838–9 they were staying in a monastery in Valldemossa in
Majorca. One rainy evening, Sand returned from town to find Chopin upset
after a bad dream. ‘He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy
water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast.’ Many have heard those heavy
drops in the balefully repeated G sharps of the middle section. Under the
beautiful melody we hear in the opening and closing sections, repeated A
flats (another way of notating G sharp) are threaded through the left-hand
line, skilfully knitting the whole piece together.
No. 16 in B flat minor could be an étude; it’s one of the most technically
difficult preludes with its hugely complicated right-hand line driven by
pulsing rhythmic figures in the bass. No. 17 in A flat major, the longest
prelude, was Clara Schumann’s favourite. A melody line dips and weaves
over pulsing repeated chords in the inner parts. In style it is rather like one
of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, though interestingly Mendelssohn
himself is said to have conceded, ‘It is something which I could never have
written.’ No. 18 in F minor, in mood akin to the famous ‘Revolutionary’
étude, demands that the two hands surmount complicated chromatic runs in
octaves, each run faster than the last. No. 19 in E flat major could also have
been included in the Études; it is the other candidate for ‘most technically
difficult prelude’ with its enormous stretches, particularly for the left hand.
No. 20 in C minor is the imposing ‘chord’ prelude, originally just four loud
bars contrasted with four soft bars; Chopin later added an echo in four even
softer bars.
In no. 21 in B flat major, the right hand sings a lovely melody while the
left hand ties itself in graceful knots. In the latter phase of the piece the
right hand, while continuing to intone the melody, joins the left in its
intricate task. No. 22 in G minor throws down a challenge in octaves to the
pianist’s left hand while the right hand provides offbeat commentary. No.
23 in F major switches the challenge to the right hand, the left hand
sometimes attempting a melody and at other times joining in with the
rippling effect. No. 24 in D minor is one of the most emotionally powerful.
Over a swirling bass, seemingly designed for a giant hand, the right hand
sings a passionate aria which feels as though it might have been inspired by
one of the Polish epic poems that Chopin loved. In the first half of the
prelude, ecstatic runs soar into the high treble. In the second half, as
harmonies twist, they plunge from the sky into the bass. The prelude ends
with three despairing runs, the third one – marked fortississimo – plunging
right down into the deepest bass where three long minim Ds stand like
sentinels barring the way to anything further.

31. Mazurka in B flat major, op. 7 no. 1 (and others)

Chopin’s Mazurkas occupy a special place among the types of piano
composition he made his own. Polonaises, nocturnes, waltzes, scherzos –
these tended to emanate from certain periods in his life, but his Mazurkas
go right through from his teenage years to his (perhaps) very last
composition. They were intimately tied to his love of Poland in a way
which never lost its power.
The Mazurka was an old Polish dance in triple time, often with a pair of
notes, a dotted rhythm or a triplet on the first beat, followed by two
crotchets. Usually it has a rhythmic stress on the second or third beat of the
bar. In folk style, one or other beat is not only stressed but elongated,
making the three beats seem more like four, a phenomenon remarked upon
by people who heard Chopin play his own Mazurkas. (The matter is
complicated, because some of his listeners thought he elongated the first
beat, whereas Chopin himself maintained that he did not, or at least that he
was playing in triple time.) To notate this type of spontaneous freedom was
outside the scope of conventional notation, and Chopin settled for a
straightforward triple time, which, however, should be taken with a pinch of
salt. Various forms of mazurka are danced in different regions of Poland,
but they are all composed of short sections (generally eight bars long) and
often have a ‘drone bass’ section in the middle, evoking the sound of the
Polish bagpipe which accompanied these dances. A measure of the
mazurka’s importance is that the Polish national anthem, composed in 1797,
is a type of mazurka.
When Chopin was fourteen, he went on holiday to the Szafarnia region
of Poland, from where he wrote his parents humorous accounts of village
goings-on in the so-called Szafarnia Courier, a journal compiled by one Mr
‘Pichon’ (an anagram of Chopin’s name). From the Courier we learn that
Chopin heard rural mazurkas being sung and played, and noted down some
of the tunes. We also learn that he heard and befriended some Jewish
musicians, whose klezmer-style music may have influenced him. The
teenage Chopin wrote a couple of his own Mazurkas too, revising them
later and including them in his first published set.
Shortly after Chopin left Warsaw in 1830 to try to make a name for
himself in the capitals of Europe, a Polish uprising against the Russian
Empire was crushed by the Russian army. The Tsar decreed that Poland
would lose its autonomy and become part of the Empire. Warsaw came
under severe restrictions; its university was closed, books and plays were
censored, and police spies were rumoured to be everywhere, making people
afraid of talking openly with one another. Chopin was desolate, but he did
not return. From Vienna he continued his journey westward, arriving in
Paris in 1831. There he made a wide circle of acquaintances amongst Poles
as well as cultured and aristocratic Parisians (‘I hobnob with ambassadors,
princesses and ministers’).
Exiled Poles were viewed with great sympathy in Paris at the time, and
Chopin’s own performances of his Mazurkas were admired as much for
their patriotic pride and yearning as for their musical distinction. Clearly the
Mazurkas meant a lot to Chopin as well, for he kept refining the form as the
years went on. Although his Mazurkas were in triple time with the usual
rhythms and sections, Chopin said his Mazurkas were ‘not for dancing’. His
interest was not in transmitting the folk music for its own sake; he meant to
sublimate it, making it a vehicle for nostalgic contemplation. The subtle
poetry of his musical language, the beauty of his melodies and their
decorations, the quiet dynamic of many of his Mazurkas and their aura of
melancholy took them out of the ballroom and into the realm of art. Chopin
was not politically active in any overt way, but the patriotic longing
embodied in his Mazurkas certainly helped to spread awareness of the
Polish cause and keep it alive in the hearts of his listeners, as Schumann
recognised when he described Chopin’s Mazurkas as ‘cannons buried in
flowers’.
One of Chopin’s first Mazurkas, in B flat major, op. 7 no. 1, was an
instant success, played all over Europe and even in Warsaw, where it was
known as ‘The Favourite’. Irresistibly tuneful and with exotic-sounding
intervals of falling sevenths and ninths in its main melody, it also shows a
subtle skill in creating phrases which cross four-bar boundaries to make
intriguing longer units. In the middle is the famous ‘sotto voce’ (in a
whisper) section where, over a most unusual drone bass pulsing away on G
flat and D flat, we hear a haunting modal melody with a distinctly Eastern
flavour.
Contrasted in character is the beautiful slow Mazurka in A minor, op. 17
no. 4, possibly one of the teenage compositions he revised. Officially it is in
A minor, but its opening seems to hover somewhere between that and F
major, and its melody constantly slips between the cracks as if seeking to
escape from A minor, an impression intensified by the delicate decorative
passages. Again, the middle section brings in the bagpipe drone. Here we
seem to have settled into a cheery A major for thirty bars, but the
complacency is broken by a wrenching chord that returns us suddenly to the
melancholy reprise. Now we see Chopin’s skill at writing codas, for over a
repeated A in the bass he writes a series of sadly drooping phrases with
chromatic harmonies, with high grace notes which plunge an octave and a
half to the melody note they are decorating, an effect almost like a gulp or
sob. After an apparent close in the home key, we drift back into the twilight
region where the piece began, ending with a pause on a floating chord of F.
This effect of ending quietly in mid-air may have influenced Robert
Schumann, who uses it quite often in his piano music (e.g. in ‘Child Falling
Asleep’ in Kinderszenen).
Yet another type of Mazurka, in B flat minor, op. 24 no. 4, is a proud
and vigorous dance which could be mistaken for a waltz were it not for
some of its internal sections, where the stress on the second or third beat
confirms it to be a Mazurka. Chopin again uses chromatic movement to blur
the sense of key, for example in the opening bars where two melodic lines
move slowly towards one another in the treble without a bass to clarify
where we are. At the ends of some phrases are sudden loud heel-clicking
outbursts of the type we associate more with the Polonaise. In the middle
section, ‘Legato’, a very Eastern-sounding melody with plaintive intervals
leads on to an episode which wanders between distant keys. The coda veers
between B flat major and minor, seeming to commit to the major key until
the final two bars, where a lonely melody casts doubt on the conclusion.
The D major, op. 33 no. 2, is one of the most popular and folk-like
Mazurkas, its outer sections employing a charming ‘echo’ effect whereby
eight bars loud are followed by the same eight bars soft. This leads into a
graceful waltz-like section in B flat whose second half is a fascinating
rhythmic pattern; over intriguing bass harmonies, the right hand plays an
oscillating figure with the same note, D, always at the top of the chords, and
folk-like ‘snaps’ on the third beats of alternate bars. After the reprise is
another unusual coda; as the bass pulses away on D, pairs of notes dance
pianissimo down a modal scale in the treble, accelerating and then
decelerating as they sink into the bass register. After they come to rest on D
major, and the pedal goes down to catch everything in its resonance, the
dance ends with a startling gesture: a high modal scale flies upwards over a
crescendo, like a bird which has suddenly escaped from its cage.
The C sharp minor, op. 63 no. 3, is a pensive and beautiful piece with
subtle phrase lengths and telling beats of silence. Its outer sections are
melodic, its middle section more rhythmical, as though danced by a group
rather than a soloist. In the last twelve bars there is an unusual instance of a
canon at one beat’s distance, both parts being played by the right hand (not
easy, because the intervals are wide), perhaps to imitate one dancer
following the movements of another a little way apart. In a historic
recording, the pianist Paderewski (who later became Prime Minister of
Poland) achieves this effect most tenderly by displacing the lower line
slightly so that it stands out from the one above it.
Finally there is the F minor, op. 68 no. 4, an unfinished and hard-to-
decipher sketch found after Chopin died by Jane Stirling, the Scottish
pianist who studied with him and became devoted to him. The opus
numbers after op. 65 were earlier works, published posthumously; the date
of this mazurka’s composition is uncertain, but its character lends itself to
speculation that it may be one of his last works. The whole piece is to be
played ‘sotto voce’ (whispering). Its haunting two-bar phrases give the
impression that they are sinking gradually down through tiny chromatic
increments, vainly reaching upwards at the ends of certain phrases. In the
middle, there is a turn for the better as the music finds its way into A major
for a few bars of waltz-like dancing, but soon the melancholy mood returns
and the sense of weary drooping is resumed. Perhaps there was to be a
substantial middle section with rhythmical drones, but we shall never know.
In keeping with the mystery of its date and its absence of conclusion, some
editions indicate that one should circle round and play it again ‘senza fine’
(without ending).

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856)

32. Kinderszenen, op. 15
Robert Schumann is in many ways the model of the Romantic composer –
living in the world of his imagination, poetic, impractical, obsessed with his
own thoughts and feelings. He was inspired by literature, devoted to his
favourite writers, moved by his rivals’ music. And his personal life was also
thoroughly ‘Romantic’. While lodging in the house of his piano teacher,
Friedrich Wieck, he fell in love with Wieck’s teenage daughter Clara,
herself a brilliant pianist. They became secretly engaged, but when Clara’s
father found out about it, he banned them from seeing one another. For
several years they struggled to win his approval, but realising he would
never give it, they went to court to obtain permission to marry. Later, their
married life was to end sadly, with Robert Schumann’s decline into mental
illness, but during the period before their marriage, when he wrote his
major solo piano works, his imaginative life was at white heat.
Schumann gives the sense that he is inviting us to share his deepest
secrets and willing to make himself vulnerable for the sake of truthful self-
disclosure, freely displaying his weaknesses as well as his strengths. He can
conjure up almost better than anyone else an atmosphere of heart-to-heart
intimacy. At the same time, he can give the maddening impression of what
today might be called ‘oversharing’, trying his listeners’ patience by going
doggedly round and round his musical material as though ensnared by it,
like a fairy-tale hero in a cursed forest. Now and then he seems to burst
through the thicket of repetitive thoughts with an idea which goes straight
to the heart. It is characteristic of Schumann’s piano music that he seems to
have to fight, sometimes for pages, to achieve these moments of piercing
beauty. For his fans, these moments are the more precious for being hard-
won.
His struggles with mental illness, mood swings and depression were a
source of shame and distress to his nearest and dearest, yet the feeling he
manages to impart through his music – that he is determined to be honest
about the turmoil in his heart – has brought him new admirers in our own
age, which has more understanding of and sympathy for mental health
issues and the part they play in creativity. Were he to be making his career
today, his ‘visions’ and his battle with mood swings and depression might
well be the subject of admiring documentaries.
Kinderszenen (Scenes of Childhood) is the way that many young
pianists encounter the music of Robert Schumann, although in fact these
thirteen little cameos are not specifically designed for children to play, but
are recollections of childish games, worries, fantasies and fireside moments
(‘Kinderszenen’ literally means ‘children scenes’). Clara Schumann, who
was not yet Robert’s wife at the time he wrote them, remarked that Robert
‘sometimes reminded her of a child’, an observation which may have
acquired a darker colour as time went on and Robert’s mental health issues
became more apparent.
In the course of piano lessons, many people have learned a few of the
pieces, particularly no. 7, the wonderful ‘Träumerei’ (Dreaming), but the
whole set is not as well known or as often heard in concert as one might
imagine. The pieces are composed with tenderness and delicacy, their
conciseness making them more akin to Schumann’s songs than to his longer
piano pieces, where obsessive repetition or over-long elaboration can dull
the charm of his initial ideas. One might imagine that it was the evocative
titles (‘Pleading Child’, ‘Important Event’, etc) that concentrated
Schumann’s imagination when he was writing Kinderszenen, but in fact he
claimed he invented the titles only afterwards. Clara seemed to agree,
telling their daughter Eugenie that ‘your father thought up the titles to the
pieces only when they were finished. They are very apt . . . but they are not
necessary.’ The Kinderszenen were written in 1838 and published in 1839
when Robert and Clara’s marriage was still a year away.
No. 1, ‘Of Strange Lands and People’. Clara claimed that in this piece
‘you feel yourself completely transported to foreign lands’, but this may
have been wishful thinking; in fact the charming little piece is notable for
its simple harmonies and phrase lengths. It does not seem to attempt to
evoke any kind of ‘strangeness’. What then was Schumann thinking about?
It has occurred to me that there may be a clue in the opening phrase of the
melody. During the time that he was separated from Clara, Robert mused on
Beethoven’s song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved),
which must have seemed painfully relevant to him, and sometimes quoted it
in his own music (such as the wonderful Fantasy in C major, op. 17). If you
take the first five notes of Schumann’s Kinderszenen and play them
backwards, you get the opening of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. Is
this deliberate? My instinct is that it is just the kind of thing that Schumann
would have delighted in devising, but would also have delighted in keeping
to himself. Beethoven’s poet sits on a hill, gazing into ‘the misty blueness’,
far from his beloved. Perhaps Schumann imagines the ‘strange lands and
people’ surrounding his own distant beloved: not ‘strange’ in the sense of
odd, but perhaps rather ‘estranged’. This opening motif of no. 1 is heard in
a number of places throughout the set.
 No. 2, ‘Curious Story’, is another piece which seems less intriguing
than its title. Perhaps he really did make the title up afterwards. It’s a gentle
dance, almost a minuet in feeling.
No. 3, ‘Hasche-Mann’ (a game of ‘tag’). The little accents every two
bars seem to show the action of a chasing child who manages to catch and
‘tag’ another. The running notes depict the scurrying little feet.
No. 4, ‘Pleading Child’. Here, the opening phrase is clearly a variant of
the theme in ‘Of Strange Lands and People’, though now harmonised in D
major. In the pairs of falling notes, do we hear snuffling, sobbing? At the
end, the melody is left hanging on the high G over an unresolved chord.
Interestingly, Chopin does the same thing at the end of his F major prelude.
In Schumann’s version the thin, high note seems to summon up a picture of
the child saying, ‘. . . please?’
No. 5, ‘Quite Happy’. Cleverly, this resolves the ‘question’ posed at the
end of no. 4. The child has been given what they wanted and is now
content.
No. 6, ‘Important Event’. It’s easy to imagine the dressing-up box and
the small king parading about feeling important. Once again, the opening
phrase could be considered a reference to the theme in ‘Of Strange Lands
and People’.
No. 7, ‘Träumerei’ (Dreaming). This gem of a piece has captured hearts
for generations. It is a wonderful piece of construction. There are six
phrases, all of which begin in the same way, but bend this way and that at
the end of the phrases, taking the music into different keys, sometimes
opening it up, sometimes taking it into a sad place, sometimes hinting at
consolation. The beauty of Schumann’s choice of harmony for the high
treble note A at the climax of the piece, in the final phrase with the pause on
the chord, never loses its ability to melt the listener’s heart. For me this
piece sometimes seems like a lovely vase of flowers with six (or eight, if
you take the repeat) stems inclining gracefully in different directions.
No. 8, ‘By the Fireside’. A cheery domestic scene. The teenage Clara
made the comment, ‘It’s so cosy, it could only be a German fireside. It
could never be so cosy in a French fireside!’
No. 9, ‘Knight of the Stick Horse’. In some editions this has been
translated as ‘Knight of the Rocking-Horse’, but a Steckenpferd is actually
a ‘stick horse’, a wooden stick topped with a horse’s head, astride which the
small rider gallops about, usually neighing and making clip-clop noises.
Galloping horses figure in a lot of Schumann’s piano music (for example in
the final piece of Kreisleriana).
No. 10, ‘Almost too Serious’ is something an adult would say about a
child. Who is almost too serious: the composer himself? In a set of pieces
largely based around G and D major, this excursion into the distant key of G
sharp minor is a step away from normality. The melody is out of step with
the bass all the way through; a semiquaver late, dragging behind the bass.
The dragging syncopation seems to show the child’s reluctance to ‘be in the
present’. In the last six bars, a phrase is delineated in the treble and then in
the bass. Is this phrase a minor version of the ‘Traümerei’ theme, suggesting
that the dream has turned sad?
No. 11, ‘Frightening’: the dotted rhythm of the opening theme recalls a
similar motif (in the same key) of Chopin’s A minor prelude, op. 28 no. 2
(and indeed the famous motif of Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’), but in fact
Kinderszenen was published a year before Chopin’s Preludes. The
atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty is appropriate in a little piece about
frightening oneself (or others). The ‘Schneller’ (Faster) sections suggest
anxious heartbeats, feet running away.
No. 12, ‘Child Falling Asleep’: the treble voice shadows the bass line at
half a bar’s distance. Could this be an example of the Doppelgänger, the
shadow figure who trails you, a figure popularised by Schumann’s favourite
author, Jean Paul? When falling asleep one might more easily feel the
disassociation of different parts of one’s mind. The piece ends tantalisingly
on a chord of A minor, without resolving into the expected E minor
cadence. This is the last of the ‘children scenes’; the next is the poet himself
speaking.
No. 13, ‘The Poet Speaks’: The final portrait is an example of how
brilliant Schumann was at ‘postludes’, or afterthoughts which change the
atmosphere and give us a new perspective, as he often does with the piano
postludes in his Lieder. Schumann steps out of the ‘child’ persona and
speaks to us as the creative artist – or perhaps as the child grown into the
artist. It seems significant that he chooses to end the cycle of pieces with the
idea of speaking, not singing. Let’s not forget that Schumann described
himself as ‘a poet as much as a musician’. Is he the poet?
 The poet seems reluctant to speak, or not confident of what to say. The
phrases are short, sometimes fragmented, occasionally pausing on a
sorrowful harmony. The opening bars reappear a year later in the first song
of his cycle Frauenliebe und -leben, bars 7–9. Do they hold some message
for Clara? In the song they are set (in the second verse) to the words
‘möchte ich lieber weinen’ (I would rather weep).
There’s an important little cadenza or ‘recitative’, printed in a smaller
font presumably to indicate that it is some sort of inset moment, like a
flashback in a film. The phrase Schumann uses here is a quote from his own
fiercely optimistic piano piece ‘Aufschwung’ (Upswing) from the
Fantasiestücke, op. 12. But here the character of the theme is very different:
no longer energetic, but quiet and remote. Has the optimism gone? The
quiet opening is reprised, but the phrases are short and tentative; the first-
beat rests in the final bars leave a lingering sense of insecurity.

33. Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 54

Schumann sketched several piano concertos in the 1830s, but his first
publicly performed attempt at a concerto was the one-movement Phantasie
for piano and orchestra, premiered in 1841 in Leipzig with his wife Clara as
the soloist. Schumann was, however, unable to interest a publisher in this
one-movement work, and eventually Clara persuaded him to expand it into
a traditional three-movement piano concerto which might prove more
commercial. He accepted the challenge and the full concerto was
premiered, again with Clara as the soloist, in Dresden in August 1845. This
time it was warmly acclaimed by music critics, with the Dresdner Abend-
Zeitung even going so far as to recognise that the somewhat introverted
treatment of the solo part might represent an interesting sort of evolution of
the piano concerto form. The piece went on to become one of the most
popular of Romantic piano concertos. In the era of recording, it has often
been paired with Grieg’s piano concerto (also in A minor) which clearly
shows the influence of Schumann’s.
In fact, it is noteworthy that Schumann’s piano concerto has remained
so popular, because it is not a traditional ‘show-off’ piece for the pianist. In
some respects it is more like a chamber work, the piano sharing the honours
with the orchestral instruments, sometimes even receding into the
background to accompany them. As with so much of Schumann’s piano
writing, it can be awkward and intricate to play without giving the pianist
the opportunity to be admired as an obvious virtuoso. At first glance it
seems surprising that Schumann even wanted to write a piano concerto
when his impulse was at least as much to express his longing for the inward
life, but many listeners have been touched by the lyrical nature of this
concerto. The challenge for the pianist is how to make it come across in the
concert hall without falsifying its intimate nature.
The first movement, the heart of his original inspiration, has been
described as a struggle between two elements, one energetic (the opening
bars), the other dreamy and wistful (the famous A minor theme which
appears in bar 4). These two elements may be examples of the fictional
characters Florestan (the impulsive extrovert) and Eusebius (the dreamer)
whom Schumann invented to personify the contrasting parts of his own
personality, and the tension between them was clearly something he
experienced as an everyday reality. The imaginary Florestan and Eusebius
stalk his compositions. He sometimes marked individual themes with ‘F’ or
‘E’ to denote which side of his character was on display.
The famous lyrical theme of the first movement is, characteristically,
heard first from the orchestra and not from the piano. It bears some
resemblance to a theme from Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous
Voyage (1828), later quoted by Elgar in the thirteenth of his Enigma
Variations. A tribute to Schumann’s friend and fellow composer, perhaps, or
an unconscious allusion to one of his pieces? Equally, it could be an
allusion to Clara, for the notes C-A-A (the first, third and fifth letters of her
name) are clearly the basis of Schumann’s theme. Schumann sometimes
nicknamed his wife ‘Chiara’, the Italian version of her name, and as the
note B is known in German as H, that would supply one more letter of
Clara’s name in the piano concerto’s main theme: C-H-A-A. At any rate, the
‘Clara’ theme is very skilfully used throughout the movement, appearing in
various guises – for example in the pensive middle section in A flat major;
transformed into a hopeful A major to launch an animated passage of
elaboration on that theme; wreathed in trills during the cadenza; or speeded
up into a clipped march-like rhythm in the ‘allegro molto’ coda.
The second movement, which Schumann preferred to be described in
the programme as the prelude to the finale, has the character of an intimate
conversation between piano and orchestra. Despite a more lyrical middle
section, in which once again the orchestra gets to announce the new
melody, the whole movement seems inconclusive, as though it is an
interlude.
The lengthy finale, Allegro Vivace, has an almost ceaseless sweep of
piano arpeggios which are conceived largely as texture and background to
what is going on in the orchestra. Originally, Schumann gave a puzzlingly
slow metronome mark of 72 to the bar. It has become traditional to ignore
this and take the movement at a faster, jollier clip to give it more élan, but
this makes the pages of arpeggios very taxing for the soloist; they should
sound like joyful little floods of harmony, but the complicated fingering
hampers this effect. In the middle of the movement comes a section where
Schumann introduces a new episode, still notated in 3/4 time but with the
dotted-rhythm theme written across the bar lines as if it is in 3/2 time.
Looking at the notation, it seems clear that Schumann was trying to create a
delightful rhythmic swing by juxtaposing the ongoing triple-time dance
rhythm and the new, stately dotted rhythm which marches cross-wise
against the dance in two-bar units. The frisson of two-against-three is
available largely to those who can see the score, alas, because without
knowing how things are notated, the innocent ear just hears a simple change
into a crisp, almost marching three-time at this point, and the sense of a
whirling waltz is lost. In performance, I have tried by body language to
indicate that the waltz rhythm is going on in parallel like a ghostly descant,
but have never been sure that it is possible to convey Schumann’s intention
successfully.

34. Piano Trio no. 1 in D minor, op. 63

Amongst Schumann’s chamber music, the Trio in D minor, op. 63, holds a
special place in my heart. His piano quintet is more popular, but although I
am fond of it too, I have always felt it is a little four-square in its
predictable phrase lengths and unvarying textures. In choosing a chamber
work to represent Schumann, therefore, I have allowed myself to select the
one which seems to me to best represent him at his most daring and
imaginative. Schumann’s characteristic writing for piano trio often gives the
pianist the role of providing texture, energy, rhythmic drive as a counterpart
to the melodic string lines. The piano is continuously active and for much of
the time the three instruments play together, creating a density of texture
which runs the risk of seeming thick and suffocating. In this music we can
hear that Schumann was an earnest student of the music of Bach, drawing
on the inspiration of Bach’s intricate counterpoint to create his own
complexity.
The pianist’s task is a tricky one, for they must find a way to provide
heft without allowing the piano part to become overbearing. There are
moments where the piano is the hero of the narrative, but these are fairly
rare. As in Schumann’s Piano Concerto, the piano writing is technically
difficult without being the sort of ebullient virtuoso writing which delights
the audience. The piano trios are, consequently, not celebrity vehicles for
pianists, but rather opportunities to weave atmosphere and texture, and to
provide light and shade in the right places. It is perhaps because of such
challenges that the piano trios were neglected for many years and are
probably still less well known than they should be.
The opening page, with its tortuous theme almost like a twentieth-
century ‘note-row’ which aims to use all twelve notes of the chromatic
scale, presents some kind of enigma one longs to resolve. Marked ‘Mit
Energie und Leidenschaft’ (With energy and passion), it flings the listener
immediately into the torrent. The role of the piano here (as in many parts of
the piece) is to create the dark, swirling textures on which the string lines
are borne along.
Much of the first movement is a tussle between the dark, swirling,
sinuous lines of the opening and the clipped dotted rhythms of a contrasting
theme. Halfway through the movement, without warning, comes one of
Schumann’s most startling inventions: a section marked ‘Tempo 1, nur
ruhiger’ (Tempo 1, only calmer). In the high treble, marked ‘ppp’
(extremely quiet) and with the ‘soft’ pedal down, the piano plays ethereal
triplets which hint at a simple melodic line. Against this, the cello (joined
by the violin) plays a kind of descant with widely spaced intervals which
make it seem more like a line written for the French horn than the cello. The
cello is instructed to play ‘Am Steg’, with the bow near to the bridge,
producing a strange, glassy, whistling sound. Nothing prepares us for this
drastic change of atmosphere, which appears like a vision, almost a
hallucination. One moment we are basking in the glorious Romantic swirl
of the writing, and the next it is as if we have been thrust a couple of
centuries forward to space-age music. It is this kind of inspiration which
makes Schumann’s music perpetually intriguing.
The second movement, a lively scherzo-and-trio structure, is a good
example of the sort of piano writing which is technically hard but not
designed to show off. The bouncy dotted rhythms, which contain many
repeated notes, require great energy to play crisply at the prescribed speed.
On Schumann’s lighter piano keyboard, they would still have been tricky,
but on the modern piano they are daunting. It is a mark of Schumann’s skill
with variation of texture that the long melodic lines of the Trio section seem
like new themes, but they are in fact just a smoothing-out of the dotted
rhythms we heard in the opening section.
The slow movement, ‘Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung’ (Slow, with
inward feeling), is one of Schumann’s finest accomplishments. Violin and
piano engage in a sorrowful duet in which it is not clear who has the
principal line. The piano seems to feel its way forward in the dark. The
violin, following a step behind, offers sad comments in fragmented phrases,
as if it is too burdened with emotion to string together a whole sentence. In
the tenth bar, where the cello enters, Schumann offers an unobtrusive stroke
of genius. Just as our attention is drawn to the consoling cello line,
Schumann begins a counterpoint in the bass of the piano part which is a
complete reprise of the whole violin part in the first ten bars. This is not at
all obvious to the listener, and I confess that I had been playing the piece for
some time before I noticed what was going on. It seems typical of
Schumann to devise something so ingenious and then leave it lying quietly
there to be found or not.
The middle section of the slow movement, ‘Bewegter’ (with more
movement), seems like a lifting into the air after the heavy, tragic
atmosphere of the opening. Here the three players seem to weave together,
rather than pursuing their sad separate courses. But the vision fades: the
weary opening section returns in condensed form. Now it’s the piano which
utters the final statement of the opening violin line, but with a twist; in the
penultimate bar the piano writhes upwards with a painful recollection of the
opening theme of the first movement.
The fiery fourth movement, couched unexpectedly in D major, is a
strange blend of straightforward energy and optimism with odd, mercurial
effects which seem to recall the curious atmosphere of the ‘nur ruhiger’
passage in the middle of the first movement. Sometimes it seems as though
Schumann had instruments other than violin, cello and piano in mind. The
piano writing in the B minor section, for example, so tricky to play
pianissimo with its fast and wide oscillations, feels as if it might be
mimicking strange woodwind instruments. Likewise in the string parts there
are many non-melodic effects, again like horn calls, or foghorns, or lights
appearing and fading in the gloom. The world of fairy tales, of woodland
spirits, feels very near. Perhaps he had in mind a scene from one of Jean
Paul’s novels?
In the coda, which lasts for several pages of the piano score, Schumann
gives the instruction ‘nach und nach schneller’ (faster and faster). As the
tempo is already fast and fiery, the players are presented with the challenge
of grading an acceleration over seventy-five bars. Is this an instance of
Schumann’s lack of practicality? It requires considerable dexterity, as well
as ensemble skills, on the part of the players to achieve an actual
accelerando from the beginning of the coda to the very end. Sometimes it
feels scarcely possible, but there is a sense that Schumann wanted to give
the impression of everything spinning out of control.

CLARA SCHUMANN (1819–1896)

35. Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 7
Clara Wieck, who became Clara Schumann when she married the composer
Robert Schumann, was one of music history’s most impressive women
musicians. She was a child prodigy, taught the piano by her ambitious
father Friedrich Wieck, who arranged concert tours across Europe for her.
She wrote and performed her own piano music from a young age, earning
compliments from Liszt and Goethe. Against her father’s wishes she
married the volatile Robert Schumann and supported him lovingly in his
composing career, even though he had made it clear from the outset that he
expected her to set aside her own creative work in order to run the
household and look after the children, of whom there were eventually eight.
‘You should live for nothing but yourself and your house and your husband,
and just wait and see how I want to make you forget the artist – no, the wife
stands even higher than the artist, and if I can only ensure that you would
have nothing more to do with the general public, then my fondest wish
would have been fulfilled’, he wrote to her the year before their wedding.
We may wonder that after years of public acclaim she was prepared to
commit to marrying on these terms, but Schumann’s views were typical of
their time, and had Clara confided any doubts to those around her she might
well have found that they also took it for granted she should devote herself
to domesticity once she was married.
At first, Robert and Clara both kept composing, but their diaries make it
clear that Clara’s confidence in herself as a composer was gradually worn
down. Although they had agreed to have two pianos in the house (one for
her, one for him), Robert found he could not think while Clara was playing,
so she gave up practising when he was working in his study. Somehow, her
piano technique was well enough established to remain at her service. When
Robert started showing signs of depression and mental instability, she
supported the family by playing piano recitals. Even when Robert was
confined to a mental asylum she kept on touring as a soloist, and after his
death her income from concerts made life possible for her and their eight
children, for whom she was now solely responsible. She gave up composing
when Schumann became ill, saying despondently, ‘I once thought that I
possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not
desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect
to?’
When Clara was only twelve, her father took her to Paris where she
played to the twenty-two-year-old Polish composer Chopin, not long
arrived in that city. Chopin was delighted with her playing and sent her a
manuscript copy of his E minor piano concerto, saying he looked forward to
hearing it played by someone so talented. Clara must have been sufficiently
inspired by Chopin’s concerto to start writing one of her own, her A minor
piano concerto, op. 7. It began life as a one-movement concert piece which
Robert Schumann (then a piano student of Clara’s father) helped her to
orchestrate. Later she made it the final section of a three-movement
concerto, adding a first and second movement. In November 1835, shortly
before her sixteenth birthday, she was the soloist in the premiere in Leipzig,
with Felix Mendelssohn conducting the orchestra.
 The key of A minor is the same one that her husband was to use for his
own much more famous piano concerto (interestingly, his went through a
similar process of being developed from a single-movement concert fantasy
to a three-movement concerto). Clara’s concerto sounds like an innocent
tribute to Chopin, with its ‘operatic’ writing for the piano, its delicate
decorative lines for the soloist and its elegant harmonic sidesteps into
unexpected keys. Her piano writing is clearly based on her own
astonishingly virtuosic piano technique, which made light of octave
passages and chords written over enormous intervals of a tenth (she did
have large hands). Octave passages (often in both hands) are a mainstay of
the work, written so frequently that we must assume she didn’t consider
them especially difficult.
As with Chopin’s E minor concerto, it is clear that the piano interested
Clara much more than the orchestral accompaniment, which is sparingly
written, with all the brightest musical limelight given to the soloist.
Intriguingly, the young Clara has unified the three movements by writing a
principal theme which appears, with slight variation, in every movement.
Each movement blends skilfully into the next. Clara’s most striking
innovation is the slow movement, a rhapsody for solo piano (without
orchestra) which introduces a solo cello into the final section, so that the
two instruments sing a heartfelt duet. Could this have been where her friend
Johannes Brahms got the idea for the cello solo in the slow movement of
his own B flat piano concerto? Clara’s final movement is a Polonaise,
probably another homage to Chopin.
Clara Schumann wrote many attractive compositions for solo piano, and
delightful chamber music works such as her Piano Trio and her Romances
for violin and piano. But perhaps she was never so confident of her own
voice and her own right to compose as she was when she wrote her youthful
piano concerto. At that time she was a celebrated pianist commanding high
fees, travelling all over Europe and being praised by famous people; she
was a teenager just beginning to fall in love with her father’s piano student
Robert Schumann, and the world was her oyster.

FRANZ LISZT (1811–1886)

 36. Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178
The life and career of Franz Liszt provide one of the most colourful
chapters in the history of piano music. He is now principally known as a
composer, but as a concert pianist he achieved staggering success. As a
young man, Liszt had been entranced by the stage manner of the violinist
Paganini, who inspired him to try for similar fame as a pianist. He worked
hard on his virtuoso technique. Piano virtuosi were popular, but Liszt
created a personality cult and a bravura style of performance which eclipsed
the others. He more or less invented the model of a concert played by a
single performer (before him, mixed programmes with several performers
were the norm). He was handsome and charismatic, played magnificently,
was an inspired improviser, made thrilling arrangements of other people’s
music, and performed his own pieces so theatrically that some listeners
used to faint with emotion. The German poet Heinrich Heine wrote, ‘How
powerful, how shattering was his mere physical appearance.’
Before a concert Liszt mingled with the audience, charming them with
his witty remarks. He had a semicircle of chairs placed around the piano on
stage so that illustrious guests could sit near him and converse with him
between pieces. He added extra bits of his own invention to the pieces he
was playing, improvising cadenzas, tremolos, double octaves and trills even
to iconic pieces like Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. He brought his silk
gloves on stage and threw them down to be fought over by audience
members. Women were said to carry his discarded cigar butts in their
cleavages. When he broke piano strings, as he often did in his
performances, people collected the broken strings and had them made into
bracelets. There was even a phase where Liszt invited listeners to write a
question for him (on any topic) on a slip of paper and put it into a hat, from
which questions would be drawn out for the great man to answer from the
stage. Clearly he was regarded as having more than musical authority.
In fact, Liszt’s touring years as a showman were concentrated into a
decade between 1839 and 1848, after which he decided to accept his partner
Princess Caroline von Sayn-Wittgenstein’s advice to devote himself to the
more serious task of composition. He moved to Weimar, took up a post as
Kapellmeister, retreated from his career as a virtuoso to compose, and only
played concerts when he felt like it. He became a piano teacher, attracting a
circle of gifted students whom he earnestly discouraged from doing things
for effect (cynics have suggested that he just didn’t like the idea of anyone
else emulating his success). He purged his life of frivolous elements,
eventually returning to his childhood dream of taking holy orders. He
became a ‘minor canon’ in 1865, after which he was known as the Abbé
Liszt.
Liszt’s music has always been controversial. For some, it is emptily
virtuosic and annoyingly melodramatic. For others, it is imaginative and
innovative, with a subtle use of harmony which probably influenced
Wagner and that looks ahead to Debussy and Ravel. Some pianists love
Liszt’s music so much that they devote a large part of their concert
repertoire to it. Others – uncertain if the means justify the effect – can never
work up the motivation to learn all those notes. Musicologists have always
admired Liszt’s mastery of ‘thematic transformation’, the way he reuses one
theme so that it finds new life in another character or tempo. There are
many examples in this sonata, none more striking than the way the
menacing repeated-note figure in the bass near the beginning is later slowed
down into the dreamily beautiful contrasting theme marked ‘cantando
espressivo’. For me, this transformation is a stroke of genius and the best
thing in the sonata.
In 1839, Robert Schumann dedicated his wonderful Fantasy in C major,
op. 17, to Liszt. Liszt wanted to return the favour, but had nothing he felt
was worthy. Eventually in 1853 he completed his one Piano Sonata, which
he dedicated to Schumann. Sadly, in 1854 a copy arrived at the Schumann
household shortly after Robert had been committed to the mental asylum in
Endenich. Clara Schumann received the score and had her friend Johannes
Brahms play it to her. She found ‘nothing but sheer racket – not a single
healthy idea, everything confused . . . And now I’ve got to thank him for it!’
Of course, it could be that at that particular time Clara Schumann was
emotionally exhausted and over-alert to signs of mental instability.
Nevertheless, her opinion was shared by Brahms and by quite a few leading
German musicians. Despite this rocky start, Liszt’s sonata soon began to
gather admirers and has never been out of the limelight.
Liszt himself liked playing it to visitors in Weimar, but always made a
point of putting the score on the piano so that everyone could see it had
been properly written down and was not one of the stormy improvisations
of his younger years. In fact, the appearance of the manuscript does suggest
that Liszt improvised it for himself and hurriedly notated it before he forgot
what he had played. The sonata lasts around half an hour and is played
without a break, though it does subdivide into several ‘movements’ like
those of a conventional sonata, or perhaps like a gigantic first-movement
structure (theme + elaboration, contrasting theme + elaboration,
development of this material, reprise with augmentation of the original
elements). Liszt never declared whether it was inspired by a specific
narrative, but many people have tried to find one that fits – ranging from the
story of Adam and Eve in the Bible to Goethe’s Faust and Milton’s
Paradise Lost. It opens with sinister premonitions, moves on to heroic
outbursts, grandiose declarations, and lyrical episodes of great beauty.
Weaving these ingredients together, it moves through brilliant pyrotechnics
and stormy fugato episodes to a reprise in which the main themes are
ennobled and glorified. The manuscript seems to show that Liszt first
planned a triumphant ending, but his second thought was inspired: he ends
with three long quiet chords whose fragile and evocative harmonies do
indeed seem to point towards the future.
Robert Schumann’s C major Fantasy, the dedication of which moved
Liszt to reciprocate with something good of his own, seems to have left its
own subtle mark on Liszt’s piano sonata. For example, the marvellous
opening gesture of Schumann’s Fantasy, a descending melodic line, may
have found its demonic echo in the dark opening of Liszt’s sonata, a
descending melodic line in the bass. And the passionate way in which
Schumann springs up the octave to restate his opening theme with more
energetic dotted rhythms in a new key has a parallel in the way that Liszt
begins the angry fast section that follows after the slow introduction. A little
further on, Liszt’s ‘Grandioso’ theme has something in common with a
theme in the last movement of Schumann’s Fantasy (‘Etwas bewegter’). It
is pleasing to think that, even if poor Schumann never saw the sonata which
Liszt had dedicated to him, he influenced Liszt’s imaginative world.

37. Nuages Gris, S.199

In his last years, Liszt suffered from episodes of depression. During this
time, he wrote a number of piano pieces radically different in style from
those of his earlier, flamboyant performing period. Gone are the torrents of
notes which have inspired and terrified so many generations of pianists. The
pages of his late piano pieces look almost minimalist, with few notes and
simple lines. Liszt was always adventurous harmonically, but in these late
pieces he goes much further, exploring the possibilities of unusual chords
which are there not to indicate the direction of the phrase so much as to
express a colour or atmosphere in the present moment, an experimental
style which makes his music sound as if it came from the era of Debussy
and Ravel. The change of style is so marked that it feels almost as if he is
trying to make amends for the excesses of his virtuoso pieces, or at least to
make it perfectly clear that he no longer felt that way. Some of his circle felt
that he had lost the plot at this time, but it may also be that he was adopting
that brevity and concentration of expression which seems to mark many
artists’ late works.
Liszt was a close friend and supporter of the composer Richard Wagner.
Their friendship was cemented when Wagner married Liszt’s daughter
Cosima. Liszt often helped Wagner financially, attempted to give him good
advice about how to run his life, and went to considerable lengths to
promote Wagner’s operas when they were as yet unknown. As Wagner’s
operas came out, Liszt often made piano transcriptions of parts of them.
Like everyone else at the time he must have been struck by the
harmonically daring Prelude to Act 1 of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and
perhaps for more than one reason; some years before Tristan, Liszt himself
had written a song, ‘Die Lorelei’, which has a harmonic gesture very
similar to the opening of Wagner’s Tristan prelude. One might take the view
that such harmonic language was simply ‘in the air’ at the time, or one
might suspect Wagner of borrowing an idea or two from his father-in-law.
One of Liszt’s best-known late piano pieces is Nuages Gris (Grey
Clouds), written during a period of ill-health and low spirits in 1881 after he
had fallen down the stairs in Weimar and was confined to his bed. It is only
forty-eight bars long, very quiet and sparing in texture. It seems to wander
sadly here and there, but is highly organised in a symmetrical structure.
Nominally in the key of G minor, it seems to want to push delicately at the
edges of this key with constant use of unexpected melody notes and
intervals such as the G to C sharp we hear repeated over and over in the
right hand. Liszt keeps gravitating to the ‘augmented triad’, a chord formed
of two major thirds piled on top of one another, for example the F sharp-B
flat-D chord we hear in the right hand in bar 11 and its three sibling chords
which follow at two-bar intervals. As the piece goes on, the left hand rocks
sadly back and forth between bass notes of B flat and A. In the final section
of the piece, three ascending phrases in the right hand slowly cover the
space of an octave.
These three phrases strongly evoke the opening of Wagner’s Tristan
prelude with its sequentially rising phrases over similar harmonies. Having
come to a half-close on F sharp in the treble, the note which we would
expect to lead on to a close in G minor, Liszt then supplies the expected
chord in the right hand but undermines it in the left with an ambiguous
chord with A in the bass and another pile of thirds of various kinds on top of
it. Throughout the piece, there is a sense of things not quite stated, of things
hovering nearby in the dark (see the bass tremolos), of things trying to rise
up and disappear. The refusal to end the piece with a gesture of closure
makes it seem touchingly modern and reminds one of Liszt’s remark that
his only remaining ambition was to ‘hurl my lance into the boundless
realms of the future’.

BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824–1884)

38. Piano Trio in G minor, op. 15
Smetana was caught up in the struggle to fight for the rights of Czech
culture at a time when Bohemia was ruled by the Austrian authorities. In his
youth he was politically active, joining in with anti-government
demonstrations; later, as the conductor of the orchestra at the newly
established national theatre, he championed the cause of Czech opera.
Smetana grew up speaking German, and had to make a determined effort to
learn Czech when he got the national theatre job. One of the viola players in
the theatre orchestra was Dvořák, who was to succeed Smetana as the
leading Czech composer.
As a young pianist, Smetana had been praised for his performances of
the piano music of Chopin and Liszt, and his own piano music owed a great
deal to those composers. Their influence can also be heard in one of his
greatest works, his Piano Trio in G minor, op. 15. The circumstances of its
composition were tragic. Smetana had three young daughters; in 1854 the
second of them, Gabriela, died of tuberculosis and in 1855 his eldest
daughter Bedřiška died of scarlet fever at the age of four and a half.
Bedřiška had shown musical talent very early, and Smetana was devoted to
her. He was shattered by her death, and that same year he composed the
Piano Trio in her memory.
The influence of Chopin, Liszt and the Schumanns (especially Robert’s
piano quartet and Clara’s piano trio) can be felt in Smetana’s music, but his
piano trio is distinctively Czech and has an expressive grandeur all its own.
All three movements are in the key of G minor, which clearly had a special
meaning for him. The passionate tone is set straightaway when the first
movement begins with a declamation by the solo violin; Smetana asks for it
to be played on the G string, the violin’s lowest string, so the violinist must
strive to play in the higher regions of that string, giving the sound an ardent,
strained quality. The other two players have to match this level of emotional
intensity when they join in a few bars later.
The opening theme, heated though it is, seems to be a cousin of the
mournful descending chromatic figure we know from Baroque laments, for
example the repeating bass line of Purcell’s ‘When I am laid in earth’ from
Dido and Aeneas. By contrast, the second theme is derived from a folk song
that little Bedřiška loved. Here, its appearance is hesitant, as though its
phrases cannot easily be made to link up to one another. In the middle of the
movement it is the turn of the piano to have a solo passage, this time clearly
inspired by Chopin’s piano style.
The anxious second movement with its unison opening theme may have
taken a leaf out of Robert Schumann’s book: the equivalent movement of
Schumann’s E flat Piano Quartet (also in G minor) has the players in
unison. The theme of the first movement is woven into this scherzo theme.
There are two ‘trios’, here called ‘Alternativo’. The first of them has a
puzzling touch of salon music, at least to our ears, but the second is a stern
march in 3/4 time, marked ‘Maestoso’ (majestic) with a distinct suggestion
of a funeral march.
The Finale, marked Presto, alternates episodes of wild, determined
dancing with soulful, songlike episodes, almost like the ‘Dumka’ form later
used by Dvořák. (Indeed the rhetorical opening of Dvořák’s ‘Dumky’ Piano
Trio has always seemed to me to be inspired by the opening of the Smetana
Trio.) The piano begins the main theme. It features pairs of repeated notes
in the treble, which fight against triplet rhythms in the left hand. It has been
suggested that this theme was inspired by a similar repeated-note theme in
the finale of Schubert’s E flat Piano Trio. Outwardly this may be so, but the
atmosphere of Schubert’s piece is delicate and otherworldly, whereas
Smetana’s version is highly charged and dramatic. The movement opens
with a desperate gallop which brings to mind the classic Dance of Death,
and specifically Schubert’s Erlkönig. Schubert’s song tells of a father riding
through the woods at night with his young child and meeting a spirit who
tries to entice the child away to his fairy realm; when they arrive home, the
boy is dead in his father’s arms.
Central to the movement is a lyrical section whose theme is related to
the opening theme. This is passed from cellist to violinist and finally to the
pianist, who takes time to decorate it in Chopinesque style. After a return of
the wild dance, the lyrical theme returns on cello, this time accompanied by
a dreamily sentimental piano part (a bit like the way Liszt decorates his
lyrical theme when it returns near the end of his Piano Sonata), which needs
careful handling in order to conjure up the right atmosphere of ‘looking
back’.
The finale flows onwards with various ruminations on the two main
themes including an unexpected funeral march. It is swept aside by a burst
of energy as the lyrical theme returns in triumphant mode, but is it really
triumphant, or a grieving father’s desperate hope that love will be stronger
than death? Sure enough, the energy ebbs away and we realise that the grim
dance is still going on in the distance. But it loses its way, and after a bar of
silent perplexity Smetana gathers up his forces for three final bars of
affirmation, possibly just too late in the story to be entirely convincing.

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)

39. Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor, op. 15
Brahms’s first piano concerto, his first major orchestral work, began life in
1854 as a sonata for two pianos, then was briefly reconceived as a
symphony in four movements. Composing it at the piano, however, Brahms
came to feel that the piano itself was central to the conception. Retaining
only the first movement from his original material, he discarded the other
movements, wrote two new ones and presented the work in 1858 as a
concerto in three movements for piano and orchestra.
The background to the piece throws some light on its character. In 1853,
when he was only twenty years old, Brahms was introduced to Robert and
Clara Schumann, who took to him immediately. On looking through
Brahms’s portfolio of compositions, Schumann recognised his genius and
hurried to inform the world about it with a generous article in the influential
magazine Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. (‘And now he has arrived, this young
blood, at whose cradle Graces and heroes kept watch.’) This seemed like
the happiest beginning to a friendship. But Robert Schumann had been
struggling with depression, and in 1854 he attempted suicide. From then
until his death two years later he was confined to the asylum at Endenich,
and Clara was discouraged from visiting him. Brahms visited him a number
of times, however, and Schumann’s letters often mention how fond he was
of this gifted young man. In Schumann’s absence, Brahms was a great
support to Clara, helping her to focus on music as much as she could in the
circumstances.
During this same period Brahms played piano concertos in several
concerts. He played Beethoven’s fourth and fifth concertos, and Mozart’s
concertos in D minor, K466, and in C minor, K491. As Brahms must have
spent considerable time preparing these works for public performance, it
seems natural that they should have found their way into the bloodstream of
his own D minor piano concerto. For example, the way the soloist enters
quietly after an impressive orchestral tutti is characteristic of those two
Mozart concertos. And the heroic style of piano writing in certain passages
is surely influenced by Beethoven, Brahms’s hero.
Schumann’s music too must have been in Brahms’s mind. Perhaps one
should not try to use amateur psychology on abstract music, but it is
interesting to note that Schumann’s music often includes themes which rise
up in pitch and fall back as if defeated (a tendency which seems to become
more exaggerated in his later years, for example in the G minor piano trio,
where reaching up and falling back are almost ‘the themes’). By contrast,
many of the themes in Brahms’s D minor concerto (e.g. the opening bars)
are of an energetically upward-reaching character. Is it fanciful to feel that
he was gathering up his forces to be as positive as possible, to defy fate
with creative optimism?
The concerto was finished in 1858, and in January 1859 Brahms was the
soloist at the premiere in Hanover. It was coolly received by the audience.
At the second performance, in Leipzig, the audience couldn’t even bring
themselves to clap. ‘The hissing was a bit much,’ Brahms recalled sadly
(although the audience’s behaviour may have had something to do with the
factional ‘wars’ going on between supporters of ‘conservative’ music – the
Schumanns, Mendelssohn and Brahms – and the ‘new’ music of Liszt and
Wagner). Things didn’t go much better when Clara Schumann performed it,
with Brahms conducting. Clara wrote in her diary, ‘The joy of the work
overcame me . . . but the public understood nothing and felt nothing.’
Gradually, however, performances were more warmly received, and the
concerto made its way to where it is today, a revered classic of the
repertoire. (I remember being told by my piano teacher that it was ‘not a
suitable concerto for a girl to play’. Most record companies and concert
promoters seem to have agreed, but that attitude too is changing.)
The jagged opening of the D minor concerto is striking partly because it
is in the ‘wrong’ key of B flat major (though admittedly with timpani and
other instruments asserting the bass note D). The piece begins with a stormy
and defiant orchestral episode, almost like the first scene of an opera. When
the soloist enters, it is as though a curtain has risen to reveal the main
character sitting at a window, lost in thought. The orchestra has been
assertive and vigorous, but the piano is melancholy and inward. After
developing this and other lyrical motifs, we arrive at the second main
theme, a dignified chorale in F major played by the piano alone. In mood
this anticipates the slow movement, and we meet the theme again in the
finale. This stately theme is taken up by the orchestra, leading to a duet
between piano and horn (an instrument which had sentimental associations
for Brahms, because his father played it professionally and he had played it
himself as a boy). The jagged opening theme returns, setting in motion a
huge development which pulls the music through some distant keys and
some fiery exchanges. At the reprise the chorale theme returns, this time in
D major, and it seems as though there may be a tranquil ending, but no: the
darkness of D minor finally prevails.
 In the slow movement, the sense of the pianist as a contemplative figure
in the midst of turbulent forces is redoubled. In 1854, Brahms had told
Clara Schumann, ‘I think of you going to the concert hall like a high
priestess going to the altar’. When he was writing the piano concerto, he
told her he was ‘painting a tender portrait of you’ in the slow movement. It
has never been explained why Brahms wrote the words ‘Benedictus qui
venit in nomine Domini!’ (Blessed is he who comes in the name of the
Lord!) in his manuscript score under the violin melody which opens the
movement. Clara herself noted the ‘churchy’ atmosphere of the music. Was
it first intended for a religious work such as a Mass, or even a Requiem (for
Schumann?) Or was it a solemn declaration of his devotion to Clara?
Whatever the thinking behind it, the movement is one of Brahms’s loveliest.
The piano gives the impression of deep meditation which sometimes works
loose into dreamy passages of melodic decoration where any sense of a
regular beat is suspended.
The final Rondo opens with a vigorous theme recalling Brahms’s
‘Hungarian’ music; one can almost imagine it being played by a gypsy
fiddler. In fact, in a skilful bit of thematic transformation, the tune is
derived from the quiet F major ‘chorale’ theme we heard in the middle of
the first movement. And is it completely coincidental that the two themes
share an outline with the famous melody of Robert Schumann’s piano piece
‘Träumerei’ from Kinderszenen?
In this movement, Brahms once more takes inspiration from Beethoven,
in this case the Rondo finale of his Piano Concerto no. 3, whose structure
Brahms follows. There is a second theme, mellower in character and
apparently new, yet it too is derived from the ‘chorale’ theme. Even the
lyrical theme played in B flat major by the strings in the centre of the
movement seems to allude to it, as does the spiky little fugue theme which
follows. Brahms pays only lip-service to the conventional cadenza with a
few rhetorical flourishes for the soloist, as if he is eager to get on to the
business of recalling all the themes for a final display. This includes the
relaxation of the Rondo theme into a perky little bit of ‘wind band’ music in
the major key. The atmosphere lightens, the piano dispatches an even
briefer cadenza, and the concerto ends in an affirmative D major.
Twenty years later, Brahms went on to write an even more majestic
piano concerto, the B flat major concerto. The two are wonderful
illustrations of Brahms in his youth and in his maturity. But even if the
second concerto is the more compositionally complex, there is an
unsurpassable sense of power and passion in the first concerto, an
astonishing achievement for a twenty-five-year-old.

40. Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34

Brahms created a marvellous body of chamber music with piano – duo
sonatas, piano duets and duos, piano trios and piano quartets – but perhaps
his crowning work in this genre is his Piano Quintet of 1864. It began life
as a string quintet with the same instrumentation as the famous quintet by
Schubert, who was clearly an inspiration. Brahms’s great friend Clara
Schumann read through the score and reported enthusiastically, ‘What inner
strength! What richness!’ but his other touchstone, the violinist Joseph
Joachim, was not convinced by the scoring. ‘The instrumentation is not
energetic enough to my ears . . . the sound is almost helplessly thin for the
musical thought. Then again for long stretches everything lies too thickly.’
Brahms laboured on; he recast the work as a sonata for two pianos, but this
time Clara Schumann was unconvinced: ‘The very first time I played it I
had the impression of a transcribed work . . . Please, dear Johannes, do
agree just this time, and rework the piece once more.’ Brahms always had a
soft spot for his two-piano version, but he took Clara’s advice and rescored
the work for piano and string quartet. This third version was a brilliant
solution: the piano challenges the string quartet to match its percussive
strength, and the strings inspire the piano with their singing lines. His
friend, the conductor Hermann Levi, congratulated him: ‘out of the
monotony of the two pianos a model of tonal beauty has arisen’.
A pianist exploring the piano quintet repertoire will notice that the role
of the piano varies quite considerably between works. Sometimes it is
gently integrated amongst the strings (Schubert’s ‘Trout’ or Dvořák’s piano
quintet), while at other times it is like a concerto soloist (César Franck).
Sometimes the piano’s role is to provide texture and rhythmic life under
melodic lines played by the string quartet (Fauré). Brahms’s quintet has
maintained a leading role amongst quintets partly because the piano writing
is so varied (hero/commentator/companion) and because it has such a big
emotional range, from dark and stormy to tender and intimate. In fact, much
of the piano part is written to be played quietly, which comes as a surprise
for those used to the quintet’s reputation for grandeur. Certainly it is grand,
but the grandeur is more than a matter of volume.
Brahms venerated Beethoven, whose methods of composition he often
tried to follow. Throughout the quintet one can hear Beethovenian
techniques of unifying material – for example the way the opening theme,
in crotchets and quavers, is suddenly speeded up by the piano after the first
pause into semiquavers for what feels like a mere transition passage, but is
actually the first ‘rhythmic transformation’ of the piece. As Beethoven does,
Brahms likes to tease the listener by making them wonder where the main
beats are – for example in the passage leading up to the development, and
the development itself, where Brahms moves around short phrases and
fragments of the main themes, casting doubt on where the downbeat is. It
wasn’t only Beethoven who had prompted Brahms to think about ways of
shifting the bar line, or appearing to. Brahms had a library of early music
scores – from Palestrina to Bach, Handel and Heinrich Schütz – which he
studied, often marking instances of where the composer had implied a
phrase in triple time cutting across a duple-time beat, or vice versa. It’s
obvious in Brahms’s own works that he adores straightforward two-against-
three rhythms. Quite apart from the fun of their effect, they are an aspect of
his love of ambiguity, so characteristic of his piano quintet with its constant
veering between sunshine and shadow (partly a Schubertian influence).
Again in the slow movement Brahms fashions new themes out of old:
for example, the wonderful opening theme on piano, which is transformed
into the ardent second theme, in E major, played by second violin and viola.
When the opening theme returns, this time played by the first violin and
cello, the piano accompanies them with a murmured recollection of the
quiet offbeats played at the start of the first movement development. A
touch of rhythmic ambiguity continues to the very end of the movement,
little sighing phrases being passed around in such a way that the main beats
become delightfully vague.
The third movement is called ‘Scherzo’ but if it is a joke, it is a grim
one. This is the most physically taxing movement, all five players entering a
trial of strength. Pianists familiar with the work will either fear or relish the
famous moment when the angrily excited repeated-note figure is brought
back fortissimo with the piano playing ‘on the beat’ in the left hand and ‘off
the beat’ in octaves in the right, following this with dramatic rising chords
played in syncopation, a semiquaver before the main beats. The ‘Trio’
section introduces a broad and more relaxed theme in C major, but a
restlessly rhythmic bass reminds us that we still have work ahead of us in
the form of a huge reprise of the scherzo. At the end of the Scherzo Brahms
hammers out the defiant falling-semitone, in this case D flat-C, which
Schubert so memorably used at the end of his String Quintet.
The Finale opens with a ‘poco sostenuto’ slow introduction which has a
different character to all the rest. Its shifting, searching harmonies almost
seem like a parallel of Haydn’s depiction of chaos at the start of The
Creation. Out of the confusion emerges a melodic fragment which turns out
to herald the theme of the last movement proper. The introduction’s
atmosphere of repressed power is almost too strong for what it introduces,
the rustic dance theme of the ‘Allegro non troppo’. However, the dance
theme (again with offbeat rhythms in the bass) is another example of
ambiguity, for it veers between wistfulness, cheerfulness and angry
outbursts, all using the same thematic material. Dance episodes alternate
with contrasting sections where a melancholy theme slides through
chromatic key changes, perhaps alluding to the mysterious mood of the
Introduction. Finally the dance theme is transformed into a fast, scurrying
version in 6/8 time and we sense that the end is approaching. Brahms
cannot resist a stern fugato section in which he combines his relaxed second
theme (now in the home key) with the scurrying first theme. Offbeats and
onbeats compete to the very end in the coda. It ends unexpectedly with a
frantic downward arpeggio from the strings, overhanging the piano’s final
chords by two quavers in a final touch of ambiguity.

41. Sonata for Piano and Violin in G major, op. 78

In 1853, when he was only nineteen, Brahms met the violinist Joseph
Joachim, who was two years older. They became lifelong friends, and it was
Joachim who introduced Brahms to Robert and Clara Schumann. Joachim
was also a composer, and Brahms often sought his advice about his own
compositions. The two of them wrote a ‘manifesto’ against the
‘progressive’ school of Liszt and Wagner, which they felt was taking
German music in a regrettable direction. Joachim’s own playing, which
influenced a whole generation of violinists in Germany and beyond, was
said to be ‘anti-virtuosic’, direct and pure with sparing use of vibrato and
with the emphasis on conveying the music rather than drawing attention to
the performer. This very much appealed to Brahms, who wrote all his great
violin music, including the violin concerto and the sonatas with piano, for
Joachim.
It is worth noting that even in music inspired by a violinist (or cellist or
clarinettist), Brahms described his duo sonatas as being ‘for pianoforte and
violin’. As a composer-pianist, he naturally perceived the piano as being at
the root of things, as did Mozart and Beethoven who also named the piano
first when describing their duo sonatas.
When Schumann first heard Brahms play through some of his works at
the piano in the Schumann household in 1853, he mentioned that he had
heard some ‘sonatas for violin and piano’, but Brahms did not publish such
a sonata until 1879, by which time he might have abandoned the earlier
attempts or revised them completely, as was his way. In any event, the first
sonata to see the light of day was the G major, op. 78, one of his loveliest
works. It was based on one of his own songs, ‘Regenlied’ (Rain Song), no.
3 of the op. 59 set of Lieder und Gesänge, a setting of a poem by his old
friend Klaus Groth. ‘Pour, rain, pour down, awaken in me again the dreams
I dreamt in childhood, when the water foamed in the sand.’ Brahms told his
friend Theodor Billroth that the piece needed ‘a nice soft rainy evening to
give the proper mood’. Billroth recognised the quotation from Brahms’s
song about the rain, which appears most fully in the last movement, but was
quick to realise that ‘the whole sonata is like an echo of the song, or a
fantasy about it’.
The appearance of the score is surprisingly like the look of a Mozart
sonata for piano and violin, and seems to suggest that Brahms is in the
tradition of Mozart as much as of Beethoven, with whom he is most often
compared. Just as Mozart does in his sonatas, Brahms uses the violin, the
treble line of the piano and the bass line of the piano as three lines
juxtaposed in different ways – violin in duet with piano left hand, the
pianist’s two hands in duet with one another, all three lines interweaving,
and so on, in the spirit of true conversation. The writing is lithe and
transparent, more like a line drawing than an oil painting, and not at all the
heavy or pompous kind of music sometimes associated with Brahms. At the
head of the score Brahms has noted, ‘Composed in the summer months
1878–79 in Pörtschach’. This was a village on the shores of the Wörthersee
in southern Austria where Brahms wrote some of his most tranquil music.
Not until the third movement do we hear the whole ‘Rain Song’
quotation, but the characteristic dotted rhythm of its first three repeated
notes actually opens the sonata, in a gentle and sunny G major and marked
‘mezza voce’ (half-voice). The Hungarian violinist Sándor Végh had an
unforgettable way of demonstrating to his students how to play this theme
with its little rest or ‘breath’ between the first two notes – a graceful looping
gesture of the bow, brimming with secret rhythmic life. Before long Brahms
is indulging his love of cross-rhythm, for example dividing the six-crotchet
bars into two groups of three in the piano part while the violin plays three
groups of two. Melody follows melody in effortless sequence, the two
instruments exchanging comments and roles, one moment leading and the
next accompanying. Even in the stormy development, where the tempo of
their exchanges heats up, the give and take is still remarkably well-balanced
and friendly.
The slow movement has a direct association with the Schumann family.
When Brahms was composing this sonata, his twenty-five-year-old godson
Felix, son of Robert and Clara, was fatally ill with tuberculosis. Brahms
sent Clara a note with, on the other side, a sketch of the slow movement’s
theme. ‘If you play what is on the reverse side quite slowly, it will tell you,
perhaps more clearly than I could in any other way, how sincerely I am
thinking of you and Felix,’ he wrote. It is one of Brahms’s chorale-like
themes, broad and solemn with what Clara might have called a ‘churchy’
atmosphere. Before long, the mood changes: the music goes into a minor
key and we hear a quiet ‘funeral march’, its dotted rhythm echoing the main
theme of the first movement (and of the finale, as we later find). Yet this
whispered march is marked ‘più andante’ (more flowing) as if it is
determined not to succumb to sadness, and the funereal phrases are
juxtaposed with tender hopeful replies. After a glorious reprise, the march
returns, this time at the slow tempo of the opening theme. At the very end of
the movement the piano part seems to be evoking the sound of French
horns, a sonority so dear to Brahms whose father, as already noted, was a
horn player. (He does the same thing at the end of the slow movement of his
F major cello sonata, where the ‘horn calls’ also seem to signify peace.)
 As the third movement begins, we move into a fragile and troubled G
minor with the extended quote from the ‘Regenlied’, though here the music
is faster than the song, giving it the character of a fleeting vision. The rapid
and delicate semiquavers in the pianist’s right hand conjure the sound of
rain, while in the bass the dotted-rhythm three-note figure now so familiar
to us from the first movement is cast in a darker light, almost like a fateful
warning. This twilight atmosphere is maintained for most of the movement,
the rain pattering on. In the middle, there is a wonderful re-encounter with
the E flat major ‘chorale’ theme of the slow movement, now sung by the
violin. Its Adagio tempo has been transfigured into Allegro, and it flies
along with hope in its heart.
The rain song theme returns, and the ‘warning’ motif in the piano’s left
hand arrives earlier in the phrase, as though the situation is more urgent.
But this sad atmosphere is short-lived. A slightly slower coda lifts the music
into G major, where we hear the ‘chorale’ for the last time. In the final
moments, Brahms closes the circle in a most poetic way. The three-note
dotted-rhythm motif with which the movement opened is passed upwards
from piano to violin until in the final moments the whole of the first
‘Regenlied’ phrase is heard on the violin, an octave higher, in slower notes,
and in the major key. We may hardly recognise it at a conscious level, but
we cannot help but feel its spirit of benediction.

42. Piano Pieces, op. 118

In his youth, Brahms wrote heroic, muscular and virtuosic music for the
piano, but the piano music of his last years is very different. It seems to
illustrate that kind of ‘late style’ often remarked upon in artists’ work – an
intensified simplicity, perhaps, and a mood which in Brahms’s music is
often described as ‘autumnal’. Like his music in general, however, its
atmosphere is not easily analysed. Is his late piano music more emotional,
or is it more intellectual? Is it inspired by earlier composers such as
Beethoven, or is it Romantic, or does it look forward to the developments of
the next generation? Is it simple music, or complicated? It seems to
combine all these elements.
When he wrote his last sets of piano pieces (op. 116–119) in 1892–3,
Brahms was spending the summer months in the Austrian resort of Bad
Ischl where he rented rooms in a peaceful villa in the hills. His mood was
serious; his friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg had died in 1892, and so had
his sister Elise. He had quarrelled with his oldest and dearest friend, Clara
Schumann, over the preparation of her late husband Robert Schumann’s D
minor Symphony for publication. Nevertheless, Clara was mollified when
Brahms sent her his op. 116 and 117 in 1892. ‘In these pieces I at last feel
musical life re-enter my soul, and I play once more with true devotion,’ she
wrote warmly. The following year, 1893, Brahms continued the series with
the six pieces of op. 118, which Clara described as ‘treasures’.
The six pieces comprise four Intermezzi, a Ballade and a Romance.
They are arranged in two groups of three with an underlying key structure
running through the six. The first in each group may be described as an
introduction in a minor key to the second of the group, which is in the
major version of the same key. The third of each group has a more noble,
heroic character. The underlying key scheme is A minor-A major-G minor;
F minor-F major-E flat minor, marking a descent in whole tones across the
interval of a tritone. Is this significant? If one listens to the whole set, there
is certainly a lingering sense of something gradually sinking or settling
down, though it is doubtful whether one can keep in mind the precise
sonority of A minor/major by the time one has got to the final one in E flat
minor. Nevertheless, it seems that although the titles of the pieces –
Intermezzo, Intermezzo, Ballade, Intermezzo, Romance, Intermezzo – may
seem to lack design, the order of the pieces is arranged with deliberation.
The year after they were written, Clara Schumann’s grandson Ferdinand
reported that Brahms, who was visiting them at the time, had told Clara that
he ‘no longer composed for the public, but only for himself’. Brahms had
gone on to say: ‘One composes until one’s fiftieth year. Then the creative
power begins to diminish . . . one must always bear this fact in mind.’
Fortunately, he was wrong about that; we know now, of course, that he
experienced an Indian summer of composition when he was in his sixties,
but it is interesting that he considered himself to be writing in a ‘private’
style. He no longer wrote overtly virtuoso piano music, but one still needs
an advanced technique to do justice to the nuances of feeling and to the
delicate tracery of inner voices. He had turned away from ‘public’ forms
and was exploring the combination of emotion and brevity. As Clara said,
there was ‘a wealth of feeling within the narrowest confines’.
 There is indeed a huge range of feeling, from the ardent sighing of the
first Intermezzo to the tender and lullaby-like second Intermezzo, the strong
vigorous rhythms of the Ballade, the fleeting shadows of the F minor
Intermezzo, the open harmonies and calm narrative of the Romance, and
finally the troubled and regretful Intermezzo in E flat minor, through whose
simple top lines we can easily see into the dark and turbulent depths below.
Despite the diversity of moods, there are some features common to all the
pieces: sadly drooping melodic phrases; frequent use of short-range
‘crescendo/diminuendo’ markings which seem to suggest deep sighs;
harmonies which seem unable to settle, as if unsure whether there is ground
beneath their feet. Intriguingly, although there is a pervasive sense of regret
or at least wistfulness, two of the minor-key pieces end with major
cadences, and five of the pieces end with an upward-reaching pattern of
notes over the final cadence, as though Brahms cannot bear to leave us too
downcast.
Although on the surface the op. 118 pieces may seem fuelled by
emotion, there are some extremely clever technical processes at work,
especially in the second group. For example, the Intermezzo in F minor is a
canon between the right and left hands, pursued in various ways through the
whole piece: canon at the octave in the opening section, inverted canon
when the hands move towards one another from different directions; in the
middle section, a more complicated canon at the octave, and in the final
section, a canon which is almost disguised by swirling triplets and
semiquavers. In the Romance, there is counterpoint which is turned upside
down: the obvious top line at the beginning has a counter-theme underneath
it, played in octaves in the ‘alto’ and ‘tenor’ lines. Eight bars later, the roles
are reversed. The underneath line is now on top, and vice versa. In the
central Allegretto, the melody and its decoration are derived from that
‘underneath’ line.
Most surprisingly of all, the sorrowful theme of the final Intermezzo,
which seems purely poetic, is based on the mediaeval plainchant of the Dies
Irae, the Latin hymn for the dead which is part of the Requiem Mass. In its
monastic setting this is a stark and powerful chant. Brahms transforms it
into something else with his washes of bass arpeggios running up and down
diminished-chord harmonies and his sad duets between treble voices
singing the theme in thirds or sixths. In the middle section comes an
unexpected change of tone: we almost seem to hear the arrival of a ghostly
cavalcade bringing hope and strength. This builds up to a huge climax on a
very emotional and undeniably Romantic dominant seventh chord marked
‘sff’ (very loud and with emphasis), but its triumph is short-lived: only a bar
later the Dies Irae returns with its dark bass arpeggios, and the final
cadence remains in the minor key, suggesting that we have not been
reprieved.

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835–1921)

43. Piano Trio no. 2 in E minor, op. 92
To those who know Saint-Saëns as an easy-going composer who, in his own
words, ‘produced music as an apple tree produces apples’, his second piano
trio will come as a surprise. Right from the beginning it’s clear that this is
no mere entertainment but a serious work, conceived on a grand scale and
ardent in temperament. It also has one of his most challenging piano parts,
requiring a virtuoso technique.
During Saint-Saëns’s heyday, the French musical public was focused on
opera. Most people (then as now) found it hard to get interested in purely
instrumental music with no singers and no obvious plot. Chamber music
was felt to be the preserve of German and Austrian composers like
Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. Saint-Saëns did not agree, and in a
powerful defence of chamber music in the Journal de Musique of April
1877 he wrote: ‘People little acquainted with matters musical generally
believe that the most important events in musical life take place in the opera
house, and that instrumental music offers little of interest . . . In literature,
there is the Theatre, but there is also the Book, to which we must always
return, whatever the powerful attractions of the stage; in musical literature,
concert and chamber music represent the Book, with its special importance,
its solidity and its durability. It is only in the past few years that the truth of
this has begun to be understood in France.’
His first and second piano trios are separated by thirty years. The first is
a charming work written in 1863, but the second dates from 1892, by which
time he had become a grand old man of French music, somewhat cut off
from the modernist experiments of his younger colleagues. He had taken to
spending periods of time abroad, and the second piano trio was written in
Algeria. He knew its seriousness would come as a surprise, and in a
characteristically sardonic manner he wrote to his friend Charles Lecocq: ‘I
am working quietly away at a trio which I hope will drive to despair all
those unlucky enough to hear it. I shall need the whole summer to
perpetrate this atrocity; one must have a little fun somehow.’
What was the inspiration for this ‘atrocity’, about which he seemed to
feel a little sensitive? Something about its sweep and drama reminds one of
Tchaikovsky’s massive Piano Trio. The two composers had met and become
friends in 1875 when Saint-Saëns visited Moscow. In fact, one of their
meetings produced this captivating anecdote, recounted by Tchaikovsky’s
brother Modest:

It turned out that the two new friends had many likes and dislikes in
common, both in the sphere of music and in the other arts, too. In
particular, not only had they both been enthusiastic about ballet in
their youth, but they were also able to pull off splendid imitations of
ballerinas. And so on one occasion at the Conservatory, seeking to
flaunt their artistry before one another, they performed a whole
short ballet on the stage of the Conservatory’s auditorium: Galatea
and Pygmalion. The 40-year-old Saint-Saëns was Galatea and
interpreted, with exceptional conscientiousness, the role of a statue,
whilst the 35-year-old Tchaikovsky took on the role of Pygmalion.
Nikolai Rubinstein [pianist] stood in for the orchestra.
Unfortunately, apart from the three performers no one else was
present in the auditorium during this curious production.

Perhaps there was something about Saint-Saëns’s regard for Tchaikovsky

which gave a particular depth of feeling to this composition.
The trio is constructed in five movements in an almost symmetrical
design: the two outer movements are fast, working inwards to two lighter,
more graceful movements as nos. 2 and 4, with a slow movement in the
centre. The first movement, regarded as one of Saint-Saëns’s finest, is, as he
put it, ‘black with notes and black in mood’. The density of notes is
allocated to the pianist who takes responsibility for motoric drive and
energy while the string parts are charged with carrying forward the grand,
sweeping melodic phrases. If one only knows Saint-Saëns through the
entertaining vignettes of his Carnival of the Animals, the carefully built and
cumulative power of his design in this movement will take the breath away.
The second movement is a lilting ‘minuet’ in irregular five-time, which
might lead one to think ‘Aha! He got that from Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique
Symphony!’ were it not for the fact that Tchaikovsky wrote his Sixth
symphony the following year, so perhaps Saint-Saëns is the inspiration this
time. The central slow movement is quite short and tuneful, based on a
gracefully sinking melody which seems like a candid recollection of the
slow movement of Schumann’s own second piano trio (Schumann was a
favourite of Saint-Saëns’s). The fourth movement is another dance, a fast
and graceful waltz in 3/8 time, which could almost be one of Debussy’s
early works.
As well as being a splendid pianist Saint-Saëns was also a fine organist,
and in the fifth and final movement he seems to call upon the spirit and
repertoire of organ music, which so often uses fugal writing and grand
accumulations of sound intended to resonate around the building. This
movement is on the massive scale of the first movement. It opens in solemn
style with a fugal theme in octaves on the piano, and the fugal writing
intensifies in the middle of the movement when a new theme is combined
with the first. The tension is eased by a brief episode with a relaxed, lilting
theme which seems to recall the irregular dance rhythm of the second
movement. In the final section, Saint-Saëns transforms the opening theme
into an energetic passage of running semiquavers for all three instruments.
Saint-Saëns’s second trio has been described as the finest French piano
trio of the nineteenth century, yet commentators are often puzzled that it has
not become more of a cornerstone of the repertoire. The answer may lie in
the disproportionate difficulty of the piano part. On the one hand, the highly
virtuosic part gives the pianist the chance to contribute an abundance of
sparkle, texture, energy and rhythmic propulsion to the work. On the other,
it dooms the pianist to a great deal of prior practice and ongoing technical
challenge which may (and I speak from experience) make the pianist feel
unevenly burdened in the shared project of bringing the piece to life. Many
piano-based chamber works present some aspect of this problem, but Saint-
Saëns’s E minor Trio is a striking example.

MILY BALAKIREV (1837–1910)

44. Islamey: Oriental Fantasy, op. 18
For a long time, Islamey’s chief claim to fame was that it was one of the
most technically difficult piano pieces ever written. Ravel admitted that
when he wrote ‘Scarbo’, the fiendish last movement of Gaspard de la Nuit,
he was motivated partly by the desire to write ‘something more difficult
than Balakirev’s Islamey’.
Balakirev was an intriguing figure whose musical education came
through piano lessons, the cultured household of a wealthy patron who
introduced him to a wide range of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Glinka and
Chopin, and his own determination to teach himself how to compose. At
that time, the music conservatoires of Moscow and St Petersburg had not
yet been founded. When the conservatoires started up, Balakirev was a self-
made musician and felt suspicious of the idea of formal training. Despite his
love of Beethoven, he resented the influx of German tutors who staffed the
conservatoires and the institutionalised reverence for German composers.
And despite his love of Liszt and Chopin he felt that the lure of Western
European music should be resisted. Instead, he followed his mentor Glinka
in believing that a distinctively Russian music, based on folk songs and
dances from Russia’s many regions, should be cultivated. In 1848 Glinka
had kickstarted this nationalist movement with his orchestral piece
Kamarinskaya. It fuses folk music with classical forms by emulating a
traditional Russian folk dance where a single melody is repeated over and
over with energetic variations. Its simplicity and irresistible pulse were
profoundly influential. Tchaikovsky, one of the many inspired by Glinka’s
tribute to folk music, said that Kamarinskaya was the basis of the Russian
school of symphonic music ‘as the whole oak is in the acorn’.
In 1869 Balakirev followed in Glinka’s footsteps when he wrote
Islamey, one of the only works he wrote swiftly (Balakirev was well known
to take ages over the process of composition). It was written for the pianist
Nikolai Rubinstein, who in the period leading up to its premiere practised it
every day in the Moscow Conservatoire, his progress eagerly monitored by
staff and students who (as Tchaikovsky reported) argued about the merits of
the work; some were in raptures, others found it ‘a curious monster’.
Balakirev had twice been on holidays to the Caucasus region, which
only became part of the Russian Empire in 1864 after half a century of war.
Because the Caucasus had once been ruled by Ottomans, Mongols and
Persians, it had an exotic ‘Eastern’ appeal for many visitors. While he was
there, Balakirev let it be known he was interested in folk music. ‘I made the
acquaintance of a Circassian prince,’ he later told a friend, ‘who frequently
came to me and played folk tunes on his instrument, that was something
like a violin. One of them, called Islamey, a dance-tune, pleased me
extraordinarily and with a view to the work I had in mind on Tamara [a
symphonic poem] I began to arrange it for the piano. The second theme was
communicated to me in Moscow by an Armenian actor, who came from the
Crimea and is, as he assured me, well known among the Crimean Tatars.’
These two themes, one a whirling dance and the other a languorous
song, are woven together in Islamey. The principle is the same as in
Glinka’s Kamarinskaya: the dance theme is repeated many times, with
elaborate variation. A short Lisztian transition ushers in the gorgeous
romantic song that forms the ‘slow movement’, but it is not long before
even this tune is bombarded with arpeggios. In the third section, both
themes are ecstatically recalled for further acrobatics. There is little
‘development’ of the conventional kind; rather, the themes are decorated
with increasing textural complexity. The pianist’s hands must fly about the
keyboard with nearly incredible rapidity: repeated notes, double octaves,
jumping chords, elaborate inner parts, left-hand arpeggios in octaves, and
descants of devilish intricacy pile upon one another. Because the underlying
form is simple, the piece may seem more of an athletic challenge and a test
of reflexes than anything else. It is beyond the grasp (or appetite) of most
pianists, and even Balakirev, a virtuoso pianist himself, admitted there were
passages he couldn’t manage. Those who have mastered it would probably
agree that it remains an edge-of-the-seat experience in performance, but
there is no denying that it is a mesmerising spectacle, guaranteed to fire up
an audience.
 GEORGES BIZET (1838–1875)
45. Jeux d’Enfants, op. 22, for Piano Duet
Georges Bizet was an extravagantly gifted French composer who died in his
thirties shortly after the premiere of his opera Carmen. Due to problems
during rehearsals (orchestra and singers complained their parts were too
difficult, and the management was concerned about the immorality of the
plot) the premiere did not go particularly well, and Bizet died without
knowing that Carmen would become one of the world’s most popular
operas.
Not long before Carmen, he composed the piano duet which made his
name amongst pianists: Jeux d’Enfants (Children’s Games, 1871),
originally a set of ten and later of twelve pieces depicting childhood scenes
and games. His inspiration was probably the news that he was going to
become a father: his son Jacques (later to be a friend of the writer Marcel
Proust) was born in 1872. In writing evocations of childhood, Bizet inspired
a number of compositions by French composers of the next generation:
Fauré’s Dolly Suite for piano duet, Debussy’s Children’s Corner for piano,
Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) for piano duet. Bizet himself was
probably inspired by Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes of Childhood). At
the time he was writing Jeux d’Enfants, Bizet was working on a piano duet
arrangement of Schumann’s studies for pedal-piano, and Schumann’s music
must have been in his mind. He does share with Schumann a very special
quality of guilelessness.
Bizet may have been writing about childhood, but he did not simplify
the means used to portray it; Jeux d’Enfants is technically demanding for
both players. For some reason, many of the pieces are in keys with many
sharps and flats, difficult to sight-read (and the Durand Edition complicates
matters by making sharps and naturals look quite similar). He clearly had a
light, transparent sonority in mind; the majority of pieces begin either
‘piano’ or ‘pianissimo’. Very few indications of pedal are given, except in
the first piece, and he specifies ‘leggiero’ (light) or ‘leggierissimo’ (very
light) in six of the pieces. These instructions increase the technical
difficulties, first of all because both players need to have a light touch at
their command (rapid quiet playing is often harder than doing the same
thing loudly) and secondly because a dry, unpedalled texture shows up
every little flaw. Moreover, there is no point in one player mastering the art
of light, quiet playing if the other will not.
One of the trickiest is the first piece, ‘L’Escarpolette’ (The Swing). Very
quiet arpeggios swing up from the bass and down from the treble, and
eventually one of Bizet’s irresistible tunes appears in the middle, wending
its way through several keys before melting away to leave the arpeggios
still swinging back and forth. This may have been inspired by Fragonard’s
painting of the same name, though Bizet’s version seems more innocent.
‘La Toupie’ (The Top) uses simple means to create a lovely sense of
spinning and wobbling. In ‘La Poupée – Berceuse’ (The Doll – Cradle
Song) he writes ‘naivement’ for the treble player’s lilting melody. ‘Les
Chevaux de Bois’ (The Wooden Horses) is a gentle good-natured canter,
inspired perhaps by Schumann’s ‘Ritter von Steckenpferd’ (Knight of the
Stick Horse). ‘Le Volant’ (The Shuttlecock) portrays the graceful flight of
the shuttlecock over the net in a manner which distantly recalls Schumann’s
piano writing in ‘Vogel als Prophet’ (Prophet Bird) from Waldszenen.
‘Trompette et Tambour’ (Trumpet and Drum) is a delightful march, of toy
soldiers rather than real ones, which could be an interlude from Carmen.
‘Les Bulles de Savon’ (Soap Bubbles) challenges the treble player to be
light and airy in music which rather recalls the old-fashioned ballet class
and its would-be ballerinas. ‘Les Quatres Coins’ (The Four Corners) refers
to a game in which children are positioned in corners of the room and have
to rush to exchange places at a signal; the music seems to show moments of
preparation followed by dashing about. ‘Colin-Maillard – nocturne’ (Blind
Man’s Buff – Nocturne) is harder to understand – rather than showing a
blindfolded child hastening forward to catch someone, it seems to portray
the tentative movements of someone feeling lost in the dark behind the
blindfold. ‘Saute-Mouton’ (Leapfrog) is a busy and boisterous game. (Who
knows why French children play at leaping like sheep while English
children leap like frogs?)
‘Petit Mari, Petite Femme’ (Little Husband, Little Wife) is one of the
most lovable pieces. Bizet’s gift for charming melody is on full display as
with the simplest of rhythms (mainly quavers and crotchets) he shows us
children playing at being grown-up and ‘keeping house’; the ‘molto
espressivo’ tune could almost be an aria from Carmen. Finally ‘Le Bal –
Galop’ (The Ball – Gallop) evokes a popular dance often played at the end
of a ball in nineteenth-century Paris. Everyone of all ages was invited to
join in as best they could, which here seems to mean a bit of stamping and
jostling as well as expert dancing. In the last fortissimo bars Bizet writes
‘furioso’, which is surely a joke, for the mood could hardly be more festive.
Bizet’s death at the age of thirty-seven was a huge loss to music. He had
the gift of melody, the art of expressing himself lucidly, and the skill of
using adventurous harmonies with a light touch and a sparing hand. One
can only imagine what he might have written had he lived into the twentieth
century.

MODEST MUSSORGSKY (1839–1881)

46. Pictures at an Exhibition
Modest Mussorgsky was one of the so-called ‘Mighty Handful’ of Russian
composers whose aim was to create a national style of Russian music based
on folk song and the rhythms of Russian speech. Trained as a soldier, he
was on duty at a military hospital when he happened to meet the composer
Borodin, who worked as a research chemist. (It’s intriguing to imagine how
an on-duty soldier and a chemist got talking about music.) Borodin
introduced him to a circle of composers, several of whom were not formally
trained in music but were determined to fight their way towards musical
expression. One of them, Balakirev, taught Mussorgsky how classical form
worked by playing piano duet arrangements with him of symphonies by
Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, stopping to talk about how the works
were put together (if only it were possible to listen in on their
conversations!). Mussorgsky became so enthralled that he decided to devote
his life to composing music, and luckily his family’s finances enabled him
to do so. He developed a style which was notable for its uncompromising
directness and unconventional harmonies. ‘Speaking out boldly, frankly,
point-blank – that is my aim,’ Mussorgsky stated.
Mussorgsky was a friend of the artist and architect Victor Hartmann,
who like him was motivated to capture characteristic scenes of Russian life
and pay tribute to the art and literature of the Russian people. It was a great
shock to Mussorgsky when the thirty-nine-year-old Hartmann died
suddenly of an aneurysm in 1873. An exhibition of Hartmann’s drawings
and paintings was organised, and Mussorgsky lent two which he had at
home. The exhibition inspired Mussorgsky to compose a set of solo piano
pieces called Pictures at an Exhibition, based on Hartmann’s works. They
were quickly sketched and remained unpublished until five years after
Mussorgsky’s death, when his friend and fellow composer Rimsky-
Korsakov tried to put the manuscript into some sort of order for a first
edition. Even then, the Pictures were rarely performed until the middle of
the twentieth century. The music-loving public became aware of them
largely through other composers’ orchestrations, particularly when Ravel
did his unsurpassed orchestration of them in 1922.
This in turn provoked interest in the piano original. Many people were
surprised to discover how bold the piano writing is. Even on the page the
music looks stark and sparsely scored in many of the movements. There are
no indications of where to use the pedal. The hands often move together
playing the same rhythm in octaves or block chords. The effect is of strong
line drawings done by someone who has no interest in softening the outline
or using the graceful shading and decorative effects which came naturally
to, say, Liszt. Mussorgsky’s is not ‘piano writing’ in the traditional sense; it
is almost as though he used the piano mainly as a way of getting these notes
down on paper. Clearly he had a vivid vision of what he wanted to convey.
One of his many imaginative touches is to portray himself walking
through the Exhibition in a series of stately ‘Promenades’. The first begins
the work, and the others are interspersed between the pieces, so that we can
envisage him moving from one painting to the next. ‘My physiognomy is
evident in the interludes,’ Mussorgsky said, and by that he was perhaps
referring to the randomly alternating bars of five and six crotchets, which
give the impression of a portly person (as he was) waddling slightly. Over
the opening Promenade theme he writes ‘nel modo russico, senza
allegrezza’ (in the Russian style, without cheerfulness). The theme is a
loose variant of a Russian folk song (‘Glory to the Sun’) he had used in the
coronation scene of his opera Boris Godunov; interestingly, Beethoven had
used the same folk song in the scherzo of his E minor string quartet, op. 59
no. 2. It was commissioned by Count Razumowsky, the Russian
ambassador to Vienna, who perhaps asked Beethoven to use this Russian
tune.
The first picture is ‘Gnomus’, which refers to Hartmann’s design for a
strange-looking nutcracker for the Christmas tree at the St Petersburg
Artists’ Club in 1869. The nutcracker was in the form of a gnome with
crooked legs. Mussorgsky could clearly visualise the way this gnome would
move; rapid, lurching movements and weird stalking episodes, almost like
the way Frankenstein is portrayed in early films, and with sinister trills in
the left hand, over which the gnome lumbers towards us.
A gentler version of the Promenade, now with the theme in the bass,
takes us to no. 2, ‘Il Vecchio Castello’ (‘The Old Castle’), the title of a
painting Hartmann did on his travels in Italy. This is one of Mussorgsky’s
most lyrical numbers, a gentle lilting dance of the ‘siciliano’ style in several
verses with a haunting, world-weary theme over a drone bass. Italian it is
certainly not – this is a very Russian castle.
A brief snippet of the Promenade, in a new key, leads on to no. 3,
‘Tuileries (Children quarrelling after play)’, inspired by Hartmann’s
painting of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris which he visited as a young man.
Mussorgsky makes great use of the interval of a falling third, so evocative
of the melodious way that children call one another’s names from a
distance. Scurrying figures dash about the park, and in the middle there is a
more introverted episode, perhaps portraying a child who has been left out
of the games. No promenade separates this from the shockingly loud
‘Oxcart’, a painting of a heavy Polish wagon pulled by oxen. Mussorgsky
uses the same key of G sharp minor which he chose for ‘The Old Castle’. In
very simple repetitive rhythms, he conjures up vividly the wagon with the
stoically trudging animals whose road is very long.
Now we hear a differently harmonised and smoother version of the
Promenade, indicating a more contemplative mood. It’s interrupted by a
cheeky ‘chirp’ which alerts us to the arrival of no. 5, ‘Ballet of the Chicks in
their Shells’. This was a costume design by Hartmann for a ballet to be
danced by the children of the Imperial Russian Ballet School. ‘Canary
chicks, enclosed in eggs as in suits of armour. Instead of a head-dress,
canary heads, put on like helmets, down to the neck’, the exhibition
catalogue clarified. Mussorgsky charmingly calls it a ‘scherzino’, a little
scherzo or joke. Most of it is marked to be played very quietly, and it is
easy to imagine the miniature fracas going on among the eggshells. In the
trio section (yet quieter), trills seem to evoke the fluttering of tiny wings.
Without an intervening Promenade, we now find ourselves in a very
different world, ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle. Two Polish Jews, one
rich, the other poor’. This portrait has been extensively discussed because
of its implied anti-Semitism, which in fact was common in Russia at the
time. When Hartmann visited the Jewish ghetto in the Polish town of
Sandomierz he had done two separate paintings of elderly men, one rich,
one poor. Both are sympathetically portrayed. Mussorgsky combines them
into one portrait in which their fortunes are contrasted; first we hear the
pompous tones of the rich man, who sings or speaks in an exotic-sounding
scale. Then we hear the stuttering, ceaseless pleading or pestering of the
poor man, before the two are juxtaposed in a way that suggests that the rich
man shouts down his needy companion. It is difficult to gauge the tone of
this piece, which today makes for uncomfortable listening.
Now we hear the whole of the opening Promenade again – perhaps we
need time to clear our heads before the next painting, no. 7, ‘The
Marketplace in Limoges. Big news.’ This is a technically challenging piece
in energetic staccato semiquavers which give the pianist no let-up. The
marketplace buzzes with chatter; people make their points with forceful
jabbing. Mussorgsky scribbled down in the margins of his manuscript some
items of gossip he imagined people excitedly sharing: ‘Big news! Monsieur
de Puissangeout has recovered his cow, “The Fugitive”. But the good ladies
of Limoges don’t care, because Madame de Remboursac has just got a
lovely set of porcelain dentures, while M. de Panta-Pantaléon is being
bothered by his enormous nose, the colour of a red peony.’ He really should
have been a writer too.
Number 8 comes in two separate parts; ‘Catacombs’ leads on to ‘Con
mortuis in lingua mortua’, a lament for Hartmann. ‘Catacombs’ is based on
Hartmann’s painting of his own visit to the catacombs in Paris. In the
painting, a guide holds a lamp, illuminating a bank of skulls in the darkness.
Mussorgsky imagines this scene with slow, sombre chords which alternate
strangely between loud and soft, like huge blocks of stone and their
shadows. In the bass, the lines sink mournfully downwards. In the second
part, ‘With the dead in a dead language’, Mussorgsky imagines: ‘The
creative spirit of the departed Hartmann leads me towards the skulls and
calls out to them. . . . The skulls begin to glow.’ Eerily, Mussorgsky inserts
himself into this scene by putting a very slow and solemn version of the
Promenade theme (which represents him) into the bass, while high up in the
treble the skulls ‘begin to glow’ via a shimmering tremolo.
The spell is broken by the violent beginning of no. 9, ‘The Hut on
Fowl’s Legs. Baba Yaga’s Hut’. It tells the tale of a Russian witch whose
forest home has no windows or doors and stands on chicken’s legs. Baba
Yaga flies through the air in a mortar, using the pestle to row herself
through the winds as she looks for victims whose bones she will eventually
grind to paste using this same pestle. Hartmann had done an elaborate
drawing of a mediaeval Russian clock designed like Baba Yaga’s house, and
he himself had once surprised his friends by turning up at an artists’ fancy-
dress ball dressed as this fearsome witch. The piece is in three parts, two
angrily stomping outer sections with a sinister central episode where we can
imagine the witch using her wiles to lure children into the mortar. Again
using simple rhythms, mainly crotchets and quavers piled upon one another
with ferocious energy, Mussorgsky conjures up the harsh mood of the folk
tale.
Finally we have ‘The Bogatyrs’ Gate at the capital in Kiev’, usually
known as ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’. This refers to an architectural design
Hartmann made in 1869 when there was a competition to design a gateway
to commemorate Tsar Alexander II’s escape from an assassination attempt
in 1866. (Bogatyrs are mythical warriors whose deeds are told in Slavic
epics.) Hartmann’s gorgeous gate had a huge rounded archway surmounted
by carved designs and a belfry capped by a tower in the shape of a Slav
military helmet. He regarded it as his finest work, but the competition was
called off and the gate was never built. It was, however, built in music by
Mussorgsky. His magnificent evocation of the imagined opening ceremony
is probably his most famous piece, especially in Ravel’s orchestration. In
the piano version the tone is less varied, and since most of the piece is loud
or very loud, controlling the build-up of grandeur without wearying the ear
is a test of the pianist’s skill.
With great imagination, Mussorgsky transforms the Promenade theme
into the simpler outline of a great chorale, as if he wishes to merge with this
scene and disappear into it. Between the chorales, in phrases marked
‘without expression’, he quotes from a Russian Orthodox chant used at the
baptism service, although here it is the great gate which is being baptised.
Finally he arrives at a huge peroration with bells ringing out in celebration
and slow triplets steadying into massive duple time as he puts the final
blocks in place. It is touching to imagine Mussorgsky both a character in
this celebration and the author of it.

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840–1893)

47. Piano Concerto no. 1 in B flat minor, op. 23
Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto is one of the ‘warhorses’ of the concerto
repertoire. Its character may have been influenced by Grieg’s piano
concerto of 1869, with which it shares quite a few lovable characteristics:
sweeping Romantic melodies, barnstorming virtuosity, and a clever and
charming use of folk melodies, real or imagined. Tchaikovsky wrote two
piano concertos and began a third one, but it is his first concerto which has
become a classic. Its performance history has been dominated by male
pianists, but this is gradually changing.
It is surprising to hear that the first person to whom Tchaikovsky played
his first piano concerto did not like it at all. This was Nikolai Rubinstein,
director of the Moscow Conservatoire, who had given him a job as a
teacher of harmony and encouraged him as a composer. Tchaikovsky
considered him ‘the best pianist in Moscow and a first-rate all-round
musician’, and intended to dedicate the new concerto to him. On Christmas
Eve 1874 he met Rubinstein at the Conservatoire to play him the concerto.
After listening to it, Rubinstein (according to Tchaikovsky) remained silent
for an alarmingly long time and then unburdened himself of all his
misgivings: the concerto was worthless, unplayable, vulgar, awkward,
unoriginal, and should either be destroyed or completely revised.
Tchaikovsky was hurt and surprised. However, he refused to be deterred,
and in 1875 he went ahead and published it as it was. He dedicated it
instead to the pianist Hans von Bülow, who praised it as ‘noble, strong and
original’, and gave the premiere in Boston, where an enthusiastic audience
demanded that the finale be repeated. It must be said that within a short
time, Rubinstein admitted that his first reaction had been mistaken. He
came to admire the concerto, first conducting it and later performing the
piano part himself.
A few years beforehand, Tchaikovsky had had an affair with an opera
singer, Desirée Artôt, one of the only women in whom he was ever
romantically interested. They talked of marriage, but Tchaikovsky’s ardour
cooled before the decisive step was taken. He must have had happy
memories of their relationship, however, because he seems to have woven
references to Desirée into the concerto. It is not necessary to know about
these hidden references to enjoy the music, but it does give an intriguing
insight into what motivated Tchaikovsky as he was writing it.
The opening section of the piece with its famous horn call, its
thundering piano chords and its sweepingly Romantic melody (not in B flat
minor at all, but in D flat major), has been criticised as not having much to
do with the rest of the concerto. It’s true that the gorgeous first theme does
not return, but it provides material for other themes throughout the whole
piece. A close look at the ups and downs of the opening theme (including
the horn calls) will show that elements from it are threaded through the
theme of the fast section, the lyrical second theme, the theme of the slow
movement, and the finale’s two main themes.
The fast ‘skipping’ section of the first movement is based on a
Ukrainian folk song, almost unrecognisable in a costume of Lisztian wit
and ornament. It subsides into a quiet and wistful theme introduced by the
orchestra and answered by the piano; this is Desirée’s theme. (Its first two
notes, D flat and A, are Des and A in German musical nomenclature,
allegedly Tchaikovsky’s shorthand for Desirée Artôt.) This broadens into a
beautiful extension of the theme in A flat major; the marvellous
development which follows is reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker
ballet music. When this lyrical theme appears again in the reprise,
Tchaikovsky lets the orchestra play the whole theme on its own, the piano
just joining in for its elaboration. This time, the lyrical theme is borne along
on the moving carpet of a syncopated accompaniment, a delightful touch.
This same wistful theme keeps its grip on Tchaikovsky’s imagination even
during the powerful cadenza, from which it emerges with the last word.
The second movement begins with a beautiful lullaby played by the
flute and echoed by the piano before an episode of little ‘sighs’ leads to yet
another lovely tune, this time played by oboe over a ‘drone’ bass and
answered by the piano before the lullaby is heard again from a solo cello,
the piano accompanying it. Then, in a ‘Prestissimo’, the little sighs are
turned upside down by the pianist and speeded up to become lively
background chatter for a surprising new theme, the French song ‘Il faut
s’amuser, danser et rire’ (You should have fun, dance and laugh), which
Tchaikovsky and his brothers used to sing, and which was part of Desirée’s
recital repertoire. The piano’s decoration eventually dissolves in a Lisztian
haze before bringing us back to the lullaby theme for the closing section.
The finale incorporates two folk songs. The first is a Ukrainian ‘spring
song’ with a vigorous ‘kick’ in its rhythm (Grieg also opens the finale of his
piano concerto with the kicking dance of a Norwegian ‘Halling’, perhaps an
inspiration here). The second is a contrasting lyrical theme akin to the grand
opening of the concerto, based on a Russian folk song, ‘I am going to Tsar-
gorod’. These two themes are developed, along with a tripping dotted-
rhythm motif which injects a feeling of excited anticipation. The tempo
increases and the soloist dashes up and down the keyboard with glittering
runs and arpeggios, eventually depositing us at the start of a long bass
‘pedal note’, which alerts our ear to the likelihood of an impending return to
the home key. Over this bass note, melodic motifs are stirred together in an
exciting way, culminating in a mighty recall of the lyrical theme in B flat,
the grandeur of its statement providing a counterweight to the grand theme
which opened the whole concerto. Finally the Ukrainian dance theme bursts
in, propelling the soloist to paroxysms of delight. The concerto closes with
a blizzard of ‘blind octaves’, a technique invented by Liszt in which the
pianist’s hands alternate up the notes of a chromatic scale to create the
effect of impossibly fast double octaves.

48. The Seasons, op. 37a

It is revealing to hear Tchaikovsky, one of the composers most associated
with grand Romantic effects, writing for the domestic market. In fact, it was
a wonderful time to be providing new music for the amateur pianists of
Moscow, St Petersburg and beyond, because the piano had become hugely
popular in Russia. In 1810 there were four piano manufacturers in the two
principal cities, but by 1860 there were more than thirty, an enormous
increase. The Tsar had given his patronage to all sorts of artistic societies
and artisans including small industrial firms making pianos. Every
household with social aspirations had at least one upright piano, if not a
grand or ‘royal’ piano as it was called. The population of Russia had
increased greatly in the mid-nineteenth century, partly due to the influx of
western Europeans, their arrival encouraged by a Tsar keen for Russia to be
seen as westernised. French, German and British entrepreneurs brought
with them their tastes and attitudes. Western European piano music and
pianists were highly esteemed, and being able to play the piano was
considered a sign of social eligibility, as shown in novels such as
Turgenev’s Home of the Gentry. The great Tolstoy was known to play the
piano for hours and had let it be known that ‘music was not an amusement
but an important business in life’.
Shortly after the premiere of his first piano concerto in 1875,
Tchaikovsky started work on his Swan Lake ballet music. At the same time
he received a request from the editor of the St Petersburg magazine
Nuvellist to write a set of twelve piano pieces, one for each month of the
year. Tchaikovsky accepted the commission, and the magazine joyfully told
its readers: ‘Our celebrated composer Tchaikovsky has promised the editor
of Nuvellist that he will contribute to next year’s issues a whole series of his
piano compositions, specially written for our journal, the character of which
will correspond entirely to the titles of the pieces, and the month in which
they will be published in the journal. It was not until the end of 1875 that
Tchaikovsky got round to writing ‘January’ and ‘February’, but it seems
that most of the rest were written in the spring of 1876 before he left Russia
for Paris (where he was bowled over by Bizet’s Carmen) and Bayreuth
(where he attended the first festival devoted entirely to Richard Wagner’s
Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle of operas).
Tchaikovsky was happy to write to commission, especially for a fee as
generous as this one was, and he accepted the editor’s suggestion for the
titles of the twelve pieces and the Russian poems to be printed alongside.
He even asked the editor to tell him frankly whether his little pieces were
‘too long or too poor’, offering to rewrite them if need be. For a composer
who had been grappling with the huge orchestral forces and the brilliant
extrovert writing of the B flat minor concerto, writing short piano pieces for
a magazine may not have seemed much of a challenge, but even though he
was immersed in Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky had plenty of melodic inspiration
left over for The Seasons.
January, ‘By the Fireside’ is a title that will remind pianists of an
identical title in Schumann’s Kinderszenen. It is somehow fitting that
Tchaikovsky’s cycle begins with music reminiscent of Schumann, whose
music he loved. Indeed, some of this first piece – particularly the middle
section with its sighs and its wisps of arpeggios rising like smoke towards
the ceiling – has a very Schumannesque vein of melancholy mixed with
peaceful cosiness.
February, ‘Carnival’, is much more technically difficult. It could be a
scene from a ballet with its excitable rushing around and its calmer middle
section – this seems like an opportunity for one of those ‘character actors’
who appear in Tchaikovsky’s ballets to make a dignified appearance.
March, ‘Song of the Lark’, is a wistful evocation of birdsong which
may well have its inspiration in Schumann’s mystical ‘Vogel als Prophet’
from Waldszenen, in the same key of G minor.
April, ‘Snowdrop’, is a song-like number which gives the pianist an
opportunity to practise a duet between a melodic phrase played by the right
hand and answered by the left hand in the ‘tenor’ region of the keyboard,
with accompanying chords weaving quietly around them.
May, ‘Starlit Nights’, is a three-part structure with peaceful chords
strumming under melodic fragments in the outer sections, and a sudden
burst of energy in the middle which seems like a response to the line of
poetry, ‘How fresh and clean May flies in!’
June, ‘Barcarolle’, feels a little like one of Mendelssohn’s Songs
without Words. Its use of a gently syncopated accompaniment in the middle
section and the closing section gives it a delightful lilt. The Barcarolle has
proved one of the most popular of the pieces and exists in multiple
arrangements for everything from mandolin to guitar duet and symphony
orchestra.
July, ‘Song of the Reapers’, begins a run of more substantial pieces, as
though Tchaikovsky was in a more expansive mood when he wrote the
second half of the year. It is a strong, vigorous threshing song with episodes
of excitable scurrying, like younger members of the family running about.
When the song returns in the last section it is accompanied by a ‘spinning’
motif in the left hand, like a wheel going round in the farmyard.
 August, ‘Harvest Song’, is one of the longest and most technically
challenging pieces, requiring quick reflexes as the music jumps about the
keyboard evoking hectic activity. In the middle, there is a calmer section in
which soprano lines are answered by bass lines in the left hand, perhaps
evoking songs being sung in an interval of rest.
September, ‘Hunting Song’, is the third substantial piece in this group,
and another of the most technically demanding. It evokes the trumpets or
bugles of the hunt and a colourful parade of riders on horseback. In the
middle, there is a mysterious episode with little creeping phrases calling to
one another between high and middle voices: perhaps these are animals,
trying to stay out of sight in the undergrowth as the hunt passes by with
horns blaring?
October, ‘Autumn Song’, is perhaps the most beautiful and serious
piece, a tender portrait of regret with more than a touch of Schumann about
it. Again, Tchaikovsky passes a melody from the right hand to the left, and
here he adds a beautiful descant for the right as he does so. In the final bars,
the melody is heard resounding quietly after the bass has stopped.
November, ‘Troika Ride’, is a depiction of a big Russian sleigh pulled
by three horses. This substantial piece, a favourite encore of
Rachmaninoff’s, could be taken from a ballet score. We can easily imagine
ourselves flying through the snow, or even through the sky. In the middle
section, the jingling harness of the horses can be heard. The closing section,
where the opening theme comes back quietly in the left hand, embroidered
by glittering semiquavers or snowflakes in the right hand, is one of the
trickiest passages in the set.
December, ‘Christmas’, is an extended (possibly over-extended) waltz;
again, this could be straight out of the Christmas scene in a ballet like
Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty. The waltz melody is at first mainly given to
the right hand with Viennese waltz accompaniment in the left. A delicious
move from A flat into E major slides us into the calmer middle section,
where the pianist’s two hands engage in an agreeable exchange of
pleasantries, almost like members of the older generation curtseying and
bowing to one another in the anteroom. The whole tranquil waltz is then
reprised, though in the coda its harmonies seem to hint at melancholy even
in the midst of the festivities.
 ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841–1904)
49. Piano Quintet in A major, op. 81
Dvořák’s second piano quintet has become one of the most beloved pieces
in the chamber music repertoire. He had written a quintet fifteen years
earlier, tried to revise it, but then decided to replace it with a completely
new work. The A major quintet is one of his best works in any genre,
brimming with Slavonic melodies, cleverly constructed and glowing with
good-heartedness.
Dvořák did play the piano, but it was not his favourite instrument. That
was the viola, which he played firstly in a dance band and then in the
orchestra at the Provisional Theatre in Prague. At that time, Bohemia was a
province of the Habsburg Empire and many aspects of Czech culture had
been suppressed. In 1860 the Emperor officially relaxed this attitude and a
‘provisional theatre’ was established to encourage the creation and
production of Czech national plays and operas while funds for a permanent
theatre were raised. Smetana, who soon became the theatre orchestra’s
conductor, composed works which expressed the new Czech musical
nationalism. Dvořák too began to blend Czech folk music and dance with
the ‘modern’ style of German composers he admired, such as Wagner, Liszt
and Brahms.
The struggle to synthesise these elements occupied Dvořák for many
years. Sometimes he seems to veer towards the ‘German’ side (for example,
in his Piano Trio in F minor or his Seventh Symphony) and sometimes to
the Czech (for example, in his Slavonic Dances, his Eighth Symphony, or
his Piano Trio in E minor, ‘Dumky’). Occasionally he seems to hit on a
happy combination of the two, as in his Piano Quintet in A major, op. 81,
written during a summer in his beloved country house at Vysoká in the
Carpathian Mountains. Dvořák’s piano writing is sometimes rather thickly
textured and awkward to play (as in the F minor Trio) but in the Piano
Quintet he has achieved a transparent style of piano writing and an ease of
expression, almost like Schubert’s approach to the piano part in his ‘Trout’
Quintet (also in A major).
One of the great strokes of luck in Dvořák’s life was his encounter with
Brahms, who sat on the jury that awarded Dvořák an Austrian state
stipendium (‘for talented composers in need’). Brahms was moved by his
first glimpse of Dvořák’s portfolio of unpublished compositions. He put
Dvořák in touch with his own publisher and tried to persuade him to move
to Vienna, even offering to finance the move, but Dvořák resisted (his
imperfect grasp of the German language being a factor). Brahms himself,
who worked so hard to achieve Beethovenian seriousness, was quick to
appreciate unforced musicianship when he heard it, and once said that any
composer would be honoured to have the ideas that Dvořák discarded. This
was perhaps Brahms’s chance to offer to a fellow composer the same kind
of selfless support he himself had been offered in earlier years by Robert
Schumann. As a result of getting to know Brahms, Dvořák became very
fond of Schumann’s music too; in Dvořák’s piano quintet there are a
number of places that show Schumann’s influence.
As a pianist I have always relished the opening of Dvořák’s piano
quintet. It is simple, but sums up the work’s delicate Bohemian flavour. On
the face of it, the piano is doing no more than setting the scene for the cello
melody, but how sweetly Dvořák arranges for smooth triplets in the right
hand, a sustained bass note A in each bar, and a three-note rising figure in
the ‘tenor’ part which cuts against the triplets with a dotted rhythm. Put
together, these elements create a tiny rhythmic frisson, a Bohemian lilt,
especially when the staccato dots in the left-hand part are observed. All this
is just ‘cushion’ for the glorious fifteen-bar cello melody, yet the care with
which Dvořák notates the piano part illustrates his wonderful ear for
sonority.
The cello’s theme sounds as if it might have been lifted from an old
Czech song, but was actually invented by Dvořák. The melody hints almost
immediately at the major/minor inflections which give the piece its
distinctive flavour. His second theme, also evoking folksong, is a restless
figure in C sharp minor, announced by the violin weaving above and below
a repeated note. Again, the accompaniment combines duple and triple
rhythms, this time split between piano (duple) and strings (triple). In the
development, Dvořák transforms his first subject into the minor, instantly
changing its mood from sunny to melancholy and even troubled and angry.
Indeed, the second theme in its minor key dominates most of the reprise and
it is only with a mighty heave that Dvořák gets the movement back into the
home key for an almost orchestral peroration.
 The slow movement shows Schumann’s influence, specifically that of
the slow movement of his own Piano Quintet in E flat, written forty years
earlier. It feels as though Schumann’s work had left a powerful outline on
Dvořák’s imagination, to be filled with his own Bohemian melodies.
Dumka is a poetic form of Ukrainian origin, usually composed of
melancholy or meditative sections. In music it has come to mean a
thoughtful piece with alternating slow and fast sections. Schumann uses this
structure, naturally without calling it a Dumka, in his own piano quintet’s
slow movement. His formula – an introduction, a march theme, a
contrasting lyrical episode in a major key with flowing triplet
accompaniment, the march theme again, an agitated episode, the march
theme again (more anxious, with triplet accompaniment), the contrasting
lyrical episode, the march theme and a coda – is echoed by Dvořák.
Dvořák follows more than just the outward shape; some melodic cells
from Schumann’s themes seem to have made their way into Dvořák’s as
well (compare for example the violin/viola theme at the beginning of the
Schumann, and the viola theme at the start of the Dvořák). Touchingly,
Dvořák’s final gesture in the movement, a sad descending arpeggio in the
coda, feels like an unconscious tribute to the similar arpeggio which begins
Schumann’s slow movement, and Dvořák’s very last chord of the
movement – an uplifting moment of consolation – is surely inspired by
Schumann’s ethereal chord at the equivalent moment. All this illustrates
Dvořák’s powers of transformation, for just as the Schumann movement
feels completely German, so Dvořák’s feels unmistakably Czech.
The Scherzo is subtitled ‘Furiant’, a wild, fiery kind of Czech dance
which often follows a Dumka. Here the string quartet gets to introduce the
theme with a demanding melodic line for the first violin. As the piano takes
over, Dvořák very sweetly introduces a counter-melody on viola, derived
from that gorgeous opening theme of his first movement. In this movement
dance episodes alternate with peaceful rustic episodes in which it is easy to
imagine bells ringing in country churches and echoing across the landscape.
The ‘Poco tranquillo’ section in F major introduces what feels like a new
theme on violin, but it is derived from bars 2 and 3 of the opening theme.
As Dvořák winds his way back from this Ländler-like episode he creates
some ravishing harmonic nuances, almost Schubertian in their ability to
evoke happiness and sadness at the same time.
 The finale is driven by short rhythmic figures, some of them designed to
trick us about where the downbeat is. For example, after the rhythmic
introductory bars, the first main theme, led by the violin, actually starts on
an upbeat. When the piano restates the theme, it brings it forward by one
beat to begin on the downbeat. Ideally there should be an amusing
difference between the two versions, though it is hard to bring out in
performance. Dvořák saves his most charming melodic idea for the second
theme, which brings a welcome sense of relaxation to the movement. As in
the first movement, he casts his opening theme into the minor to drive the
development and the C minor ‘fugato’ section, a stern little chapter which
may well have been inspired by Schumann’s fugato at a similar moment in
his quintet finale. In the final minutes there is a typical Dvořák touch where,
just before he asks the players to accelerate to the end, he seems to turn
aside in reflective mood with a series of almost solemn chords and gentle
echoes, like a quiet moment between priest and congregation before the
festival continues.
As the sonority and expressive possibilities of the piano were enlarged, it
became more and more popular. The heyday of the piano as a domestic
instrument was 1870–1920. Having one in the home was considered a sign
of culture and aspiration. The middle classes in Europe and North America
were becoming more prosperous. They were able to afford to buy their own
pianos, and were happy to add pianos to the list of possessions which made
them look respectable. Pianists were also popular. Well-known virtuosi,
whose adventures were eagerly followed by their fans, often brought out
their own editions of piano classics with the aim of providing guidance for
amateur pianists. Those amateurs in turn were willing to tackle difficult
works of piano music at home. Often they would learn parts of sonatas or
cycles of piano pieces, perhaps never completing their study of the whole
work but nevertheless gaining a valuable sense of relationship with it.
Publishers were confident of being able to sell sheet music to a large and
appreciative market. Symphonies and other orchestral works were brought
out in arrangements for piano duet and sometimes for solo piano. This was
still the age when, if you wanted to hear piano music, you had either to play
it yourself, persuade someone to play it for you, or buy a ticket for a concert
where a professional pianist would play it in your presence. Music was still
synonymous with ‘live music’.
Interestingly, the popularity of the piano as a domestic instrument did
not decrease the interest of amateur pianists in their professional
counterparts, and may even have enabled amateurs to identify more closely
with virtuosi. For, as well as this being the era when lots of people had
pianos at home and played them, it was also the era of great virtuoso
composition. Albéniz, Scriabin, Busoni, Rachmaninoff, Ravel – all of them
wrote piano music of immense technical difficulty. Yes, there was plenty of
music tailored to amateurs – for example, Grieg’s multiple sets of Lyric
Pieces – but the piano was also the hero of the most scintillating
instrumental music ever composed, and there were plenty of virtuosi who
accepted its challenge with dazzling results. There was probably a subtle
relationship between the amateur’s feeling that the piano ‘belonged to them’
and the fact that celebrated pianists were triumphant on the public platform;
perhaps every amateur pianist saw themselves ‘writ large’ as they listened
from the audience.
 EDVARD GRIEG (1843–1907)
50. Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16
When Edvard Grieg was only fifteen, he was sent from his home in Norway
to study piano and composition at the famous Leipzig Conservatoire in
Germany. At that time the Conservatoire, founded by Felix Mendelssohn
and still basking in his reflected glory, was a conservative place. Grieg
found his studies dry, but enjoyed going to concerts and hearing the latest
music. He developed a particular love of Liszt and Schumann. Robert
Schumann had died only two years earlier, but his widow Clara Schumann
had somehow managed to continue touring as a concert pianist. Grieg heard
her play her late husband’s piano concerto in Leipzig in 1858 and it made a
deep impression on him. When he came to write his own piano concerto,
ten years later, the influence of Robert Schumann was still strong.
Grieg’s piano concerto has long been one of the most popular piano
concertos and, alongside the incidental music to Peer Gynt, is one of his
two major orchestral works. It is in the key of A minor and is his only piano
concerto, two things it has in common with Schumann’s concerto. Grieg’s
was the first piano concerto ever recorded (in abridged form, by pianist
Wilhelm Backhaus in 1909) and has built up a huge discography. Audiences
have always loved its flavour of Norwegian folk music. Its gorgeous
harmonies and key changes made it a natural fit with Hollywood movies
when they came along. It was famously used in the Ingrid Bergman/Leslie
Howard film Intermezzo in 1939; equally well-known to British audiences
is a 1971 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special television show where
André Previn attempts to conduct it with comedian Eric Morecambe as the
impertinent soloist. (Morecambe plays his own version of the opening
theme with a kind of ragtime left-hand accompaniment which was
considered hilariously unsuitable, though ironically the last movement of
Grieg’s piano concerto contains a very similar style of piano writing.) Over
the years, many pianists have taken outrageous liberties with Grieg’s tempo
markings and particularly with his dynamics, often playing more loudly
than he indicates. Somehow the essential good nature of the piece has
helped it to survive these interventions.
 Grieg’s fame amongst pianists rests partly on his many short
compositions for piano, such as the Lyric Pieces. Although sweet and
charming, these can be a little repetitive. It’s interesting that his piano
concerto, which is so much longer, does not suffer from this same
weakness; indeed it seems to fill the half-hour effortlessly with a cascade of
tunes, and feels as if it had strength for more. Many composers are skilful at
writing themes, but Grieg had the rare ability to write themes that the
audience’s memory can swallow whole. His thought processes are clear,
which makes it easy for the listener to follow what is going on. Grieg had
learned from Liszt the art of ‘thematic transformation’, unifying a
composition by making subtle changes to the character and tempo of its
themes and reusing them in other parts of the piece. Grieg uses this
technique in his piano concerto, but does so in a very open and, one might
almost say, considerate way.
A drum roll heralds the dramatic entry of the pianist with a fortissimo
descending figure, both hands playing in octaves. (Schumann’s concerto has
a similar opening gesture.) The first notes we hear from the piano contain
the ‘Norwegian’ melodic shape of a falling semitone followed by a falling
third, which often occurs in (for example) Grieg’s Peer Gynt or his Lyric
Pieces. After a brief cadenza, we hear the principal theme played by
woodwind, quiet and poised with a gentle lilting rhythm. It develops into a
yearning upward-reaching phrase. The piano repeats all this, taking it
further and spilling into an ‘animato’ section with a skipping motif. A good
example of Grieg’s skill is the way the second theme is approached via a
sweeping lyrical passage whose soaring phrases make us expect something
even grander. But when the second theme arrives, it turns out to be a more
contained version of what we have been hearing, similar in rhythm but
narrower in melodic compass and more intimate in character, all of which is
strangely touching. After a lovely development section Grieg gives the
piano a long solo cadenza, starting quietly with the opening theme and
building it up to a mighty climax amid tremolos, sweeping left-hand
arpeggios and ‘roaring’ Lisztian chromatic scales played by both hands in
the bass. It’s easy to imagine that this kind of piano writing was an
inspiration to Rachmaninoff.
The slow movement is in the unexpected key of D flat major and has a
simple three-part structure of theme, interlude and enhanced theme. Its
mood is dignified and hymn-like, its rich violin melody including an
upside-down version of the ‘Norwegian’ figure we heard at the start of the
first movement, this time a rising semitone and a third. Further thematic
transformation comes when the piano enters with a dreamy Chopinesque
meditation, its melodic shape derived from the concerto’s opening. At the
end of this interlude, the piano takes up the hymn-like theme, embroidering
and augmenting it into a grand climax.
As in Schumann’s concerto, the slow movement proceeds straight into
the finale, but here the pianist launches it with a tremendous flourish (rather
too often, alas, the end of the descending run is not precisely caught by the
orchestra). This movement also has a Norwegian flavour, this time of the
‘Halling’, a traditional dance designed to show off athletic skill with
kicking, throwing and jumping. The pianist too has to demonstrate great
acrobatic skill and strength. After a mighty climax, the scene suddenly
changes and we encounter a ravishingly lovely quiet melody, high on a
flute, again with Norwegian-style ‘vocal’ ornaments of the main line. This
slow lyrical episode is a kind of inset, almost like a Hollywood ‘dream
sequence’ within the movement. It is followed by a reprise of the energetic
dance theme. This time the drama overflows in a Lisztian cadenza which
heralds the final section, a rhythmic transformation of the ‘Halling’ dance
into an exciting triple-time whirlwind. Even this is not the climax, for Grieg
has one last trick up his sleeve: a final fortissimo appearance of the lyrical
theme in a blaze of glory.

51. Lyric Pieces

Just as Chopin’s Mazurkas were a thread running through his whole
composing life, so Grieg’s Lyric Pieces were a thread running through his.
This was the heyday of the piano as an indispensable item in any well-
ordered household, and Grieg was writing for a huge domestic market. He
started composing his Lyric Pieces in 1867 and by 1901 had published
sixty-six pieces in ten volumes. The Musical Times in England, reviewing
Book VI in 1894, commented that the music required ‘taste, poetic feelings
and intelligence rather than great executive facility’, and predicted that it
would be welcomed ‘by all who in music prefer feelings to fireworks’.
 In his youth, Grieg studied for a time in Leipzig in Germany. As a
Norwegian, he struggled to decide whether he should pursue the
compositional path laid down by leading German composers, particularly
Wagner. It was not until 1863 that he saw another, more fruitful way to
express himself. A young Norwegian composer, Rikard Nordraak (who
composed the Norwegian national anthem), persuaded Grieg that he would
find a great source of inspiration in the folk music of Norway. ‘A mist fell
from my eyes,’ wrote Grieg, ‘and suddenly I knew the way I had to take.’
From then on, his work was guided by the folk music of Norway and its
splendid tradition of fiddle playing (in which the intervals of fifths between
the violin’s open strings are strongly featured).
The first set of Lyric Pieces, published in 1867, saw the fruit of this new
thinking. It was at this time too that Grieg started giving titles to individual
piano pieces, making clear the images and scenes behind them. He became
deeply immersed in the Norwegians’ struggle for their own identity. In 1900
he visited Denmark’s capital city, Copenhagen, from where he wrote to his
friend Johan Halvorsen, ‘Although I am out of the country, my only
thoughts are about Norway and Norwegians, about all our youthful
pugnacity up there. Yes, it is like the music of strong triads compared to all
the sugary sevenths down here. The struggle in Norway has to do with
spiritual survival; down here they are concerned with trivialities’. In other
words, some of the features of Grieg’s music which have been seen as
rather too straightforward (simple forms, repetitive harmonies, regular
phrase lengths) were meant to evoke the strength and good heart of the
Norwegian people.
Because Grieg’s Lyric Pieces are (with a few exceptions such as
‘Wedding Day at Troldhaugen’) not technically difficult, they have long
been used as teaching material. Even the composer was aware of their likely
fate, but was glad of the income from his little piano pieces and once
referred to them as ‘Semmeln’, meaning those fresh bread rolls which
people love to collect from the baker’s. Because of their association with
novices the Lyric Pieces fell out of the recital repertoire and, writing about
them as long ago as 1943, pianist and historian Kathleen Dale wryly
remarked that ‘what bad pianists had ruined in private, good pianists could
hardly reinstate in public’. Nevertheless, they have retained their place in
the public’s affection and in recent years have been rehabilitated through
some very fine recordings. My own experience of these pieces is that if I
forget any expectation that they should ‘develop’ in the way that the
German masters taught us, and meet them on their own terms, they
communicate a sense of contentment with the world. Grieg himself was
touchingly realistic about his piano pieces: ‘Bach and Beethoven erected
temples and churches in the heights. I only wanted to build dwellings in
which people might feel happy and at home.’ Some might say this shows a
lack of artistic ambition, while others may think that an artist could achieve
nothing finer.
One of Grieg’s own favourites was the very first piece from the first set
of Lyric Pieces, op. 12: the ‘Arietta’. It has almost the character of a nursery
rhyme, with simple two-bar phrases, though in the middle of the piece there
is suddenly an intensification of the expression when little phrases reach
upward and sink back to a soft cushion of Romantic harmony. The final
two-bar phrase is cut in half, drifting off into thought after only one bar.
Over three decades later, Grieg ended the whole Lyric series with a
‘Remembrance’ of this Arietta, in which it is transformed into a graceful
waltz, passing slowly through various keys as if trying to identify a memory
more precisely.
In the op. 43 set from 1887, ‘Butterfly’ has become a much-loved piece
of piano repertoire. The fluttering movements are depicted with a gentle
volatility which reminds one of Schumann. As often with Grieg, the
prevailing atmosphere of happiness is shadowed now and then by a tinge of
melancholy derived perhaps from the modal scales of folk music.
‘Butterfly’ illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of Grieg’s piano
writing; its charming pictorial qualities are slightly marred by its tendency
to repeat ideas once too often. Schumann comes to mind again in Grieg’s
‘Little Bird’, no. 4 from the op. 43 set. Grieg’s little bird chirps and hops
about cheerfully, and even the moment when the birdsong finds a sinister
echo in the bass doesn’t seem threatening. In contrast, Schumann’s much
earlier ‘Vogel als Prophet’ (Prophet Bird, from Waldszenen) conjures up a
much stranger forest with equally simple brushstrokes.
In the op. 47 set from 1888, ‘Melody’ employs a folk-like drone bass of
open fifths, while in the right hand a modal melody descends sadly. Eight-
bar phrases are skilfully expanded so that in the middle there is a long rise
to the climactic point. Here again, the impatient pianist may find themselves
wishing that Grieg had thought of something else to do than simply repeat
all the material, but there is no denying the appeal of this haunting piece.
In op. 54 from 1891 we find the famous ‘March of the Trolls’ which
imagines the grotesque, naughty mythical creatures said to inhabit
Norwegian caves and mountains. One of the more technically demanding
pieces, it uses staccato chromatic phrases to depict the cackling of the trolls.
Again, a folk-like bass is composed mainly of stamping fifths. The central
section brings a sharp change of tone with a pleasant lyrical episode, a
reminder perhaps that trolls can be sweet as well as menacing. ‘Notturno’,
one of the loveliest pieces in the set, is a more complex piece with an
episode of birdsong in the middle followed by a flowing section remarkably
like part of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ written in the same year (though not
published until 1905). ‘Bell-ringing’ (or in the much more onomatopoeic
Norwegian, ‘Klokkeklang’) is a daringly simple evocation of bells
resonating across a valley. Here we see very plain rhythms and the ‘open
fifths’ of folk music being used as the primary material for an evocation that
could almost be a piece of minimalist music from a century later.
‘Homesickness’ from op. 56 of 1893 uses modal folk melody in its outer
sections to evoke a mood of sad reflection. In the middle, with oscillating
fifths in the bass, there is a contrasting section, even more strongly modal
with its sharpened fourth (A sharp in the key of E major) and reminiscent of
one of the young men’s jumping contests which are sometimes part of
Norwegian folk events; here, however, the jumping is pianissimo and
played with the ‘una corda’ (soft) pedal, as if it is all going on in memory
rather than in the present.
‘Wedding Day at Troldhaugen’ (from the 1897 set) was written to
commemorate Grieg and his wife Nina’s silver wedding anniversary.
Troldhaugen (Hill of the Trolls) was the name of their summer villa outside
Bergen. Regularly voted Grieg’s most popular piano piece in surveys run by
radio stations and magazines, this is one of the longest of the Lyric Pieces.
The accompaniment of folk fiddles is easily imagined from the rhythmic
open fifths in the accompaniment. One of Grieg’s most catchy and jovial
melodies leads on to sections in which one can imagine various groups of
people jumping, dancing and jostling while the general excitement gathers
pace and bells ring out jubilantly at the climax. The central episode is a
peaceful moment of repose, after which it all happens again, ending with a
few bars of distant bells which recall the simple effect of the earlier
‘Klokkeklang’. Grieg recorded this piece himself in 1903 (missing out the
slow middle section). His performance shows how little we can assume
about how people used to play in ‘the old days’, for he takes the piece at a
tremendous pace, making light of the technical difficulties.

GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845–1924)

52. Piano Quartet no. 1 in C minor, op. 15
Writing a piano quartet (for piano, violin, viola and cello) may seem a
slightly obscure choice for a young composer hoping to make his mark, but
in fact the mid-to-late nineteenth century was the heyday of the piano
quartet. It had hardly been in the limelight since Mozart’s two masterworks
in the genre, but was revived by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Dvořák and
Brahms, whose third piano quartet (also in C minor) was written just four
years before Fauré’s first and may have inspired him. A more immediate
influence was Saint-Saëns, who had taught Fauré at school and whose own
piano quartet was premiered in 1875, the same year in which Brahms
published his third piano quartet.
Unlike many of the other leading French composers, Fauré did not
study at the Paris Conservatoire. From the age of nine, he attended the
École Niedermeyer, whose mission was to provide France with church
organists and choirmasters. Its education was focused on traditions such as
Gregorian chant and religious music of the Renaissance. This emphasised a
very different set of musical qualities than the ones sweeping western
Europe in Fauré’s day. The austere long lines of Gregorian chant had a
profound influence on his style which can be traced right through his career.
Indeed, the influence seemed to grow deeper, and the music of Fauré’s later
years strongly recalls the pure, solemn lines of mediaeval music which
seem designed to go on forever in a cycle of endless praise.
When Fauré was a teenager, Saint-Saëns took over as head of piano
studies at the school. ‘After allowing the lessons to run over,’ Fauré
recalled, ‘he would go to the piano and reveal to us those works of the
masters from which the rigorous classical nature of our programme of study
kept us at a distance and who, moreover, in those far-off years, were
scarcely known.’ These were composers such as Schumann, Wagner and
Liszt whose sensual, personal and dramatic styles must have been a breath
of fresh air for the young students of old church music. Saint-Saëns became
a lifelong friend and supporter of Fauré, helping him to get jobs and
promoting his compositions.
During the 1870s, Fauré began attending the Paris salons of music-
loving patrons who hosted performances of new music. He was a regular at
the gatherings of the celebrated mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, and wrote
his first piano and violin sonata for Pauline’s violinist son Paul. He also fell
in love with Pauline’s daughter Marianne. They got engaged, but at around
the time Fauré was at work on his first piano quartet, Marianne broke off
the engagement. For a while Fauré was very upset; biographers have said
that he vented his feelings in the passionate slow movement of the C minor
piano quartet. Ultimately, however, he was philosophical, saying that
perhaps it was all for the best as the opera-loving Viardot family ‘would
have persuaded me to alter my course’. This course was for instrumental
music, particularly chamber music, then as now considered ‘not lucrative’,
but closer to Fauré’s heart than the glamorous world of opera.
Right from the start of the first piano quartet, written in 1879, there is
evidence of Fauré’s beloved church modes: the opening theme is in C minor
but with a flattened ‘leading note’ of B flat instead of B natural, giving it a
slightly antique flavour. The piano supplies the harmonies on the offbeats, a
device Fauré uses elsewhere in the quartet. These offbeat rhythms produce a
‘modern’, almost jazzy feeling which contrasts pleasingly with the austere
melodic lines. Like Brahms and Schumann, he often uses the strings as a
self-contained group, the piano providing texture and rhythmic excitement
through flowing and sparkling arpeggios. In the middle section he opens up
a more flexible approach, bringing all four instruments into conversation on
the subject of the main themes and allotting some of the loveliest material
to the piano before it is passed to the strings.
The Scherzo is one of Faure’s most masterly movements, a gossamer-
light few minutes begun by pizzicato strings pricking out the main beats
before the piano runs amok among them in the most charmingly nonchalant
way. Passages of triple time alternate rapidly with passages in a sterner
duple time, suggesting that some of the participants would like to impose a
bit of order on proceedings, but are constantly swept aside by the sheer élan
of the dance. In the middle there is a sensuous episode in B flat major
where it’s the piano’s turn to touch in the main ‘pizzicato’ beats while
muted strings sweep slowly by in a perfumed haze.
The French pianist Marguerite Long, who studied Fauré’s music with
the composer, reported that the slow movement was the sorrowful aftermath
of his break-up with Marianne Viardot, but other friends of Fauré’s have
countered that he was never one to put his emotions on public display.
Indeed, the slow movement breathes the world of the antique once again, its
emotion nobly restrained. The stately introduction leads to a most beautiful
lyrical theme announced by the violin, with swaying triplet accompaniment.
It develops into an intense conversation between all four instruments. When
the stately theme returns, it does so over a filigree piano part which gives
the whole reprise a more fluid and romantic feel. In the closing bars, Fauré
moves the lyrical theme two quavers later in the bar so that its opening
octave, now sung by the piano, seems more of a regretful sigh than it did
before.
The finale was revised by Fauré after he had played the piano in its
1880 premiere, and it is unclear how much the published finale differs from
what the original audience heard. The version we know today has an
irresistible momentum. Its opening seems to take the theme of the slow
movement a stage further, knitting together the phrases into a single sweep
across an octave. Once again, rhythmic excitement is provided partly
through competing duple (on strings) and triple (on piano) rhythms. The
piano writing is virtuosic, requiring the pianist not only to leap about the
octaves and cross hands at speed but also to play darting left-hand
figuration which stretches across wide intervals of a tenth, not easily
manageable by small hands.
In the middle there is an episode which seems to hark back to the mood
of the Scherzo; the string group quietly picks out the main beats while the
piano introduces a slow, mysterious theme hinting at another, larger kind of
metre. This unusual effect may well have inspired Ravel, who constructs
along similar lines an even more breathtaking effect in the scherzo of his
Piano Trio, a slow theme majestically appearing out of nowhere in the midst
of frantic activity. Fauré’s finale ends with the apotheosis of its second,
lyrical theme, inflected almost to the end with an ‘ancient’ modal character.
 He went on to write another piano quartet, two piano quintets and a
piano trio, all of them addictive in their way for musicians on Fauré’s
wavelength. His melodic lines become more and more refined, the rise and
fall of tension more exquisitely controlled. But perhaps he never wrote
anything which surpasses his first piano quartet in its outpouring of warmth
and energy.

53. Dolly Suite, op. 56, for Piano Duet

The six pieces of Dolly are a touching glimpse into Fauré’s private life.
‘Dolly’ was the nickname of a little girl named Hélène Bardac, daughter of
the singer Emma Bardac. Emma has the unusual distinction of having been
the muse of not one but two great composers: Fauré (whose mistress she
was for several years) and Debussy (whom she later married). When Fauré
met Emma in 1892, she was married to the banker Sigismond Bardac. Fauré
was married to Marie Fremiet, but he and Emma began an affair which was
of great importance to him. Not long after they met, he wrote his splendid
song cycle La Bonne Chanson for her. Emma’s daughter ‘Dolly’ Bardac
was born in 1892 and the following year Fauré began writing little piano
duets (for four hands at one piano) as birthday gifts for her. Knowing of
Emma’s affair with Fauré and seeking an explanation for his attachment to
the little girl, historians have wondered whether Dolly could have been his
daughter, but it seems unlikely. Whatever the reason, he marked Dolly’s
first few birthdays and other family occasions by sending her these pieces
in manuscript.
Why piano duets for a little girl, one might wonder? Who did Fauré
imagine was going to play them – him and Emma Bardac; Emma and
Hélène when she was old enough to play the piano; Hélène and Fauré,
even? Could they have been a coded message that although he was not
present in the household, he was ‘by her side’ as a piano duet partner would
be? Or did the duets serve a double purpose of being personal gifts for his
mistress’s daughter while also catering to the public’s appetite for piano
duets? In any event, the duets did make it into print in 1897 as the Dolly
Suite. Fauré, who disliked devising names for his pieces (his son recalled
that Fauré would much rather have called them ‘Piece number such-and-
such’) relented on this occasion and gave each piece a picturesque title.
 ‘Berceuse’ (Cradle Song) was written many years earlier with another
title for another little girl, daughter of a friend, but Fauré revised it,
renamed it, and presented it to Emma for Dolly’s first birthday in 1893. It is
well known in Britain because it was the sign-off music for a long-running
radio programme, Listen with Mother. Straightaway it takes us into the
special world of Fauré’s long, pure melodic lines with serenely rippling
accompaniments. In the middle there is a delicious key change from E
major to C, the bass note dropping to produce a new harmonic colour. The
style of writing, with the melody line in the top part and the rippling
harmonies in the bottom part, may give unwary duet players the impression
that the top part is always going to be the easy one, but after the first piece
the writing becomes much more evenly distributed.
‘Mi-a-ou’ is a fast waltz, its title deriving from Dolly’s childish attempts
to pronounce the words ‘Monsieur Raoul’, a mock-formal way of referring
to her brother Raoul. (It was the publisher who introduced the hyphens,
perhaps to show the pronunciation, but this has given rise to the erroneous
belief that the piece is about a cat.) The waltz is transparently scored and
charmingly light on its feet, with frequent use of cross-rhythms where the
music moves in patterns of two beats within a three-beat metre. Towards the
end a slightly slower phrase seems to quote a nursery rhyme or song, swept
away by a cheeky coda. The final few bars will test the precision reflexes of
the duet team.
‘Le jardin de Dolly’ (Dolly’s Garden), a New Year’s Day present for
1895, continues the beautiful melodic writing of the ‘Berceuse’, this time
with piquant inflections which often give the impression that a phrase rises
up in one key and descends in another. Near the beginning (bars 7–8) Fauré
quotes the theme of the finale of his first sonata for violin and piano, op. 13,
written in 1877. The sonata was his first really successful piece, but we
don’t know why he plants a cutting from it in Dolly’s garden.
‘Kitty-Valse’ is a waltz which should really be ‘Ketty-Valse’, written to
depict Dolly’s pet dog, Ketty. By this time Dolly was four and liked to
dance with Ketty leaping about to keep her company. Ketty must have been
a very graceful dog, judging from this suave waltz. In the middle section
Fauré introduces more cross-rhythms of two beats within the three-beat
metre; here again he turns the melodic line as it descends to make us feel
we are coming down a different staircase than the one we went up.
 ‘Tendresse’ (Tenderness) is the richest piece harmonically, full of
gorgeous chromatic shadings. The writing, particularly for the lower part, is
noticeably denser and more sensuous, as if it were one of his Barcarolles or
Nocturnes for solo piano. In the middle, there is a courteous dialogue
between the top part and the lower part, almost like one of Poulenc’s
tongue-in-cheek conversations between two wind instruments.
‘Le Pas Espagnol’ (The Spanish Walk) is in the French nineteenth-
century tradition of conjuring up a Spanish atmosphere, and may have been
in part a friendly tribute to Emmanuel Chabrier whose orchestral piece
‘España’ had been a huge success. ‘Le pas espagnol’ is actually the term for
a kind of high-stepping dressage movement made by a horse; in ‘the
Spanish walk’ the horse is trained to raise each foreleg and point it in the air
before placing it down. In either Dolly’s house or Fauré’s there was a
bronze statue of a horse with its front leg raised in such a manner, and the
pianist Marguerite Long recalled that Dolly liked it. (As the statue was by
the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet, Fauré’s father-in-law, it seems more likely
that it was in Fauré’s house.) He and Dolly’s family may even have seen a
horse doing the ‘Spanish walk’ at a circus – in 1899 the Parisian artist
Toulouse-Lautrec drew a top-hatted rider on a brown circus horse being put
through its paces in a picture called ‘Au Cirque – Le Pas espagnol’ (At the
circus – the Spanish walk). Fauré affectionately evokes Spain with a fast
dance in triple time, with accents or perhaps clapping on unexpected beats
and half-beats. This final number is often played very fast, but if one
imagines the prancing movement of the horse, it seems clear that the tempo
should allow for elegance. In later years the composer enjoyed playing the
Dolly Suite with lots of different duet partners including the children of his
friends.

LEOŠ JANÁCˇEK (1854–1928)

54. On an Overgrown Path, Book 1
Janáček was a unique voice in early twentieth-century music, truculently
pursuing a path of expressive intensity based on the folk music and speech
rhythms of his native Moravia.
 Although he is often counted alongside Dvořák and Smetana as ‘a
Czech composer’, it is important to note that Janáček’s Moravia is further to
the east than Bohemia (where Dvořák and Smetana came from) and has its
own distinct character, less influenced by Germany and more by the lands
to the east of it, such as Russia with its Byzantine links and the chants of its
Orthodox Church.
Janáček had a lifelong interest in Moravian folk music, travelling deep
into the country to collect and notate folk songs which he later published
and arranged for various instruments. For him, folk music was not a light-
hearted diversion from classical composition – it was something deeply
serious. He sought a closer connection with the music of the people. But the
melodies he collected were only a part of his fascination with folk music.
He believed that folk songs could not be understood through their musical
elements alone: only the words and their spoken rhythm could explain why
the music was shaped as it was. He tried to note down the rhythms and
‘speech melodies’ of scraps of conversation he heard on his travels.
Many people imagine that tunes are made up first and have words put to
them later, but Janáček held the opposite view, believing that the words, and
the way they were spoken in that region, dictated the shape of the tunes. He
had a low opinion of artfully composed ‘folk songs’ organised into phrases
of regular length, because people do not speak like that. He wanted to
capture the natural cadence of speech in his music, which meant tracing not
only the rhythm of the words but also the rise and fall in people’s voices.
Janáček’s melodies have a deliberately erratic character, with irregular
phrases, repetitions, unpredictable pauses, changes of direction, incomplete
statements, sudden silences, and so on. ‘I am certain,’ he wrote in 1926,
‘that all melodic and rhythmical mysteries of music are to be explained
solely from rhythmical and melodic points of view on the basis of the
melodic curves of speech.’
As one might expect, Janáček was keenly interested in writing music for
voices (his operas are probably his greatest legacy), but he had a phase,
from 1900 to 1912, when he wrote quite a lot of piano music. Even though
it was instrumental music, he persisted in applying the same ‘natural
speech’ guidelines to his melodies and rhythms. He also included musical
representations of the sounds of nature, often small repetitive sounds as
might be made by insects or birds. His musical language was to some extent
also a mirror of his own nature, which by all accounts was somewhat
brusque, stubborn and defiant. ‘A tough nut!’ recalled Czech conductor
Václav Talich.
The attempt to represent song in piano music was of course not new, but
the kind of song we often encounter in piano music is ‘art song’ or trained
singing such as operatic aria, Lieder, recitative or folk song of the
manicured and tidied-up variety. Janáček’s insistence on deriving his
musical lines from the intonation of everyday speech or untutored singing
therefore gives his piano music a very unusual flavour, the more so because
his model was Moravian speech. Had he taken his notebook into the streets
of New York or London, the way people spoke there would probably have
led him to somewhat different shapes and rhythms. I have wondered
whether, with the passing of time and the shifting of populations, people in
Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) still speak just as they did in the
early years of the twentieth century. In its own way, Janáček’s music may
be a little time capsule.
The piano composition for which he is most loved is On an Overgrown
Path, Book One. (There is a second book, less frequently played but full of
interest.) The ten pieces of Book One began life as a contribution of a few
little pieces to a volume of harmonium music. Over a few years the
collection grew and was designated for the piano instead. Originally the
pieces had no titles, but Janáček later agreed to supply some. They are very
much of the kind that Schumann might have used: ‘Our Evenings’, ‘A
Blown-away Leaf’, ‘Come with Us!’, ‘Words Fail!’, ‘Unspeakable
Anguish’ and so on, domestic portraits with hints of pain beneath the
surface. In fact, this was also the period in which Janáček’s twenty-one-
year-old daughter Olga, who had always been frail, became seriously ill and
died. It is not clear exactly how closely the Overgrown Path mirrors the
events of her illness, but many of the pieces convey a strong sense of
foreboding.
The first piece, ‘Our Evenings’, is a good example of Janáček’s typical
piano writing, mixing major and minor harmonies with mysterious-
sounding modes. The lyrical section at the beginning seems peaceful, but
moves in unpredictable phrases of five bars, three bars, three bars, and so
on. In the next section, the smooth phrases are knocked aside by quiet
chattering semiquavers and loudly repeated notes whose energy comes out
of nowhere. In the final Adagio, the chattering rhythmic figure is pushed
into a subdued middle voice as the lyrical atmosphere makes an uncertain
return, hovering sadly between major and minor. In ‘A Blown-away Leaf’
we begin to see melodic phrases which are terminated suddenly, leaving
only fractured rhythms to carry the music forward. ‘Come with Us!’ shows
the composer varying a little phrase (bars 3–4) by changing its pitch,
speeding it up, and varying its rhythm so that six notes become eleven in
the same number of beats. In ‘The Madonna of Frýdek’ (the composer’s
grandfather was born in the village of Frýdek), Janáček juxtaposes solemn
chordal phrases with episodes of devotional singing which start in the
distance over shimmering accompaniment and come nearer to us with each
repetition. ‘They Chattered Like Swallows’ begins with regular-length
phrases but quickly deviates into eccentric modifications of the opening
phrase, widening its intervals, shortening its units, introducing fragments of
melody under the chattering rhythms, varying the tempo capriciously
without making it clear why.
In ‘Words Fail!’ the battle between melodic phrases and quiet obsessive
rhythms continues. The point at which one turns into the other is kept
obscure; the pianist must be ready to flip rapidly between moods of
melancholy and nervous anxiety. Those two elements run in parallel in
‘Good Night!’ Slow and lyrical melodic lines wend their way through the
piece despite the constant attrition of tiny rhythmic units in almost every
bar, keeping us at arm’s length from the peaceful night we hope for. This
technique is pushed further in ‘Unspeakable Anguish’ in which drooping
fragments of fragile melody try to find space amid the insistent chirruping
of a rhythm which recalls the implacable song of crickets on a summer
night. ‘In Tears’ proceeds with obsessive repetition of a little melodic
phrase which is moved up and down in pitch, passes through some distant
keys and back to the home key without ever finding where it was going.
The final piece is ‘The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!’ This is the
best-known of the pieces and probably the most haunting (in Czech culture,
the call of the barn owl is a sign of ill omen). It is a little drama of several
elements: the restless, leaping figure we hear at the very start (could it be
the beating of wings?) which settles down into a quiet oscillation; the two-
note descending figure which represents the haunting ‘hoo-hoo’ of the owl
(actually, the barn owl has a kind of screech; it’s the tawny owl that has a
two-note call); and a hymn-like section which seems to evoke a choir
singing in a church nearby, or perhaps just a recollection of a happier time.
When this hymn- or chorale-like figure first appears, its song is punctuated
by mysterious one-beat silences, like a heart skipping a beat. But when the
chorale is heard again later in the piece, the silence is infiltrated by the
restless motif of the opening. Gradually the hymn gains strength and seems
to be seeking to reassure us. But its final statement is immediately followed
by a return to the bleak atmosphere of the opening, the warning cry of the
barn owl being the last thing we hear.

ISAAC ALBÉNIZ (1860–1909)

55. Iberia
The Catalan composer Isaac Albéniz, a contemporary of Debussy, was a
child prodigy both as pianist and composer. His first public concert was at
the age of four, and his first published composition came at the age of eight.
His father was keen to promote his young son’s talent and arranged for him
to tour extensively, perhaps considering him a sort of little Mozart. It seems
that Isaac himself was happy to embrace the life of a performing musician;
before the age of twelve he had twice run away, on both occasions
somehow managing to earn money by playing the piano in novel ways such
as blindfold, or sitting on the floor with his back to the piano and playing
the keyboard with hands crossed behind his shoulders. His ordinary piano-
playing was even more impressive.
His restless spirit meant that he was not well suited to life as a
conservatoire student, and he moved around a lot as a young man, studying
in Leipzig and Brussels. In his diary he recounted playing to Liszt in
Budapest, but historians have marked this down as a tall tale because it
seems fairly clear that Liszt was in Weimar at the time. At any rate, Liszt’s
extrovert style of piano-playing and composition greatly appealed to
Albéniz and left their mark on his writing. Eventually Albéniz found
himself in Barcelona, where he studied composition with Felipe Pedrell.
Pedrell had devoted himself to cultivating a Spanish national school of
composition drawing its inspiration from Spanish church music of the
Renaissance and Baroque, and from Spanish folk songs, of which he was a
noted collector. His belief that Spanish music could only thrive if it
reconnected to its past and to the music of its people was enormously
influential, not only on Albéniz but also on Granados and de Falla. It is
worth noting that the Barcelona audiences of the day did not share Pedrell’s
views; Italian opera was all the rage and everyone was flocking to hear
Verdi and Donizetti. The cultural climate was conservative, and a young
composer may not have felt that it was the best place to be radical.
In 1890 Albéniz moved to London, and in 1893 to Paris, which became
his base for the rest of his life. There he was friendly with Debussy,
Chausson, Fauré, Dukas, d’Indy and others. He admired the new wave of
French composers and their vocabulary of unusual modes and scales,
particularly the whole-tone scale as used by Debussy. Albéniz began to
experiment with a more refined musical language, using Spanish folk music
and dance as his basis but expressing himself in a sophisticated Parisian
style. Ironically, it was in Paris that he wrote the masterpiece that really
vindicated Pedrell’s ideas: Iberia, a set of twelve substantial piano pieces
fired by nostalgia for Spain and respect for Spanish folk music.
Iberia is no chocolate-box picture of Spain; it’s a genuine attempt to
bring some of the rawer and more vigorous types of Spanish folk music into
the concert hall. Olivier Messiaen described it as ‘the masterpiece of
Spanish music’. Although Albéniz was from the north-east corner of Spain,
one of his great achievements is the evocation of flamenco, the gypsy music
of Andalusia in the Spanish south. This great tradition with its complex
rhythms, its passionate vocal declamations and its distinctive dance styles
was not easy to transfigure into piano music, but Albéniz probably came
closer than anyone else has. While his earlier piano pieces are more or less
playable by amateur pianists, Iberia marks a leap into virtuosity of the most
daunting kind. Perhaps the intensity of Albéniz’s feelings compelled him to
cram his music with layer upon layer of incident and embroidery; it seems
symbolic of his teeming imagination that he was drawn to key signatures
with a great many sharps and flats, as in the rarely heard A flat minor (seven
flats!) of the opening piece, ‘Evocación’. He often writes on three staves,
because the density of the layers is too great for two staves to accommodate
all the notes for which he has to find room. Debussy, when he heard ‘El
Albaicín’ performed in 1908, commented, ‘Never before has music given us
such diverse and colourful impressions. It’s as if your eyes close because
you are seeing too many images.’
Iberia is in four books of three pieces each, not designed to be
performed all at once, or in any particular order. Each piece is the evocation
of a scene, a mood, a market, a particular district, a seaport, a religious
procession, a jostling crowd. The raw folk material which Albéniz used as
his inspiration is transmuted into his own Francophile musical language but,
remarkably, without losing the intensity of the flamenco original. The sound
of guitars and ‘palmas’ (rhythmic flamenco hand-clapping) are brought in to
the music, not as touristic colour, but as serious and essential. Just as in
flamenco, an absolutely dependable – indeed implacable – rhythm is the
heart of the matter. Melody plays a subordinate role and is largely
represented by melodic fragments rather than tunes you can go away and
sing. What really sticks in the listener’s mind are the pounding, stamping
rhythms of the Andalusian dances, proud and pitiless in character. Albéniz
has wonderfully captured their passionate harshness, and as we listen it is
easy to imagine the hard southern sunlight which inspired Debussy to write
‘La Puerta del Vino’ from his second book of Preludes. The plush
cushioning of Romantic music seems far away here; energy, stamina and
determination are all. Iberia is so difficult technically that live
performances of its most intimidating pieces, such as ‘Triana’ or ‘Lavapiés’,
are few and far between. Debussy thought that the finest piece was the final
one, ‘Eritaña’, a tribute to an inn near Seville where flamenco artists
performed.
It is tempting to feel regret that Albéniz’s virtuosic style of writing puts
the majority of Iberia outside the reach of most pianists, but one can feel
the pressure of his desire – the desire of an exile – to portray Andalusia in
its true complexity. As the New York Times dryly said when the Spanish
pianist Alicia de Larrocha gave her masterful interpretation of Iberia in
New York in 1998, ‘There is really nothing in Isaac Albéniz’s “Iberia” that a
good three-handed pianist could not master, given unlimited years of
practice and permission to play at half tempo.’

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918)

 56. Images, Series 1
Debussy is often considered an ‘Impressionist’ composer whose music is
dreamy, pastel and improvisatory. But the French pianist Vlado Perlemuter,
who studied with Ravel (and with whom I studied in Paris), insisted it was
nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he explained, Debussy’s music was
extremely precise and must be played with the utmost clarity and fidelity to
the composer’s markings. If this remark seems surprising, it is because we
underestimate the skill with which Debussy concealed his meticulous
working methods.
From his twenties, Debussy was part of a circle of composers, artists
and poets who discussed esoteric theories and their use in the arts. Like Erik
Satie, Debussy was interested in Rosicrucianism, then in vogue in certain
Paris circles. Rosicrucians regarded themselves as guardians of ancient
philosophical secrets and believed that music was a scientific art based on
number and proportion. Debussy himself said that ‘music is a mysterious
mathematical process whose elements are a part of infinity.’ In his ground-
breaking book, Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis, Roy Howat
demonstrates that Debussy must consciously have used the Golden Section
(a ratio used in art and architecture to produce proportions pleasing to the
human eye) to calculate a structure and proportions for some of his pieces,
enabling him to place their focal points at precise intervals analogous to the
proportions of, say, a Greek temple or Renaissance church.
To think of Debussy as someone secretive about using mathematical
principles in his music is difficult for those of his fans who prefer to see
him as a ‘natural’, instinctive composer. But as Howat points out, ‘virtually
no composers before Schoenberg explained their precise techniques’. All
great works of art are organised on principles of one kind or another, and
we might be surprised if we knew the working methods of some of our
favourite composers. (J. S. Bach, for example, is thought to have been
deeply interested in using mathematical ideas and number symbolism in his
music.) If Debussy chose to use mathematics in calculating the relationship
of one musical unit to another, it doesn’t downgrade the role of his
imagination. Indeed, if he used mathematical schemes and yet succeeds in
giving us the impression that his music tumbles out with innocent flair, it is
a tribute to his creative methods, for many composers (especially in the age
of technology) have used complicated calculations and produced only a dry
result. There is something very pleasing about the ebb and flow of
Debussy’s music, which is probably inseparable from his skilful use of
proportions.
The first series of Images was completed in August 1905 when Debussy
was on holiday in Eastbourne on the south coast of England. He had
mentioned them to his publisher Jacques Durand that summer, but
explained there would be a delay in sending them because he had had to
rewrite the first piece ‘based on different ideas and in accordance with the
most recent discoveries of harmonic chemistry.’ Evidently he was pleased
with the result, for after he had sent them to Durand he asked, ‘Have you
played the Images? Without false vanity, I think these three pieces work
well and will take their place in piano literature . . . to the left of Schumann
or to the right of Chopin . . . “as you like it”.’ (This was probably a joke: his
initial, D, would mean that his music would be shelved between C and S!)
There was another important influence too – the music of the Javanese
gamelan, which fascinated Debussy and his friends when an Indonesian
gamelan orchestra came to perform at the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1889.
(A set of gamelan instruments had been presented to the Paris Conservatoire
in 1887, but the Great Exhibition was probably Debussy’s first opportunity
to hear gamelan music performed by experts.) The gamelan orchestra,
largely made up of bronze gongs and metallic instruments, made an
impression not only through its sound but also through its spirit: playing
gamelan was a community enterprise. There were no individual virtuosos,
and yet the combined effect was highly complex.
Debussy loved this intricate music built from layers of sound moving
simultaneously, guided by arithmetical rules and patterns. Gongs of various
sizes defined the rhythmic cycle. Large gongs marked out periods of eight
beats; gongs of diminishing sizes marked every four beats, two beats or one
beat. Meanwhile, middle-sized instruments such as metallophones (like a
xylophone with bronze keys, struck with a wooden hammer) played a
melodic pattern at medium speed while smaller instruments, such as bowed
string instruments and bamboo flutes, elaborated on the pattern at faster
speeds.
This characteristic texture, with low instruments moving slowly and
higher instruments moving at progressively faster speeds, made its first
appearance in Debussy’s mature piano music in ‘Pagodes’ from Estampes
(1903), clearly an evocation of Javanese music. By instructing that
‘Pagodes’ should be played ‘presque sans nuance’ (almost without nuance),
Debussy conveys a sense of inscrutability. The traditional Western sense of
key relationships is dissolved; pentatonic harmonies float serenely along
without striving for change. Far from finding this of limited interest,
Debussy was fascinated: ‘Do you not remember the Javanese music,’ he had
written to his friend Pierre Louÿs in 1895, ‘able to express every shade of
meaning, even unmentionable shades . . . which make our tonic and
dominant seem like ghosts?’
In Images, Series 1, the gamelan influence is more subtle, and is
integrated into a flexible palette of techniques, but echoes of gamelan music
can be found in all the pieces. In the opening of ‘Reflets dans l’Eau’, for
example, the bass tolls the bell, or gong, marking the slow pulse. In the
middle voice we hear the melodic motif, in this case the three notes A flat-
F-E flat (mysteriously described by Debussy to pianist Marguerite Long as
‘a pebble falling into a pond’), while in the treble we hear smaller
instruments (the fingers of the right hand) elaborating on this melodic
motif.
In all three pieces, Debussy uses a variety of harmonic devices: simple
harmonies based on the major scale; pentatonic harmonies (a five-note scale
often found in oriental and ‘folk’ music, and a sound we can find by playing
only the black notes of the piano); chromatic harmonies, often moving up
and down in semitone steps; and whole-tone harmonies in which the
musical steps climb not by a mixture of tones and semitones (as in the
major scale) but by whole tones only, resulting in a mysteriously ‘Eastern’
sonority. In general, when Debussy switches from one type of harmonic
organisation to another it is to signal that the music is passing from a stable
to a dynamic phase of its development (or vice versa).
The second piece, ‘Hommage à Rameau’, harks back to what Debussy
perceived as a golden age of French music. ‘I’m delighted about your
enthusiasm for Rameau,’ he wrote to a friend in 1906. ‘He deserves it for all
the qualities in his music which ought to have protected us against Gluck’s
deceitful grandiloquence and Wagner’s bombastic metaphysics.’
When two acts of Rameau’s 1737 opera Castor et Pollux were
performed in Paris in 1903, Debussy was very moved by the calm and
sincerity of the music. Interestingly, it struck him not as stiff or antique, but
as ‘breathing an atmosphere of tragedy which yet remains human. We are
not so much conscious of the robes and helmets as of people weeping as we
might weep ourselves.’ In his ‘homage’ he evokes the restrained dignity
with the measured tread of a sarabande, a stately French eighteenth-century
dance. In the middle section, something stirs: it is as if the narrator cannot
stop himself from making some personal comment. It subsides again to
allow the quiet sarabande to return. Once more, in this piece we can often
hear the different layers of gamelan-like movement: slow-moving bell-like
basses, tenor parts moving at medium speed, and faster movement in the
treble.
‘Mouvement’, the third and most obviously virtuosic piece, stays with
the world of eighteenth-century France by evoking the rattling merriment
of, for example, François Couperin’s charming ‘moto perpetuo’ harpsichord
pieces such as ‘Le Tic-Toc-Choc’. ‘Mouvement’ is in three-part form with
the first and third sections, straightforwardly based in C major, echoing one
another, while the middle section, hovering in F sharp, follows a different
and more dynamic course. For the enjoyment of the piece, it is not
necessary to know that precise calculations underlie the lengths of different
sections, but they do shed a fascinating light on Debussy’s mental
processes. Roy Howat has pointed out that Debussy calculated the
proportions using Golden Sections: ‘the main climax at bars 109–10, just
before the recapitulation, is placed over the piece’s GS (the total of bars is
177, GS of which is 109). Also, the beginning of the central section after 66
bars lies within a bar of GS on the way to the arrival of the main climax
(GS of 108 is 66.7).’
Gamelan-wise, there are also halfway divisions: the low bass C at bar
34 tolls the midpoint of the opening section, and the low C at bar 144 tolls
the midpoint of the closing one, while the ‘En augmentant’ section at bar 89
marks the halfway point of the middle section itself. Again, the outer
sections use simple harmonies while the middle section (bar 67 onwards)
accumulates energy through the use of chromatic harmonies in more than
one key at once. The closing section or coda of the piece (bar 156) switches
to whole-tone harmonies and employs its own mini-Golden-Section ratios
of 4 + 7 + 11 bars as the music ascends impassively into higher and higher
regions before evaporating.
 These are just a few of the simpler examples of Debussy’s use of
Golden Sections. We must bear in mind, though, that the way mathematical
divisions work on paper is not equivalent to how they work when music is
flowing in time. They may be a working method for the composer, and a
very potent one, but when we listen to music we can only analyse its
proportions once it has finished, unlike when looking at a painting or a
building, and it is probably impossible to discern proportions as you listen,
especially once musical material starts attracting your attention in more
immediate ways.

57. Preludes, Book 2

Debussy’s two books of Preludes, twenty-four in all, are one of the great
achievements of twentieth-century piano music. No doubt they were
inspired by the 24 Preludes of Chopin, whose music Debussy adored, but
they do not stand in Chopin’s shadow. For me, Debussy’s Preludes have
never lost their fascination and, indeed, seem to remain magically fresh.
One can sense that Debussy had a very rich mental landscape and a wide
consciousness of music from the mediaeval to the exotic and from folk
music to cabaret. His interest in numbers and in mathematical principles
helped him to give a pleasing structure to artistic compositions. His musical
vocabulary contains all kinds of scales and modes, oriental influences,
Spanish folk music, Impressionist aesthetics, music-hall sauciness, poetic
intensity, an acute sensitivity to the sounds and sights of nature, and an ear
for piano sonority which has rarely been equalled.
The French pianist Marguerite Long, in her memoir At the Piano with
Debussy, tells us that Debussy said ‘One should forget that the piano has
hammers’, meaning that it should never sound percussive. Intriguingly, he
also said that ‘the hands are not meant to hover in the air over the piano, but
should enter into it’. Many of his friends observed that when he played he
seemed to have soft hands, keeping his fingers close to the keys and
appearing to ‘mould’ the sound as if it were located in the keys themselves;
they spoke of him ‘brushing’, ‘caressing’, ‘floating over’, ‘sinking into’ the
keys. Of course there are passages which require attack, crispness, staccato,
even hammering and glittering, but these are matched to particular moments
in the music and are never to be taken as the basic sound. Now and then he
does create a piece which is deliberately virtuosic, but most of the time his
rapid figuration is used to create ‘atmosphere’, to conjure up water, wind,
mist, or the weightless dances of fairies, and is more likely to be soft than
loud.
Although in Book 1 of his Preludes he gives some indication of
fingering and pedalling, he gives none in Book 2 (by then, he felt that
pedalling should vary from one piano to another and from one hall to
another). Some years later, in the preface to his 1915 Études, he gave his
famous advice, ‘Cherchons nos doigtés!’ (Let us find our own fingering!),
which presumably must apply to Book 2 of the Preludes too. Just how little
he was interested in enabling the pianist to assert themselves or impress the
audience with traditional virtuosity is shown by the fact that the majority of
preludes in both books begin ‘quietly’ or ‘very quietly’, and many of them
end quietly too.
Debussy once said he would like to have been a painter, and most of his
preludes were inspired by literary or pictorial associations. He gave them
titles, although in order not to constrain the listener’s imagination he put the
titles at the end (of course this is a trick that only works once!). Other
famous composers of preludes such as Bach or Chopin had organised them
according to key. Debussy probably had his own organisational principles,
but characteristically he chose not to disclose them. (Here again, fascinating
work has been done by Roy Howat in his book The Art of French Piano
Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier to discover what some of those
principles might be.) Certainly there is a subtle relationship between the key
of one prelude and the key of the next, but it is not of an easily explicable
kind. In Book 2 there seems to be a subdivision of the twelve into four
groups of three, the third of each group being more extrovert in character.
(This was a principle applied on a larger scale by J.S. Bach in his Goldberg
Variations.)
Debussy was an Anglophile; he loved London and its art galleries, he
was a huge fan of Charles Dickens, and he holidayed in Eastbourne on the
south coast. The English in turn were keen on Debussy, especially after they
had seen him conduct his own music for the first time in London in 1908.
Amateur pianists bought his first book of Preludes in large numbers when it
appeared in 1910. When the second book came out in 1913, their
enthusiasm was slightly more muted, but this may have been because
Debussy’s musical language had become more elusive (one important new
influence on him in the years between the two books of Preludes was the
music of Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring ‘haunted’ Debussy after he heard
it played on the piano at a private performance in 1912). Nevertheless, his
fans enjoyed his continued use of English references such as Arthur
Rackham’s illustrations of fairies, or Charles Dickens’s Mr Pickwick. Over
the years, the second book of Preludes has come to be seen as perhaps even
more poetical than the first.
‘Brouillards’ (Mists) sets us on Debussy’s adventurous new path right
away with its use of two keys at once: here, the left hand plays chords based
in C major while the right hand creates ‘mist’ around those chords with
delicate arpeggios hinting at G flat major. This combination of keys a
tritone apart (that is to say, three whole tones apart, long considered an
incompatible harmonic pairing) is a favourite of Debussy’s, recurring
throughout the Preludes. It suggests two different planes being juxtaposed,
and creates a feeling of instability which Debussy uses to poetic effect. It
also introduces a pattern he uses in various places in the Preludes: the two
hands interlocking as the left hand plays on the white notes and the right
hand plays on the black notes in between them – for the pianist, a pleasing
tactile sensation not unlike the finger-painting one did as a child.
‘Feuilles mortes’ (Dead Leaves), one of the few preludes that Debussy
offered to perform himself, seems too sensuous to depict dead, dry leaves
and is perhaps more an evocation of a sad mood experienced on an autumn
walk. Rich chords are placed with great subtlety; simpler harmonies glide
peacefully along, while sourer, more intense harmonies seem to set off
ripples in the bass or inner parts. In the middle section Debussy gives this
delightful instruction: ‘un peu plus allant et plus gravement expressif’ (a bit
more flowing and more gravely expressive), a perfect instance of opposites
being combined to produce a fruitful tension. In the distance we seem to
hear trumpets, almost like a sneaky reference to his friend Stravinsky’s
Petrushka of 1911, or perhaps simply to the Parisian brass bands whose
music drifts through the final bars of the twelfth prelude, ‘Feux d’artifice’.
‘La Puerta del Vino’ (The Wine Gate) is one of those evocations which
led the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla to say admiringly that when
Debussy portrayed Spain, ‘we are far from these serenades, madrileños and
boleros by which the makers of supposedly Spanish music used to regale
us; here it is truly Andalusia that he presents to us’ (even though Debussy
had never been to Spain, apart from one brief trip to San Sebastián). The
piece was inspired by a postcard Debussy had received from de Falla of the
Alhambra Palace in Granada, showing one of its great stone gates in
shadow with harsh sunlight striking the sand-coloured path beyond. He
captures this duality in his prelude with soft but implacable drumming in
the bass, while in the treble we hear the kind of husky singing associated
with the ‘cante jondo’ or ‘deep singing’ of flamenco with its passionate
improvised decorations of the melody line. He imitates the sound of
strummed guitar chords with quickly snatched arpeggios. Sparing use of the
pedal will help the clarity of the guitar and percussion effects.
‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’ (The fairies are exquisite dancers)
was inspired by Arthur Rackham’s colour plates, ‘Fairies in Kensington
Gardens’ and ‘The Fairy’s Tightrope’, illustrations for J.M. Barrie’s Peter
Pan in Kensington Gardens. ‘Fairies in Kensington Gardens’ was Barrie’s
own favourite of the Rackham illustrations, and Debussy’s daughter
Chouchou had a print of it hanging above her bed. One of the most
enjoyable pieces to play, it uses unrelated keys piled on top of one another,
a sparing use of bass notes and a subtle avoidance of harmonic resting
places to create a sense of being weightless. Sometimes the fairies sway in a
sensuous waltz, while at other moments they simply flit about. Most of the
piece is very quiet with constant fluttering in one part or another, best
achieved by minimal movements of the fingers, in close contact with the
keys.
‘Bruyères’ (Heather) is written in a slightly simpler style that seems to
hark back to the tranquil mood of ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (The girl
with flaxen hair) from the first book of Preludes. It opens in pentatonic
mode (such as you would hear if you played only the black notes of the
piano keyboard) and moves back and forth between that and an open-
sounding major scale with straightforward harmonies. Again and again we
hear a graceful drooping phrase, perhaps more reminiscent of a long branch
laden with blossoms than of the tougher little spikes of heather.
‘General Lavine – eccentric’ is a portrait of an American music-hall
comedian, Ed Lavine, whose act Debussy had enjoyed in Paris. Lavine
(‘The man who has soldiered all his life’) walked on stilts, juggled, and
played the piano with his toes, activities easy to visualise when listening to
the jaunty rhythms of this cakewalk. Near the beginning Debussy gives the
poker-faced instruction ‘spirituel et discret’ (spirited and discreet) to guide
one’s playing of the cheeky tune that creeps into the bass. In the middle
section with its jazzy mutterings, Debussy twice seems to quote a fragment
from Stephen Foster’s 1850 minstrel song ‘Camptown Races’, perhaps an
allusion to Lavine’s American origin. It has been said that this is Debussy’s
only portrait of an actual human being in the Preludes, but it is probably
more accurate to think of it as a tribute to a fictional music-hall character.
‘La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune’ (The terrace for moonlit
audiences), perhaps the finest achievement of the second book of Preludes,
was inspired by reading a report in the newspaper Le Temps of the
ceremonies surrounding George V being crowned Emperor of India. The
first few very quiet notes may be an allusion to the French nursery rhyme
‘Au clair de la lune’ (In the moonlight), and there is another instance of it a
few bars later in the high treble, though perhaps the similarity to the nursery
rhyme is just a coincidence. Moonlight seems to shimmer down on us in the
form of curling phrases from on high, rich and sensuous chords in the
middle part evoking velvets and shadows. Here there are no obvious
‘themes’, rather swaying phrases which seem to stir into life and then fall
back into slumber. In the final bars there is a shift to a simple chanting
rhythm in which high little bells tinkle out a final allusion to the nursery
rhyme.
‘Ondine’ is the water sprite who leaves her watery home to live with a
mortal man. Her graceful movement is portrayed mostly in the treble
register, dance elements juxtaposed with the lapping of waves. In the
middle, things take a more sinister turn: the bass becomes more active and
the harmonies become sharper and sourer as a strange high motif composed
mainly of repeated notes is heard in the treble. A moment later this same
repeated-note motif is heard at half-speed in a new key and a seductive
mood; then it regains its spiky quality, drops down into a low register, and
suddenly seems to rear up at us, but to no avail: it disappears beneath the
waves, and all we hear is the quiet lapping of water. It’s possible that
Debussy intended a comparison to be made between this piece and Ravel’s
‘Ondine’, the first movement of Gaspard de la Nuit, composed a few years
earlier. Ravel’s shimmering ‘Ondine’ is much more fearsome technically, a
quality which Debussy may have felt he could outshine with his own brand
of supple charm (and playability).
‘Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq, PPMPC’ is a homage to Dickens’s
humorous character Mr Pickwick, the ‘Perpetual President Member of the
Pickwick Club’. His English origin is saluted by Debussy with a quotation
from ‘God Save the Queen’ (if we are in Dickens’s era, or ‘God Save the
King’ if we are in Debussy’s) played in the bass at the beginning. Mr
Pickwick’s well-meaning but slightly foolish nature is portrayed in short
sections with frequent shifts of mood, at one moment jaunty, then pompous,
then unsure. Things become agitated and at the loud climax of the piece a
crooked version of the national anthem is heard in the high treble with
frantic accompaniment above it, like quarrelling birds. A moment later all is
jovial again and Mr Pickwick goes whistling on his way, only to be startled
by yet another little mishap.
‘Canope’ (Canopic Jar) is a sidestep into the world of the Egyptian
antique. It is not known why Debussy wished to link this piece with canopic
jars, Egyptian funerary urns with elaborate carved heads, two of which
apparently stood on Debussy’s mantelpiece. Perhaps this prelude is another
example of painting ‘not the thing itself, but the effect it produces’ as the
poet Mallarmé advocated. The atmosphere is solemn and still, fragments of
‘ancient’ melody appearing at various distances and tiny bells tinkling as if
to mark the end of some rite.
In January 1913 Debussy wrote to his publisher that he had ‘got hung
up on “Tomai des Eléphants”. I’ve been soldiering away at it but as a
prelude it doesn’t work! I’ve already decided on a replacement and you’ll
have a complete set by the end of the week.’ It’s fun to imagine this missing
prelude, presumably based on Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘Toomai of the
Elephants’ (another English reference!) about a young elephant-handler in
India. We might speculate that in its place Debussy substituted ‘Les tierces
alternées’ (Alternating thirds) which seems to have wandered in from his
Études. It’s a study in subdued virtuosity in which the hands quietly and
rapidly alternate in thirds, occupying the same area of the keyboard so that
they must constantly cross as they compete for space. Considering
Debussy’s fondness for the old French masters of harpsichord music, this
may be a subtle joke, for such writing is easy enough to play if you have
two harpsichord keyboards (or manuals) at your disposal, but a great deal
harder if the two hands must vie for space on a single keyboard. Apart from
a brief oasis in the middle, the semiquaver rhythm patters on relentlessly. In
bars 75–78 there is a subdued little quote from ‘Ritual action of the
ancestors’ in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the quote underlined by Debussy’s
tenuto marks over the relevant chords in the bass. It’s hard to know what
Stravinsky’s ancestors are doing in this emotionally neutral prelude;
perhaps the quote simply shows how hard Debussy was finding it to shake
off the ‘ear-worm’ of Stravinsky’s iconic work.
‘Feux d’artifice’ (Fireworks) is a wondrous evocation of a firework
display, probably the famous one in the evening of Bastille Day in Paris,
when crowds jostle for a spot on one of the bridges over the Seine so that
they can see the fireworks reflected in the water. In this final piece Debussy
throws all reserve aside and paints with every pianistic colour at his
disposal, creating a kind of tone poem almost Lisztian in its mission to
dazzle. Everything has a huge range: dynamics, keyboard compass, texture,
colour. One of the most difficult technical challenges is the very opening,
where groups of white and black notes whirl about in a perpetual motion
marked ‘léger, égal et lointain’ (light, even and distant), easier said than
done on a modern piano. All kinds of fireworks are portrayed, from the
Roman candle to the jumping jack, the rocket, the Catherine wheel and the
gentle ‘fountain’ sending silent showers of coloured sparks. A final blaze of
pyrotechnic glory comes to a sudden end as the last rocket falls to the
ground (fortissimo glissando in both hands), and we are left groping in the
dark. In the silence that follows, we hear fragments of the French national
anthem, La Marseillaise, being played ‘de très loin’ (from very far away) by
a band marking the end of the firework display.

58. Sonata for Cello and Piano

Debussy was cast into a state of despair and depression by France’s
involvement in the First World War. His letters are full of anxieties and
forebodings, and he felt his music should reflect his feelings. Previously he
had often written music inspired by literary and pictorial ideas, but in 1915
he changed course and decided to undertake a ‘pure’ chamber music
project: a series of six sonatas ‘in the ancient, flexible mould with none of
the grandiloquence of modern sonatas. There are going to be six of them for
different groups of instruments and the last one will combine all those used
in the previous five. For many people that won’t be as important as an
opera . . . but I thought it was of greater service to music!’
Only the first three sonatas were written, because illness interrupted
Debussy’s work, and he died soon after. But he was right in thinking that
the sonatas were of great service to music, for the three pieces we have –
the cello and piano sonata, the violin and piano sonata, and the sonata for
flute, viola and harp – are masterpieces of his late style. The duo sonatas for
piano and a string instrument are intricate collaborations, demanding and
rewarding for both players. For the pianist, it is particularly galling when
they are advertised as if they are solo pieces with accompaniment, but this
is not the case: musically and instrumentally the parts are of equal weight.
In a letter to his publisher in August 1915, Debussy described his state
of mind: ‘I think of the youth of France, wantonly mown down by those
Kultur merchants [the Germans], and of their contribution to our heritage,
now forever lost to us. The music I’m writing will be a secret homage to
them; what’s the use of a dedication?’ He mentions his cello sonata, the first
of the six: ‘It’s not for me to judge its excellence but I like its proportions
and its almost classical form, in the good sense of the word.’ In October he
wrote to Igor Stravinsky: ‘I’ve actually written nothing except “pure” music
. . . two sonatas for various instruments, in the old French style.’
It’s interesting that Debussy considered the cello and piano sonata an
example of ‘pure’ music and of ‘almost classical form’, for it could be
viewed in quite another way, as a highly imaginative and evocative series of
cameos. In fact, he treats the cello in a very unusual way as a mercurial,
volatile sparring partner of the piano. It would be wrong to generalise about
the way the cello is presented in duo sonatas, but it’s probably fair to say
that the cello is more often presented as the lyrical, long-breathed member
of the duo, the ‘bass singer’ perhaps. What led Debussy to see the cello’s
potential for quicksilver repartee? The sonata’s musical language is almost
Expressionist in the sense of being slightly overwrought, fevered and highly
strung. Debussy was not a fan of Schoenberg at the time, but the cello and
piano sonata may seem to share some qualities with Schoenberg’s
nightmarish Pierrot Lunaire of 1912. It, too, has a movement called
‘Serenade’.
 The figure of Pierrot, the sad clown, was extremely popular in France in
the late nineteenth century. Debussy himself had earlier written songs based
on Verlaine’s poem ‘Pantomime’ and Banville’s poem ‘Pierrot’. When
Debussy wrote his Sonata for Cello and Piano, he received a visit from a
French cellist, Louis Roosor, who discussed the piece with him and later
claimed that Debussy had told him it was a musical depiction of Pierrot’s
amorous antics. But when Roosor went to the extent of printing leaflets
with this tale and distributing them to audiences when the sonata was on the
programme, Debussy was aghast. ‘For a moment he made me feel sorry I’d
composed a sonata . . . the episode has worried me considerably; the
ramifications are many and I’m not surprised any more that my poor music
is so often not understood. . . . Why wasn’t I taught to polish spectacles, like
Spinoza? Then I’d never have had to rely on music to provide my daily
bread.’
So it seems that either the ‘Pierrot’ theory is wrong, or that Debussy was
horrified that it had been given public airing. Nevertheless, the middle
movement of the sonata is called ‘Sérénade’, which sounds suspiciously
Pierrot-like. And the first movement is called ‘Prologue’, which sounds
theatrical. If this music is ‘pure’ and ‘classical’ as Debussy claimed, why
did he use such suggestive titles? There is another little puzzle, much
chewed over by interested observers. Why did he write the theme of the
German chorale ‘Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott’ (A Mighty Stronghold is our
God), written by Martin Luther in 1529, on the manuscript of the Serenade?
Is this quoted in the sonata, or did he just happen to use the manuscript as a
convenient place to scribble down an idea for something else? He did quote
that chorale (sardonically) in the second movement of his two-piano work
En blanc et noir, written the same year. Some commentators have
ingeniously tried to prove that the chorale is quoted in the first two
movements of the cello and piano sonata (in the ‘Debussy Sonata’ section
of his website, cellist Moray Welsh delves into this mystery), but the
evidence is not straightforward; if the chorale is quoted in the sonata, it is
tied into knots first. Clearly the situation is complicated, and today’s
interpreters must find their own path.
Debussy’s musical language in the cello and piano sonata is notable for
its compression. Phrases are often short, or made up of fragments which
break off irresolutely; there is constant changing of dynamics and tempo;
the score is heavily marked with instructions about accents, articulation,
speeding up and slowing down. Textures are clear, unsparing. The mood
changes rapidly: a nervy volatility runs through all three movements, as
though nothing can settle. The players seem to twist and turn, diving in and
out of moods, colours and types of expression. In the second movement, the
Serenade, the players are asked to be ‘fantastic and light’, ‘ironic’,
‘expressive’, ‘fiery’ and ‘extremely light’ in short order. In the finale there
are lightning-fast passages marked ‘volubile’ (volatile, changeable),
explosions of energy snuffed out almost immediately by episodes of
languorous charm which appear from nowhere. Debussy makes a point of
writing short, intense crescendos that blare forth and are extinguished, only
to begin again.
The Serenade in particular conjures up visual images. As we listen it is
easy to imagine Pierrot tiptoeing towards his beloved’s house, tripping over
a ladder, sitting on the ground looking dejected, getting up and playing his
guitar, capering wildly with his white clothes shining in the dark. But
perhaps it is simply that Debussy’s earlier music, such as the Preludes for
piano, has taught us to look for such imagery. Without them, we can only
grasp that the music seems to be fashioned from tiny disparate gestures,
sometimes beautiful, sometimes yearning, sometimes strange and
outlandish – a restless language for a troubling time.
My own first impression of the cello and piano sonata – before I had
heard the Pierrot theory – was that it has a strongly Spanish character. The
opening of the first movement seems like flamenco singing, proud and
passionate; the pizzicato passages often seem like guitar strumming, and the
piano part also imitates the violent rhythmic chords of the flamenco
guitarist. In the Serenade there is rapid dance music which combines
rhythmic patterns of twos against threes in flamenco manner, and at the
beginning of the finale the piano part surely evokes Spanish guitar music
with its characteristic fast right-hand fingerwork. Even the slow ‘rubato’
and ‘Lento’ sections in the finale seem as if they could be imitating the
sensuous undulations and arm movements of a flamenco bailerina and the
whirring of her fan. The ardent ‘vocal’ cadenza at the end, with its exotic
scale and its ‘arraché’ (snatched) chords, could hardly be more flamenco.
Pierrot, of course, was often portrayed playing the guitar, so is this why
Spanish music may have been in Debussy’s mind? And what about the
‘secret homage’ to the youth of France – where in this music is their tribute,
or does it simply capture their youthful high spirits? Whatever the
ingredients of this fascinating piece, it remains an enigma.

ERIK SATIE (1866–1925)

59. Gymnopédies
Erik Satie is most often represented by the drawing of him by his friend
Jean Cocteau, in which he appears as an elderly gentleman in pince-nez.
His own sketch for a bust of himself (never completed) also portrays him as
old and cross-looking. It comes as a surprise therefore to learn that he was
actually four years younger than Debussy, who appreciated him more than
most. Satie’s Gymnopédies was the only work by another composer which
Debussy took the trouble to orchestrate, and that was because he wanted to
help the unworldly Erik Satie to gain wider recognition for his music.
Satie was a genuine eccentric, and his lifestyle was strange and sad.
Nevertheless, he also cultivated the image of a contrarian who did not value
the things that society expected him to value, and it is hard to say how
much of his behaviour and the quirks of his compositional style were
deliberately cultivated. He began in a conventional way by studying piano
at the Paris Conservatoire when he was a teenager, but his first piano
teacher described him as ‘the laziest student in the Conservatoire’ and his
second teacher found him ‘worthless’. At the age of twenty-one, in 1887,
his life took a turn for the better when he rented a room in the bohemian
district of Montmartre. He decided to try and get a job playing the piano in
Le Chat Noir, a cabaret club frequented by many artists of the day including
Debussy. Satie presented himself to the manager of the club, describing
himself as a ‘gymnopedist’. If the manager required any enlightenment
about this description, he may not have found it in the explanation that
‘gymnopedia’ was a yearly celebration of athletic and martial arts
performed by naked youths in Ancient Sparta. Quite why Satie aligned
himself with Spartan youths is unclear, but much of his later music shows a
longing for simplicity, clarity, purity, qualities he may have associated with
the ancient world. At any rate he got the job, and his time at Le Chat Noir
brought him the most important friendships of his life.
Paris at the time was convulsed with Wagnerism following the huge
success of Wagner’s operas. Some French composers embraced Wagner’s
musical language while others worried about how to preserve the
distinctiveness of French music, avoiding what they saw as Wagner’s
excesses of emotion and ego. Satie’s music can be seen as a response of this
type. Not only does he not try to manipulate the listener, he seems to seek to
ensure that the listener will remain objective. His phrases are often self-
contained, not leading to the places you might expect; his harmonies often
seem rather random, as if he is determined not to seduce you with gorgeous
harmonic developments. His musical pacing is often very even, almost
static, as if he wants you to know he is not going to sweep you up in an
emotionally manipulative process of tension and release. His textures and
rhythms are often very simple; sometimes bar lines, phrase marks,
dynamics and final bar lines disappear entirely, so that his music starts to
look like a piece of mediaeval notation. This was probably no accident.
Most of all, Satie uses his special brand of humour to keep the listener
from getting too involved. In his piano pieces Pièces Froides (Cold Pieces),
he gives all kinds of unusual instructions, generally at moments in the
music when they are least achievable. ‘Do not eat too much’, he instructs in
the middle of a piece. ‘Be visible for a moment’, ‘Slightly cooked’, ‘In the
most profound silence’ (while playing). In Descriptions Automatiques
(Automatic Descriptions) he tells us, ‘Don’t light up yet – you have time’,
and on the next page, ‘Withdraw your hand and put it in your pocket’ (in the
middle of a two-handed passage). To guide the pianist’s interpretation of a
huge fortissimo ending, he advises, ‘Light as an egg’. In Embryons
Desséchés (Dried Embryos) he writes a cheery little figure, requesting that
it be played ‘like a nightingale with toothache’. ‘You’re tickling me’, he
complains over some repeated semiquavers. In one of my favourite
comments he muses, ‘I don’t have any tobacco. Luckily I don’t smoke.’ In
Croquis et Agaceries (Sketches and Provocations) he assures us that a
certain straightforward passage is ‘Full of subtlety, please believe me’. In
Le Fils des Étoiles (The Son of the Stars) he asks for a simple passage to be
‘Courageously easy and complacently solitary’, an instruction he himself
could probably have fulfilled perfectly. Over the final dry octave of the
piece he writes the enigmatic direction, ‘Always’. Anyone who is drawn to
this kind of humour will enjoy reading Satie’s Memoirs of an Amnesiac.
His three Gymnopédies contain few instructions and no pedalling. The
first one, written in 1888, is the most famous, finding admirers in every
generation of pianists. The three pieces are respectively marked ‘Slow and
sorrowful’, ‘Slow and sad’ and ‘Slow and serious’. They are extremely
similar to one another, all in the form of a slow quiet waltz or sarabande,
with a long bass note on the first beat of each bar, and a chord on the second
beat. No. 1 sets the pattern. After four bars of introduction, a restrained
melody, slightly ‘antique’ in atmosphere, floats in in the treble. This melody
moves in a stately fashion, in even crotchets, from time to time pausing to
rest on a long note (at which point Satie counter-intuitively asks for the
accompanying chords to be suddenly loud). The phrases are of uneven
length, sometimes the anticipated four bars but just as often five, six or
seven. The melody may just stop in mid-arc, as though an editor’s scissors
had sliced through the treble line while the accompaniment continues
impassively.
The three pieces seem like the same musical idea viewed from hardly
differentiated perspectives. The harmonies, though often straightforward,
are sometimes slightly unexpected – not so unexpected as to startle or
annoy, but ever so slightly ‘left-field’, as if Satie prefers the listener’s
attention to roll along with the merest hint of grit in the ball-bearings. The
atmosphere is perhaps the most notable thing about the Gymnopédies; it is
graceful, melancholy and austere, deliberately providing nothing with
which a person could show off, and refraining from whipping up anyone’s
emotions. If the music is connected with Ancient Greece at all, it is with
detachment, as if it depicts someone slowly turning in their hands an
ancient ceramic vase with beautiful youths depicted on its surface. It is not
surprising that Satie’s music is now regarded as a foundation of the
‘ambient music’ which became popular in the late twentieth century with its
aesthetic of staying in the background, erasing obvious points of interest,
fostering a sense of calm and contemplation.

FERRUCCIO BUSONI (1866–1924)

 60. Fantasia after Johann Sebastian Bach, BV253
I was introduced to the piano music of Ferruccio Busoni by the Scottish
composer Ronald Stevenson, whose evening classes in music appreciation I
attended as a teenager. Stevenson was an ardent admirer of Busoni, whose
wide-ranging talents as composer, virtuoso pianist, teacher and theorist he
regarded as the model of what a serious, well-rounded and deeply cultured
musician should be. As a young pianist I was mightily impressed to hear
that when Busoni was dissatisfied with the way he had played this or that
on a concert tour, he would go back to the hall late at night in order to
practise ‘until he got it right’. In later years I wondered whether I had
misremembered this, but found that in 1898 Busoni had written to a friend
that one should ‘never leave a passage which has been unsuccessful,
without repeating it; if you cannot do it in the presence of others, then do it
subsequently.’ It’s doubtful whether this high-minded advice has been
followed by many pianists, not at least to the extent of going back to the
hall to practise after the audience has gone.
Busoni was a child prodigy both as pianist and composer. He was born
in Empoli, Italy, started performing in public at the age of seven, and by
nine was studying in Vienna. When he was eleven he heard Liszt play, and
was introduced to the great man. In some respects Busoni was a natural heir
to Liszt, sharing his virtuoso technique, his talent for composition, and his
interest in transcribing other composers’ works for piano or using them as
the raw material for elaborate fantasies. Those who heard both Liszt and the
mature Busoni play the piano remarked on the similarity of their styles. In
1899 William Dayas, an American who was one of Liszt’s last piano
students, heard Busoni play one of Liszt’s transcriptions and said, ‘What a
pity the Old Man [Liszt] did not hear that! He would have given you his
sword and died in peace.’
The musical language of Busoni’s generation was, however, less stable
than Liszt’s. During Busoni’s life Romantic music gave way to austere
experiments in atonality, and his musical style seems to waver between the
two in a way which is not always comfortable to listen to. Many people find
Busoni’s piano music more palatable when he links his musical language to
that of, for example, J.S. Bach, whose organ works he had been transcribing
and incorporating into his piano music since his twenties. Bach’s steadiness
of temperament seems to have had a good effect on Busoni, restraining his
tendency to over-write or overheat. Over a period of thirty years Busoni
paraphrased so many works of Bach and had published so many pieces with
their linked names on the title page that once, when he was on tour in the
United States with his wife Gerda, she was innocently asked whether she
was Mrs Bach-Busoni.
Shortly after Busoni’s father died in 1909, Busoni wrote a Fantasia after
Johann Sebastian Bach in his father’s memory. He called it a
‘Nachdichtung’, a German literary term for a poetical work that tries to
recreate the effect of another poetical work through mood, emotion and
atmosphere rather than through literal translation. Choosing three chorale
settings from organ works by J.S. Bach, Busoni composed a fifteen-minute
piece which runs the gamut from dark and solemn to jubilant and virtuosic
and back again. Starting with an improvisatory section in F minor, he
moves to a Lisztian sound-world where floating chromatic harmonies
convey a strong sense of regret and melancholy. Amid the floating
harmonies, we hear in the treble an ‘inset’ motif of three repeated notes or
chords which in earlier works Busoni had used to signify Death. A stately
Bach chorale is introduced, and alongside it the ‘death’ motif continues to
ring out in the treble. After elaborating upon this chorale in the manner of a
peaceful Bach Invention, Busoni brings in the tune we know as the
Christmas carol In dulci jubilo, decorating it in an open and festive mood.
However, at its final cadence there is a change, and with chilling
suddenness we are returned to a mood of solemnity. Writing now in the
manner of Bach’s organ works, with many inner voices, Busoni builds to a
huge climax. As it fades, we hear once more the earlier sad chorale theme in
F minor, and the fluid, dreamy chromatic Lisztian swirling figurations with
their parallel ‘death’ motifs. Over the final lines, Busoni writes the word
‘riconciliato’, reconciled, and with some relief we hear the peaceful F major
arpeggios which seem to indicate acceptance. But no: the very last bar turns
back towards the darkness of F minor where, without the root of the chord
being stated, we hear the ‘death’ motif.
‘It is a major concert work – one of my best,’ Busoni wrote, and many
listeners would agree. After he played its premiere in London in 1910 he
told his mother, ‘It is from the heart, and all who heard it were moved to
tears.’
 ENRIQUE GRANADOS (1867–1916)
61. ‘Quejas, o La Maja y el Ruiseñor’
The Spanish composer Enrique Granados was inspired by the paintings of
his compatriot Goya to compose a suite of piano pieces, Goyescas, which
Granados premiered himself in 1911. ‘I fell in love with Goya’s psychology,
with his palette,’ Granados wrote to a friend. ‘With him and with the
Duchess of Alba; with his gallant lady [‘Maja’], his models, his squabbles,
love affairs and sweet nothings. The pinkish-white of those cheeks standing
out amidst lace and black brocaded velvet; those bodies with their
undulating waistlines and hands of mother-of-pearl and jasmine blossom
resting against jet-black hair have got me all flustered . . .’
‘Maja’ is variously translated as ‘maid’, ‘lover’, ‘girl’, ‘lady’, ‘pretty
one’, even ‘prostitute’. Generally from the lower classes, majas and majos
(the masculine version) dressed in stylish and elaborate Spanish costume,
disdained the currently fashionable French outfits, and were known for their
bold and cheeky behaviour. Goya was fascinated by them and included
them in some of his most famous paintings, for example La maja vestida
and La maja desnuda.
A quarter of a century earlier, Mussorgsky had also been inspired by a
painter when he based his Pictures at an Exhibition on paintings and
designs by Victor Hartmann. Granados takes a looser approach to Goya’s
work, allowing it to suggest atmosphere without dictating details. Indeed,
the most famous piece of Goyescas and the one which best stands alone,
‘Quejas o la Maja y el Ruiseñor’ (Complaints, or the Maja and the
Nightingale) appears not to have been based on a Goya painting at all, but
was inspired by a trip to Valencia when Granados heard a young girl
singing a folk song. ‘Una tarde que me hallaba/En mi jardín divertida/Oi
una voz dolorida/Que un pajarillo cantaba/Y a mi como me gustaba/Del
pajarillo la voz’ (‘One afternoon when I was in my nice little garden, I
heard a doleful voice of a little bird singing, and how I liked its voice’). The
young Valencian singer becomes a ‘maja’ in Granados’s piano piece as he
enlarges upon her song. The original folk song has irregular phrase lengths
– three bars per phrase – but Granados tidies this up, or at any rate shapes
them into more predictable groups of two or four bars, as if combing its hair
for polite society.
Granados was a fine pianist who trained in Paris. His piano writing is of
the lush late-Romantic style, with rich harmonies, languorous phrases and
many things going on in inner voices, making an intricate texture. His own
style of playing, of which we can get some idea from the recordings he
made for player piano in 1912, show that he played with improvisatory
freedom, rolling the chords and ‘staggering’ the duets between the two
hands in a very Romantic manner. His sensuous description of Goya’s
artworks makes it clear that he loved physical surfaces and materials, and in
Goyescas he recreates the rich colours and fabrics by way of dense musical
‘textures’ and swooning velvety phrases glittering with little decorations.
Essentially, ‘La Maja y el Ruiseñor’ is a song plus three variations in
which the theme is progressively ornamented and enriched. The first
variation (with flowing semiquavers in the bass) is in F sharp minor, the
second in B minor, the third in F sharp minor again with the theme now
beginning in the bass. Four slow bars with two drooping phrases (also used
in all the other pieces of Goyescas) seem to sigh and say ‘Alas!’ After a
silent pause, the melody makes a quiet final appearance in simpler rhythms
and milder harmonies. We might imagine this is the end, but no: the last
word is given to the nightingale who trills cheerfully from somewhere high
above us, oblivious to the girl’s suffering. This is no sentimental nightingale
– its cool virtuosity is in striking contrast to the foregoing lament, and
seems to look forward to Messiaen’s use of birdsong.
Granados went on to turn Goyescas into an opera, which contains a
sung version of this lovely piece. ‘La Maja y el Ruiseñor’ was given a new
lease of life in 1940 when it inspired Mexican songwriter Consuelo
Velázquez’s hugely popular ‘Bésame mucho’.

AMY BEACH (1867–1944)

62. Sketches, op. 15
Amy Beach is now acknowledged as the first great female American
composer. In recent years American historians and musicians have worked
hard to make her music better known. The need for remedial work on her
behalf is shown by my own, probably representative experience: in years of
piano lessons, concert-going and postgraduate piano seminars I never once
heard a piece by Amy Beach, nor did a teacher ever suggest I learn one.
This is not an indication of any lack of quality in her music, but rather a
sign of the difficulties which women composers have encountered over the
centuries, and of the unjust obscurity assigned to them by a (still) male-
dominated profession. In reality, Beach’s music stands tall in the company
of her contemporaries.
Amy Beach (born Amy Cheney) was a prodigiously gifted child whose
musical talent was a source of alarm as well as pride to her family. When
she was a tiny child her mother, believing that children should learn self-
control, used to forbid her to play the piano or listen to music if she had
supposedly been naughty. But Amy’s love of music was unstoppable, and
when it became clear that that even when banned from playing the piano
she could ‘make’ compositions in her head and save them up to be played at
the next permitted opportunity, her parents agreed she could have
composition lessons, and piano tuition from Carl Baermann, himself a pupil
of Liszt. At sixteen, Amy made an acclaimed debut in Boston playing
Moscheles’s Piano Concerto no. 3.
Agents proposed concert tours, but her parents said no. Only two years
later, at the age of eighteen, Amy married a Boston surgeon, Dr H.H.A.
Beach. Even though Dr Beach was a keen music-lover, he made Amy agree
that after marriage she would focus on being the wife of a respected doctor,
confining herself to two performing opportunities a year and giving any
profits to charity, as making money for herself would be demeaning. For the
same reason, she was not to teach the piano. She could compose if she did
so privately, but she was not to have a tutor. Her husband put it to her that
composition, rather than playing the piano, was her true calling, but ‘I did
not believe him, for I thought I was a pianist first and foremost’, Amy later
wrote.
Amy focused on composition as agreed, and her large-scale works, such
as a Mass in E flat (1892) and a Gaelic Symphony (1896), were
enthusiastically received. Her name was given on the title pages as ‘Mrs
H.H.A. Beach’. Her fellow Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick
wrote to congratulate her on ‘being counted one of the boys’. In 1900 Amy
was the piano soloist in the Boston premiere of her own piano concerto, a
work now believed to depict her struggle to be allowed to be a musician.
She wrote songs, chamber music, and in 1904 her longest solo piano work,
Variations on Balkan Themes, an innovative construction weaving four
different folk songs into a work inspired by political revolts in Eastern
Europe. After her husband died in 1910, she started calling herself ‘Amy
Beach’ rather than just ‘Mrs H.H.A. Beach’.
Beach’s piano music is clearly the work of a highly accomplished
pianist with a warm heart and a wide knowledge of European styles. Much
of it is in the style of Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Moscheles and the
American piano virtuoso Louis Gottschalk, whose music she liked as a
child. Harmonically her music often has echoes of Grieg and of Dvořák,
especially his ‘American’ phase. Critics have sometimes said that she did
not have a truly distinctive voice as a composer, but this just demonstrates
the extra burden of proof imposed on female musicians, for in all honesty
the same criticism could be levelled at a great many male composers.
My own favourite among her compositions is her 1892 four-movement
set of Sketches, op. 15: colourful, rich in texture and beautifully written for
the piano. Each piece is headed by a line from a French poem. ‘In Autumn’
has echoes of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, dancing gently through the leaves to a
left-hand accompaniment that seems almost like a premonition of ragtime.
‘Phantoms’ is a fast, playful waltz with intricate Lisztian harmonies.
‘Dreaming’, one of her finest piano works, is almost like a Fauré nocturne
with its long-breathed melodies over subtly chromatic rippling
accompaniment. Its G flat major setting recalls the key that Schubert chose
for the most beloved of his Impromptus and shares that work’s sense of
reverie controlled by a master architect. Beach’s fourth Sketch, ‘Fireflies’,
was clearly inspired by the fluttering double thirds of Liszt’s notoriously
difficult Feux Follets. Amy played her own more graceful, lilting ‘Fireflies’
in concert, and the piece was a favourite encore of the celebrated pianist
Josef Hofmann.

ALEXANDER SCRIABIN (1872–1915)

63. Piano Sonata no. 5, op. 53
The music of Scriabin, in and out of fashion since his day, has always been
controversial, attracting wild enthusiasm as well as sincere dislike. It is
impossible to take his compositions simply on musical terms, because they
were based on and driven by his philosophical beliefs and his growing
conviction that he was a god. He was keenly interested in the writings of the
theosophist Madame Blavatsky and the philosopher Nietzsche, especially
his ideas about ‘the superior man’. Applying these ideas to music, Scriabin
developed theories about the role of the composer and the effects to be
obtained by classifying keys and chords in terms of colour, light, perfume
and so on, and then mixing them like drugs to affect the audience. One of
his most famous inventions is the ‘mystic chord’, an exotic tower of six
notes composed of various fourths and thirds, not unlike the Tristan chord
made famous by Wagner. Scriabin believed that hearing his mystic chord
could give an instant apprehension of things normally beyond the power of
the intellect. (He himself called it ‘the chord of the pleroma’, pleroma being
a word used in theology to mean ‘the fullness of divine beings’.) The six
notes of the chord could be piled vertically one upon the other, or spaced
out horizontally and rearranged in a number of ways to form melodic lines,
or at least groups of related pitches.
In his earlier years, Scriabin wrote piano music that was clearly inspired
by Chopin – graceful and lyrical, though with a darker sense of introversion
than Chopin’s. He used Chopin’s titles too – Études, Nocturnes,
Impromptus, Fantasies and Mazurkas. Scriabin’s early pieces have a clear
sense of being in a certain key, which allows one to intuit whether one is at
home, moving away, in a related key or in a distant key, or moving back to
the home key. All this changed as his philosophical readings directed him to
a kind of music which enveloped the listener in a mystical trance or led
them to a realm where ordinary rules did not apply. His ten piano sonatas
act as milestones in this development. The earlier ones have a firmer sense
of a home key, but the later ones inhabit a strange floating world. As the
sense of ‘where we are’ is gradually erased, we lose the sense of tension,
release, distance, return and so on which help us to map our way through,
say, the sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, or indeed of Chopin. In a world
where everything is perfumed and sensuous, the luxurious chords to which
Scriabin ascribed different colours and meanings may, despite their
exoticism, come to seem oddly monotonous. Or, beauty being in the eye of
the beholder, they may seem intoxicating, seductive and visionary.
Scriabin’s fifth sonata (1907) is the first which is conceived in a single
movement, his preferred method from this sonata onwards. It was written in
just six days, and he considered it his best work to date. He prefaced it with
lines from his own symphonic Poem of Ecstasy – ‘I call you to life,
mysterious forces! Drowned in the obscure depths of the creative spirit,
timid shadows of life, to you I bring audacity!’ The sonata is, however,
subdivided along traditional lines. It bursts in with a few seething,
impetuous bars which give way to a meditative section in which the main
theme (yet to come) seems to emerge as from a dream. Then we hear the
principal theme itself – very fast, quiet and energetic – followed by a
contrasting theme, a development in which ideas are mixed together, a
reprise and a coda. Officially the piece is in the key of F sharp major, but
the frantic introduction laughs maniacally at that constraint.
Many expression marks underline the sensuous nature of the music:
‘caressingly’, ‘voluptuously’, ‘very perfumed’, ‘ecstatically’. Contrast is
provided by languid and melancholy sections juxtaposed with madly
difficult, almost jazzy episodes where the two hands play in different
rhythms and we seem to be hovering in the air somewhere between the
territories of Stravinsky and Ravel, perhaps even Duke Ellington. We move
on to a fanfare-like section which heralds a tremendous build-up of energy
and the clashing of motifs. The reprise whips us through this sequence
again, culminating in a terrifying coda where the pianist’s hands claw their
way up an invisible wall and disappear into the ether. At this point, the key
signature of six sharps feels like the vocabulary of another, simpler world.
After this sonata, Scriabin’s beliefs became more extreme. From
thinking of himself as a composer he upgraded himself to a creator, even a
divine being (though it is not entirely clear whether a benevolent one). His
piano music becomes more and more nervy, intense and overheated,
inhabiting an imaginative zone which would have been familiar to Freud.
Scriabin started working towards a transcendental event in which humanity
would be summoned to the foothills of the Himalayas to participate in a
merging of all the arts with all the senses, the spiritual ecstasy to be helped
along by dance, light, incense, poetry (his own) and with a soundtrack
provided by himself as the guiding deity at the piano. Sadly, he died when
he was still at the stage of planning the ‘Prefatory Action’.
The great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who played it
magnificently, said that Scriabin’s fifth sonata was the most difficult piece
in the entire piano repertoire. In the 1930s, Shostakovich described Scriabin
as ‘our bitter musical enemy’, adding that his music breathed ‘unhealthy
eroticism . . . mysticism, passivity and a flight from the reality of life’.
Scriabin’s fans continue to believe that he found a particular way of
stimulating the listener’s nervous system, and while listening to his music,
some have reported ‘seeing’ the colours and flashes of light that Scriabin
hoped his music would produce.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873–1943)

64. Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor, op. 18
Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto was the fruit of a successful period
of treatment in 1900 for writer’s block with the Moscow therapist Nikolai
Dahl. Rachmaninoff had been feeling low since the failure of his first
symphony, premiered by a conductor who was allegedly drunk and
‘wrecked it’. He had written almost nothing for three years until his aunt
and his cousins (one of whom he later married) recommended him to go
and see Dr Dahl, who lived down the street from them and was a music-
lover. Dahl had studied hypnotherapy with Dr Charcot in Paris and his
method seems to have centred on seating the patient in a comfortable
armchair, using gentle hypnosis to relax him and then, while he was in this
state, suggesting to him that he would soon be working freely and creatively
with no feeling of obstruction. Within a few months Rachmaninoff’s
appetite for work was restored. The second piano concerto was written soon
after, and was dedicated to Dr Dahl. It’s a touching footnote that in later life
Dr Dahl emigrated to Beirut and played his viola in the amateur orchestra of
the American University there. On one occasion, Rachmaninoff’s second
piano concerto was performed and the audience was told that its dedicatee
was playing in the viola section, whereupon Dr Dahl rose from amid the
orchestra to take a bow – a moment one would love to have witnessed.
 Rachmaninoff was one of the great pianists of the twentieth century, and
fortunately we have recordings to demonstrate his irresistible fluency and
sense of direction. His playing of the classics was insightful, but naturally
his playing of his own music was particularly treasured. Rachmaninoff had
enormous hands, capable of stretching an octave and a fifth, or C to G
twelve notes away on the white keys. Consequently he could reach easily
for faraway notes in his own elaborate piano figurations. At the very
beginning of the second piano concerto we are confronted with this task,
because it begins with the pianist alone, making a stealthy approach to C
minor via a series of massive chords which begin quietly and gradually get
louder, reaching fortissimo as the orchestra comes in with the famous
opening melody.
Shortly before the Moscow premiere in 1901, Rachmaninoff worried
that he had made a big mistake in allotting the first big tune to the orchestra
instead of the soloist, but somehow the mellow sonority of the string section
as it rolls along the glorious melodic line accompanied by swirling piano
arpeggios feels very pleasing, as if the pianist is courteously giving the
orchestra a bit of limelight, knowing that there will soon be stellar
opportunities for the piano to shine. The big tune was probably inspired by
the composer’s lifelong love of Russian Orthodox chant. It has that special
quality of being easily remembered, as many concertgoers will have found
as they go home humming this or one of the other marvellous themes
Rachmaninoff presents in the concerto. The second theme too, this time
given to the piano, has a gorgeous lyrical arch-shape, its little two-note
‘sighing’ motifs on the descent echoing the equivalent motifs in the first
theme. A short brass chorale propels us into the sweeping development.
When the reprise comes, the orchestra still has the first theme but it is now
invigorated by a splendid ‘maestoso’ (majestic) march theme played
alongside by the piano.
After the C minor of the first movement, the slow movement is in the
surprising key of E major, probably in homage to Beethoven who does the
same thing in his Piano Concerto no. 3. But unlike Beethoven,
Rachmaninoff works around to E major from an orchestral opening in C
minor rather as a pianist might have done in a solo recital according to the
still-prevalent custom of ‘preluding’, or improvising links between pieces.
When the soloist enters, the music is notated in triplets but because of the
patterning it sounds as if the piano is playing in four-note groups. Just as we
have got used to that pattern, a solo flute enters with a slow melody which
causes most listeners a moment or two of utter disorientation before they
adjust and realise that the flute is simply playing on the beat and the piano
has been playing triplets all along. As things heat up, there are three
climaxes one after another, the third one inspiring the pianist to burst into
arpeggios which spill over and accelerate into energetic embellishment and
a cadenza during which the soloist seems to muse on the concerto’s opening
passage as it works around to the reprise. Now it is muted violins which
sing the main theme, as the piano grandly sweeps up and down in ecstatic
agreement.
At the start of the finale, Rachmaninoff repeats the device he used in the
slow movement, beginning in the key of the previous movement and
working subtly round to the key of the new one, in this case C minor. The
mood is almost Chopinesque, a light, quiet and playful march like
something out of a ballet scene. The piano bursts in on this with an
impetuous cadenza and a sparkling follow-up which makes it clear who is
now the focus of attention. Motifs derived from the first movement’s main
theme – especially the two-note sighing figure – flash by amid the
arpeggios and soon we arrive at a slower episode with a gorgeous
‘Hollywood’-type theme, with a touch of Eastern influence in its
chromaticism, announced by the orchestra and repeated more ardently by
the piano. A mysteriously slow passage over a sustained bass note, with
delicate touches of the cymbals, takes us into the development, where the
soloist must grapple with difficult octave passages and a fugato episode
before the reprise, which is dominated by glorification of the lyrical second
theme. After a final burst of piano cadenza, the strings sail in with an
unforgettable final recall of this lyrical theme, which inflames the soloist
with a fiery dash to the end.
It has become part of the tradition of performing this concerto that
Rachmaninoff’s dynamics and tempo markings are exaggerated, often with
pianists playing louder than he indicates, or faster or slower (examples
might be the ‘maestoso’ march section in the first movement, often taken
too fast, or the start of the slow movement, often taken too slowly). The
composer himself does not play his own concerto like that – indeed his
playing is a model of nuance and flexibility, with an elegant virtuosity
which reminds us of how deeply he was rooted in the world of nineteenth-
century Russia, rather than the showier world of twentieth-century America
which made his fortune.

65. Piano Concerto no. 3 in D minor, op. 30

In 1909 Rachmaninoff, living at the time in Dresden, was invited to make
his debut as a pianist in the United States. A long tour of three months had
been proposed. He was reluctant to go so far away, but as he confided to a
friend, ‘I’d like to buy an automobile. I can’t tell you how much I want one!
. . . I don’t want to go. But then, perhaps, after America I’ll be able to buy
myself that automobile.’
His second piano concerto of 1901 was due to be performed on that
American tour, but he thought it would be a good moment to produce a new
concerto, and he hurried to write it. His third concerto turned out to be even
more technically difficult than the previous one, and in order to practise it
on the long sea voyage from Europe to America he took a dummy keyboard
with him so that he could at least practise the fingering.
In New York he had the opportunity to play his new concerto with the
composer Gustav Mahler conducting the New York Philharmonic.
Rachmaninoff recalled how grateful he was to Mahler: ‘He touched my
composer’s heart straight away by devoting himself to my Concerto until
the accompaniment, which is rather complicated, had been practiced to the
point of perfection, although he had already gone through a long rehearsal.
According to Mahler, every detail of the score was important – an attitude
which is unfortunately rare among conductors.’
The American audience liked it, but they didn’t love it the way they
loved ‘Rach Two’, as the second piano concerto became known. The third
concerto was felt to be a bit too long (forty-three minutes), a little obscure,
its tunes not quite so adorable. Also, there was its technical difficulty:
clearly its composer could play it brilliantly, but who else would be able to
rise to the challenge of such a demanding work? Its dedicatee, the pianist
Josef Hofmann, never performed it, saying it ‘wasn’t for him’. It remained
in the shadow of its predecessor until it was taken up in the 1930s by the
young Russian virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, whose stunning performances
endeared it to the public. After Rachmaninoff was persuaded to make
certain cuts to the piece, it became easier to programme. It was his own
favourite among his piano concertos. Today it is one of the most revered of
Romantic concertos, and although its performance history is male-
dominated, it is now more and more taken up by female pianists.
At the mention of the third concerto, people often start humming its
opening tune, the haunting melody the pianist plays in octaves after two
preparatory bars of murmuring from the orchestra. As with the big tune in
the second concerto, the inspiration was probably Russian Orthodox Chant,
although it could just as plausibly be Russian folk song. Another inspiration
may have been Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, which begins in a similar
way. Almost immediately after this limpid opening, complication breaks
out. The style of piano writing feels slightly different from that in the
second concerto: here it seems almost like Bach-like; clear and dry, every
note intended to be heard. Perhaps Rachmaninoff’s choice of such a style
could have something to do with three years of living in Dresden, a city that
hosted so many Baroque composers? At any rate, it is a gift to the pianist
with brilliant clarity of touch, but terrifying for the player who likes to
cloak their shortcomings in a haze of pedal.
The second theme begins in an unusual way: hesitant and spiky at first,
but developed by the piano into a lyrical episode. Halfway through the
movement comes a huge cadenza which also functions as the beginning of
the reprise (possibly also inspired by Mendelssohn’s violin concerto).
Rachmaninoff wrote two versions of the cadenza, one long and one short,
but he generally performed the shorter one. The cadenza chews over the
two main themes for several minutes in a grand manner, prolonging its
solitary musings even after the orchestra has attempted to join in.
The second movement, Intermezzo, has a three-part form, its outer
sections almost like a sad scene from one of Tchaikovsky’s operas, or at any
rate evocative of deep melancholy and nostalgia. A lengthy orchestral
introduction is interrupted by the passionate soloist, almost like someone
entering the stage in a storm of weeping before settling down to tell the
story, which it does with increasing fervour. Suddenly the mood changes,
and we are in the midst of a fascinating scherzo, perhaps a little homage to
Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto where there is a similar dance-like
episode in the slow movement. Rachmaninoff’s piano writing is at its most
sparkling, with rapid repeated notes worked into the swirling patterns of a
slightly demonic waltz (here again there is no point in hoping for the pedal
to come to your rescue: clarity is essential). The dance vanishes as quickly
as it came, leaving the melancholy atmosphere to return. Then with another
sudden cadenza, the soloist sweeps us into the finale.
Rapid repeated-note figures come to the fore immediately in the finale,
whose agitated theme has a touch of the sleigh bells from Tchaikovsky’s
‘Troika’ (‘November’ from The Seasons), one of Rachmaninoff’s favourite
recital encores. The atmosphere of simmering excitement grips immediately
and scarcely lets up; even the rather emphatic second theme, with its
dogged syncopations, is charged with energy. Characteristic of this
movement is a brilliantly patterned surface with slow-moving harmonies
underneath, as in the second theme with its sustained bass notes. In a
‘scherzando’ (playful) section, the orchestra quietly holds and reiterates
harmonies as the pianist flies about in the air rather like the fairies who are
‘exquisite dancers’ in one of Debussy’s preludes. As the mood settles, there
is a touching moment where the opening theme of the concerto, the
haunting Russian melody, is remembered by the violas, and the piano then
recalls the second theme of the first movement too. For the rest of the
movement the orchestra seems less a dynamic partner in the enterprise than
a sort of corps de ballet, surging round supportively while the soloist drives
the audience to frenzy with dazzling leaps and turns. In the reprise, all the
main themes flash before us and broaden into a mighty climax with the
pianist driven to extremes of declamatory ardour.
The year after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Rachmaninoff and his
wife Natalia emigrated to the United States. For some years Rachmaninoff
did not compose any piano music. He was busy touring and giving concerts,
but it seems that his new life (or more likely the loss of his old life) had at
least temporarily cut off the flow of his musical inspiration. In the United
States, however, he was able to afford not only the latest model of
automobile, but also a chauffeur.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)

66. Miroirs
The five piano pieces which make up Miroirs (Mirrors) were written in
1904–5. Mirrors were important symbols in late nineteenth-century French
art and literature. For the symbolist poets, mirrors suggested a world of
reflection in every sense. Mirrors offered the illusion of exactitude at one
remove; symbolist writers aimed, in the words of Mallarmé, ‘to paint not
the thing itself, but the effect it produces’. Many French painters of the time
– Manet, Degas, Bonnard, Vuillard, Morisot, Toulouse-Lautrec – give
mirrors a prominent place in their paintings. In fashionable houses, large
gilt mirrors were installed above the mantelpiece in the main rooms.
Looking at contemporary paintings one has the impression that people were
as fond of looking into mirrors as they were of looking out of windows.
They were fascinated by their own images, of course, but also by the
strange world inside the mirror, where flowers looked lovely but had no
smell, fruit had no taste, birds opened their beaks but were silent, and
beautiful beings moved in a sterile world where no one could touch them.
All this appealed to Ravel, known to his friends as ‘a dandy’,
impeccably dressed with the right shoes for every occasion, his hands
neatly manicured. He had many friends, but in his mature years he chose to
live alone in a beautifully decorated house filled with oriental art and
mechanical toys. His devotion to music was concealed behind apparently
cynical lines such as ‘. . . le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d’une
occupation inutile’ (. . . the delicious and always-new pleasure of a useless
occupation), a quote from the symbolist poet Henri de Régnier which Ravel
put at the head of his Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, a collection of
gorgeous waltzes with a hint of decay. He took great pride in being
considered a master craftsman, slightly aloof from his own creations as
though they were clockwork toys he could set going and then watch from a
safe distance, enjoying their dazzling effect. There is, of course, more to
Ravel than that: an exquisite sensibility and even a painful sensitivity lives
within his music.
In around 1900 Ravel joined an all-male group of artists, poets and
musicians who met every week to socialise and discuss their work. The
group was known humorously as ‘Les Apaches’ after they barged into a
newspaper seller on the street one day and were reproached with the
remark, ‘Attention les Apaches!’ (‘Apaches’ was current Parisian slang for
‘hooligans’). Each piece of Miroirs was dedicated to a different member of
the Apaches. The dedicatees were a poet, a painter, a critic and a composer;
with typical contrariness Ravel dedicated the technically simplest piece
(‘Oiseaux Tristes’) to Ricardo Viñes, the only one of them who was a
renowned concert pianist.
The five pieces show an absolute mastery of writing for the piano, and
this despite the fact that Ravel was not a virtuoso pianist himself. Although
the writing demands an intense and rapid activity of the fingers, the
movement required is often ‘within the hand’, meaning that the notes lie
within the natural span of the hand and don’t require the pianist to
encompass wide stretches. With these incredibly rapid notes, almost faster
than the ear can take in individually, Ravel creates a sense of shading such
as an artist would use to give texture to a drawing.
In ‘Noctuelles’ (Night Moths), for example, Ravel creates a
mesmerising effect of fluttering. The two hands play rhythmic patterns of
four-against-three; melodically, Ravel constantly uses ‘grace notes’, little
decorative notes adjacent to a main melody note or chord, to give the
impression of ceaseless movement within a very small compass. The night
moths must have benefited from the light, dry tone of Ravel’s favourite
Érard piano. He creates unpredictable patterns with irregular phrase lengths
and constantly changing time signatures which enhance the impression of a
quiet but chaotic tumbling. In the middle section, with its slightly menacing
harmonies, we encounter the slow and sombre world to which he returns
several times in the other pieces. In its own Parisian way, this seems to
anticipate Bartók’s strange, scary ‘night music’.
‘Oiseaux Tristes’ (Sad Birds) inhabits this same sombre world. Ravel
said that it portrayed ‘birds lost in the torpor of a very dark forest, during
the hottest hours of summertime’. An exotic bird calls in the distance
(again, this would have been effective on Ravel’s dry-toned piano) and
keeps up its plaintive calling as darker, slower creatures move about in the
forest. In the middle there is some kind of frantic quarrel in the treetops, but
it subsides quickly and the slow heat of the day takes over again. Towards
the end there is a most beautifully written cadenza, reminiscent of the way
the fire rises up out of the grate in Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.
Ricardo Viñes, the pianist to whom the piece was dedicated, described it as
‘a Japanese print’.
 ‘Une Barque sur l’Océan’ (A Boat on the Ocean) is the only piece
without a metronome mark; Ravel simply says ‘d’un rhythme souple’ (with
supple rhythm). (He orchestrated it in 1906 and at that point suggested a
metronome mark, but it is not necessarily the case that the tempo which
suits an orchestra is exactly the tempo that would suit a solo pianist.) It is a
leisurely depiction of a boat sailing on and on through various kinds of seas
– calm, choppy, with the wind rising up, water splashing against the boat, a
few stormy moments, and sailing off serenely at the end. These effects are
not specified by Ravel, but they come easily to mind. It is admirable how he
catches the way the waves lap against each other in an asymmetrical
pattern, little surges moving counter to the larger waves. Fragments of
melody drift through the spray, but sometimes there is nothing going on but
rippling arpeggios. This is a challenging piece, requiring great dexterity and
stamina, particularly as a lot of it is marked to be played pianissimo.
‘Alborada del Gracioso’ (Morning Song of the Clown) is the mysterious
title of the most technically difficult piece, an evocation of Spain and
Spanish guitar music. The ‘gracioso’ was a stock character in sixteenth-
century Spanish comedy, a buffoon or court jester who was allowed to get
away with all kinds of shocking behaviour because he was just ‘a fool’.
Here Ravel conjures up the dry sonority of strummed guitars and clicking
castanets with implacably fast dance rhythms and ‘snatched’ arpeggiated
chords. Soon we come to the famous repeated-note section, marked
‘suddenly quiet’ (which makes it harder). This is the passage which deters
many pianists from practising the piece to concert standard. It’s meant to
sound like the buzzing of distant guitars, perhaps, but the challenge of
repeating notes so rapidly is daunting, especially on the modern piano with
its heavier action. A languorous episode like the passionate lament of a
flamenco singer provides a brief reprieve from the technical difficulties, but
worse is to come: glissandos in fourths and in thirds, unhelpfully marked
‘quiet’, requiring the pianist to drag their right hand up and down the
keyboard with two fingers fixed like the points of mathematical compasses
defining the right interval. Ravel’s iron grip on this piece must be matched
by the pianist’s, but few will manage it accurately at the speed he indicates
and it is not surprising that the piece is more often heard in its orchestral
arrangement. It ends with a snap of the heels, a crisp flourish marked
‘without slowing down’.
 ‘La Vallée des Cloches’ (The Valley of Bells) is a ravishing evocation of
bells resounding at various distances and intervals in a valley. There is a
hint of the Javanese gamelan here, an exotic sound Ravel and Debussy both
admired when they heard it at the Paris Exhibition in 1889; in a gamelan
orchestra, metallophones, xylophones, flute and gongs (amongst others)
have their distinct roles in the sonority, smaller instruments playing higher
and faster notes, larger instruments playing deeper notes more slowly. In
Ravel’s ‘Vallée’ the bells ring out without reference to one another, the
deepest bells clashing with the higher ones, the peals creating a subtle
interplay. A melody arises in the middle, like a human being suddenly
wandering into the scene to witness what is going on, but it fades away
again, and we are left with only the bells for company.

67. Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello in A minor

Written in 1914 on the eve of the First World War, Ravel’s piano trio was
the subject of one of his most intriguing remarks. In answer to his
composition pupil Maurice Delage’s enquiry as to how it was getting on,
Ravel replied, ‘My trio is finished. All I need are the themes.’ Many
composers would probably regard the themes as being the starting point,
but Ravel’s imagination was evidently more fired by the structure of the
piece, the shape he wanted to build. If he hadn’t yet thought of the themes,
then presumably he hadn’t written down much either: the work had all been
done in his head. This rare ability was one he shared with Mozart.
In the summer of 1914 Ravel had retreated from the exhausting social
whirl of Paris to the Basque coast village of St Jean-de-Luz, near to where
he was born in Ciboure. He intended to immerse himself in a quiet period of
composition, but on 2 August the news that France had entered the war put
paid to that. Ravel, who was thirty-nine and might have hoped to be spared
the obligation of signing up, was determined to play his part (he hoped to be
accepted as a pilot, but was taken on as a truck driver and hospital orderly).
He hurried to complete the Trio, telling Delage a few days after the
declaration of war that he ‘was working on the Trio with the sureness and
lucidity of a madman’. His manuscript, on which he calls the work
‘Trio/pour piano violon & violoncelle’ (an order of instruments later
changed by his publisher), notes that he finished writing it in August. In
September he told various friends that he was carefully correcting the
proofs ‘in case I am absent’, a phrase whose ominous implication he later
clarified by saying ‘I have treated the Trio as a posthumous work’.
Fortunately it was not, but these remarks betray his sense of doom.
Ravel once said he found it useful to copy a work he admired, and in
this case it seems to have been Saint-Saëns’s first piano trio, though as
Ravel observed, one can discover a lot about oneself through one’s
‘unwitting infidelity’ to the model. Another inspiration was his own early
single-movement Sonata for Violin and Piano (Sonate posthume, 1897)
whose two main themes, also in A minor, are quite similar to those of the
Trio’s first movement. He far surpassed both of these inspirations with a
work which in terms of grandeur and complexity is the twentieth-century
equivalent of Schubert’s E flat piano trio. All three parts are of fearsome
technical difficulty, putting the whole trio under a certain duress which
somehow captures and expresses the music’s internal anxiety.
The first movement, ‘Modéré’ (moderate), is a finely balanced mixture
of tranquil, almost static episodes with sudden bursts of energy and
agitation, a mirror perhaps of life in St Jean-de-Luz that summer. Ravel said
that the opening theme had ‘a Basque colour’ and indeed its gently rocking
rhythms, 3+3+2 in a bar of eight quavers, amplify characteristic Basque
folk rhythms such as zortzico, its five-beat lilt made up of 1+2+2 beats. The
cello attempts to move things on with a flowing lyrical melody in the same
metre, but suddenly the piano flares up with a virtuoso passage which sets
all three instruments buzzing with energy. Throughout the movement, stable
episodes alternate with unstable ones, and sleepy ones with wide-awake
ones, in a carefully controlled mosaic. The writing becomes more and more
demanding, the strings using glassy harmonics, chromatic figures played in
tremolo, and acrobatic string-crossing at speed. Sometimes Ravel gives a
new metronome mark every few bars, suggesting that he was following a
precise underlying blueprint worked out in time as well as shape.
Technical difficulties increase in the remarkable second movement,
marked ‘Pantoum’. The pantoum is a Malay verse form sometimes imitated
by French poets. It has a complicated pattern of lines in which the second
and fourth lines of each verse become the first and third of the next verse.
Ravel devises his own version, composed of short alternating phrases with
distinct characters, the first spiky, ‘oriental’ and pizzicato, the second
seductive, smooth and waltz-like. These are juxtaposed not in a four-line
verse pattern like the Malay original but in an intricate three-part structure.
If we call the spiky motif ‘A’ and the smooth waltz motif ‘B’, we can see
that ABA is followed by BAB and then ABA again and so on. In one ‘verse’
the A motif is the leader, and in the next verse the B motif is in the
ascendant. Rapid changes of character test the reflexes of all three players;
as well as jumping about at lightning speed they must capture the slightly
nightmarish alternation of spiky and smooth, pizzicato and bowed, so that
the kaleidoscope of moods is presented to the listener in all its tightly coiled
brilliance. In the centre of the movement, Ravel achieves a compositional
high point when, against the continued alternation of spiky and smooth
motifs on the strings, the pianist suddenly turns aside from the fray and
finds a large quiet space in which to accommodate a beautiful chorale. It is
in a different metre from that of the string parts and has different bar lines,
producing a surreal effect of parallel spheres of activity. Roles are reversed
a moment later with the strings taking over the melody. Near the end, just
before the strings enter at the top of their register with the final spiky
phrase, Ravel inserts one single extra beat to enable them to get their hands
on the extremely high note required. This single beat may look merciful on
paper, but at Ravel’s specified tempo (crotchet = 192) it gives the players
only a fraction of a second to find the correct placing.
As a pianist with experience of performing the Trio, I often wonder
whether Ravel realised that with hands still trembling after the exertions of
the Pantoum, it would be very hard to start the Passacaille (Passacaglia)
very slowly and quietly in the deep bass register of the piano, where it is
difficult to achieve a pianissimo line. Nevertheless, this is the task awaiting
the pianist at the start of this majestic movement, in which an underlying
bass pattern is repeated and varied ten times, rising from a simple and
solemn beginning to a peak of despairing intensity which often reminds me
of Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream, before it sinks into the
depths again. Ravel’s music gives an impression of enormous forces being
controlled by a powerful intellect. The instruments are added at precisely
controlled intervals and the tension measured out most carefully; for
example, in the eight-bar build-up to the fortissimo climax the piano part
pulls heavily downwards as the string parts pull heavily upwards, the
complex harmonies twisting mightily against one another. The tremendous
climax, so slowly built up, is loud only for a few bars, and quickly we
perceive that with an iron grip we are being taken inexorably down the
other side of the mountain with no time to digest what we saw at the top
(perhaps just as well).
As the finale opens it is the turn of the strings to calm their nerves and
find the tricky harmonics and the double-stopping tremolos which set the
wind whistling through the first theme. In this movement all three players
are tested to their utmost in terms of instrumental range and technical
control. The writing is almost orchestral, or at least gives the impression
that more than three people must be playing because there is so much sound
and so much going on. Once again the rhythm is Basque in flavour;
passages of five beats in the bar alternate with passages with seven. Further
instability is given by the fact that phrases alternate between long-short
patterns (in the opening section) and short-long patterns (for example,
where all the instruments dive down to a lower register for the first time).
Twice in the movement Ravel rips aside the curtain to reveal a massive
fanfare-like theme announced by the piano while the strings trill frantically
above it like fire alarms. A premonition of war, perhaps? On the second and
climactic appearance of this fanfare the effect is heightened by the violin
and cello swooping in hysterical unison across arpeggios and rushing
scales. On the final page, as we hurtle towards the end, Ravel crams in an
improbable number of thematic motifs in canon into the top, middle and
bass of the piano part – too fast to be detected by the innocent ear, but
contributing to a feeling of being almost choked with things to say.
The French violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, while preparing
Ravel’s fiendishly difficult Sonata for Violin and Cello, once told him, ‘It’s
too complicated. It must be great fun writing such difficult stuff, but no
one’s going to play it except virtuosos.’ Ravel responded, ‘Good! Then I
shan’t be assassinated by amateurs!’ This may sound elitist, but the fact is
that Ravel’s imagination was exceptionally brilliant, and his musical
language evolved to match his vision.

68. Piano Concerto in G major

‘It is a concerto in the truest sense of the word: I mean that it is written in
very much the same spirit as those of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. The music of
a concerto should, in my opinion, be light-hearted and brilliant.’ So said
Ravel about his G major piano concerto, one of his last works. Eyebrows
may be raised at the claim that Mozart’s piano concertos are ‘light-hearted’,
but Ravel was probably referring to their qualities of restraint, clarity and
outward as well as inward beauty. Despite Ravel’s airy statement about
what concertos ‘should’ be, however, his own concertos reveal a more
complicated picture. The G major concerto forms one half of an intriguing
pair with the other piano concerto he composed at the same time – the
Concerto for the Left Hand, a much darker and more troubled piece. As a
pair, the two concertos are like the double masks of comedy and tragedy
used in the ancient Greek amphitheatres and still seen as decorative
sculptures in the theatres of today. The mask is an appropriate symbol for
Ravel’s artistic personality. The man himself was elegant, dapper, and
secretive about his private life. His music is crafted with incredible skill, yet
many listeners have the feeling that he uses its exterior sheen to conceal a
depth of emotion he was reluctant to bring to the surface. He often used
irony to offset emotion, and his mastery of styles like orientalism, neo-
classicism or Spanish folk style sometimes seems like deflecting lenses
which he used to ward off too direct a view of his heart. In the G major
piano concerto, there are several such styles, including jazz.
Ravel was fascinated by jazz in the early 1920s when it first appeared in
Paris cabarets, and used it in pieces such as his Sonata for Violin and Piano
in G major. When he toured the United States in 1928, he made an effort to
go and hear leading jazz musicians – Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Bix
Beiderbecke. He met George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue (1924) he
admired, and was fascinated by his nimble piano-playing. Ravel loved the
complex chords of jazz, its ‘blue notes’ and its experiments with
polytonality (more than one key at once). In fact, Ravel instinctively ‘got’
jazz in a way which even some of his American colleagues did not. Vexed
by their slowness, he used the opportunity of an article in the Musical
Digest to tell American intellectuals to ‘Take Jazz Seriously’: ‘You
Americans take jazz too lightly. You seem to feel that it is cheap, vulgar,
momentary. Abroad, we take jazz seriously. It is influencing our work.’
When Ravel got back from the United States he embarked on his G
major piano concerto. The role of the pianist is deliberately different from
that of the typical Romantic soloist. At the start, the piano is almost merged
with the orchestra, adding polytonal sparkle to an orchestral theme
reminiscent of the puppet-like capers in Stravinsky’s Petrushka. When the
piano does ‘speak’ for the first time, it is in the muted, velvet tones of a
nightclub jazz singer, a contralto voice perhaps – not out to dazzle us, but to
draw us into a languorous world. Moreover, the piano speaks in the middle
register of the instrument, using quite a narrow compass of notes (not much
more than an octave) for its melody. Gradually the piano leads us to the
gorgeous slow second theme, in E major, still confining itself to simple
notes and rhythms – in fact the second theme has a pentatonic, oriental
flavour. A passage of rapid fingerwork follows, which will be echoed in the
finale, but it is significant that when the cadenza arrives, it is the luscious
slow E major theme which the pianist wishes to return to and mull over,
using quiet trills to convey the melody (almost like the effect of an Ondes
Martenot, an early electronic instrument invented in 1928). Interestingly,
the cadenza precedes the reprise of the opening material, just as happens in
the first movement of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto.
The slow movement, one of Ravel’s finest creations, is a very slow and
long-breathed melody mainly in crotchets, moving in slow triple time. But
the bass part moves in quavers and touches in the bass note again at the
half-bar, cutting across the rhythm of the melody. This creates a gentle
friction between the hands; in addition, the subtly changing phrase lengths
of the melody (four bars, three bars, one bar) pull against the expected four-
or eight-bar units. Once again, the piano confines itself to its middle register
and to quite a small range of notes, as though humming to itself. The
movement is essentially in three parts: a long unaccompanied piano solo, a
central section in which piano and orchestra float back into the world of
jazz, culminating in a wonderfully wrenching climax, and a reprise in which
the orchestra (with cor anglais in the limelight) takes over the opening
theme and the piano decorates it with quiet filigree passagework.
Ravel once said that he modelled this movement on the slow movement
of Mozart’s Quintet for Clarinet and Strings K581. Mozart’s movement has
a similar design and a similar sense of time being almost suspended by the
slow-moving beats of the main melody, but Ravel’s is more stylised, almost
like a conscious melding of old French harpsichord music with the cool
Antique of Erik Satie, with a visit to George Gershwin in the middle. For
the pianist, this is a most satisfying movement to play, offering the
challenge of spinning a very long line in a calm atmosphere, of responding
to the jazz harmonies in the middle, and then using all one’s technical art to
create a shimmering haze around the slow melody when it is reprised by the
orchestra. When Marguerite Long, the French pianist who premiered the
concerto, told Ravel how much she admired the effortless beauty of the
opening phrase, he replied, ‘That flowing phrase! How I worked over it bar
by bar! It nearly killed me!’
The finale picks up on the circus-like atmosphere of the first movement.
A few loud orchestral chords, which sound as if they could be the closing
bars and indeed are later used as exactly that, end with the crack of the
wooden percussion instrument known as ‘the whip’, conjuring up a circus
ringmaster. This triggers a perpetuum mobile which keeps the pianist busy
almost throughout the movement. An array of jaunty themes passes in front
of us, sometimes led by the pianist, sometimes by the wind players. There is
a quasi-military feel to some of the themes, but perhaps more in the spirit of
a circus band or a parade of toy soldiers. Petrushka comes to mind again at
the reprise where, as the orchestra restates the opening material, the piano
seems to screech with delight, flinging itself about in the high treble with
convulsive movements. All the themes flash before us until the procession
is brought to a decisive halt by the same few chords we heard at the
beginning of the movement.
The first half of the twentieth century was a challenging time for the piano.
The First World War swept so much away, and in its wake were changed
attitudes. With the advent of radio and the increasing availability of
recordings in the 1920s and 1930s there was a seismic shift to music being
produced remotely. Until now, you either played the piano yourself or
listened to it being played in your presence. Now there was an exciting new
way to listen to piano music even when you were nowhere near a piano.
Records were expensive at first, but as the cost came down, more and more
music was listened to passively (a trend which has continued). When people
discovered how easy it was to put on a record and hear someone doing it
‘properly’, playing the piano lost some of its domestic purpose as well as
some of its aspirational quality. Amateur pianists now had numerous
opportunities to realise the limitations of their own techniques. And Uncle
Fred’s way of playing that Chopin waltz suddenly didn’t seem so charming
when you’d heard it played in your own living room by Paderewski.
Not only the classics were available on disc – there was huge interest in
buying records of popular music. Researchers went out with recording
machines and captured the sound of folk music in rural communities.
Exotic sounds from around the world became accessible; information
flooded in through radio and eventually television. This resulted in waves of
experimentation from composers who opened their minds to Eastern
philosophies, theories of chance, and new organisational principles to rival
more Eurocentric developments including ‘the emancipation of the
dissonance’, as Schoenberg put it in 1926. As popular music eclipsed
classical music in terms of its fan base, many composers seemed to retreat
into intellectual fortresses where they pursued their musical experiments in
a spirit of defiance. In a sense, the piano was fortunate: it found a new lease
of life in blues, light music and jazz. But it also held its ground with
composers of art music who, like their predecessors, saw the piano as an
outlet for personal declaration.

CHARLES IVES (1874–1954)

69. Piano Sonata no. 2, ‘Concord’
Charles Ives was an American composer who had no need to make a living
from music because he was making a lot of money as an executive in a life-
insurance firm. He was a deep thinker in the insurance world, believing in
the social power of life insurance to relieve struggling families at times of
crisis, and he devised a widely used formula for calculating how much life
insurance a person needed to take out. In 1918 he wrote a book on Life
Insurance and its Relation to Inheritance Tax, still considered a classic in
its field. Allegedly, many of his colleagues in the insurance industry were
surprised to learn in later years that he also wrote music.
In musical terms Ives was a loner, working in isolation and hardly
recognised as a composer until late in his life, when he had long stopped
composing. He had a highly experimental approach, fostered by his music-
teacher father who liked to ‘stretch his ears’ by making him sing a tune in
one key while his father accompanied him in another. Ives senior conducted
a marching band, and young Charles received further ear-stretching as he
sat in the town square in Danbury, Connecticut, listening to various bands
playing simultaneously on different sides of the square and marching past
one another with exciting cacophonous results. It is hardly surprising that
he developed a fascination with polytonality (using several keys at once)
and polyrhythm. He went further, experimenting with quarter-tones (half
the distance of a semitone), unusual time signatures, music without bar lines
and deliberate dissonance. ‘Stand up and take your dissonance like a man!’
he once advised. He thought there would come a day when ‘schoolchildren
will whistle popular tunes in quartertones’, though so far when this happens
it is usually by accident.
Ives had a philosophical approach to music, believing it to inhabit a
realm of ideas which could be appreciated ‘purely’. ‘My God! What has
sound to do with music!’ he exclaimed in Essays before a Sonata.
Instruments were ‘the perennial difficulty’, dictating and restricting what a
composer could write. ‘Is it the composer’s fault that man has only ten
fingers?’ he demanded. ‘Why can’t music go out in the same way it comes
in to a man, without having to crawl over a fence of sounds, thoraxes,
catguts, wire, wood and brass?’ (As he had no immediate expectation of
performances he was, of course, in the unusual position of not having to
consider the practical needs of real musicians.) In his Essays he makes the
startling remark, ‘That music must be heard, is not essential – what it
sounds like may not be what it is.’ This has the ring of Lewis Carroll and
Alice’s topsy-turvy world, but it also seems to be the cue for John Cage and
the conceptualists to step forward with, for example, pieces that consist
only of silence.
In 1911 Ives conceived the idea of writing a piano sonata in four
movements to celebrate four of the philosophers and writers who made up
the Transcendentalist movement based in Concord, Massachusetts, in the
mid-nineteenth century. The movement’s name came from their belief that
we all have intuitive knowledge about ourselves and the world which does
not come to us through our five senses, but ‘transcends’ these usual
channels of information. The movement was progressive, anti-slavery,
critical of the government, supportive of women’s rights and respectful of
nature. Their leader was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was against mindless
conformity and believed that each person should find ‘an original relation to
the universe’. In an influential essay, Emerson exhorted Americans to stop
looking to Europe for their inspiration and strive to develop a genuine
American individuality. All of this struck a chord with Ives.
The Concord Sonata, as it became known, was written around 1915.
Ives published it at his own expense in 1920, but it was not performed until
John Kirkpatrick’s iconic performance (playing, incredibly, from memory)
in 1939. It is the grandest of Ives’s piano pieces and is considered a ground-
breaking American work. There is an Ivesian contradiction in the fact that it
uses avant-garde language to look back nostalgically to a simpler, more
idealistic era. It quotes the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
and the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata in every movement and is, indeed, a little
like seeing Beethoven’s late piano music reflected in a cracked mirror.
Appropriately, there is a sense of stormy improvisation, as Ives would
probably have agreed, for he always played the work slightly differently
and once said it was his only piece which ‘whenever I turn to it, seems
unfinished’. The whole keyboard is plundered for sound effects and chords
as rugged as can be devised; many of the chords span a tenth, which really
means that only someone with a big hand can tackle it.
Unlike many traditional piano sonatas, which culminate in a brilliant
finale, Ives starts with the most complicated movement and works
backwards. ‘Emerson’, the first movement, is an uncompromising portrait
of a great man expressed in huge craggy chords, long phrases without bar
lines, and dense textures with different things going on in different parts.
The impression is one of sustained effort and heroic seriousness. Here and
there the outlines of a familiar hymn or American folk song peep through,
but are submerged in waves of dissonant commentary.
The second movement, ‘Hawthorne’ (dedicated to the novelist
Nathaniel Hawthorne), is a mercurial, extremely difficult scherzo with
passages of crazed ragtime, anticipations of modern jazz, slow
Beethovenian contemplation, jagged cadenzas, and a famous passage in
which the pianist must use a special piece of wood (14¾ inches long) to
press down the black notes to create huge quiet clusters of sound over an
interval that no human hand could span. Even a century later, the ghostly
effect is usually lost amid the audience’s incredulity on seeing the block of
wood.
‘The Alcotts’ is the slow movement, a portrait of the family made
famous by Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women – her father Bronson
Alcott was a member of the Transcendentalists. This is written in simpler
harmonies suggestive of hymns. Because of the descriptions in Louisa’s
much-loved novel we can easily visualise the Alcott family gathered round
the hearth for family prayers as one of the girls ‘lovingly touched the
beautiful black and white keys and pressed the bright pedals’.
‘Thoreau’, the fourth movement, is a celebration of the flute-playing
philosopher who became the most famous of the Transcendentalists because
of his identification with nature and his wish to ‘live deep and suck out all
the marrow of life’, a process he describes in Walden, his account of two
years spent living in a cabin by Walden Pond. Ives uses the full register of
the piano to create a sense of space and calm, though the dissonance of his
harmonic language disturbs it, like midges in evening light. Fragments from
other movements and snippets of songs make ghostly appearances in a
rhapsodic journey. Towards the end there is a magnificently impractical
touch where Ives asks for a flute player to contribute a brief descant. Over a
tolling bass line the music broadens out towards the end, though its final
bars seem inconclusive, as though there is more to be said.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951)

 70. Five Pieces for Piano, op. 23
A century after Schoenberg unveiled his radical new ‘twelve-note’ (or
‘twelve-tone’) method, it is still highly controversial. To Schoenberg
himself, it was a game-changing discovery akin to Einstein’s discoveries in
physics. To some musicians it was an intriguing development which
deserved to be explored, and respected for its intellectual inventiveness. It
inspired other kinds of ‘serialism’, in which series of not just notes, but also
rhythms, tone colours and other elements might be systematically
organised. To many listeners, however, twelve-note music was strange and
off-putting and has remained so despite Schoenberg’s prediction that we
would all get used to it.
Schoenberg’s early work is in late-Romantic style with gorgeous
harmonies, but he came to feel that works like his Verklärte Nacht and
Gurrelieder had shown him the limits of that sort of language. Mahler and
Richard Strauss supported him in his early style, but he found himself
largely isolated as he moved through atonality to his new twelve-note
technique: ‘the method of composition with twelve notes related only to one
another’. It’s important to realise that he saw this as a development rooted
in the past (about which he was extremely knowledgeable and a brilliant
analyst), a natural next step to take after works such as Strauss’s opera
Salome had virtually shaken music loose from its traditional anchors. If
everything had become too free, here was an exciting new way to organise
it. Music had always been organised in one way or another.
In twelve-note technique, the composer takes the twelve notes of the
chromatic scale and devises an order or ‘series’ for them, in which all the
conventional hierarchies of harmony have been banished. This is the ‘row’
or ‘note-row’, not ‘a theme’ in the familiar sense, but a source from which
themes are drawn. Different ‘rows’ have different characters according to
whether, for example, there are large jumps between individual notes, or
whether small intervals huddle together, but in terms of harmony, all the
notes are treated as equally important.
The twelve-note row operates somewhat like a mathematical series and
can be manipulated in all kinds of ways. The notes may be piled vertically
into chords, spread out horizontally as ‘tunes’, divided between different
instruments of the orchestra, distributed between the ‘voices’ of a piano
piece, played backwards or upside-down, or played in small sections,
separately or simultaneously. In this method there was no feeling of a home
key, no hierarchy of harmonies such as had dominated Western classical
music for centuries. On the other hand, chaos was not the aim: the ideal was
to create a new and compelling logic. Schoenberg believed that in time,
people would come to regard twelve-note music as commonplace:
‘Grocer’s boys will whistle serial music on their rounds’ (a prediction
which was wrong in several respects).
Schoenberg found it useful to work out new ideas at the piano, and his
piano pieces often mark significant turning points in his career. The Three
Pieces, op. 11, marked a period of atonality, or ‘free’ writing in no key at
all. The Five Pieces, op. 23, and the Suite, op. 25, composed in parallel
between 1920 and 1923, marked the arrival of serialism and the twelve-note
method. Schoenberg still uses the gestures, shapes and forms (dance forms,
for example) of older music, but his use of ‘note rows’ gives his music such
an unusual effect that we are surprised to find it still written in crotchets,
quavers and semiquavers. For some listeners it is disorienting to recognise
the familiar outlines of rising and falling phrases, arpeggios and chords,
dialogue between the hands, and so on, but expressed in notes which are
almost entirely perplexing and difficult to remember. One could argue that
Schoenberg’s method focuses exclusively on the interest it affords to the
composer, and ignores the comfort of the listener. Some listeners are drawn
to explore this world, but others are alienated by it.
In turning away from the luxurious style of late-Romantic piano music,
Schoenberg resolved to write sparsely. ‘Anyone writing for piano should
never forget that even the best pianist has only two hands . . . the only way
is to write as thinly as possible: as few notes as possible,’ he said in 1923
(in defiance of the fact that many great composers of piano music have
triumphed by ignoring the limitations of ‘only two hands’). His Five Pieces,
op. 23, look quite sparing on the page. Slender lines of music do interact,
but rarely are there more than three notes sounding at once. Phrases are
short, more like fragments; the score is heavily marked with accents,
staccatos and volatile expression marks. Quiet passages are subdivided into
p, pp, ppp and pppp; loud ones into f, ff, fff. Almost every note has some
kind of instruction attached to it, which makes the player’s experience
rather different from that of playing Romantic piano music; it feels as if
one’s concentration is being forced to travel slowly along the line, attentive
to microscopic details. Many pianists find it difficult to get the precise
pitches to ‘stick’ in their memory without sustained effort.
A lot of the music is marked to be played quietly, but this is not the
quietness of tranquillity; rather, it feels like a kind of dangerous quietness,
in which lights come and go, and strange voices chatter from places we
can’t see. The first four pieces just have numbers to identify them, but the
fifth piece is entitled ‘Walzer’ (Waltz). Although it evokes the familiar
Viennese dance, this waltz is at pains to avoid any hint of ease or
complacency, and its spindly legs seem to cavort in the kind of twilit
strangeness that Schoenberg had perfected in Pierrot Lunaire.
In the concert hall, Schoenberg’s serial technique has never been box-
office gold, but his fevered harmonic language did find a home in the film
world, where a number of his pupils and disciples (David Raksin, Bernard
Herrmann, Scott Bradley, Gerard Schurmann) made money by writing
scores for ‘film noir’, horror movies, supernatural tales and even Tom and
Jerry cartoons. In the 1944 cartoon Puttin’ on the Dog, little mouse Jerry
dons a dog’s-head mask and runs about, terrifying his companions to the
tinkling of a twelve-note row. ‘I hope Dr Schoenberg will forgive me for
using his system to produce funny music,’ wrote his pupil Scott Bradley,
‘but even the boys in the orchestra laughed when we were recording it.’

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945)

71. Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, op. 20/Sz 74
At the beginning of the twentieth century, many composers were searching
for a way to escape the overheated language of late-Romantic music. Some
very different escape routes were found, ranging from austere
intellectualism to a conscious engagement with ‘the music of the people’.
Bartók followed the latter path and was one of the composers who took it
most seriously, travelling to many regions of Hungary, Romania and
Slovakia as well as further afield to record and transcribe folk songs. As one
can still see in a famous photo, he travelled with a phonograph, into whose
horn the peasants were invited to sing. The nuances of their singing were
hard to capture in traditional notation, but with some gentle adjustment and
the frequent use of grace notes and ‘pause’ marks, Bartók managed to
preserve thousands of folk songs and the way they were sung. This turned
out to be even more precious a collection than he first thought, because
after the First World War certain boundaries were redrawn and some of the
territories he had explored were no longer accessible to him.
When Liszt wrote his Hungarian Rhapsodies in the 1850s, he thought
he was incorporating genuine folk music into his work. However, it was
later realised that Liszt’s ‘folk music’ was more likely to have been
composed for popular gypsy bands of the time to play, not even necessarily
in the countryside but in urban settings as far afield as Austria and
Germany. Liszt’s ‘Hungarian’ music fell from favour, especially when
Bartók and his colleague Zoltán Kodály began revealing the results of their
researches. They discovered that the genuine folk songs of Hungary,
Romania and Slovakia used scales more varied than had been supposed,
and that many exotic-sounding modes were widely used by peasants. Their
tuning and their rhythms were also varied and subtle.
Bartók’s immersion in this research had a profound influence on his
own composition. He realised that Eastern European folk music was a rich
resource into which a modern composer could tap. Its varied rhythms and
metres pointed him towards new freedoms and modes of expression, all the
more satisfying to use because of their ancient origin. Folk music is often
thought to have a jollifying or sentimentalising effect on classical
composers, but for Bartók it had the effect of intensifying his musical
expression. It is clear that he felt a responsibility to use these folk elements
with respect.
In 1920, when the First World War was over and the shape of Hungary
had changed, Bartók wrote Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant
Songs, a richly imaginative work for his own instrument, the piano. In the
1940s, after he had moved to America, he described the work in a Harvard
lecture as a transcription of folk music in which ‘the added composition-
treatment attains the importance of an original work, and the used folk
melody is only to be regarded as a kind of motto. Some people believe it is
easier to write a transcription than an original work,’ he went on. ‘To the
contrary, it is my belief that in some cases the use of a given theme presents
greater difficulty because of the restriction given by it . . . To write a good
transcription, the composer must have creative imagination at his disposal
as well, quite as much as in the writing of an original work.’
The Eight Improvisations bear out the truth of this view with their
skilful combination of old melodies with ‘advanced’ harmonies. The first
two numbers form a pair of the slow-fast type familiar from Hungarian (and
many other kinds of) folk music: no. 1 is the simplest, almost a straight
transcription of a folk song in three verses to which Bartók supplies
increasingly outlandish harmonies. No. 2 is a sardonic-sounding narrative
which takes four verses through a cycle of four keys a major third apart.
No. 3 inhabits a more adventurous harmonic world; a sad song is
accompanied by poignant and unexpected harmonies which Bartók directs
to be played at first ‘without colour’. In no. 4 the sardonic mood returns
with a vigorous dance and offbeat accents, and these become even more
prominent in the whirling dance of no. 5, its ‘verses’ separated by acid little
transitions. No. 6 is a virtuosic dialogue between a black-key theme and a
white-key accompaniment, and between a gruff deep voice and a more
coaxing high one. In this piece there is much use of pairs of notes with the
characteristic short-long rhythm (LA-daaa, with the accent on the short
note), so frequently heard in Bartók’s Hungarian music.
The final two pieces form another slow-fast pair. No. 7 was
commissioned by the French magazine La Revue Musicale in 1920 as a
contribution to a ‘tombeau’ or memorial to Debussy. Bartók was a great
admirer of Debussy and his tribute is a setting of a Hungarian cradle song,
here offered in a spirit of lamenting. Finally the eighth piece, beginning in
the key with which no. 7 ended, whisks us back to the world of the
energetic peasant dance. In its middle section we meet the kind of ‘tune plus
mocking laughter’ which Bartók later uses to such effect in the ‘Intermezzo
Interrotto’ of his Concerto for Orchestra. At the end of the eighth
Improvisation there is a more or less straight-faced reprise of the tune in
octaves, but accompanied in the high treble by a scathing commentary in
wrenching offbeat chords. The harmonies of this final pair of pieces make
one realise why Bartók said that ‘in my Eight Improvisations for Piano I
reached, I believe, the extreme limit in adding most daring accompaniments
to simple folk tunes’.
 72. Contrasts, Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano, Sz 111
In 1938, when he was still in Hungary, Bartók received an unusual
commission from the jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman, the ‘King of
Swing’. The invitation came via the Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti, who
had persuaded Goodman to ask Bartók to write something for Szigeti and
Goodman to play together. Goodman, enormously popular as the
bandleader of the Benny Goodman Orchestra and the leader of the Benny
Goodman Quartet, had just performed an iconic concert with his band at
New York’s Carnegie Hall, an event which not only marked the first concert
in that august venue by a swing band, but also the first mixed-race concert
in the hall. It was a huge and unexpected success, and made Goodman
realise that there was a classical audience out there who were ready to
become his fans. He was keen to broaden his repertoire and raise his profile
in the classical world, and he started to commission new works from
classical composers. He specified that Bartók should write something that
could fit on two sides of a 78rpm record, lasting no more than seven
minutes altogether. And (perhaps at Szigeti’s suggestion) he asked that
Bartók make constructive use of the two-side format by writing something
in the traditional slow-fast pair of movements often found in Hungarian folk
music, the slow section being called ‘lassú’ and the fast one ‘friss’.
Bartók decided to write a trio for clarinet, violin and piano – the only
time he included a wind instrument in his chamber music. Rather than
seeking to blend the sounds of the violin and clarinet, he wanted to
showcase each instrument in its own right, perhaps leading to his choice of
Contrasts for the title. As preparation, he listened to some recordings of
Benny Goodman’s trio with Teddy Wilson (piano) and Gene Krupa
(drums). Perhaps this was what led to him conceiving the piano part a little
like the rhythm section of a swing band – keeping the beat, highlighting the
offbeats, supporting the soloists with a cushion of sound. There was another
inspiration too – Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, whose middle
movement is a delicious ‘Blues’ with a strummed violin part at the
beginning, very similar to what Bartók writes for the violin in Contrasts.
The two-part ‘lassú-friss’ format was realised in the first movement,
‘Verbunkos’, and the third movement, ‘Sebes’. However, the first
movement is not really slow or solemn, so eventually Bartók added a real
slow movement, ‘Pihenő’ (Taking a Rest). By this time the whole piece had
far outstripped the specified seven minutes.
‘Verbunkos’ is a recruiting dance as used by the Habsburg army when
they came marching into a village looking for new recruits. To command
admiration, the hussars would dance for the villagers; firstly the sergeant
with dignified gestures, then lower-ranking officers with energetic
movements and finally the youngest soldiers with jumps and the clicking of
spurs. The music was played by Romani (gypsy) groups brought along by
the army. The recruiting technique was to get people drunk while they were
watching the display and then conscript them into the army, marching them
away before they had sobered up. Thus there is a lot of strutting and
parading in the first movement, contrasted with quiet, blurry sections which
may represent the hazy state of mind of new recruits. Just before the
clarinet cadenza, there is a passage (‘poco rallentando’) which seems to
mimic the sound of an old wind-up gramophone player running down – an
in-joke, perhaps, for those who knew of Bartók’s phonographic researches.
The middle movement is one of those ‘night pieces’ for which Bartók
became famous – not a sensuous nocturne like one of Chopin’s, but a quiet,
sombre evocation of what one might call the darker side of night. There are
rustles and whispers in the undergrowth; lines move tentatively towards one
another and drift apart again; things glide about very quietly, sometimes
coming near to us in a scary way. At the climax, the clarinet becomes
agitated, the violin accompanying it in anxious tremolos. In the last line, the
piano takes the lead with a quiet chorale, which has almost the effect that
Janáček’s chorales do in his Overgrown Path piano pieces, a moment of
benediction.
The final movement opens with an unusual effect: the violinist is asked
to use a second violin, its strings tuned differently (the bottom string a
semitone higher, and the top string a semitone lower) so that it sounds
deliberately ‘out of tune’ (a sidelong glance, also, at the violin solo at the
start of Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre). Brazenly playing on these
discordant intervals, the violin introduces a lively folk dance with which the
piano soon joins in. (After a short while, the violinist is given a chance to
change back to their usual violin while the piano and clarinet ‘twiddle their
thumbs’ musically.) Bartók relishes the offbeat accents, mainly played by
the piano, which are common to both folk music and jazz. The central
section brings a complete change of mood: a quiet, swaying Bulgarian
dance in a rhythm notated as 8+5/8, that is, thirteen quavers in the bar.
Bartók supplies dotted lines to show the subdivisions of the thirteen quavers
into 3+2+3+2+3, probably to convey the flexible approach to the dance beat
which he had observed on his folk-music-collecting travels. This central
section, with its clusters of chords and the instruments groping about in
opposite directions, is the most haunting in the piece. From now on, the
piano becomes fully involved in the action, proposing the next theme and
remaining energetically engaged in its development. Now it is the violin’s
turn to have a cadenza, a fiendishly tricky one which requires the violinist
to play two-note chords while also plucking an open string rhythmically.
After the cadenza, the energy never lets up, all three instruments tussling
with one another in a dance which gets faster and faster until in the final
bars there is a sudden halt and a suggestion, perhaps, of a dazed salute.
When Bartók visited New York in 1940, he performed Contrasts at
Carnegie Hall with Goodman and Szigeti, and they also made a famous
gramophone recording (on two 78rpm discs).

ALBAN BERG (1885–1935)

73. Piano Sonata, op. 1
Berg’s piano sonata is one of the classical music world’s most remarkable
‘op. 1’s, a masterpiece in the old sense of the word, meaning the fine piece
of work which a graduating apprentice would submit to a Guild to obtain
membership and recognition as ‘a master’ of the craft.
Alban Berg was one of the three most famous composers of the Second
Viennese School: Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern. Berg is the
one who seems to retain the closest links to traditional musical language,
even though he was a passionate disciple of Schoenberg’s radical new
compositional methods. People often find the music of the mature
Schoenberg and Webern somewhat ‘cold’, whereas Berg’s music is
perceived to be ‘warmer’ and more sensuous.
Berg’s private life was like an episode from Arthur Schnitzler’s
scandalous play, La Ronde, about the casual liaisons and social
transgressions of turn-of-the-century Vienna. When Berg was only
seventeen he fathered a daughter with a family servant twice his age, who
‘knew her place’ and kept the little girl out of the way. Berg later married
the glamorous singer Helene Nahowski, widely spoken of as a biological
daughter of the Emperor Franz Josef I; hidden in the piano in the Berg
household were semi-precious jewels thought to be gifts to Helene from the
Emperor. Berg’s marriage was ‘perfect’, yet he had a secret affair with
Alma Mahler’s sister-in-law, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the course of which he
charted cryptically and minutely in his Lyric Suite for string quartet. In
letters to his wife he talks of composing music as an intoxicating experience
akin to the dreams one might have under the influence of morphine. His
operas Wozzeck and Lulu, dealing with themes of jealousy, insanity and
murder, seem to have given him a way of sublimating some ingredients of
his fantasy life. His wife underwent analysis with Sigmund Freud, and it is
tempting to imagine their conversations.
As a teenager, Berg was more interested in literature than music, but he
had written a number of songs. In 1904, when he was nineteen, his sister
noticed an advertisement for counterpoint and harmony lessons being
offered by someone called Arnold Schoenberg. Berg signed up and began
studying with the man whose temperament and musical ambition would
powerfully affect his own. By 1907 Berg had begun to use Schoenberg’s
method of ‘developing variation’; that is, deriving all the elements of a
composition from motifs announced at the beginning. It is significant that
Berg decided to announce himself to the world with this one-movement
piano sonata. He intended to write several movements, but found himself
stuck for ideas after completing the first one, and eventually accepted
Schoenberg’s suggestion that the single movement was already a complete
statement.
Berg’s style of piano writing in op. 1 leans heavily on Romantic piano
literature, but his way of composing themes was learned from Schoenberg.
(This was at a time when Schoenberg was still in his ‘atonal’ phase – he
hadn’t yet invented his twelve-note technique.) Berg’s themes are
constructed from tiny motifs of two or three notes which he uses as building
blocks, to be turned upside down, played backwards, stretched out, played
in a different order, stacked vertically so that they formed chords, played
simultaneously with other motifs, transposed into other keys, used as
accompaniments, and so on. The motif may be a rhythm, a dotted rhythm
for example, which we can recognise even when it appears in different
melodic costumes. The sense of a home key is still present, but its hold has
been consciously loosened. Sometimes we do indeed seem to be in the B
minor of the key signature, while at others we seem to be floating or even
writhing in limbo. One might put it the other way round and say that Berg
sets out to explore a non-tonal, otherworldly realm but finds the gravity of
B minor acting upon him whether he likes it or not.
The form of a traditional sonata movement is easy enough to discern.
We can hear an opening theme, a transition, a slower contrasting theme, and
there are clearly links between them – for example, the three-note rising
motif (G-C-F#) we hear in a dotted rhythm at the very beginning, which is
woven into every strand in the texture at some point. Smooth progress is
blurred by Berg’s constant instructions to accelerate, to slow down, to play
suddenly faster than the opening tempo, or much slower; sometimes it feels
as if scarcely two bars together are allowed to remain in a stable tempo, and
this does indeed give a nightmarish ‘morphia-dream’ quality to the story.
After the exposition is repeated, we move into the development, a stranger
and colder harmonic world with nervy little crescendos and diminuendos
pushing and pulling at the musical lines as they clash and rise to a climax.
After a peak of intensity has been reached, the second theme is recalled,
followed by the first; these themes go on developing and apparently
struggling to reach some kind of landing place, only to take off again and
become more anguished.
Berg packs the notation with instructions which are hard to fulfil
simultaneously: to play accents within a diminuendo, to get faster while
also delivering tiny ups and downs of volume, or to be ‘very expressive’ in
one hand while also playing ‘molto marcato’ (very marked) and ‘schwer’
(heavy) in the other, all within a general slowing-down. After the drama has
played itself out, it is almost a shock when the music quietens down and
commits itself to a final cadence in B minor, the rising three-note motif of
the opening being heard four times as it rises from octave to octave.
Ravel once wisely said that when you set out to copy the work of
someone you admire, you may find that your instinct is to diverge from the
model in certain ways, and this divergence will show you your own voice.
This seems to be the case with Berg’s piano sonata, written under the strict
eye of Arnold Schoenberg but diverging from his rigorous style in ways
which showed Berg’s distinctive (and, many would say, more likeable)
musical personality.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)

74. Piano Sonata no. 7 in B flat major, op. 83
Prokofiev’s so-called ‘War Sonatas’, his piano sonatas 6–8, were written in
Moscow during the Second World War when circumstances were painfully
difficult for Russians and the mood was tense. Earlier in his life Prokofiev
had lived and travelled in the United States and Western Europe where he
was known as a fine pianist as well as a composer, but in 1936 he made the
decision to go back to live in Russia, perhaps thinking that his fame would
protect him from criticism from Stalin’s regime. This was the time of
Stalin’s ‘purges’. Prokofiev survived, but many of his friends and
colleagues did not. His music was officially criticised for ‘formalism’, that
is to say, being more concerned with artistic form than with supplying
music which pleased the people and mirrored their Communist aims. He
was ‘invited’ to compose music which fulfilled these aspirations and to
some extent he complied, but conflicted feelings found their way into his
piano sonatas. Their complicated language makes it possible to ‘read’ them
in different ways, for example as depicting the struggle of the Soviet
people, but they can also be read as portraits of inner anguish.
The seventh sonata has become the most widely known of the ‘War
Sonatas’. It was written in 1942 and premiered in Moscow by Sviatoslav
Richter in January 1943, just as the Russian army was on the verge of its
unbelievably hard-won victory against the Nazis at Stalingrad. Richter
recounted that he had only four days to learn the (hugely demanding) piece.
He learned it on a piano in the home of his highly regarded former piano
teacher Heinrich Neuhaus. The piano was in the bedroom, where as it
happened, Mrs Neuhaus lay sick, but she had to listen to Richter practising
the ferocious finale for hours each day. The premiere, in the hall of the
House of Trade Unions, was a huge success and earned Prokofiev the first
of his Stalin Prizes.
 It is difficult to know what the authorities made of this grimly driving
music, especially its outer movements. Did they see it as representing the
unstoppable rush of the workers towards an ideal society? Did they hear the
incessant working of factory machines, the heroic activity of military
manoeuvres? Even today it seems as if objective and subjective elements
are fighting to be heard in Prokofiev’s violent, dissonant score. On the page,
the music looks clean and economical, almost like a Bach Invention or a
Haydn allegro. But Prokofiev’s acid harmonies and his apparently
deliberate avoidance of memorable melodies gives it a totally different
effect, its clarity ruthless, its tone insistent and cold.
In the first movement there are two themes, one fast and chaotic and
one slow and sad, but the contrast does not bring relief: we are clearly still
tangled up in things we cannot escape. As Richter said, ‘We are brutally
plunged into the anxiously threatening atmosphere of a world that has lost
its balance.’ Repeated notes are hammered out, and repeated-note motifs are
used both as themes and accompaniments, as well as being banged out in
the bass like the terrifying ‘knocks on the door’ that so many Soviet citizens
feared.
The slow movement, at first almost Romantic in style, is in the
surprisingly distant key of E major. Why? The answer may lie in a tune
quoted in the middle voice at the start: a song by Schumann with words by
Joseph von Eichendorff. ‘Wehmut’ (Melancholy) from Schumann’s
Liederkreis, op. 39, tells us: ‘Yes, I can sometimes sing as if I were happy,
but secretly tears press, and my heart feels free.’ Prokofiev disguises it by
displacing the tune slightly so that the emphasis falls on a different note
than it does in the Schumann, and indeed it seems that none of the political
elite noticed the reference, which would surely have been condemned as a
selfishly private emotion. From this lyrical beginning the piano whips
everything up into a huge despairing climax, bells tolling high and low.
These bells, or perhaps the pendulums of clocks, continue marking out the
time implacably even after things have subsided. The ‘Wehmut’ theme
returns briefly, interrupted by a clashing bell-like chord in the treble.
The finale is a real tour de force, a bombardment of repeated notes and
percussive chords with scarcely any let-up. There are no ‘themes’ in the
orthodox sense and indeed it is as if Prokofiev has deliberately subtracted
melodies from his design in order to replace them with pounding motifs,
every one of which counts. Its time signature of 7/8 allows a crucial degree
of alleviation of the pianist’s physical strain because the asymmetry of the
rhythmic patterns, 3+4, 2+3+2, and so on, means that the main stresses
alternate from hand to hand. And in fact the irregular time signature imparts
a strange kind of life to this implacable machine. Prokofiev’s first wife
Carolina was a Spanish singer, and it is tempting to wonder whether the
rhythms of Spanish dance, presumably familiar in the household, had had
just the merest influence on Prokofiev’s imagination when he was
composing this onslaught. Almost throughout the movement there is the
hammered repetition in the bass of a minor third, like some great cog
clunking as it moves forward. Perhaps Stravinsky’s ‘Danse Sacrale’, the
final section of The Rite of Spring, was in the back of Prokofiev’s mind, for
Stravinsky’s Danse employs a very similar device, and for a similar purpose
– the evocation of frightening fate, the blows of destiny.
Prokofiev marks this third movement ‘Precipitato’, which is a mood
rather than a tempo marking, and pianists have played and recorded the
movement at widely different tempos, ranging from the almost stately
pummelling of its original interpreter Sviatoslav Richter to the recently
fashionable scorching presto.

FRANCIS POULENC (1899–1963)

75. The Story of Babar the Elephant
In the summer of 1940, Poulenc was staying with cousins in the French
town of Brive-la-Gaillarde. He was composing music at the piano one day
when his four-year-old cousin Sophie approached with one of her Babar the
Elephant books. ‘That’s boring, Uncle Francis. Play this,’ she commanded,
putting the picture-book on the piano. Poulenc was amused and started
looking through the pictures, improvising little bits of music to suit the
scenes. And because of Sophie’s brilliant idea, Poulenc’s musical version of
Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar the Elephant was born.
Poulenc worked it up into an extended piece for solo piano and narrator.
It was later orchestrated by Jean Françaix. Like Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants,
although it is ‘for children’ it is actually very tricky to play, requiring an
accomplished technique. In the theatre there’s a saying that you should
never work with children or animals – well, in Babar, you have to do both.
Babar the Elephant is a collection of vignettes encompassing a range of
dances and types of music – waltz, march, toccata, polka, lullaby, fugue,
scherzo, schottische (a dance), and French cabaret style. Although the music
requires considerable finesse, the pianist may find that the audience has
chiefly noticed whether this or that sound effect was believable – the
lumbering of elephants, the honking of the car horn, the food poisoning
suffered by the king of the elephants – so that the piano music itself tends to
be downgraded to the category of illustrative music. This can be frustrating
in the light of the work involved in practising the piano part to concert
standard, and is probably one reason why Babar is not more often
performed in the version for solo piano.
The story is that Babar, a little elephant, runs away from the forest after
his mother is killed by a hunter. He runs until he comes to a town where his
attention is caught by two gentlemen he sees in the street. ‘What lovely
clothes they have got! I wish I could have some too!’ thinks Babar. ‘Luckily
he was seen by a very rich old lady who understood little elephants and
knew at once that he was longing for a smart suit.’ Babar goes to live with
the rich old lady, and every morning he drives about in the car she has
bought him. Occasionally he thinks wistfully of the forest. Two years later
when out for a walk ‘he meets two little elephants with no clothes on’.
These are his cousins Arthur and Celeste. He takes them to buy lovely
clothes, and then they have tea and cakes at a patisserie. Eventually Arthur
and Celeste’s mothers come to town to fetch them home to the forest, and
Babar decides to return with them. ‘Alas! That very day the King of the
elephants had eaten a bad mushroom. It had poisoned him. He had been
very ill. So ill that he died. It was a terrible misfortune.’ After the funeral
the elephants gather round to choose a new king. Just then, they hear
Babar’s car arriving and are struck by his sophistication. The oldest
elephant suggests making Babar their new king. ‘He has come back from
the town, where he has lived among men and learned much.’ Babar accepts
the crown but tells them that ‘on our journey in the car, Celeste and I got
engaged to be married. If I become your King, she will be your Queen.’ The
elephants gladly assent, and there is a great wedding party, attended by all
the birds and animals.
 Today, this story makes uncomfortable reading. The ‘naked’ elephant
(from Africa, presumably) goes to town (Paris) and learns to wear fine
clothes, drive a car, drink tea and eat cakes (bourgeois pursuits). When his
cousins arrive in town, he hastens to cover up their nakedness with clothes
(see Garden of Eden). Having learned the ways of the idle rich, he is
qualified to go home and rule over the ignorant natives, who gratefully
acknowledge his superiority. No doubt when the book was published in
1931 it seemed like an amusing and nostalgic parody of French colonialism.
To our more informed eyes and ears, the parody now seems insensitive, but
it is to be hoped that Poulenc’s finely crafted music can be enjoyed in the
spirit in which he wrote it.
There are too many delightful touches in the music to enumerate, but
here are some: the ‘Rite-of-Spring-ish’ sour-sweet opening, in which
Babar’s mother rocks him with her trunk, and his mother’s gentle slow walk
as she carries Babar on her back. The charming waltz which Babar dances
after being given money by the rich lady – here Poulenc takes the trouble to
write idiosyncratic fingering over certain scale passages
(3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3) which may be some kind of in-joke – perhaps he
had seen a child playing the piano like that? There’s the deliberately boring
fugue which paces Babar and the old lady through their morning exercises –
to my ears, it contains a sly echo of the Allegro finale of Schubert’s
‘Wanderer’ Fantasy, likewise a moment of earnest effort in the midst of
callisthenics. Then there is the fast waltz which tinkles in the background as
Babar eats patisseries – almost a music-hall number with its edge of
bawdiness. There’s the lovely ‘nocturne’ which represents the old lady’s
sadness at losing her little elephant; the high-pitched scherzo as the birds fly
off, shrieking joyfully, to deliver wedding invitations; the cabaret polka
which everyone dances ‘with good heart’ after the coronation.
Although writing in a tuneful style, Poulenc does not abandon his usual
habit of threading a kind of meta-narrative into the tunes in the form of
‘wrong’ notes and harmonies that jar slightly. In fact, it is this sense of wry
commentary that saves the music from seeming trivial. And it is typical of
Poulenc that at the very end, after lulling us with a peaceful night scene
(‘Baigné de pedales – on ne mettra jamais assez’) (bathed in pedals – you
can never use too much), he bids us farewell with a dissonant note which
pings out while the last chord is quietly resonating, as if the composer has
suddenly whipped round from the piano and fixed us with a quizzical look.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975)

76. Piano Trio no. 2 in E minor, op. 67
From the pianistic point of view, Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E minor is
not the most interesting part to play, but artistically it is one of his most
powerful works. I can hardly think of another work where there is such a
huge difference between the simple, indeed sparse appearance of the notes
on the page and the impact they can have on an audience, especially one
which knows something of the history of Russia and the Second World War.
The trio’s atmosphere is bleak, its manner a strange combination of
ironic and despairing. Like other works which Shostakovich wrote during
the 1939–45 war, the trio makes powerful use of repeated notes and chords,
hammered out to represent oppression, or sadly trudging along in a spirit of
exhaustion. This kind of writing, which appears on a grand scale in his
Seventh Symphony, has been judged simplistic, crude, rabble-rousing, and
in the words of composer Virgil Thomson, ‘seems to have been written for
the slow-witted, the not very musical and the distracted’. But its first
Russian audiences had suffered greatly through the harsh deprivations of
the war; just to read about the horrifying conditions in which
Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was rehearsed and performed in
Leningrad in August 1942 is to realise that we cannot judge what people
needed from music at that moment, or what composers found it possible to
say.
The Trio in E minor was written in 1944 and is dedicated to the memory
of the composer’s close friend, Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, artistic director
of the Leningrad Philharmonic, who had died at the age of forty-one while
the orchestra was in evacuation in Siberia. Sollertinsky was a highly
cultured man who had introduced Shostakovich to fresh ideas and music
which was new to him, including Mahler. Shostakovich was grief-stricken
when Sollertinsky died in the middle of the war, and wrote to his widow, ‘I
owe all my education to him’.
 There was another influence on this work: as the Germans withdrew
their soldiers from certain regions, news started to come through of the Nazi
death camps and the treatment of the Jews. Shostakovich was not Jewish,
but his empathy with the victims and his shock at the stories which were
starting to circulate was expressed in his piano trio (as well as in other
works).
The first movement opens with the cello playing a sad Russian-
sounding melody in artificial harmonics (in which one finger stops the
string while another lightly touches the string a fourth above, producing a
note two octaves higher). This gives the tune a glassy, otherworldly sound
which some have imagined to be an evocation of ice or wind. This theme is
passed around between the instruments and leaves its icy realm to become
an active theme of the movement. Then we hear the repeated notes and
persistent accompanying figures, first on strings and then on piano, which
seem elementary but prove to have a cumulative effect. In the middle of the
movement a curious ‘jolly’ theme in G major introduces the idea of ironic
dance which will be amplified to such effect in the finale. The dance gathers
strength and its character becomes mocking, but its energy drains away
again, leaving only plain fragments behind.
The second movement is often described as ‘a scherzo’ because it
occupies the traditional place for a playful interlude in a longer work, but
this belies the dark and demonic atmosphere of this particular movement.
Shostakovich gives it an almost impossibly fast metronome mark, but he
apparently told a Leningrad violinist who questioned him about it that he
used a rickety old metronome which wasn’t reliable and that ‘you, as a
musician, should just play as you feel the music and take no notice of those
markings, take no notice’. Shostakovich writes many accents – sometimes
on every note in the bar – and unusual bowing requests such as three rapid
down-bows in a row, or fast consecutive upbows with crescendos on each
one; to achieve this at the tempo he wants, enormous energy and control are
needed. In this movement again there is a ‘jolly’ dance in G major in the
middle, but its fortissimo marking and accents make it clear that it is manic
rather than cheerful. As for the piano, it breaks away from its accompanying
patterns to reiterate the main theme at top speed, jumping awkwardly about
the keyboard in the key of F sharp major; the piano part may look simple
but the right combination of volume, lightning speed and defiant character
requires strong fingers and steady nerves.
The slow movement was used after the composer’s death as the musical
background to his lying-in-state before his funeral. It is a passacaglia, a
form where an underlying pattern of harmonies is repeated in the bass with
variations going on in upper parts. J.S. Bach seems to be the inspiration; the
tension between the stately passacaglia and the wailing melody is
powerfully engineered. The ‘ground bass’ is given to the piano which plays
a sequence of eight granite blocks of chords, repeated six times, rising in
volume towards the middle and fading away again. The sequence starts in B
flat minor and seems to work its way towards a cadence in the trio’s home
key of E minor, but before it gets there, it cuts back to the beginning and
repeats, giving a sense of thwarted progress. Above, the violin and cello
exchange mournful melodic lines, evocative of Jewish laments, which seem
to circle around a few notes, striving to break free but not succeeding. The
very slow tempo, the quiet dynamic and the intense atmosphere demand the
utmost control of the bow by the string players.
The final Allegretto supplies the cadence into E which the slow
movement had constantly hinted at but not achieved. Immediately we feel a
startling change of atmosphere from sorrowful to sardonic. In this finale
there is a suggestion of folk music, specifically of Jewish klezmer music,
but in the blackest of settings. Shostakovich uses the full repertoire of
repeated notes, accents, pounding chords, shrieking strings and obsessive
repetition of rhythmic patterns to create a hypnotic atmosphere of menace,
even a dance of death. He demands the utmost effort from all three players
to build the terrifying energy of the climax, whose sustained volume and
intensity can have a shattering effect out of all proportion to the fact that
only three people are producing it.
At the height of the climax comes a strange passage where the piano
breaks into whirling chromatic arpeggios, as if a wind has suddenly blown
everyone into the sky, like in a Chagall painting. In the midst of the
whirling we hear the theme of the first movement again. The string players
are muted, so their attempt to shout out the theme is half-stifled. The wind
blows away and the bleak dance returns, now enfeebled. Finally we hear
once more the passacaglia ‘chorale’ theme of the slow movement, this time
resolving into E major. In many composers’ work, such a turn from the
minor to the major key at the end of a work would indicate a peaceful
outcome, but in Shostakovich’s trio any suggestion of optimism remains
deeply ambiguous. For the players, mixed emotions are guaranteed as their
hearts will probably still be thumping from exertion while they try to
deliver the hushed phrases of the ending.

77. Piano Concerto no. 2 in F major, op. 102

Not many students get to play the premiere of a piano concerto by their own
father at their graduation, but such was the opportunity presented on his
nineteenth birthday in May 1957 to Maxim, the son of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Maxim was a young pianist, just finishing his studies at Moscow’s Central
Music School. At the same age, his father had been a promising young
pianist with his sights set on a solo career. Indeed, Dmitri Shostakovich got
as far as the finals of the 1927 Chopin Competition, but did not win a prize,
and his disappointment on that occasion was a factor in his decision to
prioritise composition instead.
By the 1950s, Shostakovich had been through a punishing series of
confrontations with the Stalinist authorities, who were always exhorting
Soviet composers to write uplifting, optimistic music. Shostakovich had
been censured on a number of occasions for writing un-Soviet music, and
such censure could be followed by terrifying reprisals. After Stalin died in
1953, things became somewhat less restrictive. Even so, four years later
when Shostakovich wrote this piano concerto, he dismissed it in a letter to
his pupil Edison Denisov as having ‘no redeeming artistic-ideological
merits’, an enigmatic remark which might have been intended as ironic. At
any rate, the second piano concerto has proved to be one of Shostakovich’s
most popular works. It often seems like a pot-pourri of his own favourite
composers – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Ravel, Stravinsky,
perhaps even Poulenc.
It begins with a jaunty orchestral opening and a mock-modest entry by
the soloist, playing a sweet and innocent theme in octaves. The style is
reminiscent of Rachmaninoff at the start of his third piano concerto. Making
the pianist play in simple octaves is a feature of the whole concerto and
may have been a reference to the kind of ‘youth music’ supplied in great
quantities for the budding pianists of the Soviet Union’s music schools. A
second theme, irresistibly reminding British listeners of ‘What shall we do
with the drunken sailor?’, moves the action onwards and we start to hear the
‘wrong-note-on-purpose’ style that Prokofiev wielded so skilfully in his
ballet music. A third theme, in simple rhythms and with the pianist still
playing in octaves, has a delightful ‘bluesy’ touch which makes one wish
Shostakovich had felt like writing in this style more often. In the
development the jauntiness acquires a demonic edge as the pianist,
suddenly revealing a technique equal to rushing chromatic scales and
arpeggios, whips everyone up into a fierce military-style march. The reprise
is led by the soloist, now playing the theme with a hectic Baroque-style
counterpoint in the left hand, and pursuing this course even after the
orchestra has joined in with a reprise of the opening themes.
The slow movement has an unapologetic serious beauty most unusual
for Shostakovich. The orchestra begins with a sarabande in C minor,
Baroque in style but somehow Russian in spirit. When the piano enters, it is
with an even nicer surprise, a soaring melody in a melting C major with not
a hint of irony. It reminds one of the slow movement of the Ravel G major
piano concerto, one of the loveliest inspirations in classical music with its
silkworm-slow melody over subtly shifting harmonies. In Shostakovich’s
concerto too, this dreamy atmosphere is maintained throughout the
movement, the piano eventually taking up the sarabande theme from the
beginning and transferring its minor-key atmosphere to the soaring theme
when it returns. The movement ends with quiet arpeggios from the piano,
very much as Beethoven might have ended a slow movement – for
example, in his fourth piano concerto. Shostakovich, like Beethoven,
continues seamlessly into the last movement with repeated notes which
form a bridge between both, and turn out to be material for the new theme.
This new theme, with its repeated notes, bears a brief resemblance to
the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’ before settling into a lively F major. Once more
the soloist plays in simple octaves, elaborating the opening theme for a
minute or so until the orchestra bursts in with a new idea, a jolly theme in
7/8, the same time signature used by Prokofiev for the finale of his seventh
piano sonata, but with none of Prokofiev’s sting. The soloist joins in,
whisking the theme through some adventurous keys and then suddenly
breaking into the familiar and dreaded pattern of a technical study known to
all pianists at that time, from Hanon’s The Virtuoso-Pianist (a set which
Saint-Saëns also parodies in ‘Pianistes’ in his Carnival of the Animals). This
may be an in-joke between father and son; no doubt Shostakovich had often
had his creative thoughts interrupted by the sound of Maxim’s piano
practice at home.
As the movement continues, Shostakovich resorts to a device he uses in
the finale of his E minor piano trio, of starting with a low rumble in the bass
and bringing the music gradually towards us as it gets higher, louder and
more frightening. The music takes on a military edge, especially when a
side drum enters. Suddenly it seems as if we are back on Shostakovich’s
default territory, that of insistent rhythms beaten out obsessively. But in the
nick of time the jazzy seven-time passage suavely steps in to lighten the
atmosphere. Near the end, the ‘Hanon’ technical study reappears, but this
time the composer has a surprise for the young pianist, who must play in
sixths instead of octaves, and has to zip through several chromatic keys
before arriving back in F major for the merry conclusion.

OLIVIER MESSIAEN (1908–1992)

78. Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus
It is well known that Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for
the End of Time) was first performed in 1941 in the middle of the Second
World War by four prisoners (the composer himself playing the piano)
performing to an audience of hundreds of fellow captives in a prisoner-of-
war camp in Silesia. Less well known perhaps is that Messiaen’s
masterpiece for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Twenty
Contemplations of the Child Jesus), was written in Paris in 1944, the last
year of its Nazi occupation. It was a miserable time; food and fuel were
scarce, the electricity supply was so sporadic that many institutions could
not remain open; the Resistance was active, strikes were called, and there
was fighting in the streets. Messiaen had by then been released from the
POW camp and was living in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris, where
there were barricades in the streets. Ever since he was a prisoner, a name
had been whispered among those hoping for rescue: ‘In our despair, a single
name rose up, a name to which everyone clung, and it was that of General
de Gaulle,’ Messiaen recalled. By 1944 there were rumours that Allied help
was not far away. In August it arrived, and Paris was liberated on 25
August, General de Gaulle leading the victory parade from the Arc de
Triomphe to the Cathedral of Notre Dame the next day.
During most of this tumultuous year, Messaien was writing his
extraordinary Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, in a way an escape from
what was going on around him, and in another way perhaps a meditation on
it, for Jesus was born when Bethlehem was under Roman occupation.
‘Regards’ has been translated in various ways: ‘Looks’, ‘Meditations’,
‘Adorations’, even just ‘Regards’ although the word has a slightly different
ring to it in English. Like all Messiaen’s music, the work was inspired by
his deep Catholic faith and his fascination with theology. Since the age of
twenty-two, he had been the organist at the Église de la Sainte Trinité in
Paris, a post he held until his death in 1992. He was famous for his
tremendous improvisations on the church organ, and on a Sunday morning
many people went to Mass in that particular church partly to hear Messiaen
‘play out’ the congregation at the end of the service with thundering
broadsides on the organ. Those who heard him said that his improvisations
were even more impressive than his compositions – a remark also made
about both Beethoven and Chopin.
Messiaen’s musical language was rich and complicated. Early in his life
he was influenced by a description of Hindu music from India, explaining
the principles of ‘additive rhythm’, the way that regular patterns are
extended by adding extra beats and half-beats, giving the listener a sense
that the points of rest in the musical line are being pushed further into the
distance. Messiaen developed this technique in his own music, using it to
suspend our sense of the bar line and produce a feeling of organic flow. He
gathered many other influences into his language – church bells, serialism,
mathematics, gamelan music from Indonesia, Bach, Japanese music,
Wagner, Mussorgsky, even jazz, which adds a joyful and sometimes a
surprisingly sensual quality to the contemplation.
Then there is birdsong. Lots of composers have included birdsong in
their music, but Messiaen was a serious ornithologist and believed that
birds were ‘the earth’s first musicians’ and ‘the greatest musicians on the
planet’. He spent years collecting and transcribing birdsong, a lot of which
found its way into his music, including the Vingt Regards. A further
influence on his language is synaesthesia. Messiaen ‘saw’ colours when he
heard music, and many of his commentaries on his own music refer to its
vivid and detailed colours: indeed, he once said that some of his modes ‘are
neither melodic nor harmonic – they are colours’. Not everyone sees
colours when they hear music, so this quality of his music is difficult to
share, as Messiaen recognised when he said ‘I don’t ask performers to see
the same colours as I do myself . . . but to see colours, each in his own
way.’
Some of the ways the child Jesus is ‘regarded’ in these pieces are
familiar – we have the gaze of the Father, of the Virgin, the angels, the
prophets, the Star of Bethlehem. But we have also the gaze of silence, of the
heights, the gaze of ‘the terrible unction’, and even ‘the gaze of the Son
upon the Son’. The very beautiful penultimate piece (which could almost be
a Debussy prelude) is entitled ‘I sleep, but my heart keeps watch’, and the
last one is ‘The gaze of the church of love’. Messiaen added a line of
explanation: ‘Here are bells, glory and the kiss of Love . . . All the passion
of our arms around the Invisible One.’
These visions are expressed in a language which in a way seems rooted
in the rich and lush vocabulary of the Romantics – the style of piano writing
is often surprisingly like that of Liszt – while also clearly seeking to
transcend the limitations of Western musical language and create a sense of
endless space, grandeur and ecstasy. Although sudden revelations and
severe contrasts are a feature of Messiaen’s style, there are a few constantly
recurring ‘atmospheres’: rapt, prayerful contemplation; overwhelming
grandeur expressed in battering chords; ecstatic outpourings of adoration
for God. Four ‘Themes’ or motifs are woven through the twenty pieces: the
Theme of God, the Theme of the Star and the Cross, the Theme of Chords,
and the Theme of Love, which seem to function rather like Wagnerian
leitmotifs. The intensity of Messiaen’s religious ecstasy as expressed in this
music is a balm to some, a remote world to others.
Messiaen was fortunate in having Yvonne Loriod as the very fine pianist
who made it her mission to introduce his piano music to the world. She was
first his composition pupil and later his second wife and muse. Her
understanding of composition, her piano technique and her devotion to
Messiaen’s ideals gave him the freedom to write piano music as complex
and challenging as his faith demanded. The whole Vingt Regards cycle
takes almost two hours to perform and demands extraordinary stamina and
concentration. Individual pieces are sometimes played in recitals,
particularly no. 15, ‘Le Baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus’, a twelve-minute rhapsody
with an intoxicating mix of high Romantic music, jazz, birdsong, Wagner’s
Tristan, and spiritual absorption expressed in luscious, closely packed
chords whose inner notes slowly revolve, like an icon ‘regarded’ from
different facets.

JOHN CAGE (1912–1992)

79. Sonatas and Interludes
It is tempting to represent the pioneering American composer John Cage
with a blank page symbolising his most famous piece of piano music,
4’33”, in which he tells the pianist simply to sit at the piano and play
nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Cage dropped this silent
bombshell on the musical world in 1952. The idea was that for a precise
amount of time, the audience would devote their attention not to the
composer, the piece or the pianist but to ‘the music of what happens’: in the
quietness, they would find themselves hearing and savouring all kinds of
ambient noises. However, Cage’s 4’33” has had a lot of attention, and
although it is an interesting ‘performance art’ concept, it isn’t really piano
music.
Cage is often thought of as a kind of ‘hippy’ composer of the 1950s,
part of the blissed-out generation seduced by Zen, Kerouac, Indian
philosophy, James Joyce, the Chinese I Ching or ‘Book of Changes’, altered
states of mind and macrobiotic cooking. Part of Cage’s hippy reputation
arose from his love of mushrooms, and who could not love a composer who
said that ‘I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about
music by devoting oneself to mushrooms’? In fact, he was a serious student
of the mushroom and once taught a course in New York about mushroom
identification. Even more pleasingly, on a visit to fellow composer Luciano
Berio in Italy in the 1950s, Cage was a competitor on a TV quiz show
where he chose ‘mushrooms’ as his specialist subject and won the top prize
of 5 million lire ($10,000) by correctly naming the twenty-four varieties of
the white-spored Agaricus. Moreover, he believed that if one paid proper
attention when foraging, one might hear the spores of the mushroom
(infinitely varied in shape, apparently) dropping to the forest floor ‘like
gamelan music’.
But in his earlier years Cage was a devoted student of none other than
Arnold Schoenberg, studying (European) compositional methods for two
years and looking up to him. Schoenberg once said that ‘Music is not
something we [composers] experience, but rather an idea we can have, the
expression of which can never be perfect, though we ought – for artistic and
moral reasons – to bring it as close to perfection as possible.’ In the end,
this austere attitude drove Cage to explore other avenues. Rather than
seeking to perfect every aspect of a composition, he embraced the idea that
music could be open to chance. He began to use the Chinese I Ching, an
ancient book of divination, to determine ingredients of his compositions.
This appealed to Cage because he felt he was bypassing the inevitably
limited will of the composer. ‘I love the activity of sound,’ he said. ‘I don’t
need sound to talk to me.’
After he left Schoenberg but before he arrived at his ‘chance music’,
Cage went through a phase of being interested in Indian philosophy. This
led to his writing the hour-long set of twenty short piano pieces regarded as
his most important work for the piano, Sonatas and Interludes (1946–8).
There are sixteen short ‘sonatas’ – sonata meaning simply ‘a piece that
sounds’ – and four interludes. The underlying inspiration was ‘rasa’, an
Indian concept of aesthetic flavour or ‘essence’ that is found in works of art.
It is a complex concept, but on a simple level there are four ‘white’ rasa
(humour, wonder, heroism, erotic love) and four ‘black’ (anger, fear,
disgust, sorrow). All of these are believed to tend towards a ninth rasa,
tranquillity.
To evoke the exotic sound-world he imagined, Cage used a ‘prepared
piano’, a term he coined. In this case, he prepared forty-five notes by
having screws, nuts, bolts, pieces of plastic (such as rawlplugs) and rubber
inserted between the strings or placed at precisely specified points along the
string. When the pianist played these notes, strange tinkling, bell-like
sounds and clangs would alternate with dull thuds, buzzes, clonks and notes
of disorienting tunelessness. The pitches of the notes were altered by the
added materials, so that what the pianist sees on the score is not the same as
what comes out when they play the specified notes. Some notes were
heavily prepared, some lightly, and others not at all, so that ordinary piano
notes are part of the mix.
To determine the length of musical units, large and small, Cage used a
complicated system of numbers and fractions. He never said which of the
pieces corresponded to which Indian rasa, but he did say that bell-like
sounds generally meant Europe, whereas drums indicated the East. In fact,
the gong-like sonority of the prepared notes makes many of the pieces
sound oriental. Some of the sonatas, for example number 2, are clearly
‘gamelan music’ of the kind we might hear mushrooms produce if only our
ears were attuned to them. Others are more European, for example Sonata
7, a bit like a tiny Bach Invention played by out-of-tune gongs, or Sonata
12, like a bit of distorted Romantic piano music. Sonatas 14 and 15 are a
pair of quiet hypnotic pieces in simple running quavers, inspired by the wire
geometric sculptures of American sculptor Richard Lippold. Sonata 16,
which Cage said was ‘clearly European’, is a slow and hesitant piece which
could almost be a late Brahms intermezzo were it not couched in
expressionless metallic sonorities.
It’s interesting to note that in discussing his American composition
students, Schoenberg later said of Cage that ‘he wasn’t a composer . . . but
an inventor – of genius.’

GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923–2006)

80. Musica Ricercata
Several composers have followed in Debussy’s footsteps in exploring the
possibilities of the piano in sets of short pieces. But none has done so more
vividly than the Hungarian György Ligeti, who combines this Debussyan
influence with the spirit of Bartók. Towards the end of his career, Ligeti
wrote eighteen Études, virtuoso studies in the tradition of Chopin and Liszt,
which contain some of the most ingenious piano music of the late twentieth
century. His most approachable piano work, however, is probably his earlier
Musica Ricercata. Composed in secret between 1951 and 1953 at a time of
Soviet repression in Hungary, it represents an act of defiance, but also an
act of creativity, full of playful imagination.
Ligeti was a Hungarian Jew who lost many members of his family in
concentration camps during the Second World War. After the war he
experienced the harsh regime of Communist Hungary. Modern music was
banned; even the music of Bartók disappeared from concert programmes
and the airwaves along with Debussy and Stravinsky. In 1950, Ligeti
became a teacher of harmony and counterpoint at the Franz Liszt Academy
in Budapest, but his teaching material was closely monitored; in 1952 he
got into trouble for analysing Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms with his
students. Western European radio stations broadcasting new music were
jammed by the Hungarian authorities, but Ligeti found that the broadcasts
retained enough higher frequencies to give him an idea of the music. In
addition, he was able to obtain (illegally) a copy of Thomas Mann’s novel
Doktor Faustus (1947) in which the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn
describes the system of twelve-note music. Motivated by this, Ligeti began
to work in secret on new methods.
Musica Ricercata means ‘researched music’ and refers to a) the
Renaissance and Baroque ‘ricercare’, a contrapuntal technique which shares
some features with the fugue, and b) Ligeti’s efforts to construct a new style
from first principles. One of his principles here was to restrict the number
of pitches he could use in each piece. The first piece uses only two pitches,
A and D; the second piece uses three pitches, the third uses four, and so on
up to the eleventh and final piece which uses all twelve notes of the octave.
Within these restrictions, Ligeti creates a huge variety of moods and styles.
Many avant-garde composers in the 1950s and 1960s were inventive, but
Ligeti is not just inventive but playful and humorous. One can hear the
influence of Bartók, whose research into folk music had inspired Ligeti to
do some folk-music collecting of his own; the spirit of improvisation is
never far away. Unlike some of the contemporary composers whose
methods he tried to study in secret, Ligeti did not seek to avoid melody. In
Musica Ricercata he often avoids jagged leaps between intervals, preferring
stepwise movement or small intervals which make his lines more easily
memorable.
The first piece confines itself mostly to the note A, which appears in
various registers in a controlled acceleration and crescendo whose sparing
use of syncopation hints at jazz. The humour of cross-rhythms becomes
more insistent, even cruel. Both hands pound out a ‘ferocious’ coda with
octaves in the high treble and low bass before a sudden silence is broken by
the unexpected use of a loud D (a moment which often makes the audience
laugh).
No. 2 (used in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut) is much more
solemn. It begins with two pitches, E♯ and F♯. A hint of mournful folk song
colours the stately theme, which appears in loud and soft versions. In the
middle of the piece an important new note, G, appears in the treble.
Stabbing reiterations of this G become increasingly frenzied, accompanied
by the instruction ‘with all one’s strength’ as well as ‘very heavy’ and
‘threatening’. Ligeti later confessed he had conceived of this passage being
‘like a knife in Stalin’s heart’. (A cautionary note: in an attempt to convey
this violent image in performance, I once injured a finger by over-zealous
‘stabbing’.)
No. 3 (using the notes C, E, E♭ and G) is a cheerful, almost cabaret-like
piece in which C major and C minor battle good-naturedly with one another
in cheeky rhythm, juxtaposing sudden louds and softs. No. 4 (A, B♭, F♯, G
and G♯) is a barrel-organ waltz which Ligeti directs to be played with freely
chosen periods of speeding up and slowing down, imitating the erratic
turning of the handle by the organist. These accentuate the asymmetrical
lines of the waltz, which sometimes distort the triple-time rhythm with
duple-time bars. No. 5 (A♭, B, C♯, D, F, G) brings Bartók’s music to mind
with its lamenting melodic lines. As the piece goes on, the two hands
converge, chasing one another in canon as bells toll in the deep bass and
then in the high treble. No. 6 (A, B, C ♯ , D, E, F ♯ , G) exhibits another
radical change of mood, an outburst of chattering with the two hands
exchanging rhythmic motifs and melodic fragments in jovial style.
No. 7 (using A♭, A, B♭, C, D, E♭, F, G) is a fascinating piece built on a
quiet, rapid seven-note figure repeated over and over throughout the piece
in the bass by the left hand. Ligeti directs that it should be played ‘evenly,
without any accent and independently of the right hand’s rhythm’. This is
easier said than done as the right hand then enters with a slow, sad melody
whose long phrases have to be gently sustained while the left hand patters
along underneath with its obliviously repeating seven-note pattern. During
several ‘verses’ the melody gradually rises into the high treble and
disappears, leaving only the rapid pattering, which the left hand
unexpectedly passes to the right hand for the conclusion.
No. 8 (A, B, C, C ♯ , D, E, F ♯ , G, G ♯ ) is a short and energetic dance,
again reminiscent of Bartók, in an irregular metre made more irregular by
jump cuts which snip off the end of certain phrases, making it feel as
though the needle has jumped in the groove of an old gramophone record.
Although officially in 7/8 time, that is, seven quavers to the bar, the dance
seems like one of those Hungarian folk songs collected by Bartók where the
local custom is to elongate certain beats without actually intending to distort
the basic pulse.
No. 9, ‘Bela Bartók in memoriam’ (A, A♯, B, C, C♯, D, D♯, F, F♯, G♯),
begins by evoking Bartók’s style of night music. Bells toll in the deep bass,
while in the right hand a theme built from rising and falling intervals of a
third are stated with the characteristic short-long rhythm derived from
Hungarian speech. This short-long rhythm quickly dominates the piece, the
short portion of each two-note motif becoming even shorter and eventually
rising in pitch with the instruction ‘as if panicking’. This is followed by a
sad final section in which low trills rumble in inner parts as the main theme
recovers its composure.
No. 10 (A, A♯, B, C♯, D, D♯, E, F, G♭, G, G♯) is a spiky scherzo with a
demonic humour. Ligeti makes the two hands play in different keys and
duet with one another at uncomfortably close range. The metre shifts
constantly between three and two; smooth phrases are contrasted with
punching chords. As in previous pieces the music rises frantically into the
high treble; stabbing motions are marked ‘insistent, spiteful’ and the pianist
is asked to repeat them over and over ‘as if mad’. After a shocked pause, the
piece ends with a ‘calm’ descending phrase whose calm feels ironic. Today
this little piece seems humorous, theatrical, but it was once banned in
Hungary for being ‘dangerous’.
No. 11, ‘Homage to Girolamo Frescobaldi’ (A, A♯, B, C, C♯, D, D♯, E,
F, G ♭ , G, G ♯ ), is a tribute to the Baroque composer credited with
developing the ‘ricercare’, a cousin of the fugue. Ligeti’s theme is a twelve-
note row, using all the notes of the chromatic scale. His counter-theme, a
steadily descending chromatic line, appears immediately in the bass as the
next voice takes over the ricercare theme. As more voices enter, the piece
gathers intensity and density; at one point Ligeti has to write on four staves
to accommodate all the overlapping lines. In the second half of the piece the
main theme develops in different rhythmic directions; it appears twice as
fast in one part while in another it suddenly becomes twice as slow, framing
a middle voice which continues at the original pace. These ingredients pile
up to produce a grand climax, after which the theme breaks up into
fragments which overlap and fan out to the extremes of the keyboard.
Finally, the theme is whispered, hesitantly, in the high treble while the
counter-theme descends in the low bass, both hands coming to rest on the
note A, where the whole cycle began.

PIERRE BOULEZ (1925–2016)

81. Douze Notations
Pierre Boulez was one of the most influential figures in French music
during the twentieth century; as a composer, conductor, polemicist and
founder of experimental music institutions he raised the profile of
contemporary music enormously and influenced the thinking of many
young composers. I was a young violinist in the National Youth Orchestra
of Great Britain when Boulez came to conduct us in a performance of
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s La Mer. He spoke to the
orchestra about his belief that we did not need to ‘interpret’ the music or
develop an emotional attachment to it; all we needed to do was to follow
the composer’s instructions meticulously and if we succeeded, the right
result would emerge.
For most of us this was new and surprising. And in this particular music,
the results seemed to bear him out. His careful balancing and layering of
‘voices’ in the orchestra, making sure that at any given moment the right
lines were in the foreground, was impressive. His sharp hearing, too, made
us respect his musicianship. He might complain that a certain A flat ‘was
more like a G sharp’, and so on. On the piano, with its fixed tuning, these
are just two ways of specifying the same note, but on many instruments it is
possible to tweak the tuning to reflect the ‘direction of travel’. At that time,
I had learned the violin to a moderate standard, but the art of adjusting the
pitch to the harmonic or melodic context was a closed book to me until
Boulez mentioned it. Maybe I hadn’t been paying attention, but I don’t
remember my violin teachers mentioning it (an indication that technique
was studied too much in isolation).
Boulez was a brilliant student who started to train as a mathematician
but changed to music after a year. He worked hard to absorb information
from many sources. In 1945, at the age of twenty, he was a composition
pupil of Olivier Messiaen who taught him his own principles of rhythmic
organisation, made him study classic works by composers of other eras, and
introduced him to Indonesian gamelan music (which had such an influence
on French composers at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century).
At around the same time, Boulez encountered a very different approach to
composition when he heard a performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet,
op. 26, and his Piano Pieces, op. 23, examples of twelve-note music. This
led to his studying the twelve-note technique of the Second Viennese
School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) with René Leibowitz alongside his
other studies. In addition, he pursued the interest in ethnomusicology which
Messiaen had awakened in him, regularly visiting certain Paris museums to
study their recordings of Asian and African music.
Boulez’s 1945 set of piano pieces, Douze Notations (Twelve Notations),
written at this time, was a synthesis of these ingredients and amounts to a
portrait of a young composer at a fertile moment. Inspired by the powerful
brevity of Anton Webern’s twelve-note music, Boulez set out to write
twelve short pieces of twelve bars each, using the same twelve-note ‘row’ in
every piece. He used the note-row quite freely, not only horizontally or
vertically but in clusters, segments, glissandos and repeated notes. Each
piece has a distinctive character within which the pianist must constantly
change touch and dynamics, deploying very varied techniques from smooth
legato lines to sudden jabbing fortes, clusters produced with the flat palm of
the hand, violent glissandos. There is a hint of the angry virtuosity which
characterised later pieces such as his second piano sonata.
The musical gestures or phrases in the Notations are mostly short, often
strongly contrasted with one another, and nearly every bar has a different
length, so that the listener’s expectations are kept disrupted. Rarely does
one have the luxury of sitting back and listening to a long phrase unfold;
both performer and listener have a sense of having to concentrate intensely
on the present moment. Later in the twentieth century there was a cult of
music which enabled one to ‘be in the present moment’, like a form of
mindfulness. Boulez’s music also demands that one focus on exactly what
is happening at every moment, but its methods are severe.
Some of the pieces (e.g. Nos. 1 and 5) are delicate and questioning, akin
to Webern, while others are aggressive (e.g. No. 2). Some (e.g. Nos. 2 and
4) show the influence of Messiaen with their unpredictable added beats and
half-beats and their suggestion of slightly manic birdsong. The influence of
Debussy, particularly of late works such as his sonatas for violin and piano,
and cello and piano, can be heard in No. 1. The sixth piece applies the
venerable art of canon to ferocious jagged lines where the left hand chases
the right or varies its patterns at a distance of two semiquavers. In the
seventh piece, reminiscent of Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes, a wistful line is
constantly interrupted by strident ‘calls’ expressed in a snapping tritone
figure (C sharp to G in this case).
Rapid repetitive jangling rhythms reminiscent of African metallophones
power their way through number 8. The ninth piece is marked ‘distant and
calm’, but the way it stirs around in the low bass register seems more
sinister than calm. No. 10, ‘mechanical and dry’, feels like an angry
argument between the hands. Grace notes fan out across the keyboard in
number 11, decorating lyrical notes and chords. The final piece, harsh and
imposing, ends with the command to ‘let it resonate for a long time’.
Evidently it did resonate for a long time with Boulez, for over the next
decades, and in fact until his old age, he returned again and again to these
Notations, orchestrating some of them and using them as springboards for
other compositions: ‘The ideas were for me full of possibilities I had
entirely overlooked in 1945.’ These possibilities included the idea of ‘total
serialisation’ in which series of pitches, durations, dynamics, tone colours
and other elements could be systematically organised.
Boulez’s piano music has remained a specialist field despite the
advocacy of some gifted performers. Many ordinary music-lovers still find
it impenetrable. For the beginner it is perhaps useful to approach the
Notations as tiny pieces of theatre, telling dramatic stories in super-
condensed form.
 LUCIANO BERIO (1925–2003)
82. Wasserklavier
Luciano Berio’s most imposing piano music is probably his 1965 Sequenza
IV for solo piano, a work influenced by Stockhausen. It is a restless
exploration of the known and unknown sonorities of the piano including
effects that can be achieved with the use of its pedals. Clusters, fleeting
lines, jagged gestures and violently opposed louds and softs are its building
blocks, and its style is theatrical.
Berio was an inspiring composition teacher whose perceptive and open-
minded approach helped many younger composers to find their own style,
even if it was miles away from his. Despite being a devoted modernist,
Berio retained affection for many of the older composers whose works had
influenced him, and sometimes allusions to their work are found in his. At
the same time as writing his Sequenza in 1965, he also wrote the much
more approachable Wasserklavier (Water Piano). It was later included in Six
Encores collected from various decades of Berio’s piano compositions.
Wasserklavier is a quiet and thoughtful piece lasting just a couple of
minutes. Berio directs the pianist to play with the ‘una corda’ (soft) pedal
down throughout, and to play ‘ppp’ (very, very quietly) and very smoothly.
At the head of the piece he writes ‘teneramente e lontano’ (tenderly and
distantly). Clearly this comes from a very different part of his imagination
compared with Sequenza IV. Why Wasserklavier, a German title although
the composer was Italian? Perhaps it is a reference to the nickname of
Beethoven’s famous piano sonata in B flat, op. 106, ‘Hammerklavier’
(hammer-piano, the German term Beethoven in his later years took to using
in preference to the Italian ‘Pianoforte’). But Wasserklavier implies a more
liquid type of sonority.
From the very start there are hints of Brahms and Schubert not far
below the surface. First of all, the key is F minor, the key of Schubert’s
Impromptu, D935 no. 1, one of his finest late piano pieces. It isn’t directly
quoted, but the allusions come in the rising octave C to C in the first bar,
echoing the C-C octave spread with which Schubert begins his impromptu.
Also, Berio’s first chord in the left hand is the same as Schubert’s – an F
minor chord spread over the interval of a tenth (an octave and two notes).
Furthermore, the very last chord in the left hand of the Berio is the same as
Schubert’s. Small things, but used like tiny poetic clues.
At the same time, we might feel we are hearing an allusion to Brahms’s
Intermezzo in B flat minor, op. 117 no. 2, likewise one of his finest late
piano pieces. At the beginning of the intermezzo, Brahms makes great play
with pairs of drooping (and occasionally rising) melodic notes, a
characteristic habit. Again these are not directly quoted, but in the Berio
those notes are threaded through different layers of the piano writing: for
example, in the very first bar of the Berio we hear the D flat-C we know
from the opening of the Brahms, while in the second bar the next two
Brahmsian pairs (B flat-C and C-F) are placed in various parts of the
chords.
There are other Brahmsian allusions – for example, Brahms loved three-
against-two rhythms, often using triplet movement in a piece in duple time
to create a kind of gentle sway. Here Berio echoes this, though he more
often does it the other way round, by using a duple movement in a piece in
6/8 time, which has two groups of three quavers in each bar. For both
composers this three-against-two seems to allude to a world of ambiguity, a
twilight region in which the subconscious is happy. There are hints of other
Brahms Intermezzi too, for example, op. 117 no. 3 with its strange central
episode, where the intervals are widely spaced and the pianist’s hands seem
to be moving hesitantly about in the dark, the bass notes just touched in but
never more.
Naturally these allusions are detectable more by the person who has
time to look at the music under a microscope than by the casual listener, but
they seem to show the nostalgia Berio must have had for a world of piano
music which – after the advent of twelve-note music, electronic music and
the dogmas of Stockhausen, Boulez and their colleagues – may have felt as
if it were denied him.
Wasserklavier was originally written for two pianos, and its origin
seems to have left some imprint on the version for solo piano in which it is
most often performed, for there are lots of very widely spaced chords. Some
of them are marked with squiggly vertical lines, a sign that the pianist
should ‘roll’ the chords, but even some chords not marked with squiggly
lines are impossible for anyone without a big hand to play without rolling
them. Actually, the rolling seems quite suitable for a piece about water.
Piano music is full of water pieces, many of them from the French
Impressionist era (e.g. Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau or Debussy’s Reflets dans l’Eau)
but also going back to Liszt’s Les Jeux d’Eau à la Villa d’Este, Chopin’s
Barcarolle (inspired by the image of a boat on the water), Mendelssohn’s
Venetian boat-songs and Schubert’s many songs about brooks and water.
Whether any of them was at the back of Berio’s mind we cannot know, and
perhaps he had his own reasons for meditating on water, but there is a
strong sense of pianistic nostalgia in his Wasserklavier, a soft piece in the
midst of much hard music.

GYÖRGY KURTÁG (b. 1926)

83. Játékok, selected pieces
The nine volumes (so far) of György Kurtág’s Játékok (Games) represent a
huge ongoing project in the work of this insightful Hungarian musician.
Kurtág has been an important influence not only on young composers but
also on musicians whom he has coached, particularly in chamber music, in
settings such as the International Musicians’ Seminar in Prussia Cove,
England. He himself is very active as a performer, and for many years he
played piano duets with his wife Márta, who died in 2019; their
performances of selected pieces from Játékok were treasured around the
world.
Kurtág’s early career as a composer was halting, but in 1973 a request
from Budapest piano teacher Marianne Teöke for a set of short pedagogical
pieces seemed to liberate his imagination. (There was, of course, a splendid
precedent in his compatriot Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, several volumes of
pedagogical piano pieces written from 1926 to 1939.) In the foreword to
Játékok, Kurtág said he was inspired by ‘children playing spontaneously,
children for whom the piano still means a toy. They experiment with it,
caress it, attack it and run their fingers over it.’ He goes on: ‘Pleasure in
playing, the joy of movement – daring and if need be fast movement over
the entire keyboard right from the first lessons instead of the clumsy
groping for keys and the counting of rhythms – all these rather vague ideas
lay at the outset of the creation of this collection.’ It ‘does not provide a
tutor’, then, but it does something equally valuable: it aims to make young
people feel at home on the piano, and it promotes the spirit of ‘play’.
Taking his cue from these young ‘players’ (in two senses), he created
extensions to the usual vocabulary of music notation. He devised symbols
to indicate that something should be played with the flat of the hand, with
the edge of the palm, with the elbow, with a ‘rotating’ palm, with a fist, with
the fingers held ‘like drumsticks’. He indicates ‘clusters’ of notes on white
keys, black keys, clusters put down so gently that nothing sounded.
Durations are ‘very long’, ‘long’, ‘short’, ‘very short’, but not further
defined. He shows how to play overtones by holding down a note silently
while playing another note that would make the silent note resonate in
sympathy. Another symbol shows how to lean on the keys with one forearm
pressing down lots of black keys while the other depresses lots of white
keys. Notes are sometimes given little crosses instead of the usual round
heads to show that the pitch is ‘approximate’: the player can choose.
Glissandos are important in Kurtág’s style and he suggests that they should
be mastered first ‘silently over the entire keyboard’ and then practised while
wearing gloves.
Right from the start, Kurtág paid tribute to his favourite composers:
Bach above all (in concerts he often intersperses his own pieces with Bach
chorales), but lots of others – Scarlatti, Beethoven, Schubert, Bartók,
Tchaikovsky, Kodály, Shostakovich, Stravinsky. Then he started dedicating
pieces to friends and colleagues, fellow composers and pianists. Later still
his pieces took on the character of diary entries and ‘personal messages’,
their significance not explained. The titles are inviting: ‘Wrong notes
allowed’, ‘Stubborn Knots’, ‘Quiet Talk with the Devil’, ‘Obstinate A flat’,
‘Play with Infinity’, ‘Staggering’, ‘Beating’. Others are enigmatic: ‘The
mind is a free wild animal’, ‘Love in the heart, bitter pain’, ‘Phone numbers
of our loved ones’, ‘Flowers We Are . . .’
Most of the pieces in the ‘Homage to . . .’ series are not elucidated, so
we are left to imagine what characteristics these friends represented.
Kurtág’s comments about his music often suggest that there is a weighty
intellectual hinterland to these short pieces, some of them no more than a
few seconds long. For example, a 1998 addition to the collection is called
‘Merran’s Dream – (Caliban detecting-rebuilding Mirranda’s dream)’ [sic].
This suggests a deconstruction of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but the little
piece itself is quite demure and keeps its secrets to itself. Some of the pieces
seem too fleeting or fragile to carry the weight of their titles.
I know from my own experiences of Kurtág’s coaching that when in
teaching mode he is ultra-demanding, rarely satisfied, always seeking a
further level of engagement or insight for the sake of the music. Hours can
be spent on perfecting the touch, tone and spirit of a single bar or phrase,
and he can be critical of those whose patience runs out before the task is
fulfilled to his standards. This can create friction with the ideal of a
musician being spontaneous and free, playing ‘playfully’. One often notices
an intense concentration on the faces of performers playing Kurtág’s own
music, and wonders whether this is what he wants, or whether by asking
more and more of them he hopes to push them to something ‘beyond games
and scripts’. Perhaps there is a realm where, after musicians have exerted
themselves to the utmost to fulfil the composer’s wishes, they discover that
it is possible to do so ‘freely’. At any rate, Kurtág’s ability to hear and
demand complex ingredients in single notes or chords can be applied to the
pieces of Játékok too. They are brief, often laconic, but the qualities of their
individual sounds and silences are meant to be explored with no less
dedication.
Most of the pieces are for two hands, but some are for three (maybe a
student playing one line while a teacher plays two) and volumes IV and
VIII are for four hands at one piano, or for two pianos. Many of the pieces
have been arranged for other instruments including (appropriately) toy
piano. Kurtág and his wife Márta liked to perform duets from Játékok on an
upright piano with a strip of felt between hammers and strings to muffle the
tone (the Viennese piano of Schubert’s day had a more sophisticated version
of the same thing). I attended a concert in London’s Wigmore Hall where
the Kurtágs used this effect throughout, playing an upright piano and sitting
with their backs to the audience. As the sound was very quiet, it was
amplified and relayed via loudspeakers so that those of us at the back of the
hall could hear it, a contradictory effect which seemed curiously apt.
Among over four hundred pieces it is hard to pick out favourites, but
here are some suggestions: ‘Homage to Tchaikovsky’, a humorous parody
of the opening of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto; ‘Play with Overtones’,
a delicate exploration of how the strings of the piano talk to one another;
‘Perpetuum Mobile’, a feast of glissandos softly moving around the
keyboard; ‘Play with Infinity’, in which a gentle chromatic scale descends
the whole keyboard against a counterpoint of spiky comments; ‘Scherzo’, a
witty collage of effects such as pawing the keys, repeated notes and
glissandos. Some of his ‘homages’ to older composers are poetic: ‘Homage
to Schubert’ captures in just a few bars the strange happy-sadness of
Schubert’s harmonies, and ‘Homage to Beethoven’, equally brief, catches a
certain mood of Beethoven’s, peaceful yet searching. ‘In Memoriam Sebők
György’ is a mournful exploration of deep piano tone. Some of the pieces
arranged for toy piano (plus glockenspiel) are weirdly evocative: the several
variants of ‘Flowers we are, frail flowers . . .’ have their fragile poetry
almost heightened by the metallic tinkling of a tiny toy piano played by an
apparently oversized pianist. In ‘Prelude and Chorale’, an abrasive prelude
introduces a mysterious chorale whose top line circles round a single note
while underneath it the ground shifts and drops away.

TŌRU TAKEMITSU (1930–1996)

84. Rain Tree Sketch II
Tōru Takemitsu was, as conductor Seiji Ozawa observed in his foreword to
Takemitsu’s essays Confronting Silence, ‘the first Japanese composer to
write for a world audience and achieve international recognition’.
Takemitsu was born in Tokyo, moved with his parents to China for the first
eight years of his life, and then returned to Japan where at the age of
fourteen he was conscripted into military service, an experience he
described as ‘extremely bitter’. During the American post-war occupation
of Japan, he encountered Western music through hearing it played on US
Armed Forces radio. He loved what he heard, particularly the contemporary
music. He later admitted that his disillusionment at that time with his own
culture gave extra impetus to his engagement with the music of the West.
This situation was gradually brought into balance by his discovery of
the seventeenth-century Japanese art of Bunraku puppet theatre and the
traditional music which accompanied it. His emotional response to Bunraku
made Takemitsu recognise that he had deep roots in Japanese culture, and
from then on he sought to blend elements from both cultures in his music.
As a composer he was largely self-taught (‘the radio was my first teacher’),
though over the years he assiduously sought out contact with composers he
admired in order to learn from them. Takemitsu had a searching intellect
which spurred him to explore all kinds of different arts; his friends reported
that he could talk with equal knowledge and passion about films, nature, art
(particularly surrealism), gardens and Japanese philosophy as well as music.
Takemitsu’s interest in the piano began when, as a teenager, he heard
piano music on the radio and took to walking around Tokyo, listening for
the sound of a piano being played in a house, upon which he would knock
on the door and ask if he could try the piano for a few minutes: ‘I was rarely
refused!’ His piano works are a small but select part of his output.
Takemitsu’s love for the music of Debussy and Messiaen, who both wrote
so beautifully for the piano, had a deep influence on his piano writing.
Although most listeners will feel that he inhabits the same French sound-
world, he imbues it with a distinctly Japanese sensibility. Takemitsu often
wrote about his respect for the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’, sometimes
translated as ‘space’ or ‘silence’ or ‘emptiness’ but not in a negative sense –
more poetically, ‘Ma’ means ‘the time and space that life needs to grow’. In
Takemitsu’s music this translates into carefully situated pauses and silences
which make one think of the space around the artistically placed rocks in a
Japanese garden. ‘I want to give sounds the freedom to breathe,’ he wrote.
In 1982 he wrote his piano piece Rain Tree Sketch, following it up ten
years later with Rain Tree Sketch II, his last work for piano, dedicated to the
memory of Olivier Messiaen. Both works were inspired by the Japanese
novelist Kenzaburo Oe’s 1982 collection of short stories, Women Listening
to the Rain Tree. The rain tree is an ancient tree whose leaves store up water
during rain, gradually releasing droplets from its thousands of leaves after
the rain has stopped (which could be construed as an analogy for an artist’s
work). Rain Tree Sketch II is in three sections; the first and third are more
rhythmical sections marked ‘Celestially light’, and the central section is a
melodic episode marked ‘Joyful’. Both descriptions clearly refer to those
qualities in Messiaen’s music. In keeping with the idea of lightness, the
opening section is based in the treble region of the keyboard. Delicate
crystals of chords dance in a gentle triple time, with little phrases that are
quietly echoed after ‘breathing spaces’. The serene tinkling of the chords
evokes not only Debussy and Messiaen but also the Indonesian gamelan
orchestra whose sonority they loved. Soon we hear in the low bass the first
of the oriental-sounding ‘gong’ notes, and we also hear a short rising motif
made up of two three-note arpeggios in each hand. As the piece goes on,
this motif becomes important; sometimes the three notes in each hand are
heard together, sometimes dislocated from one another.
The middle section, ‘Joyful’, recalls Messiaen’s style more precisely. A
two-bar melody in the right hand is followed at a quaver’s distance by the
left, a gentle canon which poetically suggests the idea of one person
following another. Still the low gong note sounds in the bass. After a
ringing pause, the opening ‘Celestially light’ section returns in abbreviated
form, and a gong note marks the end. On hearing of Messiaen’s death in
1992, Takemitsu said that ‘Truly, he was my spiritual mentor.’ Rain Tree
Sketch II is a thoughtful tribute to Messiaen, blending Western and Eastern
aesthetics.

SOFIA GUBAIDULINA (b. 1931)

85. Chaconne
Sofia Gubaidulina is a composer of Tatar-Russian heritage (she was born in
Chistopol in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, now known
as Tatarstan). In the 1930s her family suffered deprivation due to policies
(such as collectivisation) pursued by the Stalinist authorities. Despite the
suppression of religious activity, the young Sofia developed a spiritual
outlook and an awareness of realms beyond the visible and logical. By the
age of ten she was determined to become a composer, and later said that all
her work was driven by her religious sensibility.
Her studies took her to Moscow, where her exploration of exotic scales
and other experiments got her into trouble with the Soviet authorities, but
on graduation she received ironic encouragement from Dmitri Shostakovich
(himself a victim of Stalinist criticism) who told her, ‘Don’t be afraid to be
yourself. My wish for you is that you continue on your incorrect path.’ She
persevered and very gradually, despite all sorts of difficulties, became one
of the most highly regarded contemporary Russian composers and the
recipient of many awards. She later got involved in electronic music, and
started a music group, Astreya, which explored the folk music and
instruments of her native region and beyond. She has a particular love of
percussion instruments, believing that their sound is ‘at the border between
the conscious and the subconscious’.
Although she later became well known for electronic music and works
for various ensembles, Gubaidulina’s early work focused on the piano,
partly because she herself was an accomplished pianist. Her piano pieces
were amongst the first works to make her name outside of Russia. The first
of them was her Chaconne of 1962. The Chaconne is a Baroque form,
synonymous with the Passacaglia, in which a sequence of harmonies, often
laid out in the bass, is used as a template for continuous variation and
decoration. One of the most famous examples is the last movement of J.S.
Bach’s Partita for solo violin in D minor, a huge structure beginning with a
stately sarabande which is gradually elaborated into the grandest of
climaxes. Bach’s chaconne has inspired many composers including, in
recent times, Bartók, John Adams, Britten, Henze and Philip Glass as well
as Gubaidulina. Her choice of chaconne for her first major piano piece was
surely a homage not only to Bach himself, but also to his religious faith.
Gubaidulina has emulated Bach in using religious iconography and number
symbolism in her music, and has spoken about her attempts to trace the
shape of the Cross in music by juxtaposing vertical (chordal) and horizontal
(melodic) elements.
Gubaidulina’s style of writing at the time of her Chaconne shows the
influence of Shostakovich and Prokofiev (particularly when in sardonic
mode) as well as that of Webern and the twelve-note system of the Second
Viennese School. Her Chaconne is broadly in the key of B minor and gives
a prominent role to F sharp (both as a single note and as a key) as the
closest relation of B minor, but it also employs twelve-note rows which are
used with flexibility. Gubaidulina’s piano writing is often sparsely scored
and looks spidery on the page, sometimes giving the impression that it
might be a study for an orchestral work; for example, it is easy to imagine
that she meant double-bass pizzicato for some staccato bass notes, or had
the brassy sound of trumpets in mind for certain passages, or would have
liked to add clangorous percussion to the loud chords of the opening and
closing sections. For pianists, it is helpful to have these types of sonorities
in mind when practising the piece.
 The theme of Gubaidulina’s Chaconne is eight bars long, not in triple
time like Bach’s, but in duple time with imposing widely spaced chords that
ring out like church bells. Its first four chords are B minor (twice), G and E
flat – three chords separated by major thirds (which may be
numerologically significant). Three other motifs stand out: a faster-moving
little rhythmic motif with a Bartókian feel; a five-note curling motif in the
right hand which is a little melodic anchor in the midst of dissonance; and,
at the end of the theme, six rising steps of the whole-tone scale in parallel
chords (these examples of horizontal movement may be intended as
contrasts with the verticality of the opening chords – or in other words, as
elements of a cross-shape). As the piece develops, these motifs are useful
little signposts.
The theme is followed by seven variations, initially keeping the eight-
bar format, and then (from the fourth variation onwards) becoming longer,
which is to say that they extend their explorations over two, three or more
iterations of the chaconne ‘unit’. The fifth variation functions as a sort of
scherzo within the piece, and subdivides into three sections each with a high
point of its own. During this longer section, the note F sharp is pinged out
and gradually becomes more noticeable. There follows a fugal section
(variation 6), slightly cooler in temperature as one often finds at equivalent
moments in the finales of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Although there are
moments in the fugal writing where we seem to be in an almost jolly C
major, the note F sharp continues to be sharply prominent.
The seventh variation is a kind of look back at the opening pages, with
the note F sharp becoming more and more insistent, as if to alert us to the
imminent return of the home key, B minor. Just as in Bach’s violin
chaconne, the decorative writing becomes faster and more ecstatic; with F
sharps ringing through the texture like tiny cymbals, the right-hand
figuration reaches a whirling frenzy of speed and intricacy. Then, after a
sudden pause, the theme returns grandly in the home key. Old and new
techniques combine as the left hand hammers out a dissonant note-row
while the right hand proclaims the ascendancy of B minor with seven
ringing chords.
Jazz was the USA’s great contribution to music in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, and it continues to be a huge influence on
musicians all over the world. Musically it drew on African roots, was
developed in African-American communities, mainly in the southern states,
and was taken up with enthusiasm by wider musical communities,
spreading quickly to other parts of the world.
The piano has been central to jazz since its beginning, partly because
there were often upright pianos in churches, bars, places of entertainment,
and famously in the ‘sporting houses’ or brothels where ragtime piano was
developed.
The piano has played many roles in jazz; at first, it was used mainly to
supply chords and bass lines, as well as to keep singers or other
instrumentalists on track by defining the pulse and contributing rhythmic
accompaniments. As time went on, pianists liberated themselves from
supporting roles and entered into dialogue with the soloists (often
saxophone or other woodwind or brass players). Composers of jazz were
often pianists themselves. It quickly became evident that there were many
pianists whose techniques enabled them not only to converse with single-
line players or singers but to hold their own as formidable soloists. Today,
many of the most eminent jazz players are pianists.
Jazz pianists have to become good at transposing, that is, playing tunes
in any key requested by the singer or the other players. All jazz musicians
have to be able to do this, but the challenge is greater for pianists, because
they are not only playing single lines. Transposing into other keys requires
the ability to think and calculate very fast, especially when the chords are
rich and complex, or the tempo lively. Since classical music became more
or less synonymous with notated music, most classical pianists are never
confronted with the need to play a piece in a different key from the one they
learned it in (though pianists who specialise in vocal accompaniment are
still sometimes asked to play a song in a different key, to suit the singer’s
voice). Although I and my chamber-music colleagues sometimes joked
about it, I would have had a nervous breakdown if suddenly required to
play, say, a Beethoven piano trio in a key different from the one he wrote it
in. Even if my ear had been equal to the challenge, it would have taken
some time to work out the new patterns of fingering on the keyboard.
 Of course, notation has also fostered a culture of very complicated
music. A lot of jazz is not notated, or uses just a sketch of the basic
framework. A piano jazz ‘chart’ (a page of music score which typically
notates a melody with simple indications of which chords are to be played
under which melody notes) is much simpler than the piano part of a
Beethoven trio, but it also needs to be, because there are many elements as
yet undefined. I have been at jazz performances where I’ve seen one of the
players turn to the pianist right before a piece begins and murmur, ‘In E
flat’, or ‘In F’. Depending on which instruments are in the ensemble and
which keys the players feel most comfortable in, the pianist may already
have a shrewd idea of which key they will choose, but even so, to switch
into any key at short notice requires a keen intelligence.
Much of jazz has always been improvised, and many jazz musicians
have not been trained to read notated music. This did not hold them back
and may even have helped them to avoid the habits of obedience which
cramp the style of conservatoire-trained musicians. However, although jazz
was improvised, its improvisation has long depended on an understanding,
shared with other players, of what the framework (for example, of chords)
is and what the ‘rules of engagement’ are. Thus the good jazz musician is
walking, or, you might say, skipping along a path laid out for them. In most
kinds of jazz, improvising allows the player to use their imagination freely
while still anchored to a musical framework, and this depends on
developing a good musical ear allied to a good memory for chords, melodic
shape, length of phrases and so on. The innate flexibility of jazz does not
guarantee success: as with classical performance, one can hear every level
of accomplishment. However, the sense of freedom and elation conveyed
by good jazz players has been a source of inspiration to musicians and
music-lovers around the world.

RAGTIME AND ‘SYNCOPATED’ PIANO MUSIC

SCOTT JOPLIN (1867/8–1917)

86. Maple Leaf Rag (and other pieces)
With his Maple Leaf Rag of 1899, Scott Joplin became the first important
composer of ragtime, which was the earliest instrumental African-American
music to be welcomed into mainstream (i.e. white) culture. Ragtime had its
heyday around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, from
roughly 1895 until 1920. The Chicago World Fair of 1893, at which
millions of visitors heard ragtime, helped to spread word of this new and
entertaining style. It can be described as a blend of African-American
rhythms and the European marches (such as John Philip Sousa’s) and
waltzes which were popular at the time. Ragtime became a national craze,
boosting sales of sheet music and even the sale of pianos.
To ‘rag’ a piano piece was to loosen up the rhythms in the right hand, so
that while the left hand kept strict time, the melody in the right hand was
displaced, landing on the cracks between the beats. This was considered
making the tune ‘ragged’, which led to the term ‘ragtime’. Today we think
of those melodic half-beats as syncopations, but syncopation has come to
mean something smooth and sophisticated, whereas ‘ragging’ suggests an
energetic spirit and humour. Lightness was added by having the left hand
play bouncy offbeat chords on the second and fourth beats of the bar,
making ragtime feel livelier than the traditional march. It was in a sense the
beginning of jazz, although that term wasn’t used in music until 1915.
Today ragtime seems a slightly strait-laced forebear of jazz, so it’s
important to know that Joplin described its syncopations as ‘weird and
intoxicating’, and in the early 1900s its rhythmic freedoms were (in some
quarters) considered rather daring, even unsuitable for polite society.
Ragtime flourished just before sound recording became widely
available. Ragtime thus came down to us as a written tradition, and on
piano rolls. (These were made for ‘player pianos’ which had a pneumatic
mechanism through which paper rolls could be made to operate the piano
keys, making it look as if an invisible pianist was playing.) As with other
forms of written music, we have to deduce how ragtime was actually played
from comments made by those who played or heard it. In the case of Joplin,
we have the admonition he wrote on several of his pieces: ‘Notice! Don’t
play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.’ This had led to
some very stolid ‘respectful’ performances, even on disc. But one would
have to know what Joplin meant by ‘fast’. There’s a recording of Maple
Leaf Rag made by the United States Marine Band in 1906 which goes at
quite a clip. Joplin himself made a piano roll in 1916, the year before he
died, but he left no indication of how fast the roll is meant to be played (the
mechanism can be set to different speeds), so this doesn’t settle the
question. Possibly he meant something like, ‘Don’t make it sound trivial’,
or ‘Don’t mess it around’. For Joplin cared about his ragtime compositions
and wanted his notes to be faithfully conveyed. His early lessons in
classical music with Julius Weiss, his German émigré piano teacher in
Texas, may have given him a respect for the composer’s instructions. He
knew what atmosphere he wanted to create: ‘very often good players lose
the effect entirely,’ he warned.
So what was the effect? Very likely this way of ‘ragging’ a march
started off with the improvisations of African-American players, good
musicians who couldn’t read music but had an instinctive sense of how to
give a march tempo a bit of ‘swing’. Written ragtime was probably just a
way of formalising something that was already being done in the saloon
bars and dancehalls. Joplin had a particular way of varying the
straightforward traditional harmonies of a march by introducing half-steps
up or down from the main key, giving the music a wistful quality. And
although the music is generally in a major key, we sometimes find ourselves
unexpectedly in the minor. (These last two are characteristic of Schubert’s
music, which Joplin probably encountered in his lessons with Julius Weiss.)
Added to this is the ‘Spanish tinge’ then popular in New Orleans – the hint
of Cuban habanera rhythm which finds its way into some of Joplin’s music.
The unusual combination of strict march tempo with a syncopated melody
line, a hint of Cuban cross-rhythms, an attention to detail, and the old-world
European harmonic colouring – all these give Joplin’s rags a flavour of
refined merriment shot through with melancholy. They influenced classical
composers too – Stravinsky was a fan (Piano-Rag Music) and so were Erik
Satie (‘Le Piccadilly’) and Claude Debussy (‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ and
‘General Lavine – eccentric’).
Ragtime faded with the advent of stride piano and various jazz styles
that followed. In the 1970s, Joshua Rifkin’s record of Joplin’s music and the
film The Sting alerted a new generation to Joplin’s charming waltzes
(Bethena) and rags (The Entertainer, The Easy Winners). But Maple Leaf
Rag, Joplin’s very first hit, remains his signature number. Like many
another popular piano piece of the time, it is not at all easy to play – a fact
remarked upon by its first publisher, who wondered whether it would be
more admired than actually played by amateurs (there’s still some truth to
this).
Rather than having a singable tune, Maple Leaf Rag has catchy motifs
based on ‘broken’ arpeggios. Although it sets out in the major, after just a
few bars its colour is darkened by the minor key, and the left hand adds
some wistful Romantic harmonies. Now comes the famous middle section,
in which the left hand thumps out the beats and half-beats as the right hand
dances down a chromatic line in delicious cross-rhythms (essentially, the
very top line of the treble delineating a pattern of three semiquavers against
the two or four semiquavers in the left hand). Then come two ‘trio’ sections,
the first in the new key of D flat, and a bouncier second section linking
back from this key to the home key of A flat. As was often the way with this
kind of music (see also Billy Mayerl’s), the piece ends with the trio section
and doesn’t go back to reprise the main section, as one might expect with
the classical ‘minuet and trio’ format. To play the cross-rhythms with the
right spirit and accuracy requires co-ordination, steady rhythm and an
ability to be light on one’s feet (or hands), but when these qualities are
combined the effect is entrancing.
In his 1975 novel Ragtime, set in the early years of the twentieth
century, the American writer E.L. Doctorow has a beautiful description of
Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag played by the main character: ‘This was a vigorous
music that roused the senses and never stood still for a moment. The boy
perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in
intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own
being.’

BILLY MAYERL (1902–1959)

87. The Jazz Master (and other pieces)
Billy Mayerl was a brilliant pianist and the composer of some of the finest
as well as some of the most fiendishly difficult light music that has been
written for piano. His music is an English development of American
ragtime and ‘novelty ragtime’ piano style. Billy Mayerl was one of the first
classically trained British pianists to jump ship for a new style when
‘syncopated music’ arrived from America. As a teenage student of classical
piano at Trinity College of Music in London, he liked to sneak off and listen
to American numbers such as Alexander’s Ragtime Band on penny-in-the-
slot machines in the pub. ‘They had a thrill and a liveliness which
fascinated me,’ he recalled. ‘I never wanted anything so much in my young
life as to be able to infuse my weekly College composition with some of
that “go” and quick rhythm.’
These days most college piano teachers would, on principle, be open to
hearing any music that their students were enthusiastic about, but in 1914
Mayerl’s teachers were aghast. ‘When Doctor Pearce, the harmony teacher
at that time, and the Principal of the College heard the effort,’ Mayerl
recalled, ‘. . . they said it was a monstrosity that disgraced the College, and
if I ever did anything like it again I would be thrown out.’ The following
year he either left Trinity or was asked to leave (accounts vary) and became
a professional ‘syncopator’. This was a shrewd move, for within a short
time he was earning more than his classical peers and was soon to have a
level of celebrity that none of them could have dreamed of.
One of the pieces rejected by his tutors was published in 1923 as The
Jazz Master. ‘It was the first syncopated jazz composition for the piano,
quite different from the honky-tonk of the American ragtimes,’ Mayerl said.
‘Over 150,000 people bought copies of it – I say “bought” advisedly, for I
can’t say they were playing it. They couldn’t!’ If it was different from the
American ragtimes, that difference lay perhaps in a slightly more restrained
use of offbeat melodies, taking its cue more from Felix Arndt’s Nola (1915)
and Zez Confrey whose Kitten on the Keys was a huge American hit in
1921.
As in most ragtime pieces, there are several sections. The second main
section employs pleasing cross-rhythm in a three-against-two effect. After a
short reprise, there’s a ‘Trio’ section in a different key (A flat instead of the
prevailing E flat), but the mood remains energetic and the dotted-rhythm
bounce is never quelled. Accuracy is essential and Mayerl made it look
easy, but anyone who has tried to perform his intricate pieces with any sort
of ‘go’ will have discovered that careless wrong notes ruin not only the
harmony but also the intended effect of effortless style, the pianistic
equivalent of Fred Astaire’s dancing. One might wonder why, in a style
designed to be popular, Billy Mayerl produced such technically challenging
pieces. My own feeling is that his piano pieces are first and foremost the
notated evidence of his own virtuosity: that was what he cherished.
In 1923 Mayerl had joined the band of the luxurious Savoy Hotel in
London, playing for dinner dances that attracted the cream of society. He
was offered solo spots for his own compositions, which intrigued the
dancing couples enough that they stopped dancing and gathered round the
stage to watch. Word started to spread of his amazing piano solos, but the
man in the street never got to hear them until the Savoy Havana band
started being broadcast nationwide on radio. Mayerl’s solo piano pieces
were a highlight of the broadcasts and brought him personal fame. In
October 1925 he was the soloist in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, at the
Queen’s Hall in London. Gershwin himself had premiered the piece with
the band at the Savoy, but Mayerl’s performance was the first attended by
the general public.
In 1926 he left the Savoy to concentrate on solo appearances, to
compose and to start his own Billy Mayerl School of Piano, which
blossomed into a ‘Correspondence Course in Modern Syncopation’. He
devised tutor books which were sent out to subscribers along with
newsletters. His success was astonishing: by the mid-1930s the
correspondence course had 30,000 students in 117 branches around the
world and was employing 100 staff. Members of the Royal family were
subscribers, and in 1930 the press reported that when the King and Queen
of Spain visited London, the Princesses Beatriz and Maria Cristina ‘often
take lessons from Billy Mayerl, who is one of the foremost jazz pianists.
They are making excellent progress, much to the despair of their Spanish
music master’.
Billy Mayerl wrote and recorded many charming piano pieces
(Marigold, The Antiquary, The Harp of the Winds, Sleepy Piano) and made
a lot of money all through the 1920s and 1930s, until the Second World War
brought an end to frivolity. After the war, the atmosphere was different.
Mayerl’s music fell out of fashion until there was something of a revival in
the 1990s, when the Billy Mayerl Society was founded. I’m very fond of
Mayerl’s vivacious pieces and often programme them in recitals, but one
has to be careful about how and where to include them, because they can
eclipse the more serious pieces on the programme. I feel a bit like a
restaurant chef who doesn’t want people to go home talking only about how
fabulous the dessert was!

JAZZ PIANO, JAZZ PIANISTS

FATS WALLER (1904–1943)

88. Handful of Keys (and James P. Johnson, Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith
and Stride Piano)
Ragtime was a style with quite a formal manner and a recognisable
structure, usually of four or five short march-like sections one after another,
each section to be repeated. The time signature was generally 2/4, or two
crotchets in the bar, divided into four quavers; the left hand played bass
notes (often single) on quavers 1 and 3, while on quavers 2 and 4 it played a
mid-range chord confirming the harmony. The right hand played
syncopated melody or rhythmic figuration.
By the 1920s this style had been expanded by innovative African-
American pianists. Instead of playing single bass notes or octaves on the
beat, they now often played intervals of a tenth, for example C to E (for
which you had to have a big hand). Ragtime pianists rarely delved down to
the bottom register of the keyboard, but now pianists started to use more of
the bass range, filling in the mid-range with chords on the offbeats as
before. The expanded range of the left hand meant that pianists had to move
large distances back and forth across the keyboard, often with their hand in
‘open’ position because of the big intervals, and this became known as
‘striding’ or ‘stride piano’.
Ragtime was usually notated, but this new style could be applied to any
popular tune. This was a boon for the many good African-American
musicians who didn’t read music, because they could ‘stride through’ the
popular songs of the day by ear, adding swing as they wished. Strict march
tempo with its ‘don’t play fast!’ ethos was relaxed into a wide variety of
tempos, mostly on the faster side. Syncopated lines became freer. Pianists
started to lead into their big tunes with leisurely introductions which gave
the listeners time to settle down. The left hand was occasionally liberated
from playing the pulse in order to join the right hand in a cascade of
alternating chords. Even if the left hand kept strict time, the right hand now
became acrobatic, gambolling around the treble region of the keyboard in
rapid figuration usually derived from the arpeggio. ‘Tunes’ were not the
focal point of stride piano – the patterns which lay naturally under the
fingers were the building blocks for improvisation, underlining the fact that
stride was an instrumental form, not an imitation of sung style.
Realistically, stride piano was only mastered by very good players, because
the wide jumps across the keyboard necessitated supreme accuracy and an
innate sense of the geography of the keyboard. It was the preserve of male
pianists above all – there were some excellent female stride players, but
they had to have big hands.
In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s there were competitions between stride
pianists, typically male-dominated events where a pianist could be elbowed
off the piano stool by someone else who thought they could play faster,
louder or more entertainingly. Because of this ‘cutting in’ on another
pianist, these popular events were known as ‘cutting contests’. Several of
the best-known stride pianists were aficionados of cutting contests. Even
today, a number of jazz styles retain the custom of ‘swapping eights’ in the
middle of an improvisation, handing over the theme from one instrument to
another, often with an implied ‘See if you can do better!’ This may be a
minor legacy of the cutting contests, though ‘swapping eights’ can also be
seen as a simple way of subdividing a longer piece, giving individual
players a rest.
One of the pianists who straddled the change from ragtime to stride
piano was Jelly Roll Morton, who played both styles. The evolution from
ragtime can be seen in his habit of playing ‘with swing’ in both hands, not
just the right. He tended to play a little more slowly than some of his fellow
stride pianists, and made use of this slower tempo to decorate the melody
line with little sprays of ‘grace’ notes not unlike Chopin’s ornaments. He
devised a way of playing the tune with his right thumb, leaving four fingers
of the right hand to accompany the melody with chords that lay higher than
the tune, an interesting innovation. And in his left hand, he sometimes used
the interval of a sixth instead of an octave or a tenth.
 The three African-American pianists generally regarded as giants of
stride piano were James P. Johnson, Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith and Fats
Waller. Johnson, who played ragtime as well as stride, was a brilliant pianist
whose 1921 phonograph records were among the first jazz piano solos on
disc. He was so highly esteemed by his contemporaries that his recorded
solos (not available as sheet music) were often learned note for note from
recordings and used as test pieces in competitions; Harlem Strut was one
such, and Duke Ellington remembered memorising Carolina Shout from a
record. Johnson often worked as an accompanist for singers and was able to
play their songs in any key they wished, a sign of excellent musicianship.
He was the favourite accompanist of singer Bessie Smith. His recording of
You’ve Got to be Modernistic demonstrated his wonderfully fluent,
confident touch as well as accuracy.
Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith set the bar similarly high with his challenging
Finger Buster, a rapid virtuoso piece requiring both hands to jump about
independently. It was also used as a sort of gold standard for stride pianists
to copy. During the First World War he enlisted in the US Army, became the
drum major for his regiment, and got his nickname ‘The Lion’ from his
brave conduct on the front lines in France. Willie ‘The Lion’ was a big
personality who enjoyed being the master of ceremonies at musical events
and was a popular competitor at ‘cutting contests’ in Harlem. Allegedly he
always had a cigar hanging out of the corner of his mouth, as one can see in
clips of his later televised performances, but despite the cigar he often
managed to sing while he was playing. Willie’s father was Jewish and as a
boy Willie had encountered European styles of music including classical.
Their influence can be heard in his own composition Echoes of Spring,
whose echoes include Debussy’s Passepied and Chabrier’s Idylle with
added swing and nonchalance.
Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller, the star pupil of James P. Johnson, was a versatile
musician who played several instruments, composed hundreds of songs,
was a brilliant ‘Harlem stride’ pianist and a larger-than-life personality
whose running commentary during his performances was judged to be as
skilled as his piano-playing. In the 1920s he was kidnapped by four
mysterious men when leaving a performance in Chicago and hustled into
the Hawthorne Hotel where he discovered he was to be the surprise
entertainer at a party hosted by gangster Al Capone. It can’t have been too
frightening an experience, because allegedly he stayed at the hotel for three
days and left with thousands of dollars in tips.
‘Fats’ was one of the era’s most brilliant pianists, with a technique that
was equal to classical piano repertoire as well as dazzling stride piano. In
his 1941 recording of his own song Honeysuckle Rose, billed on the RCA
Bluebird label as ‘à la Bach, à la Beethoven, à la Brahms, à la Waller’, he
makes playful reference to historical piano styles, flavouring them with his
own jazz technique. He (like Rachmaninoff) could stretch an octave and a
fifth on the keyboard, and the blind jazz pianist George Shearing once said
that shaking hands with Fats was ‘like grabbing a bunch of bananas’. Sadly,
because of his weight and his unhealthy lifestyle, Fats only lived to the age
of thirty-nine. Although best known for his inimitable performances of his
songs (Ain’t Misbehavin’, Your Feet’s Too Big, The Joint is Jumping, I’m
Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter), his 1929 recording of the
piano solo Handful of Keys demonstrates the bounce, agility, accuracy and
sense of sheer fun which makes him irresistible.

ART TATUM (1909–1956)

89. Tiger Rag (and other pieces)
The African-American jazz pianist Art Tatum has been an inspiration of
mine since student days. Tatum had impaired vision all his life; by the time
he was an adult he was blind in his left eye, and had very limited vision in
his right (though, as his friend and fellow jazz pianist Dorothy Donegan
dryly said, ‘I know he could see women’). As a child he taught himself to
play the piano by listening to piano rolls, radio shows and recordings.
Already as a teenager he had his own radio show in Toledo, Ohio, and soon
visiting artists were making a point of coming to hear him play. Even then,
Tatum had formed the habit of staying on after closing hours so that he
could continue playing, and was known to play through the night, just for
the fun of it.
Word spread and soon he was being summoned to New York.
Surprisingly, he put it off for a while because he felt he was not ready for
the big city, but when he did make it there in 1932 he went along to
Morgan’s Bar in Harlem to take part in a ‘cutting contest’ with the three
stride pianists mentioned above: Fats Waller, Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith and
James P. Johnson. When Tatum played his mind-boggling arrangement of
Tea for Two, everyone acknowledged that a new king of the piano scene had
arrived. (His 1953 recording of it gives some idea.)
It’s said that, on hearing Tatum play, quite a few professional pianists
felt discouraged, because what was the point of practising when there was
someone who could play like that? Despite being almost blind – or perhaps
because of it? – Tatum had a sureness of touch and a pitch-perfect
understanding of the keyboard which allowed him to speed lightly across
the keys, hitting every note he wanted like a precision cutting tool, each
note clean and clear, as in his amazing recording of Tiger Rag. Wrong notes
appeared not to be in his vocabulary. All the usual technical challenges
seemed easy for him, even at the fast tempos he favoured. His big hands
enabled him to put down complex chords with added harmonic notes which
didn’t really feature in jazz again until decades later.
But these were only technical aspects. What really impressed his fellow
musicians was his ability to subject a well-known tune to complex re-
harmonisations, adding middle voices, playing in two keys at once, playing
‘solos’ with his left hand, creating ‘orchestral’ layers of texture with
different things going on in each layer, all beautifully separate and
controlled. Even at the end of phrases, if there were a couple of empty beats
before the next phrase, Tatum would nonchalantly fill them with a pearly
cascade or an arpeggio so fast that one could scarcely see the individual
keys being played. At the next such breathing space, he might modulate
rapidly into a distant key and scuttle out again, just to fill the time (as in his
live 1935 recording of Lulu’s Back in Town).
Listeners had the sense that, even though the tempo was fast, Tatum had
plenty of time to think. On the video clips of his playing, he looks perfectly
relaxed – focused, yes, but at ease. His face shows none of the grimaces or
tense jaw movements that one so often sees with pianists – even very good
ones – under pressure. For me as a fellow pianist, the most remarkable thing
about Tatum is that his concentration does not seem to need to ‘go up a
gear’ for anything in particular. Most of us probably know that sense of
‘Uh-oh, here it comes’ when we approach a really challenging passage. We
home in on it, paying extra attention so that it will turn out well. Tatum does
not seem to do this. Simple passages or difficult passages, cute melodies or
seven-octave arpeggios are alike to him; his concentration flows serenely
across them and his heart beats evenly. One feels one could learn something
valuable from this for one’s own playing.
Fans have often wondered how much improvisation there really was in
Tatum’s recorded solos. Judging from pieces he recorded several times over
the years, it seems that he may have prepared certain pieces in anticipation
of recording them, and when he repeated them in later years he adhered
more or less to the same plan. However, there are many accounts which
make it clear that his long stints of after-hours playing in his favourite clubs
were improvised. Indeed, listeners said he was even more creative when he
thought no microphone was around, and would often abandon the tune and
do extensive improvisations on a sequence of interesting chords, as ‘modern
jazz’ was to do. Tatum once told a friend that he practised improvising on
tunes in every key, adding that it was amazing what ideas would come to
you if you were comfortable in every key.
When Tatum played in New York clubs, some of the greatest pianists of
the day used to drop in after their own concerts to hear him. Rachmaninoff,
Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, George Gershwin – they all sat
quietly and marvelled at the reflexes and harmonic imagination of this self-
taught African-American pianist who might not even have been welcome in
the concert halls where they had just performed. And the young saxophone
player Charlie Parker, who had a job washing up in one of Tatum’s regular
spots in Manhattan, was listening and learning too.
I love the recording Tatum made of his own arrangement of a Dvořák
Humoresque, somehow a homage rather than a travesty. Tatum works his
magic on the lilting melody, turning it into a display of jazz piano virtuosity.
Would Dvořák have minded? Already in the 1890s Dvořák had said that
‘Negro music’ was the future of American music, so he would probably
have enjoyed Tatum’s affectionate teasing.

BEBOP PIANISTS
90. Bud Powell (1924–1966), Thelonious Monk (1917–1982) and
others
Bebop was a highly influential jazz style that arose in New York in the
1940s. At that time, musicians who had finished their paid employment at
this or that club or café would often gather late at night to play more music,
this time without an audience, just for the pleasure of it. Most of the
participants were gifted African-American musicians and the sessions
quickly became experimental. They took standard jazz, blues or Broadway
numbers (such as George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, a favourite) but instead
of improvising melodies clearly related to the underlying harmonies, as they
would have done for the public, they pushed the boundaries and started
using melody notes more and more remote from the chord sequence, and
with daring dissonances.
This was a style which had several important characteristics. It was by
musicians for other musicians; it was for participants, not primarily for an
audience. It was not designed to be singable – it was an instrumental style.
Instead of a big band or large jazz ensemble being the norm, bebop was
played by small groups. The improvising was serious and quickly became
competitive, showcasing the participants’ individual virtuosity. There was
an element of setting the bar deliberately high so that only truly skilled
players could join in, or stay in. Tempos were usually rapid, and musicians
made a point of changing frequently into other keys to test one another’s
aural skills. The usual ‘sweet’ vibrato was phased out by the wind players:
bebop tone is purer and harder, emphasising the fact that it was not
‘customer-facing’. Phrasing was no longer in standard lengths; players
usually began off the beat and often ended a phrase in between beats as
well. Instead of using the popular swing style, they took to playing in rapid
even quavers, a development made necessary partly by their fast tempos
which left little room for swing. In ‘trad jazz’ it was possible for a musician
with a grasp of a few main chords to feel their way along by ear. In this new
style, it was impossible to thrive unless you actually understood the
underlying harmonic structure and were able to keep track of it amid the
dissonance. It was a style for connoisseurs. Bebop musicians, many of
whom had suffered racial stereotyping, thought of themselves not as
entertainers but as serious artists.
The origin of the name ‘bebop’ is not clear, but probably came from the
style of jazz singing known as ‘scat’, where instead of using words a singer
would improvise in nonsense syllables: ‘doo-be-doo-WAP!’ Some
musicians didn’t like the nickname, because it seemed disrespectful to a
style which was serious and intellectual. When the first bebop recordings
appeared in 1945, the wider public were a little puzzled as well, not just by
the name but by the style. Nevertheless, bebop became and has remained
hugely influential. Bebop may be said to parallel developments in the
classical/art music world of the early twentieth century where composers
were likewise pushing the boundaries of dissonance. Undoubtedly there
were some bebop musicians, for instance the great saxophone player
Charlie Parker, who took an interest in what had been going on in the world
of Bartók and Schoenberg and may have seen themselves as walking the
same experimental path. Others felt that the inspiration for bebop could be
traced back to music from the players’ African heritage. Perhaps both are
true.
The pianist Bud Powell is acknowledged to have been one of the most
important bebop musicians and was, as Herbie Hancock said, ‘the
foundation out of which stemmed the whole edifice of modern jazz piano’.
Art Tatum was Powell’s inspiration, and he shared Tatum’s ability to
process chord changes at lightning speed and reflect them in scintillating
runs. Powell was a troubled character who was in and out of state
psychiatric hospitals most of his working life. Remarkably, he recorded
some of his finest tracks while on day release from hospital in the late
1940s. His solo album Jazz Giant, which came out in 1949, contains the
remarkable Tempus Fugit (Time Flies), where he launches straight in with
high-octane virtuoso runs over complex rapid chords.
Powell’s runs are played in straight, even, detached and clearly
articulated quavers, not in pairs of ‘swung’ notes. His right hand seems to
imitate his friend Charlie Parker’s saxophone playing, flying up and down
the octaves with irresistible élan. Powell was known to envy the acclaim
and applause that ‘single line’ players such as trumpeters and saxophonists
received for their solos, and was probably motivated to emulate their
virtuoso style as well as their mastery of melody lines. On the same album,
his composition Celia shows him in more reflective mood. One of Powell’s
finest tracks is a trio recording he made for Blue Note Records in 1950 with
bassist Curly Russell and drummer Max Roach. Powell composed the tune,
Un poco loco, in Afro-Cuban style. The independence of his hands and his
rhythmic inventiveness are remarkable, and almost as notable is the way the
bass and drums are liberated from their usual time-keeping duties to
become more participatory and imaginative in the trio.
Very different in style from the mercurial Bud Powell was another
revered bebop pianist, Thelonious Monk, famous for remarking that ‘The
piano ain’t got no wrong notes.’ Renowned for his hats, sunglasses and
suits, Monk was an idiosyncratic performer and composer. He wrote the
beautiful 1944 classic Round Midnight, still one of the most recorded
numbers in jazz, a potential pitfall for the unwary with its complicated
chord changes. It isn’t typical of his piano style, which tended towards the
lumbering and defiant. (The poet Philip Larkin, a huge jazz fan, once
described Monk’s style as ‘a faux-naïf elephant dance’.) Many of Monk’s
seventy tunes (including Blue Monk, Straight No Chaser, Well You Needn’t,
Ruby My Dear) have become jazz standards.
Monk was not one of those bebop pianists who loved to race around the
piano creating filigree embellishments of the underlying chords; rather, he
sometimes gave the impression that he was delving into the underside of
the tune, ferreting about in its roots and not even bothering to state the tune
itself, let alone decorate it. He favoured a laconic performance style with
jagged asymmetrical phrases and unexpected, intriguing silences in between
the phrases. Distillation was his style, he liked to express himself sparingly,
and he liked moderate and slow tempos. These factors may have played a
part in the fact that he rose to fame more slowly than some of his bebop
colleagues like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Thelonious Monk was
not everyone’s cup of tea.
Monk’s piano tone was plain, often percussive, and although he played
the piano all his life it sometimes seems as if his hands still felt awkward as
they moved about the keys. He often uses a modernised form of ‘stride’
piano bass with strange, angular chords; in melodies he jabs at odd, distant
keys, and to the outsider it sometimes seems as if he didn’t care whether he
was liked or not. However, his unique sound became part of jazz piano
vocabulary, and the force of his musical ideas gradually won him many
fans. Monk was famous for getting up from the piano and doing a little
dance on stage while others in his group were playing solos. Although it
seemed eccentric at the time, today’s teachers of the Alexander Technique
and physiotherapists might even advocate this way of walking away from
the piano and moving around to release tension.
 Other renowned exponents of bebop were Oscar Peterson, Mary Lou
Williams, Horace Silver, Lennie Tristano and Jaki Byard (with whom I
studied jazz piano), many of whom lived to adapt their styles to post-bebop
eras and to enjoy further success. Along with Powell and Monk they
influenced the playing of Bill Evans, Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, Cedar
Walton, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau. Bebop and its
offshoot, ‘hard bop’, gave way in the 1960s to less intense forms such as
modal and free jazz, but the legacy of bebop can be heard in the musical
vocabulary of every serious jazz pianist working today.

BILL EVANS (1929–1980)

91. Waltz for Debby (and other pieces)
In the early days of jazz piano, from ragtime to stride, the style of piano-
playing was predominantly rhythmic. This was so when the pianist was
playing as part of a band, but even when playing on their own, pianists
tended to focus on the percussive qualities of the piano. It’s always been a
temptation when playing an instrument that carries its own weight and
invites the player to relish and make use of those many little downward
strokes on its eighty-eight keys. Most of the famous piano recordings from
the 1920s onwards are characterised by lively and skilful rhythmic patterns.
But as I mentioned in the section on bebop pianists, Bud Powell, who
could play stride piano with the best of them, started experimenting in the
1940s and 1950s with imitating his colleague Charlie Parker’s saxophone
playing. The saxophone is principally a melodic instrument and Powell
wanted to be able to create melody lines like that on the piano. He
developed an influential style where his right hand played long and
complex lines of melodic improvisation while his left hand sketched in the
beats, leaving the heavier rhythm aspects to the bass and drums. This was
an important influence on later pianists who appreciated being liberated
from the duties of the rhythm section.
Bill Evans took this idea further and became famous for his lyrical and
thoughtful approach to the piano. Evans was trained as a classical pianist,
and to the end of his life he paid tribute to the keyboard works of J.S. Bach
and the way they kept his fingers in good training. He learned to play
Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, but became particularly fond of the music
of the ‘French Impressionists’, Debussy and his circle, whose gentle
sophisticated harmonies are easy to hear in Evans’s improvisations.
He moved into jazz in the 1950s and joined the Miles Davis Sextet at a
crucial time, just before their recording of Kind of Blue, the best-selling
1959 jazz album. Probably Evans’s classical background helped him to
understand what Miles Davis was driving at when he asked his players to
improvise not on pre-existing tunes but rather on a series of ‘modes’, scales
using different combinations of steps and half-steps between the notes. At
any rate, Evans’s piano contribution to Kind of Blue was one of its most
striking aspects. Right from the opening track one can hear Evans’s unusual
chord voicings, often using notes a fourth apart rather than a third as was
more common. (This was probably the beginning of the so-called ‘quartal
harmony’ which became an important part of jazz vocabulary.) The piano
seems to float in a kind of alto range, leaving other instruments to state the
bass line. Listeners were also struck by how sparingly and elegantly he
dabbed in his unusual chords like a painter evoking an effect without
actually drawing an outline. Later, Evans was credited with having softened
the hard sonorities which Miles Davis had previously favoured.
After Evans left the Davis Sextet, he formed the first of several trios –
piano, double bass and drums – which made his name. This was a skilful
choice of partners, because the bass and drums could take over the job of
defining the beat while Bill continued to refine his approach to complex
harmonies and time-keeping. His harmonies were what one might call
‘high-end’: he often took a standard ‘seventh chord’, adding ninths,
elevenths, thirteenths and so on, but then selecting only the higher notes as
the components of his chords. The root of the chord was often not stated (at
least not by the piano). This gave his harmonies an unusual, floating quality.
Taking this effect even further, Bill Evans cultivated a very
sophisticated way of placing his chords just before or after the beat, rarely
where one expects them. He extended this style into the right hand too. His
right-hand improvisations are an exquisite illustration of artist Paul Klee’s
remark that ‘a drawing is simply a line going for a walk’. Evans takes his
right hand on a walk, often using just a single graceful line to meander
purposefully around the melodic signposts that listeners were looking out
for. His classically trained touch enabled him to ‘swing’ without losing
quality of tone. His classical background came out too in works such as his
1958 Peace Piece; over a recurring left-hand sequence very similar to the
one Chopin used in his Berceuse, Evans improvises a right-hand line which
has echoes of Chopin’s filigree decoration but goes further, towards the
‘birdsong’ of Olivier Messiaen, with strange, wistful chirping in the high
treble region, often in a different key.
His temperament inclined him towards melancholy ballads (But
Beautiful, Very Early, Turn out the Stars) where his lyrical gift and his
mellow sonority was most strikingly in evidence. Bebop was part of his
style too, as one can hear in his composition Funkallero, but he was most
cherished for pieces like Waltz for Debby, where he constructs a delicate
architecture of lines and chords, outwardly restrained but full of inner life.
For many years, Evans was a heroin addict. The altered state of mind in
which he often performed is said to be evident in his playing, which indeed
demonstrates a kind of super-focus, a sharpened awareness of each moment
and the detail that it could contain. It is impossible to know, however,
whether Evans would have been able to develop these qualities without
drug use, and impossible not to regret the damage done to him by heroin
and cocaine which resulted in his death at the age of fifty-one. (I was keenly
aware of this sad event because I had just arrived in America to study jazz
and was hoping to have some lessons with him.)
His 1961 recordings at the Village Vanguard club in New York with his
favourite trio colleagues Scott LaFaro (bass) and Paul Motian (drums) are a
joy to watch and listen to. Waltz for Debby is one of the tracks, though the
whole collection is often cited as a high point of recorded jazz. Dressed in
suit and tie, his hair neatly combed back, and wearing his intellectual-
looking horn-rimmed glasses, Bill ignores the audience, concentrating
intently on the piano, leaning forward and sometimes bending low over the
keys in the manner of his contemporary, the eccentric Canadian pianist
Glenn Gould. Bill creates a rapt performance atmosphere which seems to
owe something to the classical concert hall. His lyricism, his taste, his
refined voicings, his serious approach to his chosen craft have all had an
enormous influence on later jazz pianists such as Herbie Hancock, Chick
Corea, Keith Jarrett and more recently, Brad Mehldau. To many people’s
ears, however, Bill Evans remains inimitable.
 WOMEN JAZZ PIANISTS IN A MAN’S WORLD
92. Mazie Mullins, Lovie Austin, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Mary Lou
Williams, Hazel Scott and Marian McPartland
Since the very beginning of the jazz era there have been women pianists,
but for many different reasons they have often been overlooked or their
achievements minimised. Jazz has always been primarily a male preserve,
and probably still is despite progress made in recent decades. The women
who attained celebrity status in jazz in the early years were mostly singers,
or ‘songstresses’ as they were sometimes known, hired for their looks as
well as their talent. Instrumental jazz has always been male-dominated, and
female pianists have had to learn to be ‘one of the boys’ if they wanted to
pursue a professional career. As New York jazz collector and record label
founder Rosetta Reitz observed about women’s instrumental playing styles,
‘We haven’t yet had a female voice in jazz, because those women who have
been successful have not wanted to identify with their womanliness.
They’ve preferred rather to identify with the male voice that comes from
jazz. And it’s understandable, because it’s a very positive voice. I think it’ll
be a very long time before we hear what the female sensibility in jazz is.’
For women pianists who liked to play solo, one of the few opportunities
in the early years of jazz was to play piano (and sometimes organ) in a
movie theatre. During the era of silent films, pianists were employed to sit
in ‘the pit’ and play music that enhanced what was happening on screen.
Sometimes the music was improvised, sometimes it was specially
composed, and sometimes they were asked to play classical music, so they
had to be versatile. They also had to accompany the stage acts, a variety of
entertainers employed by movie houses to keep the audience happy while
waiting for the films. Fats Waller recalled that as a young teenager he
learned a great deal about jazz improvisation by sneaking into the Lincoln
Movie Theater on 135th Street in Harlem to listen to the African-American
pianist Miss Mazie Mullins (1888–1921) responding with lightning
flexibility to whatever was going on in the film narrative.
Another African-American movie house pianist was Lovie Austin
(1887–1972). She led her own band in Chicago in the 1920s, wrote music,
played in vaudeville, accompanied blues singers, and was well known
around town as a glamorous and stylishly dressed figure at the wheel of her
own car. Also working in Chicago in the 1920s was Lil Hardin, later Lil
Hardin Armstrong (1898–1971) when she married the trumpeter Louis
Armstrong. Hardin played the piano in ‘King’ Oliver’s band as well as in
Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five. She was one of the only musicians in those
bands who could write music down, and she taught Armstrong to read
music. Her composition Hotter than That, on which Louis plays trumpet
and sings, was a big hit for the Hot Five.
One of the women jazz pianists with the longest career was the
formidable Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981), who taught herself the piano
at the age of three and by the age of six was supporting her family by
playing the piano at neighbourhood parties in Pittsburgh. By the age of
thirteen she was playing in one of Duke Ellington’s early bands, the
Washingtonians. She worked with nearly all the leading jazz musicians of
the day and developed her own solo career. In 1930, at the age of only
twenty, she went to Chicago and recorded two piano solos, Nightlife and
Drag ’Em, which made her name nationwide. These recordings show her
confident touch, her sense of swing and her agility. Over the decades she
composed, performed, was an inspiration to the younger bebop generation
and hosted a radio show in New York. In the 1950s she suffered some kind
of burn-out and took a three-year break from the piano. During this time she
converted to Catholicism, and in later years was deeply involved with the
church and composing religious music. Her social conscience made her
open her home to many jazz musicians struggling with addiction or poverty.
Trinidad-born Hazel Scott (1920–1981) was one of the most naturally
gifted jazz pianists. Her parents moved with her to New York when she was
four, and by the age of eight she had won a scholarship to study at the
Juilliard School. By nineteen she was playing jazz on radio and was a star
attraction at the nightclub Café Society, where she became known as ‘the
hot classicist’. By twenty-five she was earning what today would be a
million dollars a year, an astonishing achievement for a woman jazz pianist
at the time, and in 1950 she became the first person of African heritage to
have her own show on television. This illustrious career was curtailed by
her involvement in civil rights issues, her uncompromising attitude with
employers, her opposition to racial stereotyping, and her appearance in
front of the House Un-American Committee, which led first to her TV show
being cancelled and then to her decision to leave the United States and
move to Paris in the 1950s. In other words, her political conscience barred
her from achieving the fame she should have enjoyed in America. Scott was
a virtuoso pianist as well as a glamorous figure with natural screen
presence. She appeared as herself in films including 1943’s The Heat’s On,
where with extraordinary flair and co-ordination she plays two pianos (a
black one and a white one) at once, flipping her piano stool around from
one to another, sometimes playing one piano with each hand, or starting one
phrase on the white piano and finishing it on the black one, all the while
communing as much with the camera as with the keyboard. Her
performance can be seen on a clip entitled Black and White Are Beautiful.
Marian McPartland (1918–2013) was another jazz pianist with enviable
career longevity. Born in England, she studied classical piano but, to her
family’s dismay, decided to pursue her love of light music and jazz as a
professional pianist; for a while she was a member of Billy Mayerl’s four-
piano quartet. She emigrated to the United States where she played with
many different leading jazzmen, formed her own trio and founded the
Halcyon Records label. For ten years, from 1952 to 1962, she had a regular
spot at the Hickory House jazz club where Duke Ellington used to come to
listen to her; she took to heart his advice that she played ‘too many notes’.
(Her mellow, cultured style is apparent in the 1953 recording Marian
McPartland Trio at the Hickory House.) Already in the 1950s, she began
writing articles which questioned why women could not have their own
style and were obliged to emulate the styles displayed by male jazz pianists.
She was the host of a long-running radio show, Marian McPartland’s Piano
Jazz, on National Public Radio from 1978 to 2011, and received many
honours for her involvement in education projects. McPartland is one of the
few women and the few white people among fifty-seven jazz artists
captured in Art Kane’s historic 1958 photograph, A Great Day in Harlem.
As has been noted by jazz historians, the Second World War and the
draft of men into the army opened up more opportunities for women jazz
musicians. Gradually, with the coming of equality laws and the advent of
feminism, jazz became a somewhat easier world for women to enter, though
even today it still has daunting aspects. In more recent years there have
been many excellent women jazz pianists – Nina Simone, Carla Bley, Diana
Krall, Norah Jones, Joanne Brackeen, Zoe Rahman – but arguably they are
still required to prove themselves to an excessive degree in a man’s world.
The six women pianists described above were yet more remarkable,
fighting their way to the platform in a society which had all kinds of inbuilt
prejudices against their being there.

JAZZ GOES CLASSICAL

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898–1937)

93. Rhapsody in Blue
The most famous opening gesture in American music came about by a
happy chain of circumstances. In 1924, songwriter George Gershwin was
asked by Paul Whiteman to write a ‘jazz concerto’, to be included in a
concert Whiteman was planning of jazzy pieces interspersed with classical
pieces played by the Whiteman Band. By creating ‘symphonic jazz’, the
plan was to make jazz respectable to classical concertgoers, as well as
encouraging jazz fans into the concert hall. Gershwin had never written a
long piece, but he was keen to try. He wasn’t in the habit of orchestrating,
either, as he usually composed his songs at the piano and handed them over
to someone else to orchestrate for theatre shows. So when Gershwin
composed the opening gesture for Rhapsody in Blue he had no idea it would
come to mean ‘New York’ or ‘America’ to music-lovers around the world.
He planned to start with a trill and rise note by note up a nice sweet B flat
major scale, seventeen separate notes over two and a half octaves, to the
high B flat, the first note of the famous theme. When it was orchestrated by
Ferde Grofé, the talented pianist/arranger of the Whiteman band, he gave
the opening scale to the clarinet. But at the first rehearsal, clarinettist Ross
Gorman, just for fun, played the first octave ‘normally’ and the rest as a
drawn-out wailing glissando. Gershwin loved it and asked him to play it
like that – with as much ‘wail’ as possible – at the premiere. On the night,
Rhapsody in Blue came almost at the end of a long programme, but the
sound of the clarinet glissando woke everyone up with a thrill, and it has
been thrilling people ever since.
 George Gershwin (born Jacob Gershowitz, of Russian and Lithuanian
parents) left school early to write songs and work as a ‘song plugger’, a
profession which no longer exists. A song plugger was employed by a
music store to sit at the piano, demonstrating the latest songs so that
customers would be seduced into buying the sheet music (and maybe a
piano too). Gershwin was a brilliant young pianist and improviser, adept at
turn-of-the-screw modulations which increased the excitement from verse
to verse (a skill he deployed in Rhapsody in Blue). Already at the age of
twenty he had written – allegedly in ten minutes, on a Manhattan bus – the
song Swanee, made famous by Al Jolson, which earned Gershwin a lot of
money. In 1924 when Whiteman asked him for a new piece for the concert
in Aeolian Hall, public transport inspired him yet again: on a train to
Boston, the rhythm of the wheels clickety-clacking over the tracks (another
lost sound, alas) worked on his imagination and he suddenly ‘saw’ the
whole Rhapsody in front of him. Interestingly, at that point he didn’t have
any ideas for the themes – it was the structure he ‘saw’ (just as Ravel did
with his Piano Trio).
The structure has in fact been judged one of the weaker aspects of the
Rhapsody, which is more like a collection of ‘scenes’ – a characteristic that
has lent itself to the many cuts and changes to which the work has been
subjected over the years. Even at the first performance, Gershwin was still
figuring out how long some of his piano cadenzas would be – the
conductor’s score contains the instruction ‘Wait for nod’ (which reminds
one of Mozart and his last-minute improvisations as a concerto soloist).
Whatever the perceived shortcomings of the Rhapsody’s form, the strength
of its themes has kept it triumphantly standing, and it’s hard to believe they
weren’t the first things Gershwin thought of.
Why ‘Rhapsody in Blue’? Gershwin’s brother Ira, the lyricist of their
fraternal songwriting duo, came up with the words on this occasion too. Ira
had been to an exhibition of paintings by Whistler, and had been taken with
one called Nocturne in Black and Gold. How about Rhapsody in Blue for
George’s jazz concerto? It was evocative, and it neatly alluded to ‘the blues’
of the jazz world.
There are several stirring, memorable themes in the Rhapsody – firstly,
the clarinet solo at the beginning, which immediately announces the ‘blues’
element by introducing the flat seventh (and the flat sixth too) and a mixture
of major and minor thirds. Perhaps Gershwin’s fondness for Romantic
piano repertoire taught him to derive new themes from old ones as he does
here – the faster-moving second theme is built out of the first, and when the
piano enters it is with a new-sounding ‘commentary’ which also proceeds
from what has gone before – as well as apparently quoting Gershwin’s
celebrated song, The Man I Love, written that same year.
The pianist mulls over these themes in virtuoso solo passages, arriving
eventually at a new and jaunty repeated-note theme in C major, which the
pianist decorates in a manner reminiscent of ‘novelty piano’ (Zez Confrey’s
style). Next comes a more active theme in G, whose rhythm (as we later
realise) foreshadows the rhythm of the big romantic theme that is to come
later. It passes through some intriguing Lisztian modulations (e.g. G major
to D flat major, not a conventional move) to usher in a slower, more playful
section in which the pianist muses on the second theme from the opening
section. The song plugger’s armoury comes in useful as the tension is
jacked up in small increments to prepare for the return of the opening
theme, now in C major with the orchestra playing the theme and the pianist
frolicking about in the treble with Chico Marx-style insouciance.
A longish piano cadenza, based in the key of G major, prepares our ears
for the big new theme we sense is coming. When it does, the gorgeous
sideways glide into E major is one of the most melting moments in the
piece. The big theme, announced by the orchestra, is like something
Rachmaninoff might have written – a nod to Gershwin’s Russian heritage,
perhaps. Skilfully, Gershwin uses the rhythm the pianist has been chewing
over for several pages, but takes it down to half speed and gives it a
different melodic profile, crucially with an octave drop between its third
and fourth notes, making it a pleasure to sing (or play). In the second
‘verse’, the pianist accompanies the orchestra with a jazzy counterpoint to
the glorious theme. This has proved tricky for pianists to get right in
performance, because if the orchestral theme is too indulgently slow, the
jazzy counterpoint will be leaden. Gershwin himself solves the conundrum
(on his 1924 recording) by speeding up at exactly this point to create a
lively atmosphere for the piano figuration, and then letting the orchestra
slow down again.
What can follow such a high point of lyricism? Only something quite
different, perhaps, and now the pianist announces a kind of scherzo, a
playful section marked ‘agitato e misterioso’ – another outbreak of ‘novelty
piano’ writing, this time with an almost Cuban rhythm. (Gershwin once
commented that his piano style was tricky because he treated the piano as a
percussive instrument.) Now the pianist surges forward, sweeping all the
main themes virtuosically into the melting-pot. We seem to be hearing the
main themes in reverse order, arriving all too soon at the reprise of the
clarinet’s opening theme, grandly declaimed by piano and orchestra
together in a manner that makes one see ‘THE END’ in huge illuminated
letters across the screen in one’s mind’s eye.
Gershwin’s own 1924 recording, one of two abbreviated recordings that
he made, is a fascinating demonstration of how much styles have changed.
Tempos are fast, sometimes surprisingly fast (though this may have had
something to do with the attempt to fit the piece on two sides of a 78rpm
disc). The opening clarinet solo is played by the original clarinettist Ross
Gorman with more spice and tasty detail than one usually hears now (for
example, ‘spitting out’ the short detached notes). Notes are ‘bent’ by the
wind players. Gershwin’s piano-playing is brisk almost to the point of
heartlessness – a characteristic also evinced by his fan Billy Mayerl, ‘the
English Gershwin’. New York in the 1920s comes vividly to life; there is a
tremendous sense of élan, of bustle and confidence, of what Gershwin
called ‘our unduplicated national pep’.

IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882–1971)

94. Piano-Rag Music
Igor Stravinsky wrote Piano-Rag Music in 1919 when he was still living in
Switzerland after exiling himself there from Russia during the First World
War. He later claimed that until the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet came
back from an American tour with some ragtime sheet music to show him,
he had never heard this kind of music performed. His claim is unusual
given that ragtime had been quite a craze in Europe in the decade
beforehand, and in fact had been around so long that it was already starting
to be supplanted by jazz. Prior to settling in Switzerland, Stravinsky had
travelled extensively around Europe, spending time in capitals such as
Paris, London and Berlin, and staying in fashionable hotels on, for example,
the Riviera, so it is hard to believe that he had never encountered ragtime in
any of these meccas of entertainment. Even St Petersburg had hosted a visit
from John Philip Sousa and his marching band in 1903 when Stravinsky
was still living there, and they included ragtime in their programmes. The
scandalous premiere of The Rite of Spring with its wild asymmetric dances
had taken place in Paris in 1913, five years before Ansermet brought home
the copies of ragtime from the United States. So perhaps Stravinsky was
being slightly naughty when he claimed that ‘as I had never actually heard
any of the music performed, I borrowed its rhythmic style, not as played,
but as written’.
Piano-Rag Music was actually the last of his experiments with ragtime,
the others being the ragtime dance in The Soldier’s Tale and the Ragtime for
Eleven Instruments. None of the three is a faithful homage to ragtime,
Piano-Rag Music least of all. One of the most obvious qualities of ragtime
is its steady pulse, but in Piano-Rag Music Stravinsky straightaway starts to
play around with the beat; within the first few bars he has departed from the
four-in-a-bar time signature of the opening and has included bars of six
quavers, five quavers and five crotchets. Syncopation is certainly there, but
amid so much rhythmic displacement it hardly evokes the friendly
syncopations of Scott Joplin. As for the generally plain and pleasant
harmonies of ragtime, Stravinsky throws those out of the window
straightaway, using instead a sour and dissonant style in which even the
simplest passages are made to seem ironical by use of notes startlingly
extraneous to the key.
Stravinsky’s take on the cheerfulness of ragtime is a kind of mocking
humour, and his capering rhythms seem jerky and awkward rather than
innocently fun. With instructions like ‘excessively short and loud’, ‘attack
[the chords] each time’, ‘triple forte’ and ‘staccatissimo’ he makes it clear
that we are a long way from the saloons of New Orleans. Writing in two
keys at once, interrupting jazzy passages with sudden brutal chords,
constantly changing the time signature in a manner that would drive any
dancer to despair – these show his wilful approach, and around the most
difficult bar of the piece, where the hands compete for space in the same
register of the piano with complicated syncopations, he draws little dotted
lines and coldly writes ‘make sure all the notes are heard very clearly’. Not
a very sympathetic kind of ragtime, then, but vintage Stravinsky, a sort of
tribute performed in a frightening mask. Of Piano-Rag Music he said, ‘The
different rhythmic episodes were dictated by the fingers themselves. My
own fingers seemed to enjoy it so much that I began to practise the piano
simply for my own personal satisfaction.’ It must be admitted, however, that
in his own 1934 recording of the piece he adopts a somewhat slapdash
approach, playing with élan but neglecting to follow some of his own
instructions.

CONLON NANCARROW (1912–1997)

95. Studies for Player Piano 3a–e
One of the wilder offshoots of ragtime and early jazz piano is the music
written for player piano by the American composer Conlon Nancarrow. As
a young man he studied with leading American composers Roger Sessions
and Walter Piston, but in his twenties he joined the Communist Party and
went to Spain to join the fight against the fascist regime of General Franco.
Subsequently, fearing harassment in his native United States because of his
political beliefs, he went to live in Mexico and became a Mexican citizen.
As Joseph Haydn once said about his own isolation in an Esterházy palace
far away from the mainstream, he was ‘forced to become original’.
Rather in the manner of Charles Ives, Nancarrow developed ideas about
how layers of music moving at different speeds could be superimposed.
Soon he began composing music too difficult for ordinary musicians to
play. He began to teach himself how to write piano rolls to be played on a
player piano, where he would not be limited by the speed at which ordinary
hands could move around the piano nor by the inaccuracies likely to arise
when musicians try to compute hugely complex simultaneous time
signatures. He travelled to New York in order to acquire a machine that
could punch holes in the paper of the piano rolls as he wished. He also
experimented with changing the sound of the player piano by covering its
hammers in felt or metal. Once he could create his own piano rolls he gave
full vent to his imagination, constructing an eccentric and wildly excitable
form of ragtime or boogie-woogie jazz piano, played by the machine at
speeds beyond any that could be achieved by a real pianist. There is
something extraordinary about seeing the keys of the player piano move on
their own in his manic creations.
Nancarrow was inspired by American composer Henry Cowell’s
suggestion that, just as pitches can be organised into a rising scale, so time
can be divided into finely graded steps and used like a ‘scale’ of another
kind. The results can be heard in, for example, his Study no. 3, later
combined with other pieces into the five-movement Boogie-Woogie Suite
(1949–50). Study 3a is a madcap dash through a composition which sounds
like speeded-up Art Tatum. All five pieces draw on the vocabulary of
boogie-woogie and blues, using self-contained lines which proceed in
magnificent isolation from one another. The energy is infectious, but nuance
was not Nancarrow’s thing; the player piano pieces tend to be insistent in
tone. Sometimes the independent pulses seem disturbingly close to one
another, as if there has been some slippage which the ear cannot quite grasp.
There is often a feeling of mathematical calculation, which seems to work
best when the effect is playful.
Later, Nancarrow moved beyond reference to the jazz style and created
pieces which, if they were influenced by anyone, were inspired by J.S. Bach
and his mastery of canons and fugues. Here again Nancarrow’s player piano
allowed him to calculate mind-boggling time-gaps between the entry of one
voice and the next. Written in the early 1960s, Study for Player Piano no. 21
(Canon X) is a terrifying piece which starts out by superimposing lines
which mutually ignore one another and gets more and more complicated
until it becomes a blizzard of different musical strata moving at
incomprehensible speed. Some of his pieces have been arranged for
ordinary musicians playing ordinary instruments, but they require great skill
to play. Curiously, the effect of Nancarrow’s music being ‘humanised’ is not
always as pleasing as one might imagine. The mechanical brilliance of the
player piano performing rhythmic miracles with neither effort nor emotion
seems to be an important part of the effect.
Nancarrow was not widely recognised until his sixties, when recordings
of his player piano pieces started to be made available by resourceful fans.
In the 1980s he achieved a belated quirky celebrity, especially when György
Ligeti said of him, ‘His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly
constructed, but at the same time emotional . . . for me it’s the best music of
any composer living today.’

FREDERIC RZEWSKI (b. 1938)

96. Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Frederic Rzewski is an American composer and pianist of Polish heritage
who is deeply interested in social justice. In the 1960s he concerned himself
with electronic composition and minimalism, but later emerged from those
‘schools’ to forge his own style. He identifies himself with the struggle of
ordinary people to achieve dignified working conditions. His best-known
piano piece is the hour-long composition The People United Will Never Be
Defeated!, a huge set of thirty-six variations on a Chilean protest song of
the Allende era.
For me his most striking piano piece is the ten-minute Winnsboro
Cotton Mill Blues of 1979, which exists in the original solo version and also
in the composer’s arrangement for two pianos, which may be even more
effective. The original song is a blues number which became popular in the
1930s at the time of the textile mill strikes in the American South (folk
singer Pete Seeger recorded it on his American Industrial Ballads album).
Winnsboro is a town in South Carolina where there were many cotton mills.
Conditions for workers were harsh and became harsher when the
government’s attempt to reduce working hours was met with cynical
increases in production targets imposed by mill owners. Workers were
subjected to so-called ‘stretch-outs’, meaning extensions of their working
day without extra pay. In 1934, as part of a wider co-ordinated strike of
textile mill workers, the Winnsboro workers rebelled and sat outside the
mills refusing to work. Music played an important part in the strike; to keep
up their spirits, they made up songs or refitted old songs with new words to
reflect their situation. One of them was an older blues, The Alcoholic Blues,
which the Winnsboro workers brought up to date with lyrics conjuring up
the prospect of being worked to death and beyond:

Ol’ man sergeant sittin’ at the desk

The damn ol’ fool won’t give us no rest
 He’d take the nickels off a dead man’s eyes
To buy a Coca-Cola and a eskimo pie

I got the blues, I got the blues

I got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues.
Oh Lordy, Lordy, spoolin’s hard
You know and I know, we don’t have to tell
You work for Tom Watson gotta work like hell
I got the blues, I got the blues
I got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues

When I die don’t you bury me at all

Hang me up on the schoolroom wall
Place a bobbin in my hand
So I can keep on a-workin’ in the Promised Land

Rzewski’s brilliant idea was to use the piano to imitate the sound of cotton
mill machinery. The first three minutes consist of clusters of black and
white notes in the deep bass register in steady, implacable alternation. Low
down in the bass we cannot discern the pitches with any accuracy, and it
seems uncannily as if we are trapped inside the mill during a working shift.
At first it seems as if there is no human presence, but gradually, lyrical
fragments start to emerge (at this point there is a sequence of chords which
recalls the opening of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, but I have
no idea whether this is intended to convey a metaphor or not). As the
machines continue their shuttling, the tune of the Winnsboro Cotton Mill
Blues starts slowly in the right hand. Before long, machines drown it out,
though fragments of the song appear to be tangled up in the machinery. At
the climax of this section, a crashing chord is held for a long time, echoing
down the halls.
Then, like a slow movement, we hear a gentle performance of the blues
in the key of B flat. In the context, it seems fragile and touching. We seem
to be far away from the mills, perhaps in a saloon bar late at night,
drowning our sorrows. The song gathers force and at its peak we begin to
realise that the rumbling of machinery has resumed. Now there is chaotic,
dissonant counterpoint with bits of the blues theme being chewed up in the
machinery of a fugue. (The sound-world of Charles Ives feels quite close at
this point.) Again the mood changes; now we hear the whole of the
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues declaimed cheerily in the treble with the
machine-like figuration cannily transformed into a kind of boogie-woogie
bass from which the ‘swing’ element has been scoured away. But the ‘break
time’ comes to a sudden end as the tune is swept away by the sound of loud
machinery, rattling on and on.
For me this piece provokes all sorts of reflections on the piano, the
pianist, the worker, and the role of the musician in society. The piano itself
is a kind of machine. Looking into its mechanism is not utterly unlike
looking into the machinery of a ‘spinning jenny’ as the early industrial
spinning frames were called. Moreover, the repetitive and tedious processes
of piano practice have something in common with the repetitive actions of
machine work, even at the highest levels. Is it ridiculous to compare a
professional pianist to a worker, or does it reveal something useful about
the musician’s life which is usually hidden from us by the label of ‘art’?
The image of a formally dressed pianist at a grand piano in a concert
hall is very far from the image of an industrial worker at a loom, and their
working conditions are quite different, yet they share some elements. Both
are making something beautiful for which they hope to be remunerated. The
cotton mill strikes ultimately failed when production moved elsewhere.
What if the same thing happens to musicians, when what they offer can be
cheaply or electronically reproduced, when nobody wants to buy the
laboriously hand-crafted version? Will anyone compensate pianists when
their skilled job is taken over by robots? What is ‘protest music’ for
musicians? These and other thoughts are prompted by Rzewski’s potent
blend of lyricism and industrial process.
Many composers of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries have
written for piano and ‘prepared piano’, extending John Cage’s experiments.
This repertoire, which has its own specialists, has been somewhat
superseded by the development of the computer and all the effects which
can be achieved electronically without the need to interfere physically with
the mechanism of the piano.
Today’s piano music is not united by the kind of shared musical
language which composers of earlier eras used as their default starting
point. Musical language and notation has become bewilderingly diverse;
colourful graphic scores, designed to represent music in new and less
prescriptive ways, could also function as little artworks. Some
contemporary music may not seem like music in the traditional sense at all,
but more like theatre, mathematics, or an art installation. There is an array
of attitudes towards the piano, and towards pianists. Some contemporary
composers seem to go out of their way to make it clear that they don’t see
the pianist as any kind of Romantic hero, nor do they wish to continue the
exhausting Romantic search for expression of the individual soul; this kind
of contemporary music often seems affectless, deliberately not engaging
with the emotions. Others have continued to see the potential of virtuoso
piano music, now pressed into service not so much for exuberance and
beauty as for the portrayal of contemporary anxieties and dystopian visions.
Several of today’s most interesting composers have used piano music as an
opportunity to reflect on the styles of earlier eras. A lot of the more
popularly successful recent piano music has been concerned with evoking a
peaceful, dreamlike state of ‘flow’, valued by those seeking escape from the
pressures of modern life. This diversity of language and purpose is
potentially enriching, but it is not yet clear whether music-lovers are really
developing wider tastes, or whether each genre has its own specialised
audience. As so often, the world of music mirrors wider society, which
through the internet now has a vast range of references at its command, but
often seems to polarise and break down into ‘special interest’ groups.

ARVO PÄRT (b. 1935)

97. Für Alina
The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is currently the most performed
contemporary composer in the world, and has been so for several years. His
style is a unique outpost of minimalism, sometimes referred to as ‘holy
minimalism’ because of its religious underpinning. Pärt began his career by
writing in styles favoured by the Soviet authorities, but in 1960 he got into
trouble with Nekrolog, the first piece of twelve-note music written in
Estonia, which was criticised as showing ‘susceptibility to foreign
influences’. Some years later he was again criticised for writing an overtly
religious work, Credo. He then maintained a silence for eight years, during
which he immersed himself in the study of early religious music such as
Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony. In 1972 he converted to the
Eastern Orthodox Church. It was another four years before he emerged
from his silence with the first of the works which brought him to worldwide
attention. This was his 1976 piano piece Für Alina (For Alina).
Für Alina is an example of the ‘tintinnabuli’ style for which Pärt is
famous. Tintinnabuli refers to the ringing of bells, a sound which has
multiple meanings for the composer. The way that bells, particularly large
ones like church bells, resonate has been of enduring interest to all sorts of
people from musicians to scientists and poets. Bells can be ‘tuned’ like
other instruments. Their characteristic shape means that when they are
struck, their overtones are complex. The listening ear detects first a ‘strike
tone’ and later a number of other overtones, some lower and some higher
than the note first detected. In particular there is a ‘hum’ note which sounds
an octave lower. In the higher overtones, the notes easiest to detect are the
minor third and the fifth above the basic note of the bell. The prominence of
the minor third in the bell’s acoustic cloud may be one reason why listeners
often perceive bells as having something ‘sad’, ‘solemn’ or ‘mysterious’
about them.
In the piano piece Für Alina, the bell’s overtones are explored in a very
simple structure of just fifteen bars, notated in the key of B minor. No
tempo is given, and the only indication of volume is ‘quiet’; there are no
crescendos or diminuendos. By contrast, the mood is specified with the
words ‘Calm, exalted, listening in to oneself’. Each bar varies in length, and
contains only a few notes. First we hear two low Bs struck simultaneously
in the deep bass, kept ringing by holding down the sustaining pedal. Then,
in the treble part, a simple symmetrical structure begins, with bars gradually
lengthening and then gradually shortening again. In the first bar there is a
short note (its duration unspecified) and a long one. In the second bar, there
are two short notes and a long one; in the third bar there are three short
notes and a long one, and so on, up to the point where there are seven short
notes and a long one. Then the pattern reverses, with six short notes and a
long one, and so on, until there is just one short note and a long one. The
final bar has a ‘coda’ of two short notes and a long one, perhaps a kind of
‘Amen’.
Throughout, the left hand plays one or other note of a simple B minor
chord – B, D or F sharp. The right hand (playing high up, and always
coinciding exactly with the left) plays a kind of melody, formed of notes
one might hear in the higher overtones of a bell (in this case B, C sharp, D,
E, F sharp, G, A). The selection of precisely which left-hand note
accompanies which right-hand note is carefully made, so that occasionally
‘dissonant’ intervals, such as a ninth (an octave plus one note), arise
between them; these intervals provoke delicate overtones, more noticeable
at a slow tempo. There is only one point, at the end of bar 11, where the
bass note departs from its guideline and plays a C sharp, and it is at this
point also that Pärt asks for the pedal to be lifted (to stop the resonance
from continuing) and put down again in the next bar. In the context of very
plain and simple harmonies, the use of a left-hand C sharp in bar 11 feels
like a meaningful shift of focus, albeit for one moment only. There is some
subtle calculation involved in exactly where this happens.
The piece does not concern itself with the usual array of techniques with
which composers and pianists demonstrate their expressive skill. It is the
opposite of virtuosic, in a way which is both intentional and important.
There is no opportunity for playing fast, loud, or showing mastery of
emotional contrasts (in this way, Pärt has something in common with Satie).
How then is a performer to approach such music? In writing it for piano, the
composer must have considered that it might be played in a piano recital.
Clearly the aim is to bring to the concert hall the mystical experience of
hearing, say, Gregorian chant sung in an ancient monastery where overtones
linger in the vaulted space. Can such a thing be done by playing a few notes
on the piano in a mindful manner? Does the spiritual meaning reside in the
notes themselves, or must the performer think how to create a rapt
atmosphere by means of body language, facial expression and so on? In one
sense there is not much to the notes, but if they are unevenly or carelessly
played, the effect will be lost. Quality of tone and of concentration are
important, and these take skill. The piece encourages the pianist to think
about what simplicity is, and how to achieve it.
Pärt’s ‘tintinnabuli’ style draws on ancient elements that are part of
heritages around the world. It clearly resonates with many listeners,
particularly perhaps the younger generation who have been exposed more
than most to formulaic electronic music, often greatly amplified. Many
composers have tried to follow Pärt in evoking a peaceful meditative
atmosphere which is far away from the hustle and bustle of modern life, but
to my ears many of these imitations are less genuinely spiritual than Arvo
Pärt’s. As the composer Steve Reich has said, ‘Pärt’s music fulfils a deep
human need that has nothing to do with fashion.’

PHILIP GLASS (b. 1937)

98. Mad Rush
The American minimalist composer Philip Glass is one of the most
successful and influential composers in the world today, his music familiar
from his 1975 opera Einstein on the Beach and from films such as
Koyaanisqatsi, The Hours, The Truman Show and Notes on a Scandal.
Glass is a classically trained composer who studied with Nadia Boulanger
in Paris and counts Bach, Mozart and Schubert among his favourite
composers. But in 1967, after hearing a minimalist work by Steve Reich in
New York, he changed course. He simplified his style and focused on a
‘consonant vocabulary’, meaning harmonies which sound pleasant. His first
minimalist works were not received with enthusiasm by fellow musicians,
but he formed his own ensemble, started performing his music in New York
lofts and quickly gathered fans amongst visual artists, writers and rock
musicians. After some years Glass felt that minimalism had lost its appeal
for him, but without abandoning the style altogether he started to introduce
new elements into it, calling it ‘music with repetitive structures’.
Glass has always been interested in spiritual matters and particularly in
Eastern religions; his opera Satyagraha focuses on Mahatma Gandhi’s early
years and the development of his theories of non-violent resistance. He is
also a supporter of Tibetan independence and of the Dalai Lama, who
preaches social change through non-violent resistance. In 1979 Glass was
asked to compose something for the visit of the fourteenth Dalai Lama to
New York. Recalling this in later years, Glass said that the organisers were
unsure exactly when His Holiness would arrive in the hall, so ‘I was asked
to compose a piece of somewhat indefinite length – not actually a problem
for me.’ This was a reference to Glass’s now-famous method of repeating
blocks of material over and over again with small incremental changes
occurring slowly – a method that can obviously be used to generate music
of flexible length. His response was to write a keyboard piece which, on the
occasion of the Dalai Lama’s visit, had its first performance on the organ,
this being the instrument in the hall. Later he gave it the title Mad Rush,
though this had nothing to do with its original purpose. ‘For those interested
in Buddhism,’ said Glass, ‘you might think of it as the interplay between the
wrathful and peaceful deities.’
Mad Rush has become one of Glass’s signature piano pieces and has
been recorded many times by him and other pianists. It demonstrates his
characteristic combination of a detailed, intricately patterned surface
bonded to simple underlying harmonies in units repeated in more or less
moveable blocks. It has a three-part structure which he calls ‘A’, ‘B’ and
‘C’, all closely related. Just a few chords are used, primarily chords of F
major and A minor with occasional interpolations of G minor. Sparing use is
made of added seventh notes, such as the note E in the F major chord, or the
note F in the G minor chord; towards the end a D flat also creeps into the G
minor harmonies. The listener’s ear holds on to the oscillating quavers on
the notes A and C in the left hand; these two notes are common to both F
major and A minor, and by restrained use of bass notes can be made to
represent one or the other. After the rocking quaver motion has been
established in the left hand, the right enters with triplets, setting up a gentle
three-against-two motion. A melodic fragment, F-G-F-E, drifts slowly
through the bass from time to time. After a number of repeated sections, the
rippling motion is intensified when both hands break out (loudly and at a
slightly faster speed) into glittering sextuplet arpeggios, still elaborating the
same simple chords. The performer must be on their guard here, because the
rippling pattern is not always predictable; occasionally in the final bar of a
phrase, fractions of extra beats are added, for example stretching a bar of
twenty-four semiquavers to one of twenty-eight, an effect which causes the
mind to do a tiny ‘double take’.
In the ‘B’ section, things follow the same course, with some elisions so
that the rippling arpeggios arrive sooner. Then the performer is directed to
go back to the beginning and repeat the ‘A’ section again. In the ‘C’ section,
or ‘Coda’, things calm down. The gentle quaver motion reasserts itself, and
this time, as the melodic fragments drift through the left hand, they are
answered by rising fragments of an A minor chord – octaves of A-C-E –
drifting upwards through the treble region. The end, when it comes, seems
arbitrary: the pattern is simply cut by an invisible editor’s scissors.
This sort of music raises the question of what music is and what it is
supposed to do. There are many kinds of music around the world which
explore the idea of slowly changing patterns and aim to produce a
meditative state of mind in the listener. In the great tradition of piano music,
such patterns have been background, not foreground. In ‘music with
repetitive structures’, as with a lot of minimalist music, slowly changing
patterns are the whole point. Such music does not grab us by the
heartstrings, but perhaps that is missing the point: peaceful immersion is the
goal. As for ‘the interplay between the wrathful and peaceful deities’,
however, one is left wondering whether this is a claim too far.

JUDITH WEIR (b. 1954)

99. The Art of Touching the Keyboard
Judith Weir, currently Master of the Queen’s Music, is a British composer
of Scottish origin (this is important to her). Although perhaps best known
for her operas and larger-scale ensemble works, piano music has been
threaded through her composing career, partly because pianist friends (such
as me) have prevailed upon her to write solo and chamber pieces for them.
Weir’s piano writing seems to share some of György Kurtág’s playful,
enquiring, irreverent approach to the instrument as exemplified in his
Játékok series: imaginative and humorous, but ultimately serious in
purpose.
 In 1983 Judith Weir wrote her piano piece The Art of Touching the
Keyboard. Its title is what she calls ‘an over-literal translation of the title of
François Couperin’s harpsichord tutor of 1716, L’art de toucher le
clavecin’. Couperin’s work was designed to instruct keyboard players how
to play his music with correct style, and he included an essay on how to
ornament the lines tastefully. His music was, of course, designed not for the
modern piano but for the earlier (plucked) harpsichord, and it is the
harpsichord’s dry, precise and clear sonority that seems to lie behind much
of Weir’s piano writing, as though she secretly hankers for the qualities that
characterised Baroque keyboard music. In all her piano writing, she treats
the piano as primarily a rhythmical instrument, preferring the ‘dry’ side of
the sound spectrum to the ‘wet’ side – glorious, richly harmonised melodies
and luscious pedalled chords – which became so popular in the Romantic
era. The sustaining pedal is used judiciously for special effects. Rests and
silences are telling ingredients of Weir’s piano music and, refreshingly, it
seems that she pays as much attention to how the notes should end as to
how they should begin.
Weir has written a piano concerto: it is fifteen minutes long, with three
short movements scored for piano and an ensemble of nine string
instruments. She once said of it, ‘Ever since the modern piano was born, the
composition of piano concertos has been on an inflationary spiral, and it is
now a musical form associated with the crashingly loud side of music;
which is not the kind of music I generally like to write.’ Her own piano
concerto is, indeed, anti-show-off and is more like a quirky concerto grosso
of the Baroque era (and perhaps a cousin of Manuel de Falla’s 1926
Concerto for Harpsichord and Five Instruments). The soloist generally plays
with hands moving in unison or in parallel, often playing in the treble, and
almost always coolly, interspersing the string phrases with objective-
sounding comments and studiously avoiding vainglorious climaxes of the
type we know from the ‘warhorses’ of the concerto repertoire. In fact the
endings are often deliberately thrown away, like a comedian with an
exceedingly dry delivery (the end of the third movement is a case in point
with its final ‘wrong-note’ chord almost like someone sticking their tongue
out at the audience, pleased to have confounded their expectations). Here
again it seems as if the composer might have been envisaging the piano as
an over-dimensional harpsichord.
 The Art of Touching the Keyboard is, in homage to Couperin, a
compendium of ways to touch the piano keys ‘from the gentlest of strokes
to the most vicious of blows’, as Weir says. Unusually for solo piano music
the sustaining pedal is rarely used, and in almost every bar there are rests,
which aerate the texture and force the pianist to be constantly attentive to
how to strike the next note. The piece begins with the player touching single
keys tentatively and ends ten minutes later with the same keys played in a
‘confident and relaxed’ manner. From the cautious opening, the pianist
begins to add little feathery grace notes around the melody notes, and then
more elaborate rhythmic figures, increasing in volume. As in Weir’s piano
concerto, the pianist’s hands generally move in parallel motion, and their
sphere of action is usually the mid-to-high regions of the piano. Sometimes
they divide a spidery line of delicate figuration between them, but rarely
combine to produce rich and complex textures; now and then there is a
‘Romantic’-sounding bar, for example one with a nine-note chord directed
to be sustained with the pedal for a whole bar, marked ‘luxurious’ (which
seems ironical).
In the middle of the piece, a quiet chordal passage evokes a different
style of writing, perhaps that of Brahms. This is followed by the direction to
put down the ‘una corda’ (‘soft’) pedal. This effect is held for an unusually
long time while the piano holds a restless debate with itself; quiet chords
are interrupted by loud glissandos, long chords in one hand are played short
in the other hand; chords jump about in a skeletal jig.
The soft pedal comes up, and for a moment it seems that a melodic
theme may be ushered in, but although it makes several attempts it is
drowned out by rhythmical chattering, the hands still moving in rhythmic
unison (‘nervous and disjointed’). Through the chattering it seems as if
words may be being spoken, or rather muttered. The closest we come to a
traditional melodic theme is the dance-like passage marked ‘with urgency’;
a fragment of melody is heard in the right hand while the left begins to
rumble. The urgency increases and the rumbling gets louder and more
brutal before fading away again. Six bars of precisely notated silence
follow, and then the coda (‘pp, with a veiled tone’). Again a hint of Brahms
seems to flit through the pedalled chords, which grow in richness and
complexity. Is there to be a Romantic ending after all? No; the pedal is
lifted, a naked F breaks rudely through the dream, and the pianist ends with
three short, simple B major chords marked ‘confident and relaxed’.

THOMAS ADÈS (b. 1971)

100. Three Mazurkas
Chopin’s mazurkas are a nostalgic tribute by a Polish exile to a form of
dance music popular in his beloved homeland. The mazurka has roots in
village life, but Chopin’s mazurkas took them out of the village and into the
elegant salons of the nineteenth century. In Poland the mazurka can be slow
or fast, and Chopin’s mazurkas illustrate both kinds.
Chopin of course was one of the leading composer-pianists, and
Thomas Adès is a modern example. Adès himself has said that he is a
composer first and foremost and that ‘when you come to see me play the
piano, you’re seeing a composer who is a pianist’. This sounds as if it might
be an excuse for disappointing piano skills, but nothing could be further
from the truth: Adès is a renowned pianist. So it is fascinating to see what a
composer-pianist of the twenty-first century does when he is invited to look
at some of the piano pieces of Chopin from almost two hundred years
earlier.
Adès was asked to write something for Emanuel Ax to play during
Chopin’s bicentenary celebrations in 2010. His response was Three
Mazurkas, a kind of double refraction of the mazurka as seen by Chopin as
seen by Adès. Just as Chopin took the mazurka out of the fields and into the
salon, Adès seems to have taken the mazurka out of the salon and into the
realm of space-age fantasy. The characteristic rhythms of the mazurka are
still there, though not all the time; Adès also keeps Chopin’s ‘rubato’ style,
meaning a gentle flexibility of tempo around the beat. The melodic shapes
of Chopin’s mazurkas are there too, though elongated and distorted so that
occasionally it feels as if we are watching Chopin in one of those crazy
mirrors which bend and stretch familiar outlines.
Adès’s first Mazurka is in the key of A minor, the key of some of
Chopin’s loveliest and saddest mazurkas. The dotted-rhythm first beat and
two following crotchets are familiar, and so is the ‘travelling’ melodic line,
swooping easily up and down across the octaves with ornaments
reminiscent of Chopin’s. At first glance Adès’s use of wide intervals may
seem un-Chopin-like, but actually Chopin made wonderfully effective use
of wide intervals when he wanted to introduce piquancy into the melodic
line, as in his famous B flat Mazurka, op. 7 no. 1, where the melody line
contains lots of drooping sevenths or ninths, and the middle section ‘sotto
voce’ makes great play with the dissonant interval of a ninth. Chopin’s
drone bass in this middle section also finds an echo in the middle section of
Adès’s first mazurka. The reprise in the Adès sees the mazurka theme bent
this way and that in volatile changes of time signature including bars of 5/8
and 2/4 within the triple time.
The second mazurka is headed with the interesting instruction
‘prestissimo e molto espressivo’ (extremely fast and very expressive), two
qualities which might seem to contradict one another but can produce an
unusual effect. Chopin has only one mazurka marked ‘Presto ma non
troppo’ – the E flat minor, op. 6 no. 4. Probably one should not look for
close correspondence between Chopin’s mazurkas and Adès’s, but Chopin’s
E flat minor mazurka has the same restless sequence of descending melodic
phrases repeating constantly, as though trapped in a bubble. (A similar
effect can he heard in another fast mazurka, Chopin’s C major, op. 7 no. 5,
with its mysterious instruction to repeat ‘without end’, and the final
chromatic section of the D major mazurka, op. 33 no. 2, is another which
might have provided grist for the mill.)
In Chopin’s E flat minor mazurka there are only a couple of triplets, but
triplets are the focus of Adès’s second mazurka. The left hand plays six-bar
phrases which start high and descend in crotchets before hiking themselves
up and doing it all again on slightly different pitches. Meanwhile the right
hand dances crazily about in triplets and quavers whose rhythms are blurred
by tiny obsessive mordents (little decorative ‘snaps’) on many of the notes.
The loud middle section, marked ‘boisterously’, reverses the melodic trend,
this time with short phrases striving repeatedly to make their way upwards
against a clumsy rhythmic bass which keeps switching from 3/4 to 2/4 and
back. In the reprise, the left hand is pulled into the right hand’s orbit,
abandoning its plain statement of the beats and becoming intoxicated with
offbeat rhythms.
 The third mazurka (‘Grave, maestoso’) is of the melancholy kind, and is
in fact much graver than any of Chopin’s, as if it is a kind of ‘tombeau’ or
memorial tribute. Its texture is much sparer than the other two mazurkas –
single notes, spaced widely apart in both hands, are placed with solemn care
almost like a piece of Arvo Pärt’s. Eventually, a third line arises, with a
dotted rhythm, threading its way between the hands while the slow notes
continue. The middle section takes up a faster tempo and an ethereal
quality, directed to be played ‘pppp’ (very, very, very quietly). Is there an
echo of the equivalent section of Chopin’s A minor mazurka, op. 17 no. 4?
In the reprise, we hear again the two slender lines in the high treble and
the bass, but this time there is more going on in the middle register between
the two: not only the dotted rhythm motif, but now also a stately descending
line in crotchets, proceeding implacably through the texture from the treble
to the baritone region where it merges with the slowly tolling notes of the
deep bass. The piece ends on that most unsettling of intervals, the tritone
(three whole-tone steps), in this case a high E in the right hand and a low B
flat in the bass. Some of Chopin’s mazurkas end inconclusively – the A
minor, op. 17 no. 4, for instance – or they end surprisingly, like the D major
mazurka, op. 33 no. 2, which ends with a modal scale (incorporating that
same strange tritone interval) flying up into the ether. And there is the
poignantly unfinished wistful mazurka in F minor, op. 68 no. 4,
reconstructed from manuscript pages found among Chopin’s possessions
after his death – perhaps this was in Adès’s mind too, for at the end of his
third mazurka he seems to take his hands off the keys as if saying, ‘No one
knows what comes next.’
In the new millennium, piano music – or at least some of it – has been
taking a new direction. Composers of the younger generation have spoken
of feeling that we had reached ‘peak complexity’ with the piano music of,
for example, Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy. In contemporary
music circles it seemed for a while as though only tough, uncompromising
modernism with a challenging attitude could really count as serious music.
While certain modernist composers and their adherents were insistent that
people needed to get used to and learn to like this kind of music, it’s
probably fair to say that the general public was never convinced.
As the twentieth century progressed, more and more of a split seemed to
open up between ‘contemporary music’ on the one hand and ‘commercial
music’ on the other. Serious contemporary music received backing from
(for example) broadcasting organisations, Arts Councils and university
music courses, but remained a specialist field. Some professional
performers would go to tremendous lengths to learn the latest intellectually
rigorous or graphically adventurous pieces of music, while others, perhaps
the majority, sighed when they had to engage with new music which they
knew would take forever to learn and would probably be received glumly
by non-specialist audiences. In my own experience, which I could
summarise as a modest but ongoing effort to learn new music, I could not
help feeling sad that its complexity and the time it took to practise and
rehearse were rarely matched by the enthusiasm of the audience’s response.
There were exceptions, but they were rare. To many of us it felt that one
could not go much further in the direction of daunting complexity; clearly
the time was ripe for some sort of change in the weather, but from which
direction would it come?
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the American minimalists showed one
possible way to attract the attention of a new audience with simple but
engaging ‘repetitive structures’ (as Philip Glass termed his music) which
co-opted Eastern philosophies in support of their tranquil enjoyment of the
present moment. In their wake came a younger generation of composers
who wanted to build on the minimalists’ achievements, incorporating new
and diverse influences. These influences reflected the fact that music was
more and more widely available through digital streaming services and
could be accessed as easily by a music fan in Lagos, Tokyo or Reykjavik as
by one in New York or Berlin.
 Many people now get their exposure to classical music through film and
television. Knowing how big the audience is, a lot of composers aspire to
write film scores or music for advertisements. Certain pieces of classical
music are now identified on playlists as being ‘from the movie such-and-
such’, although this claim would have surprised Mozart (Elvira Madigan,
The Shawshank Redemption), Beethoven (A Clockwork Orange, The King’s
Speech), Wagner (Apocalypse Now, Melancholia), Rachmaninoff (Brief
Encounter, Shine), Chopin (The Pianist, Little Women), or Samuel Barber
(The Elephant Man, Platoon). Some composers from before the age of film
even have their own ‘filmography’ pages listing their ‘soundtracks’. They
might have been further surprised to find that their piano pieces are
classified as ‘songs’, a catch-all term which has made its way into the
vocabulary of piano students.
Another new factor in how people like to listen to music was the rise of
stadium concerts attended by huge audiences. Amplification allowed single
artists (including pianists) and small groups of musicians to convey their
music to the very back of the stadium. Those who couldn’t be physically
present could often stream a concert to their phones or other devices
wherever they were in the world. Gradually this has created a sense of the
audience as a vast and multicultural group which feels itself to be a
community of some kind, even if bonded only by social media. (During the
coronavirus pandemic of 2020, when live music events disappeared, this
sense of a community was heightened – and perhaps even strengthened by
the fact that there was no division between the privileged ones who were
really there at the live performance and those who were only able to listen
remotely; during lockdown, everyone was listening to the same streamed
event.) Importantly, this community is not drawn from a single tradition or
musical heritage, but sees itself as open to other influences and understands
the wish and need of minority groups to be included. In turn this has
changed composers’ perceptions of who and where their listeners are.
Composers have used computer technology to produce all sorts of
effects impossible for an ordinary pianist to produce. The basic sound of the
piano can be synthesised and used to ‘play’ any piece of piano music,
though anyone with experience of the real thing is likely to be discontented
with the result. For this kind of technology-generated piano music, no
physical interaction with a piano is necessary and no human being need be
present. It has found a home in computer gaming, but as yet it feels as if it
inhabits a different sphere of activity to the one that most ‘acoustic’ pianists
interact with. More and more examples of piano music on the internet are
supplied by computer programmes, a worrying development for human
pianists who fear that people will get used to the uninflected piano sound
characteristic of computer piano-playing and start considering it iconic.
The digital piano has become more and more common and is now the
default choice for city dwellers living in apartments, but the acoustic piano
still retains its allure. Electronic keyboards are often used at non-classical
events, but when a solo artist from the pop/rock world wants to accompany
themselves on the piano in a prestigious venue, they generally choose to
play a grand piano. Its distinctive curved shape has cachet. Playing a grand
piano has become the equivalent of putting on a dinner jacket or a posh
gown for a special occasion – a dignified choice with historical resonance.
Many students now leave school without having encountered much of
the classical repertoire unless their parents choose to pay for private
lessons, usually outside the main school curriculum and often outside the
school altogether. Young music fans are raised on a diet of pop music and
music composed for computer games. However, the pressures of modern
life have left many people feeling that they need some kind of music which
creates a feeling of calm and a contemplative space. Pop is often too hectic,
dance music too insistent. They are bored with needing special ear plugs or
noise-cancelling headphones to attend stadium concerts. They’re not sure if
it’s good for them to feel their hearts jumping in their ribcage because of the
sheer volume. Classical music already has a huge repertoire which could
fulfil the need for beautiful, contemplative music, but this resource is only
useful to people who are aware that it exists. And, sadly, it seems that many
are not, because it is not offered to them as part of their core education.
Lacking awareness of what’s already there, many have turned instead to a
new crop of pieces designed to fulfil the desire for ‘mindful’ music.

AMBIENT MUSIC
When Erik Satie honed his neutral, pared-back style of piano music in late
nineteenth-century Paris, he was considered eccentric. We can now see that
his music inspired later composers to emulate his conscious disengagement
from the hurly-burly of city life. Works such as his Gymnopédies for solo
piano have enjoyed a new surge of popularity in the twenty-first century.
Satie said he wanted to write pieces which were ‘melodious, softening the
noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing
itself’. It’s interesting that he chose to write these pieces for the piano,
which has often been used to symbolise the solitary individual, musing on
life. A glance at the score of Satie’s Gymnopédies will show how similar
they are to many of the pieces which today fill albums of ‘contemporary
piano music’.
This new piano music hovers somewhere between pop and minimalism.
It is sometimes called ‘ambient’, meaning that atmosphere is more
important than structure or musical development. Actually, the whole of
classical music is scattered with examples of such pieces, but they generally
play a role within a larger context. (For example, the first movement of
Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata with its rolling melancholy arpeggios and
its simple slow-moving theme might almost be an eerie and brilliant
anticipation of ambient piano music.) When ambient music became a genre
of its own in the mid-twentieth century, an influential example was Terry
Riley’s 1964 composition In C, which uses repetitive patterns and principles
learned from Indian classical music. Another pioneering work was Brian
Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports of 1978. Its composer wrote in the
liner notes that ‘Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to
think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of
listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as
ignorable as it is interesting.’
Michael Nyman has written a great deal of minimalist film music which
has drawn large audiences to the concerts of his Michael Nyman Band.
Nyman is a pianist himself and his film music has supplied pianists with
some very popular pieces such as The Heart Asks Pleasure First, minimalist
music crossed with Scottish folk song. Amongst younger composers, Max
Richter, Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds have all attained cult status with
their partly acoustic, partly electronic keyboard music used in films, dance,
and collaborations with visual artists. The music of the Italian pianist
Ludovico Einaudi – who started out as a pupil of Luciano Berio – has been
hugely successful in recent years, attracting large and respectful audiences
around the world. Against the roar of acclaim, we sometimes hear the
exasperated voices of music critics complaining that there is nothing there,
that it is ‘clichéd and shameless’, as The Guardian found when Einaudi
played seven sold-out concerts at London’s Barbican Centre in 2019.
To any pianist with a wide repertoire, the simplicity of ambient music is
indeed a little puzzling. Why are these composers restricting themselves to
such a simple vocabulary? Don’t they know what can be done with a piano?
Are they pretending to know nothing about the rich heritage of piano
music? Their post-minimalist piano pieces seem formulaic and sometimes
even interchangeable. They are often at a dreamily slow tempo, with very
simple melody lines or figurations based in the middle regions of the
keyboard. Often they are based on just a few chords, generally in root
position, the simplest form of the chord; chord sequences are repeated over
and over again. To me, listening to them is often like waiting and waiting
for the actual music to begin and then discovering that the piece is over.
But the lack of complexity is part of the point. The simplicity is
intended to tap into other, older kinds of music which excel at creating a
‘mindful’ atmosphere: mediaeval plainchant, for example, or any kind of
chant used in religious contexts. In a sense, plainchant could hardly be
simpler – single lines, small intervals, voices in unison, no harmonies, no
chords, no insistent beat, lots of repetition, long flowing phrases which help
the listener to sink into a state of spiritual contemplation. Despite its
simplicity, its effect can be profound.
Ambient piano music seems to inhabit a world which overlaps with this.
It does not aim to over-stimulate, nor does it block out other things which
are going on in the room. Students use it to create a calm background for
studying; it is used in yoga classes, kindergartens, health spas, delivery
suites in hospitals. From the comments left under YouTube clips of such
music, it is clear that many people find it beautiful, restful, nostalgic and
evocative, even spiritual.
One thing hasn’t changed, however: all the best-known exponents of
such piano music are men. In a generation very sensitive to the
marginalisation of women, this is perplexing. The ambient artist is often in
priest-like black at the piano, dramatically lit so he appears to have some
sort of aura. Perhaps the projection of such a persona is something which
comes more naturally to men, or is associated with men by those designing
the stage sets. At any rate, the stars of ambient piano are continuing a long
tradition of male composer-pianists who were comfortable with ‘guru
status’ – and in the meantime there is still a gender imbalance.
One important point is that a lot of minimalist/ambient piano music is
not technically difficult. Pianists who have trained for years to develop an
advanced technique may look at such music with alarm, wondering what
was the point of all their training if this is what ‘piano music’ means today.
On the plus side, technical approachability brings such music within the
grasp of many people who might otherwise be locked out of the piano
repertoire. It enables more people to feel that they are pianists and can use
the piano to make music, and this can only be a good thing.
On the minus side, this kind of music lacks contrast. Yes, it is dreamy
and calming, but will these qualities be enough for it to endure? Will
listeners come to feel that its palette is too narrow, its challenges too easily
met? If we as a society find ways of reducing stress and conflict, will the
need for such music disappear? We don’t know the answers yet. What is
certain is that piano music is in a phase of democratisation, opening itself to
influences and philosophies which have particular meaning for our era.

OPENING OUR EARS TO A RANGE OF MUSIC

Writing this book has reminded me that we respond to different kinds of
music at different times. Perhaps we even need different kinds of music at
different stages of our lives. Over the centuries, composers have produced
music of every grade of difficulty, whether technical, musical or
intellectual, and have always found listeners who were glad they had made
the effort to express themselves in precisely that sort of language. For every
person who likes nothing better than to chill out to a cool Gymnopédie,
there is another who is thankful that J.S. Bach exerted his imagination to the
utmost in the Goldberg Variations.
Listening to many different kinds of piano music, I have been struck by
the fact that on some days a complex piece is just what my mind enjoys
chewing on, while on other days the same complex piece feels slightly
sickening. A simple piece may seem soothing on some days, empty on
others. I can listen to a piece written yesterday and not have the faintest idea
what the composer is trying to tell me. Sometimes, music from centuries
ago seems just that, a faint message crackling through the air as it tries to
reach me, whereas at other times it feels as if time could really be a spiral,
enabling something from long ago to speak right in my ear and seem to be
putting my very thoughts into words. A piece written by someone who
‘speaks my language’ may be reassuring, but I also long to hear what people
are saying in other languages with other ways of interpreting the world.
All this proves that we need a range of music, because we are wide-
ranging people with lively imaginations. It also shows that nobody’s effort
has been wasted when they have taken the trouble to express something in
music. Even if a thought seems marginal when a composer first conceives
it, it will seem central to someone who has been searching for an echo of
their own experience and finds it in that particular piece. It takes a long time
to write down piano music, but someone may be glad you did. Somewhere
there’s a pianist who will relish the task of learning those notes – if not now,
then tomorrow, and if not here, then on another continent. One pianist will
thank you for writing something they can learn in an hour, while another
will be glad to have a challenge that keeps them company for months.
The range of music we have is not a dry historical archive – it is a
treasury of human expression. Piano music is one of its glories. As a body
of work developed over more than two centuries, piano music is surely one
of the great achievements of any musical culture: probably no other
instrument can or ever will boast such a fabulous repertoire. The piano was
invented and developed in Europe, and European composers created a large
part of its repertoire, but the piano now has worldwide appeal. The
pressures of urban living have made digital pianos popular, but the acoustic
piano still has cachet in many countries and a whole new prestige in China,
where piano manufacturers have sprung up to cater to the vast numbers of
young people learning to play it. As new generations of pianists come into
being, new music will be written for them; the repertoire will acquire
distinctive voices from other parts of the world.
As well as being installed in millions of homes, pianos have been
carried into the jungle, into the desert, into forests, into the Grand Canyon;
pianos have been put in pubs, street markets, railway station forecourts, in
airports and on beaches. They have been piled up into ‘pianodromes’,
bolted to the floor of cruise ships, and suspended in the air (not just when
being moved into an upper-storey apartment). They have been brought into
courtrooms to demonstrate music to judge and jury. Dummy keyboards
have been taken on long voyages by concert pianists. ‘Piano black’ is a
lustrous style of lacquer. Futuristic pianos with sweeping curves of
plexiglass, touchscreens and LED-lit cases adorn the lounges of luxury
yachts, though interestingly the shape of these designer instruments is based
on that of the 300-year-old grand piano.
The design of the piano keyboard hasn’t changed either. In the early
days, the white keys were sometimes black and the black keys white, but in
the nineteenth century this became standardised to the arrangement we
know today. The classic pattern of eighty-eight notes arranged in
interlocking layers of black and white keys has proved a brilliant solution to
making the twelve semitones of the octave available within the span of the
average hand. If the eighty-eight keys were side by side in a long row, an
octave would be too wide for the hand to stretch, and piano music would
have evolved quite differently. Luckily, technology has not suggested a
redesign. Pianists continue to move their fingers in the same patterns that
Bach did, and to practise on imaginary keyboards as he probably did too.
On that iconic layout of black and white keys, composers have
superimposed patterns of mind-boggling complexity. These patterns are
expressed in musical notes, but they also represent the spatial and physical
movements required to play them, as well as the timing involved. As all
pianists know, one can practise those movements without making a sound,
and one can find oneself contemplating them as abstract patterns in their
own right. Sometimes they seem to be silent charts of time and space
symbolising more than musical journeys. They have often made me think of
the I Ching, the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’, an ancient method of
divination which symbolises sixty-four basic situations of life in a series of
hexagrams composed of six horizontal lines, unbroken and broken. Some of
those hexagrams look uncannily like snippets of the piano keyboard.
Looking at them has given me new insight into the deep processes going on
when someone composes a piece of piano music. One could say the same of
any music, but the completeness and complexity of piano music is special.
A lot of piano music is played at home, but the piano is also one of the
most successful concert instruments. In the hands of concert pianists the
piano becomes an extraordinary amalgam of the personal and the public.
On stage, particularly when it is the only instrument on the platform, the
piano stands there like a challenge given physical form, and everyone in the
audience has some inkling of the courage the pianist needs to walk towards
it. Yet even the grandest of grand pianos does not lose its sense of being a
mouthpiece for a composer’s inward thoughts, a way of amplifying them
and broadcasting them to many people, each of whom has the sense that
they are listening in on the composer’s private experience. The concert
pianist is part of an intense triangle between composer, performer and
listener.
Take away the audience, however, and the pianist playing alone at home
is still part of an intense conversation with the composer. The composer has
provided the pianist with something to play, but it is the pianist who has the
power to turn the musical template into sound. Composer and pianist may
never meet, or even live in the same historical era, but their hopes are
invested in one another. That is a rewarding relationship which for many
pianists is one of the most enduring in their lives.
 FURTHER READING

It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive list of sources for a book like this. My thoughts
about music have developed over a career as a pianist during which I have been inspired by great
teachers such as Sándor Végh, György Sebők and György Kurtág, by fellow pianists, and by many
colleagues from different countries. Each of them has brought new insights into the music we have
played together. I have also developed my approach to both chamber and solo music through my own
teaching and my students’ observations. I have described many of these interactions in my previous
books, most recently in Speaking the Piano (Boydell Press, 2018).
When it comes to the history of piano music and the biographies of composers, I have consulted a
huge range of material available online. This includes composers’ scores and autographs, many of
which are available on the IMSLP website, scholarly articles available through JStor, entries in Grove
Online (the online version of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians), Wikipedia
articles, some of which are detailed and scholarly (though anonymous), and numerous other websites.
There are serious and scholarly websites devoted to several of the major composers.
Many books on music are either written for people who are fluent in musical notation and
terminology, or, if they are written for non-specialists, they skate round the difficult task of writing
about the music. Here are a few distinguished examples that achieve this balancing act, and can be
read for pleasure as well as information.

BOOKS DEVOTED TO SPECIFIC COMPOSERS

Avins, Styra (ed.), Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Bertensson, Sergei and Jay Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Indiana University
Press, 2009).
Boulez, Pierre, Orientations: Collected Writings, trans. Martin Cooper (Harvard University Press,
1990). Not easy, but gives an insight into this ruthless and penetrating intellect.
Cage, John, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 50th anniversary edn
2011).
Chissell, Joan, Clara Schumann (Hamish Hamilton, 1983).
Daverio, John, Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Dobrzański, Sławomir, ‘Maria Szymanowska and Fryderyk Chopin: Parallelism and Influence’
(2001, Polish Music Center website: polishmusic.usc.edu).
Duchen, Jessica, Gabriel Fauré (Phaidon, 2000).
Duschesneau, Louise and Wolfgang Marx (eds), György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange
Sounds (Boydell Press, 2011).
Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, as Seen by His Pupils (Cambridge
University Press, 1986).
Einstein, Alfred, Schubert: The Man and his Music, trans. David Ascoli (Cassell, 1951).
Forbes, Elliot (ed.), Thayer’s Life of Beethoven (Princeton University Press, 1967).
Hill, Peter and Nigel Simeone, Messiaen (Yale University Press, 2005).
Howat, Roy, The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier (Yale University
Press, 2009); and for a more detailed look at Debussy’s methods, Debussy in Proportion: A
Musical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Kirkpatrick, Ralph, Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton University Press, rev. edn, 1983). First published
in 1953, this remains the liveliest and most authoritative guide to Scarlatti’s music and its context.
Kurtz, Michael, Sofia Gubaidulina, trans. Christoph K. Lohmann (Indiana University Press, 2007).
Layton, Robert, Grieg (Omnibus Press, 2010).
Lockspeiser, Edward, Debussy: His Life and Mind, 2 vols (Cassell, 1962, 1965).
MacDonald, Malcolm, Schoenberg (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Morrison, Simon, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Nichols, Roger, Ravel (Yale University Press, 2010).
Pollack, Howard, George Gershwin: His Life and Work (University of California Press, 2006).
Potter, Caroline (ed.), Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature (Routledge, 2016).
Radcliffe, Philip, Schubert Piano Sonatas (BBC Music Guides, 1968).
Robbins Landon, H.C., Haydn: A Documentary Study (Rizzoli, 1981). A vivid and digestible
selection from Landon’s pioneering four-volume work, Haydn: Chronicle and Works (Thames
and Hudson, 1976–80).
Roberts, Paul, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Amadeus Press, 1996).
Selden-Goth, G., Felix Mendelssohn: Letters (Vienna House, 1973).
Spaethling, Robert, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life (Faber, 2004). There are several large and small
biographies of Mozart, but the most direct insight into his character is provided by this selection
of letters, translated without the ‘tidying up’ of earlier editors.
Suchoff, Benjamin (sel. and ed.), Béla Bartók Essays (Faber, 1976).
Swafford, Jan, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Faber, 2015).
Swafford, Jan, Charles Ives: A Life with Music (Norton, 1998).
Swafford, Jan, Johannes Brahms (Macmillan, 1998).
Tchaikovsky Research Website: en.tchaikovsky-research.net
Tovey, Donald Francis, A Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas (ABRSM, 1999). Collected
from Tovey’s commentaries to an edition of the Sonatas published in the 1930s, still full of
valuable insights for the performer and listener.
Tyrrell, John, Janáček: Years of a Life, 2 vols (Faber, 2006 and 2011).
Walker, Alan, Franz Liszt (Cornell University Press, vol. 1, The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (3rd rev.
edn, 1988); vol. 2, The Weimar Years, 1848–1861 (2nd rev. edn, 1993); vol. 3, The Final Years,
1861–1886 (1996).
Walker, Alan, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
Wolff, Christoph, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (Oxford University Press, 2001). A
detailed and scholarly biography, but also readable.
Wigmore, Richard, Haydn (Faber, 2009). One of Faber’s ‘Pocket Guides’, with insight into a wide
range of Haydn’s music.
Wilson, Elizabeth, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Faber, 1994).
 BROADER PERIODS
Hamilton, Kenneth, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford
University Press, 2008).
Isacoff, Stuart, A Natural History of the Piano (Knopf, 2011).
Lyons, Len, The Great Jazz Pianists (Da Capo Press, 1989).
Philip, Robert, The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music (Yale University Press,
2018). Includes descriptions of concertos from Bach to Prokofiev.
Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (expanded edn, W.W. Norton, 1998).
For readers with some musical knowledge, this celebrated book is full of insights.
Ross, Alex, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Fourth Estate, 2007). A brilliantly
readable guide to the knotted confusions of twentieth-century music.

THE THOUGHTS OF MODERN PIANISTS

Adès, Thomas, Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service (Faber, 2012).
Barenboim, Daniel, Music Quickens Time (Verso, 2008).
Brendel, Alfred, Alfred Brendel on Music (JR Books, 2007).
Brendel, Alfred, A Pianist’s A–Z (Faber, 2013).
Hough, Stephen, Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More (Faber, 2019).
Monsaingeon, Bruno (ed.), Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations (Faber, 2005).
Neuhaus, Heinrich, The Art of Piano Playing, trans. K.A. Leibovitch (Kahn & Averill, 1998). A
classic source of inspiration for pianists by a great teacher, whose pupils included Sviatoslav
Richter, Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu.
Page, Tim (ed.), The Glenn Gould Reader (Knopf, 1984).
Schiff, András, in conversation with Marcel Meyer, Music Comes out of Silence (Orion, 2020).
Tomes, Susan, Speaking the Piano (Boydell Press, 2018). The most recent of my previous five books.
 INDEX

accompanists (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

Adams, John (i)
Adès, Thomas (i)
Three Mazurkas (i)
references Chopin’s mazurkas (i)
written for Emanuel Ax (i)
Africa (i), (ii)
and jazz (i), (ii)
metallophones (i)
African-Americans
and bebop (i), (ii)
and jazz (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and ragtime (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and silent film pianists (i)
and ‘stride’ piano (i)
women pianists (i), (ii)
Alba, Duchess of (‘The Black Duchess’), painting by Goya (i)
Albéniz, Isaac
child prodigy (i)
claims to have played to Liszt (i)
Iberia (i)
Debussy on (i), (ii)
evokes Andalusia and flamenco (i)
Messiaen on (i)
New York Times on (i)
primacy of rhythm in (i)
technical challenges (i)
influence of French composers (i)
influence of Liszt (i)
influence of Spanish church and folk music (i)
settles in Paris (i)
taught by Felipe Pedrell in Barcelona (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
Alcoholic Blues (i)
Alcott, Bronson (father of Louisa May)
and Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata (i)
and Transcendentalists (i)
Alcott, Louisa May
and Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata (i)
Little Women (i)
Alexander II, Tsar of Russia (i)
encourages piano manufacture (i)
Alexander’s Ragtime Band (Irving Berlin) (i)
Alexander Technique (i)
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (i)
Algeria (i)
Alhambra Palace, Granada, inspires Debussy’s ‘La Puerta del Vino’ (i)
Allende, Salvador (i)
Amadeus (play and film) (i)
amateur music-making see domestic music-making
ambient music (i)
and minimalism (i)
audience for (i)
Ólafur Arnalds (i)
Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata anticipates (i)
criticism of (i)
definition (i)
gender imbalance (i)
influence of plainchant (i)
Ludovico Einaudi (i)
Brian Eno’s Ambient I: Music for Airports (i)
Eno on (i)
Niels Frahm (i)
Nyman’s The Heart Asks Pleasure First (i)
Max Richter (i)
Terry Riley’s In C (i)
Satie’s Gymnopédies the inspiration for (i), (ii)
simplicity of (i), (ii)
amplification (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Ansermet, Ernest, introduces Stravinsky to ragtime (i)
anti-Semitism
Felix Mendelssohn suffers (i)
in Mussorgsky (i)
in Russia (i)
Wagner’s (i)
Apaches, Les, Ravel joins (i)
Apocalypse Now (film) (i)
Armstrong, Louis (i)
Arnalds, Ólafur (i)
Arndt, Felix, Nola influences Mayerl (i)
Artôt, Desirée, affair with Tchaikovsky (i)
Arts Council (i)
Astaire, Fred (i)
atonality
and Berg (i)
and Busoni (i)
and Chopin (i)
and Schoenberg (i), (ii), (iii)
‘Au clair de la lune’, quoted by Debussy (i)
audiences
and Balakirev (i)
and bebop (i)
and Beethoven (i), (ii)
and Brahms (i)
and Cage (i)
and Debussy (i)
and Einaudi (i)
and Bill Evans (i)
and Field (i)
and film music (i)
and Kurtág (i)
and Ligeti (i)
and Liszt (i)
and Mendelssohn (i)
and Messiaen (i)
and minimalism (i)
and Nyman (i)
and the pianist (i)
and Poulenc (i)
and preluding (i)
and Rachmaninoff (i), (ii)
and Schubert (i)
and Shostakovich (i), (ii)
and silent films (i)
and singers (i)
and Takemitsu (i)
and Tchaikovsky (i)
Chopin prefers private (i)
Benny Goodman and the classical audience (i)
in the modern world (i), (ii)
rage for Italian opera (i)
reception of Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
reception of difficult modern music (i)
stadium concerts (i)
Auernhammer, Josepha (i)
Austen, Jane (i)
Austin, Lovie (i)
Austria (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Habsburg army and recruiting dances (i), (ii)
rules Bohemia (i), (ii)
Ax, Emanuel (i)

Baba Yaga in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (i)

Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and Frederick the Great (i)
as clavichordist and harpsichordist (i)
autobiography (i)
Burney on him as composer and improviser (i)
esteemed by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven (i)
Freie Fantasie in F sharp minor (i)
on expressing feelings (i)
on fingering (i)
on improvisation (i), (ii)
The True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (i)
works (i)
Bach, Johann Christian (i)
Bach, Johann Sebastian (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Art of Fugue (i)
cantatas (i), (ii)
character of his music (i)
chorales
in Busoni (i)
in Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn (i), (ii)
in Kurtág (i)
Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (i)
Clavierübung (i)
compared with D. Scarlatti (i)
counterpoint (i)
craftsmanship (i)
markings (i)
Goldberg Variations (i), (ii), (iii)
technical challenges (i)
harpsichord versus piano (i), (ii), (iii)
influence on Adams (i)
influence on Bartók (i)
influence on Britten (i)
influence on Gubaidulina (i)
influence on Henze (i)
influence on Beethoven (i)
influence on Brahms (i)
influence on Bill Evans (i)
influence on Kurtág (i)
influence on Felix Mendelssohn (i)
influence on Messiaen (i)
influence on Nancarrow (i)
influence on Rachmaninoff (i)
influence on R. Schumann (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
 Inventions (i)
Italian Concerto (i)
Mass in B minor (i)
Musical Offering (i)
rests (i)
St John Passion (i)
‘Es ist vollbracht’ (i), (ii), (iii)
St Matthew Passion (i), (ii), (iii)
revived by Felix Mendelssohn (i), (ii)
Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord in E major (i)
Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin (i)
Partita in D minor, Chaconne, inspiration for Gubaidulina (i)
tempo (i)
transcriptions of Corelli and Vivaldi (i)
Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (i)
Well-Tempered Clavier (48 Preludes and Fugues) (i), (ii)
Bach, Maria Barbara (wife of Johann Sebastian) (i)
Backhaus, Wilhelm, records Grieg’s Piano Concerto (i)
Bad Ischl, Austria (i)
Baermann, Carl
pupil of Liszt (i)
teaches Amy Beach (i)
Balakirev, Mily (i), (ii)
as pianist (i)
distrust of conservatoire teaching (i)
influence of Glinka (i)
interest in folk music (i), (ii)
Islamey, op. 18 (i)
Balakirev on origins (i)
compared with Glinka’s Kamarinskaya (i)
influence on Ravel’s ‘Scarbo’ (i)
reception (i), (ii)
Tchaikovsky on (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
music education (i)
promotes Russian nationalist school (i)
Tamara (i)
teaches Mussorgsky (i)
visits Caucasus (i)
Banville, Théodore de, ‘Pierrot’ set by Debussy (i)
Barber, Samuel (i)
Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain) (i)
Bardac, Emma
affair with Fauré (i)
Fauré writes La Bonne Chanson for her (i)
marriage to Debussy (i)
Bardac, Hélène (daughter of Emma), Fauré writes Dolly Suite for her (i)
Bardac, Raoul (son of Emma) (i)
Bardac, Sigismonde (husband of Emma) (i)
barn owl, omen in Czech culture (i)
Barrie, J.M., Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
Debussy inspired by Rackham’s illustrations (i)
Bartók, Béla (i)
admires Debussy (i)
Concerto for Orchestra (i)
Contrasts for Clarinet, Violin and Piano (i)
Benny Goodman commissions (i)
compared with Janáček (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of Bulgarian folk music (i)
influence of Hungarian folk music (i), (ii), (iii)
influence of Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano (i)
‘night music’ (i)
recording (i)
rhythmic complexity (i)
technical challenges (i)
Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs (i)
Bartók on (i), (ii)
no. 7 memorial to Debussy (i)
influence of folk song (i)
influence on Ligeti (i)
music banned in Communist Hungary (i)
‘night music’, compared with Ravel’s ‘Noctuelles’ (i)
researches folk song with Kodály (i)
Basque country (i)
influence of folk music on Ravel (i)
Beach (Cheney), Amy (i)
as pianist (i)
child prodigy (i)
Gaelic Symphony, op. 32 (i)
influence of Chopin (i)
influence of Dvořák (i)
influence of Gottschalk (i)
influence of Grieg (i)
influence of Liszt (i)
influence of Mendelssohn (i)
influence of Moscheles (i)
limited concert opportunities (i)
marriage (i)
Mass in E flat major, op. 5 (i)
Piano Concerto, op. 45 (i)
struggle for recognition (i), (ii)
Sketches, op. 15 (i)
‘Fireflies’
favourite of Josef Hofmann (i)
inspired by Liszt’s Feux Follets (i)
 influence of Fauré (i)
influence of Grieg (i)
influence of Schubert (i)
premonition of ragtime (i)
taught by Carl Baermann (i)
Variations on Balkan Themes, op. 60 (i)
Beach, Dr H.H.A. (husband of Amy) (i)
bebop see jazz
‘Beethoven Album’ (i)
Beethoven, Karl van (nephew of Ludwig) (i)
Beethoven, Ludwig van (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
and Archduke Rudolph (i), (ii)
and Carl Czerny (i)
and his nephew (i)
and Ignaz Schuppanzigh (i), (ii), (iii)
and Napoleon (i)
and religion (i)
and the sublime (i)
An die ferne Geliebte, op. 98, quoted by R. Schumann (i)
as pianist (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
as improviser (i), (ii)
as violinist (i)
cadenzas (i), (ii)
campaign for statue (i)
choice of keys (i)
Choral Fantasy, op. 80 (i)
composing methods (i), (ii)
deafness (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
death (i)
difficulty of his music (i), (ii)
dynamic markings (i)
folk music in (i)
in films (i)
influence (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of Haydn (i), (ii)
influence of Mozart (i), (ii), (iii)
influence on Brahms (i), (ii), (iii)
influence on Gubaidulina (i)
influence on Ives (i)
influence on Mendelssohn (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
late works (i), (ii)
Missa Solemnis, op. 123 (i)
order of instruments in duos (i), (ii)
Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor, op. 37 (i)
Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major, op. 58 (i), (ii), (iii)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
 Piano Concerto no. 5 in E flat major, op. 73, ‘Emperor’ (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Piano Sonata in G major, op. 31 no. 1 (i)
influence on Schubert (i)
Piano Sonata in D minor, op. 31 no. 2, ‘Tempest’, influence on Felix Mendelssohn (i)
Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 57, ‘Appassionata’ (i)
Piano Sonata in E minor, op. 90, influence on Schubert’s Rondo in A major, D951 (i)
Piano Sonata in B flat major, op. 106, ‘Hammerklavier’ (i), (ii)
quoted in Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata (i)
Piano Sonata in A flat major, op. 110 (i)
piano trios compared with Schubert’s (i)
Piano Trio in G major, op. 1 no. 2 (i)
Piano Trio in B flat major, op. 87, ‘Archduke’ (i), (ii), (iii)
technical challenges (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Schubert on (i), (ii)
self-esteem (i), (ii)
Sonata for Piano and Violin in F major, ‘The Spring’, op. 24 (i), (ii)
Sonata for Piano and Violin in C minor, op. 30 no. 2 (i)
Sonata for Piano and Violin in G major, op. 96 (i), (ii)
String Quartet in E minor, op. 59 no. 2, Russian folk song in (i)
Symphony no. 5 in C minor, op. 67 (i)
quoted in Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata (i)
Symphony no. 6 in F major, op. 68 (i)
Symphony no. 7 in A major, op. 92 (i)
transformation of themes (i), (ii)
Triple Concerto in C major, op. 56 (i)
tempo in (i), (ii)
use of the piano’s tonal range (i)
variations, seriousness of (i)
Violin Concerto in D major, op. 61 (i)
Beiderbecke, Bix, influence on Ravel (i)
Beirut, American University (i)
Bel canto (i)
bells, and Pärt (i)
Berg, Alban (i)
atonality (i)
composition method (i)
early songs (i)
Lulu (i)
Lyric Suite, and affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (i)
marriage (i)
Piano Sonata, op. 1 (i)
detailed markings (i)
use of motifs (i)
private life (i)
taught by Schoenberg (i)
uses Schoenberg’s ‘developing variation’ (i)
Wozzeck (i)
Berg (Nahowski), Helene, (wife of Alban) (i)
 treated by Freud (i)
Berg, Smaragda (sister of Alban) (i)
Bergen, Norway (i)
Bergman, Ingrid (i)
Berlin, Germany (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Berio, Luciano (i), (ii)
as teacher (i)
Sequenza IV (i), (ii)
influence of Stockhausen (i)
Six Encores (i)
Wasserklavier (i)
influence of Brahms (i)
influence of Schubert (i)
influence of tradition of ‘water’ music (i)
markings (i)
originally for 2 pianos (i)
title inspired by Beethoven (i)
Bethlehem (i)
Bible, the (i), (ii)
Billroth, Theodor, on Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Violin op. 78 (i)
birdsong
and Boulez (i)
and Bill Evans (i)
and Granados (i)
and Grieg (i), (ii)
and Messiaen (i), (ii)
and Schumann (i)
and Tchaikovsky (i)
Biss, Jonathan, on Beethoven (i)
Bizet, Georges (i), (ii)
arranges R. Schumann’s Studies for Pedal Piano for piano duet (i)
as pianist (i)
Carmen (i), (ii), (iii)
admired by Tchaikovsky (i)
compared with Schumann (i)
death (i)
Jeux d’Enfants (i), (ii)
‘Les Chevaux de Bois’ inspired by Schumann (i)
‘L’Escarpolette’ inspired by Fragonard (i)
inspired by R. Schumann’s Kinderszenen (i)
inspires Debussy, Fauré and Ravel (i)
markings (i)
technical challenges (i)
‘Le Volant’ compared with Schumann’s ‘Prophet Bird’ (i)
Bizet, Jacques (son of Georges) (i)
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, influence on Scriabin (i)
Bley, Carla (i)
‘blind octaves’
 in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
invented by Liszt (i)
Blue Note Records (i)
Bohemia
and Dvořák (i), (ii)
and Smetana (i)
character distinct from Moravia (i)
ruled by Austrian Empire (i), (ii)
Bonaparte, Napoleon, and Beethoven (i)
Bonnard, Pierre (i)
Borodin, Alexander, befriends Mussorgsky (i)
Bösendorfer pianos (i)
Boston, USA (i)
Boulanger, Nadia, teaches Philip Glass (i)
Boulez, Pierre (i), (ii)
as conductor (i)
attention to markings (i)
attention to tuning (i)
as mathematician (i)
Douze Notations (i)
Boulez on (i)
composition method (i)
influence of African music (i)
influence of Debussy (i)
influence of Messiaen (i)
influence of Ravel (i)
influence of Webern (i)
orchestration (i)
Piano Sonata no. 2 (i)
studies ethnomusicology (i)
studies twelve-note music (i)
taught by Leibowitz (i)
taught by Messiaen (i)
‘total serialisation’ (i)
Brackeen, Joanne (i)
Bradley, Scott
pupil of Schoenberg (i)
uses serialism in Tom and Jerry cartoon (i)
Brahms, Elise (sister of Johannes) (i)
Brahms, Johann Jakob (father of Johannes) (i)
Brahms, Johannes (i), (ii), (iii)
as conductor (i)
as pianist (i)
chamber music (i)
compared with Beethoven (i)
compared with Mozart (i)
compared with Schumann (i)
composing methods (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
devotion to Clara Schumann (i), (ii)
dynamic markings (i), (ii)
friendship with Joachim (i)
horn played by his father (i), (ii)
‘Hungarian’ themes (i)
identified as ‘conservative’ composer (i)
influence of Beethoven (i), (ii), (iii)
influence of Clara Schumann (i)
influence of early music (i)
influence of Haydn (i)
influence of Mozart (i)
influence of R. Schumann (i)
influence of Schubert (i), (ii)
influence on Berio (i)
influence on Fauré (i)
influence on Weir (i), (ii)
late works (i), (ii)
Lieder und Gesänge, op. 59, no. 3 ‘Regenlied’ (i)
manifesto against ‘progressive’ school (i)
meets Robert and Clara Schumann (i), (ii)
on Clara Schumann (i)
on Dvořák (i)
Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor, op. 15 (i)
Clara Schumann performs (i)
early performances (i)
originated as sonata for two pianos (i)
‘unsuitable’ for women (i)
Piano Concerto no. 2 in B flat major, op. 83 (i), (ii), (iii)
Piano Pieces, op. 116 (i)
Clara Schumann on (i)
Piano Pieces, op. 117 (i)
Clara Schumann on (i)
influence on Berio (i), (ii)
Piano Pieces, op. 118 (i)
Clara Schumann on (i)
piano quartets (i)
no. 3 in C minor, op. 60 (i)
influences Fauré (i)
Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34 (i)
Clara Schumann on (i)
Hermann Levi on (i)
Joseph Joachim on (i)
originally for string quintet, then for 2 pianos (i)
plays Liszt’s Piano Sonata (i)
rhythmic style (i), (ii)
R. Schumann writes article on (i)
Sonata for Piano and Cello in F major, op. 99 (i)
Sonata for Piano and Violin in G major, op. 78 (i)
 and Felix Schumann (i)
based on ‘Regenlied’ (i)
Billroth on (i)
Brahms on (i)
supports Dvořák (i)
Brief Encounter (film) (i)
Britten, Benjamin (i)
Brive-le-Gaillarde, France (i)
Broadwood pianos (i), (ii)
Brunhoff, Jean de, Babar the Elephant
colonial issues (i)
set by Poulenc (i)
Brussels, Belgium (i)
Buckingham Palace, London (i)
Budapest, Hungary (i), (ii)
Franz Liszt Academy (i)
Bülow, Hans von (i)
plays premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
Burney, Charles, on C.P.E. Bach as composer and player (i)
Busoni, Anna (mother of Ferruccio) (i)
Busoni, Ferdinando (father of Ferruccio) (i)
Busoni, Ferruccio (i)
as child prodigy (i)
as pianist (i)
character of music (i)
compared with Liszt (i)
Fantasia after Johann Sebastian Bach (i)
Busoni on (i)
quotes ‘In dulci jubilo’ (i)
influence of Liszt (i), (ii)
on practising (i)
technical challenges (i)
transcriptions of J.S. Bach (i)
virtuoso technique (i)
William Dayas on (i)
Byard, Jaki (i)

cabaret (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)

Cadenzas (i)
Cage, John (i), (ii)
and chance (i)
and silence (i)
as ‘hippy’ (i)
4’33” (i)
influence of gamelan (i)
influence of I Ching (i)
influence of Indian philosophy (i)
influence of Ives (i)
 influence of Richard Lippold (i)
on mushrooms (i)
on sound (i)
Schoenberg on (i)
Sonatas and Interludes (i)
influence of Indian ‘rasa’ (i)
‘prepared’ piano (i)
taught by Schoenberg (i), (ii)
canon (i)
in J.S. Bach (i), (ii)
in Boulez (i)
in Brahms (i)
in Chopin (i)
in Ligeti (i)
in Nancarrow (i)
in Ravel (i)
in Schubert (i)
in Takemitsu (i)
Carnegie Hall, New York (i), (ii)
Carpathian Mountains (i)
Carroll, Lewis, compared with Ives (i)
Caucasus
Balakirev visits (i)
becomes part of Russian Empire (i)
folk music (i)
‘oriental’ appeal (i)
Chabrier, Emmanuel, Idylle influences Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith (i)
Chadwick, George Whitefield (i)
Chagall, Marc (i)
chamber music (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
accompanied sonatas (i)
Beethoven breaks domestic convention (i)
Debussy on (i)
importance of (i), (ii)
Kurtág coaches (i)
Mendelssohn on (i)
‘not lucrative’ (i)
Saint-Saëns champions in France (i)
Schubert builds on Beethoven (i)
see also individual works
chance (i)
and Cage (i)
Charcot, Jean-Martin, teaches Nikolai Dahl (i)
Chat Noir, Le, Paris
Debussy frequents (i)
Satie works at (i)
Chausson, Ernest, influence on Albéniz (i)
Cherubini, Luigi dedicates Fantasy to Symanowska (i)
Chicago, USA (i), (ii)
World Fair 1893 (i)
Chile (i)
China (i)
popularity of the piano in (i)
Chopin, Frédéric (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
as improviser (i)
as pianist (i), (ii)
Ballade no. 1 in G minor, op. 23 (i)
inspired by poetry of Mickiewicz (i)
Barcarolle, op. 60 (i)
character (i)
Charles Hallé on his playing (i)
compared with Field (i), (ii)
compared with Mozart (i)
compared with Rachmaninoff (i)
compared with R. Schumann (i), (ii)
composition methods (i)
concerts (i)
dislike of (i), (ii)
concentration on piano music (i)
death (i)
Éccossaise, op. 72 no. 3, compared with Szymanowska’s Anglaise in A flat major (i)
Étude in C major, op. 10 no. 7, compared with Szymanowska’s Étude no. 3 (i)
Étude in F major, op. 10 no. 8, compared with Szymanowska’s Étude no. 1 (i)
Étude in E flat major, op. 10 no. 11, compared with Field’s Nocturne no. 7 (i)
Étude in C minor, op. 10 no. 12, ‘Revolutionary’, compared with Prelude no. 18 (i)
Étude in A minor, op. 25 no. 4, compared with Szymanowska’s Étude no. 12 (i)
exile (i), (ii)
fingering (i)
illness (i), (ii)
improvisation (i)
in films (i)
influence of klezmer (i)
influence of Polish dance (i), (ii)
influence of Szymanowska (i)
influence on Beach (i)
influence on Bill Evans (i)
influence on Grieg (i)
influence on Ligeti (i)
influence on Clara Schumann (i)
influence on R. Schumann (i)
influence on Smetana (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Mazurkas (i)
in E flat minor, op. 6 no. 4 (i)
in B flat major, op. 7 no. 1 (i), (ii)
in C major, op. 7 no. 5 (i)
in A minor, op. 17 no. 4 (i), (ii)
 in B flat minor, op. 24 no. 4 (i)
in D major, op. 33 no. 2 (i), (ii), (iii)
in C sharp minor, op. 63 no. 3 (i)
in F minor, op. 68 no. 4 (i), (ii)
inspire Adès’s Three Mazurkas (i)
Chopin’s way of playing (i)
Chopin encounters rural dancing (i)
resemble Szymanowska’s (i)
patriotic element (i)
rhythmic character of the dance (i)
R. Schumann on (i)
Nocturne in E flat major, op. 9 no. 2
compared with Field’s Nocturne no. 9 (i)
Nocturne in A flat major, op. 32 no. (i)
compared with Szymanowska’s Nocturne in B flat (i)
notated instructions (i)
on Field’s playing (i)
on Clara Schumann (i)
piano concertos (i)
no. 1 in E minor, op. 11, compared with Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto (i)
sends to Clara Schumann (i)
Piano Sonata no. 2 in B flat minor, op. 35, funeral march (i)
preference for salons (i), (ii)
pupils (i)
24 Preludes, op. 28 (i)
compared with Debussy’s Preludes (i)
no. 2 in A minor (i)
no. 4 in E minor
compared with Field’s Nocturne no. 14 (i)
compared with Hummel’s Prelude in E minor (i)
inspired Jobim’s Insensatez (i)
no. 15 in D flat major nicknamed ‘raindrop’ (i)
no. 17 in A flat, compared with Mendelssohn (i)
no. 18 in F minor, compared with Étude in C minor op. 10 no. 12 (i)
no. 23 in F major, compared with Szymanowska’s Étude no. 3 (i)
relationship with George Sand (i)
R. Schumann on (i)
settles in Paris (i)
Szafarnia Courier (i)
taught by Jósef Elsner (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii), (iii)
Variations on Là ci darem la mano, compared with Szymanowska’s Étude no. 12 (i)
Waltz in A flat major, op. posth., compared with Szymanowska’s Waltz no. 3 (i)
chorales
Busoni (i)
Debussy
Kurtág (i)
Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn (i), (ii)
 Mussorgsky (i)
Ciboure, Basque country (i)
clavichord (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
preferred by C.P.E. Bach (i)
Clementi, Muzio (i)
Clockwork Orange, A (film) (i)
Cocteau, Jean, drawing of Satie (i)
colonialism, and Babar the Elephant (i)
computer, role of in modern music (i), (ii)
conceptualists, influence of Ives (i)
concerto grosso
and Weir’s Piano Concerto (i)
influence on J.S. Bach (i)
concerts
and ‘live’ music (i)
and recordings (i)
Brahms (i)
Chopin (i)
Einaudi (i)
Kurtág (i), (ii)
Liszt (i)
Fanny Mendelssohn (i)
Mozart (i)
Nyman (i)
Rachmaninoff (i), (ii)
Clara Schumann (i), (ii)
stadium (i), (ii)
Szymanowska (i)
Concord, Massachusetts, USA, centre of Transcendentalists (i)
conductor
Ansermet (i)
Boulez (i)
in Beethoven (i), (ii)
Mendelssohn (i)
Ozawa (i)
Rachmaninoff (i)
role of in early 19th century (i)
Smetana (i), (ii)
Talich (i)
Confrey, Zez
influence on Gershwin (i)
Kitten on the Keys influences Mayerl (i)
conservatoires
Leipzig (i), (ii)
Moscow (i), (ii), (iii)
Paris (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
St Petersburg (i)
contemporary music
 computer-generated piano (i)
contemporary piano music inspired by Satie (i)
demand for contemplative music
film and television (i)
influence of minimalists (i)
multicultural community (i)
reaches ‘peak complexity’ (i)
stadium concerts (i)
streaming (i), (ii)
see also ambient music
Coolidge, Calvin (i)
Corelli, Arcangelo (i), (ii)
‘trio sonatas’ (i)
coronavirus pandemic (i)
Corea, Chick (i)
Cöthen, court of, Germany (i)
Couperin, François
L’Art de toucher le clavecin inspires Judith Weir (i)
influence on Debussy (i)
‘Le Tic-Toc-Choc’ (i)
Cowell, Henry, rhythmic ‘scale’ inspires Nancarrow (i)
Cramer, Johann Baptist (i)
Cristofori, Bartolomeo (i)
Cuba
rhythms in Bud Powell (i)
rhythms in Gershwin (i)
rhythms in Joplin (i)
‘cutting competitions’ (i), (ii), (iii)
Czerny, Carl (i)
on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4 (i), (ii)
On the proper performance of all Beethoven’s works for the piano (i)
plays Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto (i)
piano studies (i)

Dahl, Nikolai
dedicatee of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 (i)
plays viola (i)
studies with Charcot (i)
treats Rachmaninoff for writer’s block (i)
Dalai Lama (i)
Danbury, Connecticut, USA (i)
Davis, Miles (i)
Dayas, William, on Busoni (i)
Debussy, Claude (i), (ii)
and amateur pianists (i)
and Impressionism (i)
and World War I (i), (ii)
as conductor (i)
as pianist (i), (ii)
Children’s Corner inspired by Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants (i)
‘Gollywog’s Cakewalk’ influenced by Joplin (i)
‘Clair de Lune’ compared with Grieg’s ‘Notturno’ (i)
compared with Saint-Saëns (i)
composition methods (i), (ii)
death (i)
En blanc et noir, quotes ‘Ein Feste Burg’ (i)
English love of Debussy (i)
Estampes, ‘Pagodes’ (i)
Études (i)
Falla on his evocations of Spain (i)
Golden Section in (i), (ii)
Roy Howat on (i)
harmonies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Images, Series 1 (i)
Debussy on (i), (ii)
Reflets dans l’Eau (i)
influence of Couperin (i)
influence of flamenco (i)
influence of Javanese gamelan (i), (ii)
influence of Joplin (i)
influence of Liszt (i), (ii)
influence of Spain (i)
influence of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (i)
influence on Albéniz (i)
influence on Bartók (i)
influence on Boulez (i)
influence on Bill Evans (i)
influence on Ligeti (i)
influence on Messiaen (i)
influence on Takemitsu (i), (ii)
interest in Rosicrucianism (i)
late style (i)
love of Dickens (i)
love of England (i)
Marguerite Long on his playing (i)
markings (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
marriage to Emma Bardac (i)
music repressed in Communist Hungary (i)
need for precision (i)
on Albéniz’s Iberia (i), (ii)
on Gluck (i)
on Javanese gamelan (i)
on music and mathematics (i)
on playing the piano (i)
on Rameau (i)
on Wagner (i)
‘Pantomime’ (Verlaine) (i)
pedalling (i)
pentatonic scale (i)
‘Pierrot’ (Banville) (i)
polytonality (i), (ii)
Preludes, Book 1 (i)
‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (i)
Preludes, Book 2 (i), (ii)
‘Bruyères’ compared with ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (i)
‘Canope’, inspired by Egyptian urns (i)
compared with Chopin’s Preludes (i)
echo of Stravinsky’s Petrushka (i)
‘General Lavine – eccentric’
influence of Joplin (i)
inspired by Ed Lavine (i)
‘Hommage à S.Pickwick’, inspired by Dickens’s Mr Pickwick (i)
‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’
compared with Rachmaninoff (i)
inspired by Rackham’s fairy illustrations (i)
‘Feux d’artifice’
influence of Liszt (i)
inspired by Bastille Day fireworks (i)
quotes La Marsellaise (i)
technical challenges (i)
many influences on (i)
‘Ondine’, compared with Ravel’s ‘Ondine’ (i)
organisation by key and character (i)
compared with Bach’s Goldberg Variations (i)
‘La Puerta del Vino’
evokes flamenco (i)
inspired by Alhambra Palace (i)
sonorities (i)
‘La terrasse des audiences’
inspired by report from India (i)
quotes ‘Au clair de la lune’ (i)
‘Les tierces alternées’
compared with Études (i)
evokes harpsichord music (i)
quotes Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (i)
titles (i)
‘Toomai of the Elephants’ (abandoned prelude) (i)
sonatas
as ‘pure’ music (i), (ii), (iii)
Debussy on (i), (ii)
for Cello and Piano (i)
and ‘Ein Feste Burg’ (i)
and Pierrot (i), (ii)
as ‘expressionist’ (i)
 compared with Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (i)
compressed language of (i)
Debussy on (i)
influence of flamenco (i)
Louis Roosor on (i)
Moray Wesh on (i)
Spanish character (i)
influence on Boulez (i)
for Flute, Viola and Harp (i)
for Violin and Piano (i)
homage to German culture (i)
Suite Bergamasque, ‘Passepied’ influences Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
‘tombeau’ in Revue Musicale (i)
supports Satie (i)
uninterested in virtuosity (i)
Vlado Perlmuter on (i)
Debussy, Claude-Emma (‘Chouchou’, daughter of Claude and Emma) (i)
Debussy, Emma see Bardac, Emma
Degas, Edgar (i)
de Gaulle, General
leads liberation of Paris (i)
Messiaen on (i)
Delage, Maurice (i)
Denisov, Edison (i)
‘developing variation’ (Schoenberg), used by Berg (i)
Dickens, Charles
Debussy’s love of (i)
The Pickwick Papers, and Debussy (i), (ii)
Dies Irae, in Brahms (i)
dissonance
‘Emancipation of the’ (Schoenberg) (i)
in bebop (i)
Ives on (i)
Döbling, Austria (i)
Dobrzański, Sławomir, research on Maria Szymanowska (i)
Doctorow, E.L., Ragtime (i)
domestic music-making
Albéniz’s early pieces for (i)
and the growth of piano manufacture (i), (ii), (iii)
and the piano (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
attempting difficult music (i)
Debussy’s Preludes (i)
Grieg’s Lyric Pieces (i), (ii)
impact of recordings on (i)
in Haydn’s day (i)
Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor (i)
relationship with virtuoso pianists (i)
 salons (i)
Schubert (i), (ii), (iii)
Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons (i)
Domus (piano quartet) (i)
Donizetti, Gaetano (i)
Doppelgänger (i)
Dresden, Germany (i)
Dresdner Abend-Zeitung (i)
duets see piano duets
Dukas, Paul, influence on Chabrier (i)
Dumka
in Dvořák (i), (ii), (iii)
in Smetana (i)
duos (piano with one other instrument) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
order of instruments (i), (ii)
role of piano misrepresented (i)
see also piano duos
Dvořák, Antonín (i)
as pianist (i)
as viola-player (i)
awkward piano writing (i)
Brahms on (i)
Humoreske arranged by Tatum (i)
influence of folk music (i), (ii)
influence of R. Schumann (i)
influence of Smetana (i), (ii)
influence on Beach (i)
love of mountains (i)
markings (i)
on importance of ‘Negro music’ (i)
piano quartets (i), (ii)
Piano Quintet in A major, op. 81 (i), (ii), (iii)
compared with Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet (i)
cross-rhythms (i), (ii), (iii)
earlier attempt at a piano quintet (i)
folk-like themes (i), (ii)
influence of R. Schumann’s Piano Quintet (i)
major/minor inflections (i)
piano trios (i)
in E minor, op. 90, ‘Dumky’ (i)
opening inspired by Smetana (i)
in F minor, op. 65 (i)
plays in dance band (i)
plays under Smetana in Provisional Theatre, Prague (i), (ii)
resists move to Vienna (i)
Slavonic Dances (i)
struggles to balance German and Czech elements (i)
supported by Brahms (i)
 Symphony no. 7 in D minor, op. 70 (i)
Symphony no. 8 in G major, op. 88 (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
wins Austrian state stipendium (i)

Eastbourne, England, Debussy holidays in (i), (ii)

École Niedermeyer
Fauré studies at (i)
Saint-Saëns teaches at (i)
editions
Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants (i)
by virtuosi (i)
Chopin’s Mazurkas (i)
Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major, K488 (i)
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (i)
Scarlatti’s Sonatas (i)
Einaudi, Ludovico, taught by Berio (i)
‘Ein Feste Burg’, and Debussy (i)
Einstein, Alfred, on Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet (i)
Eisenstadt, Germany (i)
Elephant Man, The (film) (i)
Elgar, Edward, Enigma Variations quotes Mendelssohn (i)
Elizabeth Alexandrovna, Tsarina of Russia (i)
Ellington, Duke
compared with Scriabin (i)
influence on Ravel (i)
memorises James P. Johnson (i)
on Marian McPartland (i)
The Washingtonians (i)
Elvira Madigan (film) (i)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
against conformity (i)
and Ives (i), (ii)
and Transcendentalists (i)
urges American individuality (i)
Empoli, Italy (i)
Enlightenment, German (i)
Eno, Brian
Ambient I: Music for Airports (i)
on ambient music (i)
Erard pianos, favoured by Ravel (i)
Esterháza Palace (i), (ii), (iii)
Esterházy family (i), (ii), (iii)
Ethnomusicologists (i), (ii)
Evans, Bill (i)
Eyes Wide Shut (film) (i)

Falla, Manuel de
 Harpsichord Concerto, compared with Weir’s Piano Concerto (i)
influenced by Felipe Pedrell (i)
on Debussy’s evocations of Spain (i)
Fauré, Gabriel (i)
affair with Emma Bardac (i)
as pianist (i)
Barcarolles (i)
La Bonne Chanson, op. 61 (i)
Dolly Suite, op. 56 (i)
‘Berceuse’ used for Listen with Mother (i)
inspired by Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants (i)
‘Le Pas espagnol’
reference to statue of horse (i)
tribute to Chabrier’s España (i)
quotes Fauré’s Sonata for Violin and Piano no. 1 (i)
reasons for writing (i)
‘Tendresse’ compared with Poulenc (i)
written for Hélène Bardac (‘Dolly’) (i)
engaged to Marianne Viardot (i)
influence of church modes (i)
influence of Gregorian chant (i), (ii)
influence of Liszt (i)
influence of medieval and Renaissance music (i), (ii)
influence of Saint-Saëns (i)
influence of Schumann (i)
influence of Wagner (i)
influence on Albéniz (i)
influence on Beach (i)
late style (i)
love of chamber music (i)
marriage to Marie Fremiet (i)
Nocturnes (i)
on Saint-Saëns’s teaching (i)
piano quartets (i)
no. 1 in C minor, op. 15 (i)
influence of Brahms (i), (ii)
influence of Saint-Saëns (i)
influence of R. Schumann (i)
influence on Ravel (i)
Marguerite Long on (i)
revision to finale (i)
piano quintets (i), (ii)
Piano Trio in D minor, op. 120 (i)
rhythmic style (i), (ii)
Sonata for Violin and Piano no. 1 in A major, op. 13
quoted in Dolly Suite (i)
written for Paul Viardot (i)
studies at École Niedermeyer (i)
 technical challenges (i), (ii)
Fauré (Fremiet), Marie (wife of Gabriel) (i)
Fazioli pianos (i)
Ferdinand, Crown Prince (later King Ferdinand VI) of Spain (i)
Ferneyhough, Brian (i)
Fibonacci sequence (i)
Field, John (i), (ii)
as pianist (i), (ii)
Chopin on his playing (i)
compared with Chopin (i), (ii)
fingering (i)
Liszt on his playing (i)
nocturnes
first to write (i)
used as slow movements (i)
Nocturne no. 7 in C major (i)
compared with Chopin’s Etude op. 10 no. 11 (i)
Nocturne no. 9 in A major (i)
compared with Chopin’s Nocturne op. 9 no. 2 (i)
Nocturne no. 10 in E flat major (i)
Nocturne no. 11 in E flat major (i)
Nocturne no. 14 in C major (i)
compared with Chopin’s Prelude no. 4 (i)
on Chopin (i)
pupil and business partner of Clementi (i)
settles in St Petersburg (i)
figured bass (i), (ii)
fingering
and women’s hands (i)
C.P.E. Bach on (i)
Debussy on (i)
in J.S. Bach (i), (ii)
Finnissy, Michael (i)
Flamenco
evoked by Albéniz (i)
evoked by Debussy (i), (ii)
evoked by Scarlatti (i), (ii), (iii)
Flaubert, Gustave, Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (i)
Florence, Italy (i)
folk music
Bartók records and transcribes (i)
Bohemian/Czech (i)
Caucasian (i)
Circassian (i)
Crimean Tartar (i)
Hungarian (i), (ii)
gypsy music ‘mistaken’ for by Liszt (i)
made available by recordings (i)
 Norwegian (i)
Polish (i), (ii)
Romanian (i)
Russian (i), (ii)
Scottish (i)
Slovakian (i)
Spanish (i)
Ukrainian (i)
Forkel, Johann (i), (ii)
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, L’Escarpolette inspires Bizet (i)
Frahm, Niels (i)
Françaix, Jean, orchestration of Poulenc’s The Story of Babar the Elephant (i)
France (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Franck, César, Piano Quintet in F minor (i)
Franz Josef I, Emperor of Austria (i)
Frederick the Great of Prussia (i), (ii)
free jazz (i)
Fremiet, Emmanuel
father-in-law of Fauré (i)
sculptor of horse statue (i)
Fremiet, Marie see Fauré, Marie
French Overture (i), (ii)
Freud, Sigmund
and Scriabin (i)
treats Helene Berg (Nahowski) (i)
Friedrich, Caspar David (i)
Fuchs-Robettin, Hanna, affair with Berg (i)

‘galant’ style (i), (ii)

gamelan (i)
at Paris Conservatoire (i)
at Paris Great Exhibition (i)
description (i), (ii)
influence on Cage (i)
influence on Debussy (i), (ii)
influence on Messiaen (i)
influence on Ravel (i)
Gandhi, Mahatma (i)
gender issues
ambient music (i)
Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto (i)
Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
discouragement of women composers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
discouragement of women pianists (i)
fingering and editions (i), (ii)
neglect of women composers (i), (ii), (iii)
piano as instrument for young ladies (i)
piano keyboard designed by men (i)
 Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
women and the drawing room (i)
women in jazz (i)
women’s rights, and Transcendentalists (i)
see also women composers; women pianists; women violinists
Genzinger, Marianne von (i)
George V, King, Debussy and his installation as Emperor of India (i)
Germany (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
centre of piano culture (i)
Italian opera in (i)
prejudice against Mendelssohn in (i)
Gershwin, George (i), (ii)
as pianist and improviser (i), (ii)
I Got Rhythm (i)
influence on Ravel (i), (ii)
The Man I Love (i)
on American character (i)
Rhapsody in Blue (i)
clarinet glissando (i), (ii)
collaboration with Whiteman (i)
influence of Zez Confrey (i)
influence of Liszt (i)
influence of Rachmaninoff (i)
influence on Mayerl (i)
structure and cuts (i)
orchestrated by Grofé (i)
Gershwin plays London premiere (i)
Mayerl plays (i)
recordings (i)
title (i)
song plugger (i)
Swanee (i)
Gershwin, Ira (brother of George) (i)
Gillespie, Dizzy (i)
Glass, Philip (i), (ii)
Einstein on the Beach (i)
The Hours (i)
influence of Reich (i)
interest in Eastern religions (i)
Koyaanisqatsi (i)
Mad Rush (i)
composition method (i)
Glass on (i)
inspired by Buddhism (i)
and minimalism (i), (ii)
‘music with repetitive structures’ (i)
Notes on a Scandal (i)
Satyagraha (i)
 taught by Nadia Boulanger (i)
The Truman Show (i)
Glinka, Mikhail (i), (ii)
interest in folk music (i)
Kamarinskaya (i)
Tchaikovsky on (i)
originator of Russian nationalist school (i)
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Debussy on (i)
‘God save the King/Queen’, quoted by Debussy (i)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Faust (i)
on Clara Schumann (i)
on Felix Mendelssohn as a child (i)
on Mozart as a child (i)
on Szymanowksa (i)
Goldberg, Johann (i)
Golden Section
in Chopin (i)
in Debussy (i), (ii)
impossibility of hearing (i)
Goodman, Benny
and Szigeti (i)
Carnegie Hall concert (i)
commissions Bartók’s Contrasts (i)
Orchestra (i)
Quartet (i)
Trio (i)
seeks classical audience (i)
Gorman, Ross (i), (ii)
Gottschalk, Louis, influence on Beach (i)
Gould, Glenn (i)
recordings of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (i)
Gounod, Charles, on Fanny Mendelssohn (Hensel) (i)
Granados, Enrique (i)
as pianist (i)
Goyescas (i)
compared with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (i)
adapted as opera (i)
influence of Felipe Pedrell (i)
influence of Goya (i)
on Goya (i)
‘Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor’ (i)
based on folk song (i)
inspires Consuelo Velásquez’s ‘Bésame mucho’ (i)
nightingale anticipates Messiaen (i)
Gregorian chant
in Brahms (i)
influence on ambient music (i)
 influence on Fauré (i)
influence on Pärt (i)
Grieg, Edvard (i)
and Norwegian nationalism (i)
compares Danish and Norwegian characters and music (i)
composition methods (i)
influence of Chopin (i)
influence of Liszt (i), (ii)
influence of Norwegian folk music (i), (ii), (iii)
influence of Rikard Nordraak (i)
influence of R. Schumann (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
influence of Wagner (i)
influence on Beach (i)
influence on Rachmaninoff (i)
Lyric Pieces (i), (ii)
and Norwegian national character (i)
as teaching material (i)
compared with Chopin’s mazurkas (i)
Grieg on (i)
influence of R. Schumann (i)
influence on Beach (i)
‘Notturno’ compared with Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ (i)
repetitiveness (i)
reviewed in Musical Times (i)
‘Wedding Day at Troldhaugen’
Grieg records (i)
most popular of Lyric Pieces (i)
technical challenges (i)
written for amateurs (i), (ii), (iii)
marriage (i)
on Norwegian folk music (i)
Peer Gynt (i), (ii)
Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16 (i)
and Hollywood movies (i)
compared with R. Schumann’s Piano Concerto (i)
Eric Morecambe parodies (i)
Halling in (i), (ii)
influence of Chopin (i)
influence of Liszt (i), (ii)
influence of Norwegian folk music (i), (ii)
influence of R. Schumann’s Piano Concerto (i), (ii), (iii)
influence on Rachmaninoff (i)
influence on Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i), (ii)
markings often ignored (i)
recordings of (i)
used in Intermezzo (film) (i)
technical challenges (i)
thematic transformation in (i)
 studies at Leipzig Conservatoire (i), (ii)
Grieg, Nina (wife of Edvard) (i)
Grofé, Ferde, orchestrates Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (i)
Groth, Klaus (i)
Guardian, The (newspaper) (i)
Gubaidulina, Sofia (i)
as pianist (i)
Astreya (group) (i)
Chaconne (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of Beethoven (i)
influence of Prokofiev (i)
influence of Shostakovich (i)
influence of Webern (i)
twelve-note row (i)
electronic music (i)
influence of folk music (i)
on percussion (i)
religious faith (i), (ii)
Shostakovich’s advice (i)
Soviet repression (i)
gypsy musicians
and Brahms (i)
and Haydn (i)
and Liszt (i)

Habsburg Empire see Austria

Hallé, Charles, on Chopin’s playing (i)
Hancock, Herbie (i)
Handel, George Frideric (i)
influence on Brahms (i)
Hanon, Charles-Louis, The Virtuoso Pianist parodied by Shostakovich and Saint-Saëns (i)
‘hard bop’ (i)
Hardin Armstrong, Lil (i)
Harmonium, Janáček writes for (i)
harpsichord (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
compared with piano (i), (ii)
evoked by Debussy (i), (ii)
by Pleyel (for Wanda Landowska) (i)
played by C.P.E. Bach (i)
Hartmann, Victor
death (i)
inspires Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (i)
Hawthorn, Nathaniel, and Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata (i)
Haydn, Franz Joseph (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
compared with Mozart (i)
The Creation (i)
employed by Esterházy family (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
 evokes gypsy music (i)
impressed by Broadwood pianos (i)
influence on Beethoven (i)
influence on Brahms (i)
marriage (i), (ii)
Mozart on (i)
on Mozart (i), (ii)
Piano Sonata in E flat major, Hob. XVI:52 (i)
technical challenges (i)
written for Therese Jansen (i)
Piano Trio in G major, Hob. XV25, ‘Gypsy Rondo’ (i)
relationship with Mozart (i)
Variations in F minor, Hob. XVII:6 (i)
compared with Mozart’s Rondo in A minor (i)
visits London (i), (ii), (iii)
Heine, Heinrich, on Liszt (i)
Hensel, Wilhelm (husband of Fanny Mendelssohn) (i)
Henselt, Adolf von (i)
Henze, Hans Werner (i)
Herrmann, Bernard (i)
Herzogenberg, Elisabeth von (i)
Hiller, Ferdinand, advises Felix Mendelssohn on his Piano Trio no. 1 (i)
Hofmann, Josef
plays Beach’s ‘Fireflies’ (i)
rejects Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 (i)
Hollywood movies, and Grieg’s Piano Concerto (i)
horn, French, significance for Brahms (i), (ii)
Horowitz, Vladimir, plays Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 (i)
House Un-American Committee (i)
Howard, Leslie (i)
Howat, Roy
The Art of French Piano Music (i)
Debussy in Proportion (i), (ii)
Hummel, Johann Nepomuk (i), (ii)
compared with Szymanowska (i)
Septet arrangement and Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet (i), (ii)
Preludes, influence on Chopin (i), (ii)
Hungary (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Bartók and folk music (i)
Ligeti under Communist regime (i)
Hymns, in Ives (i) see also chorales

I Ching
and John Cage (i)
and the piano keyboard (i)
‘Il faut s’amuser’, song quoted in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
improvisation (i)
C.P.E. Bach on (i), (ii)
 J.S. Bach (i), (ii)
Beethoven (i)
Chopin (i)
Miles Davis (i)
decline among pianists (i)
Bill Evans (i), (ii)
figured bass (i)
flamenco (i)
Gershwin (i), (ii)
Hummel (i)
in public (i)
jazz (i), (ii), (iii)
Scott Joplin (i)
Liszt (i), (ii)
Messiaen (i)
Mozart (i), (ii)
organists (i)
‘preluding’ (i)
Alberto Semprini (i)
Scarlatti (i)
scat singing (i)
silent films (i)
Art Tatum (i)
India
George V crowned Emperor (i)
Kipling’s ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ (i)
music
and Messiaen (i)
and Terry Riley (i)
philosophy (i)
‘rasa’ and John Cage (i), (ii)
‘In dulci jubilo’, quoted by Busoni (i)
D’Indy, Vincent, influence on Albéniz (i)
Intermezzo (film)
and Grieg’s Piano Concerto (i)
International Musicians’ Seminar, Prussia Cove (i)
Italy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Fanny Mendelssohn visits (i)
Ives, Charles (i)
career in insurance (i)
compared with Lewis Carroll (i)
compared with Rzewski (i)
Essays before a Sonata (i)
father’s experiments (i)
influence of Beethoven (i)
influence of transcendentalists (i)
influence on Cage (i)
influence on conceptualists (i)
 Life Insurance and its Relation to Inheritance Tax (i)
on dissonance (i)
on limitations of instruments (i)
on music as ideas (i)
on quartertones (i)
Piano Sonata no. 2 ‘Concord’ (i)
clusters (i)
influence of Beethoven (i), (ii)
influence of hymns (i)
influence of ragtime (i)
inspired by transcendentalists (i), (ii)
Ives on (i)
John Kirkpatrick performs (i)
needs large hand (i)
quotes Beethoven (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
polyrhythm (i)
polytonality (i)
Ives, George (father of Charles) (i)

Janáček, Leoš (i)

collects Moravian folk music and ‘speech melodies’ (i)
composition methods (i)
irregular phrase lengths (i)
On an Overgrown Path (i)
and death of daughter (i)
compared with Bartók’s Contrasts (i)
originally for harmonium (i)
titles recall Schumann (i)
on relationship between speech and melody (i)
operas (i)
piano music, applies patterns of speech and nature to (i)
Talich on (i)
Janáček, Olga (daughter of Leoš) (i)
Jansen, Therese (i), (ii), (iii)
Japan
Bunraku (puppet theatre) and Takemitsu (i)
influence of music on Messiaen (i)
‘Ma’ (i)
US occupation (i)
Jarrett, Keith (i)
Javanese gamelan see gamelan
jazz (i), (ii)
Armstrong, Louis (i)
bebop pianists (i)
Jaki Byard (i)
characteristics (i)
influences later pianists (i)
 Thelonius Monk (i)
Blue Monk (i)
Philip Larkin on (i)
Round Midnight (i)
Ruby My Dear (i)
Straight No Chaser (i)
Well You Needn’t (i)
origins in New York clubs (i)
Oscar Peterson (i)
Bud Powell (i)
influence of Charlie Parker (i), (ii)
influence on Bill Evans (i)
inspired by Tatum (i)
Jazz Giant
Celia (i)
Un poco loco (i)
Tempus Fugit (i)
Horace Silver (i)
Lennie Tristano (i)
Mary-Lou Williams (i)
‘charts’ and notation (i)
Chick Corea (i)
influence of Bill Evans (i)
Miles Davis
improvisation on modes (i)
Kind of Blue (i)
Bill Evans (i)
But Beautiful (i)
classical training (i), (ii)
drug addiction (i)
Funkallero (i)
harmonic style (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of Debussy (i)
influence of Bud Powell (i)
influence on later pianists (i)
joins Miles Davis Sextet (i)
melodic style (i)
Peace Piece, influence of Chopin and Messiaen (i)
Trio (i), (ii)
Turn Out the Stars (i)
Very Early (i)
Waltz for Debby (i), (ii)
free jazz (i)
Herbie Hancock (i)
influence of Bill Evans (i)
‘hard bop’ (i)
improvisation (i), (ii), (iii)
influence on Messiaen (i), (ii)
influence on Ravel (i), (ii), (iii)
Keith Jarrett (i)
influence of Bill Evans (i)
jazz goes classical (i)
George Gershwin (i)
Conlon Nancarrow (i)
Frederic Rzewski (i)
Igor Stravinsky (i)
Brad Mehldau (i)
influence of Bill Evans (i)
modal jazz (i)
Oliver, ‘King’ (i)
origins in ragtime (i), (ii)
piano’s role in (i), (ii)
quartal harmony (i)
stride piano (i)
‘cutting’ competitions (i)
develops from ragtime (i)
James P. Johnson (i), (ii)
accompanies Bessie Smith (i)
Carolina Shout (i)
memorised by Duke Ellington (i)
Harlem Strut (i)
You’ve Got to be Modernistic (i)
teaches ‘Fats’ Waller (i)
Jelly Roll Morton (i)
Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith (i), (ii)
Echoes of Spring, influence of Chabrier and Debussy (i)
Finger Buster (i)
in World War I (i)
Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller (i), (ii)
Ain’t Misbehavin’ (i)
classical technique (i)
Handful of Keys (i)
Honeysuckle Rose (i)
I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter (i)
The Joint is Jumping (i)
plays for Al Capone (i)
George Shearing on (i)
taught by James P. Johnson (i)
Your Feet’s Too Big (i)
‘symphonic jazz’ (i)
Art Tatum (i), (ii)
attracts classical pianists (i)
blindness (i), (ii)
‘cutting’ contest (i)
Dvořák’s Humoreske (i)
 harmonies and complexity (i)
improvisation (i)
Lulu’s Back in Town (i)
self-taught (i)
Tea for Two (i)
technical precision (i), (ii)
Tiger Rag (i)
McCoy Tyner (i)
transposition (i)
Cedar Walton (i)
women jazz pianists (i)
Austin, Lovie (i)
Bley, Carla (i)
Brackeen, Joanne (i)
Hardin Armstrong, Lil (i)
Hotter Than That (i)
in King Oliver’s band (i)
in Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five (i)
Jones, Norah (i)
Krall, Diana (i)
McPartland, Marie (i)
Duke Ellington on (i)
in Billy Mayerl’s Quartet (i)
radio show (i)
Mullins, Mazie (i)
Fats Waller on (i)
Rahman, Zoe (i)
Scott, Hazel (i)
Simone, Nina (i)
Williams, Mary Lou (i)
Drag ‘Em (i)
Nightlife (i)
The Heat’s On (film) (i)
plays with Duke Ellington (i)
political activity (i)
Jean Paul (Richter), and Schumann (i), (ii)
Joachim, Joseph
character of his playing (i)
friendship with Brahms (i)
introduces Brahms to the Schumanns (i)
manifesto against ‘progressive’ music (i)
on early version of Brahms’s Piano Quintet (i)
on Felix Mendelssohn’s modesty (i)
Jobim, Antonio Carlos, Insensatez based on Chopin (i)
Johnson, James P. (i), (ii)
Jolson, Al (i)
Jones, Norah (i)
Joplin, Scott (i)
 Bethena (waltz) (i)
The Easy Winners (i)
The Entertainer (i)
Maple Leaf Rag (i), (ii)
composition method (i)
described in Ragtime (novel) (i)
piano roll (i)
technical challenges (i)
and origins and character of ragtime (i)
influence of Cuban music (i)
influence of marches (i)
influence of Schubert (i)
influence on Debussy (i)
influence on Mayerl (i)
influence on Satie (i)
influence on Stravinsky (i)
on character of ragtime (i)
on tempo of ragtime (i)
revival in 1970s (i)
Joshua Rifkin plays (i)
The Sting (i)
taught by Julius Weiss (i)
Josef II, Emperor of Austria (i)
Journal de Musique (i)
Journal of Luxury and Fashion, Weimar (i)
Joyce, James (i)

Kaiserling, Count (i)

Kane, Art, A Great Day in Harlem (photo) (i)
Kant, Immanuel (i)
Kerouac, Jack (i)
Keys, composers’ choice of (i), (ii)
King’s Speech, The (film) (i)
Kipling, Rudyard, ‘Toomai of the Elephants’, Debussy attempts prelude on (i)
Kirkpatrick, John, perform Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata (i)
Kirkpatrick, Ralph, catalogue of Scarlatti’s Sonatas (i)
Klee, Paul (i)
Klezmer
influence on Chopin (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
Kodály, Zoltán, folk music research with Bartók (i)
Krall, Diana (i)
Krupa, Gene (i)
Kubrick, Stanley, Eyes Wide Shut (film) (i)
Kurtág, György (i)
as pianist (i)
as teacher (i), (ii)
demanding standards (i)
 Játékok (i)
arrangements (i)
commission (i)
compared with Bartok’s Mikrokosmos (i)
compared with Judith Weir (i)
enigmatic titles (i)
intersperses with Bach chorales (i)
on inspiration by children (i)
performed by Kurtág and his wife (i), (ii)
pieces for more than one player (i)
playful instructions (i)
tributes to Bach and other composers (i), (ii)
Kurtág, Márta (wife of György) (i)

LaFaro, Scott (i)

Landowska, Wanda (i)
recordings of Scarlatti (i)
Lanz, Joseph, on Schubert’s piano-playing (i)
Larkin, Philip, on Thelonius Monk (i)
Larrocha, Alicia de, plays Albéniz’s Iberia (i)
‘late style’ (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Lecocq, Charles (i)
Leibowitz, René, teaches Boulez (i)
Leipzig (i), (ii), (iii)
Conservatoire (i), (ii)
Leningrad
and Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7 (i)
see also St Petersburg
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Nathan the Wise (i)
Levi, Hermann, on Brahms’s Piano Quintet (i)
Levine, Ed, inspires Debussy’s ‘General Levine – eccentric’ (i)
Lewis, Paul, on Schubert (i)
Ligeti, György (i)
and Communist repression (i)
and World War II (i)
as teacher (i)
Études (i)
influence of Bartók (i)
influence of Chopin (i)
influence of Debussy (i)
influence of Liszt (i)
inspired by Mann’s Doktor Faustus (i)
Musica Ricercata (i)
composition method (i)
influence of Bartók and folk music (i), (ii)
influence of Frescobaldi (i)
influence of ricercare (i), (ii)
markings (i), (ii)
 used in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (i)
on Nancarrow (i)
Linke, Joseph (i), (ii)
Lippold, Richard (sculptor), influence on John Cage (i)
Lisbon, Portugal (i)
Listen with Mother (BBC radio programme), Fauré’s ‘Berceuse’ used for (i)
Liszt, Cosima see Wagner, Cosima
Liszt, Franz (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
as improviser (i), (ii)
as pianist (i), (ii), (iii)
as teacher (i)
attacked in manifesto of Brahms and Joachim (i)
character (i), (ii)
compared with Busoni (i)
composition technique (i), (ii)
daughter Cosima marries Wagner (i)
depression (i)
Feux Follets (i)
Heine on (i)
Hungarian Rhapsodies, folk/gypsy origins (i)
identified with ‘New German School’ (i)
improvisation (i)
influence of R. Schumann (i), (ii)
influence on Albéniz (i)
influence on Beach (i)
influence on Debussy (i), (ii), (iii)
influence on Fauré (i)
influence on Gershwin (i)
influence on Grieg (i), (ii), (iii)
influence on Messiaen (i)
influence on Ravel (i), (ii)
influence on Smetana (i), (ii)
influence on Tchaikovsky (i), (ii)
influence on Wagner (i)
Les Jeux d’Eau à la Villa d’Este (i)
inspired by Paganini (i)
Kapellmeister in Weimar (i)
late works (i)
‘Die Lorelei’ (i)
Nuages Gris (i)
on Clara Schumann (i)
on Field’s playing (i)
pioneers solo concert (i)
Piano Sonata in B minor (i), (ii)
dedicated to R. Schumann (i)
Clara Schumann on (i)
Brahms’s opinion of (i)
influence of R. Schumann’s Fantasy (i)
 technical challenges (i)
relationship with Princess Caroline von Sayn-Wittgenstein (i)
relationship with Wagner (i)
reputation (i)
takes holy orders (i)
teaches Carl Baermann (i)
thematic transformation (i), (ii)
Little Women (film) (i)
London, England (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Barbican Centre (i)
Buckingham Palace (i)
Long, Marguerite (i)
At the Piano with Debussy (i)
on Debussy’s playing (i)
on Fauré’s Piano Quartet no. 1 (i)
premieres Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major (i)
studies with Fauré (i)
Longo, Alessandro, edition of Scarlatti (i)
Loriod, Yvonne, and Messiaen (i)
Lutheran chorales
‘Ein Feste Burg’ and Debussy (i)
incorporated by Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn (i)

‘Ma’
importance for Takemitsu (i)
in Japanese culture (i)
McPartland, Marie (i)
Madrid, Spain (i)
Mahler (Schindler), Alma (i), (ii)
Mahler, Gustav
marriage to Alma Schindler (i)
Rachmaninoff on his conducting (i)
supports Schoenberg’s early works (i)
‘Maja’ and ‘Majo’, in Goya and Granados (i)
La maja desnuda (Goya) (i)
La maja vestida (Goya) (i)
Mallarmé, Stéphane
and Debussy (i)
on symbolism (i)
Manet, Édouard (i)
Mann, Thomas, Doktor Faustus (i)
Maria Barbara of Portugal, Princess (later Queen of Spain) (i)
Maria Fiedorovna, Tsarina of Russia (i)
Marienbad (Bohemia) (i)
Marsellaise, La, quoted by Debussy (i)
Marx, Chico (i)
mathematics
compared with music (i)
 in Debussy (i)
in J.S. Bach (i)
in Messiaen (i)
in Satie (i)
see also Golden Section
Mayerl, Billy (i)
and World War II (i)
The Antiquary (i)
as pianist (i), (ii)
at Savoy Hotel (i)
Billy Mayerl School of Piano (i)
Billy Mayerl Society (i)
classical training (i)
The Harp of the Winds (i)
influence of Felix Arndt and Zez Confrey (i)
influence of Gershwin (i)
influence of Joplin (i), (ii)
The Jazz Master (i)
Mayerl on technical challenges and sales (i)
Marigold (i)
on arrival of ‘syncopated music’ (i)
plays Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (i)
radio shows (i)
recordings (i)
revival in 1990s (i)
Sleepy Piano (i)
teachers appalled (i)
teaches King and Queen of Spain (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
Mazurka
Adès (i)
character of the dance (i)
Chopin (i)
mediaeval music
and ambient music (i)
and Brahms (i)
and Debussy (i)
and Fauré (i)
and Satie (i)
Mehldau, Brad (i)
Melancholia (film) (i)
Memorisation
Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson (i)
John Kirkpatrick memorises Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata (i)
Mozart (i), (ii)
Fanny Mendelssohn (i)
Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D minor (i)
Schoenberg (i)
 Szymanowska (i)
Mendelssohn (Hensel), Fanny (i), (ii), (iii)
as pianist (i), (ii)
compared with Felix Mendelssohn (i)
compared with Mozart (i)
compared with R. Schumann (i)
Gounod on (i)
identified as ‘conservative’ composer (i)
incorporates J.S. Bach’s chorales (i), (ii)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of Liszt (i)
influence of Schubert (i)
influence on Beach (i)
Das Jahr (i)
compared with Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons (i)
technical challenges (i)
marriage (i)
plays at Villa Medici, Rome (i)
songs without words (i)
Mendelssohn, Felix (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
anti-Semitism and (i)
as conductor (i), (ii)
conducts Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto (i)
baptised as a Christian (i)
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture, quoted by R. Schumann and Elgar (i)
changing fashion for his music (i)
character (i), (ii)
compared with Fanny Mendelssohn (i)
compared with R. Schumann (i)
director of Leipzig Conservatoire (i), (ii)
family (i)
discourages Fanny Mendelssohn from publishing (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of Beethoven (i), (ii)
Jewish ancestry (i)
meets Queen Victoria (i)
Midsummer Night’s Dream (i)
Octet in E flat major, op. 20 (i)
on Chopin (i)
performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4 (i)
piano quartets (i)
Piano Trio no. 1 in D minor (i)
difficulty (i)
Hiller advises on (i)
Piano Trio no. 2 in C minor, op. 66 (i)
plays from memory (i)
plays to Goethe (i)
publishes Fanny Mendelssohn’s songs under his name (i)
 revival of J.S. Bach (i)
St Matthew Passion (i), (ii)
tempo (i)
Variations Sérieuses in D minor, op. 54 (i)
Violin Concerto in E minor, op. 64
influence on Rachmaninoff (i)
influence on Ravel (i)
Wagner on (i)
Mendelssohn, Moses, model for Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (i)
mental health
and piano-playing (i)
and R. Schumann (i), (ii), (iii)
Messiaen, Olivier (i)
additive rhythms (i)
and World War II (i)
as organist at Sainte Trinité, Paris (i)
improvisations (i)
as pianist (i)
birdsong anticipated in Granados (i)
Catholic faith (i)
death (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of birdsong (i), (ii)
influence of gamelan (i)
influence of Indian music (i)
influence of Japanese music (i)
influence of jazz (i), (ii)
influence of mathematics (i)
influence of Mussorgsky (i)
influence of serialism (i)
influence of Wagner (i), (ii)
influence on Boulez (i)
influence on Bill Evans (i)
influence on Takemitsu (i), (ii)
Yvonne Loriod performs (i)
on birds (i)
on colours (i)
on General de Gaulle (i)
Quatuor pour le Fin du Temps (i)
synaesthesia (i)
technical challenges (i)
Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus (i)
composed in Nazi-occupied Paris (i)
devotional character (i)
influence of Debussy (i)
influence of Liszt (i)
influence of Wagnerian leitmotifs (i)
Messiaen on (i)
Mexico (i)
Mickiewicz, Adam (i)
‘Mighty Handful’ (Russian composers) (i)
Milton, John, Paradise Lost (i)
minimalism (i)
and ambient music (i)
continuing influence (i)
‘holy minimalism’ (i)
modes
influence of church modes on Fauré (i), (ii)
modal jazz (i)
Mongols, in Caucasus (i)
Monk, Thelonius (i)
Moravia
character different from Bohemia (i)
Influence of Russia, Byzantium, and orthodox chant (i)
influence of folk music and speech rhythms on Janáček (i)
Morecambe, Eric, parodies Grieg’s Piano Concerto (i)
Morisot, Berthe (i)
Morton, Jelly Roll (i)
Moscheles, Ignaz (i)
influence on Beach (i)
Piano Concerto 3 (i)
Moscow, Russia (i)
Conservatoire (i), (ii), (iii)
Central Music School (i)
Motian, Paul (i)
Mozart, Leopold (father of Wolfgang (i), (ii)
Mozart, Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’, sister of Wolfgang) (i), (ii)
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
cadenzas (i)
character and emotional range (i)
compared with J.S. Bach (i)
compared with Haydn (i)
compared with Ravel (i)
Concerto for Two Pianos in E flat major, K365/316a (i), (ii)
death (i), (ii)
editions (i)
Gran Partita, K361 (i)
Haydn on (i)
importance of his rests (i)
in films (i)
influence on Beethoven (i)
influence on Brahms (i)
The Magic Flute (i), (ii), (iii)
The Marriage of Figaro (i), (ii)
on C.P.E. Bach (i)
on Haydn (i)
 on Piano Concertos K413–15 (i)
on Josepha von Auernhammer (i)
on Regina Strinasacchi (i)
order of instruments in duos (i)
piano concertos (i), (ii), (iii)
compared with Ravel (i)
in D minor, K466 (i)
in A major, K488 (i), (ii)
in C minor, K491 (i)
piano quartets (i)
no. 2 in G minor, K478 (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
plays to Goethe (i)
relationship with Haydn (i)
Rondo in A minor, K511 (i)
compared with Haydn’s Variations in F minor (i)
Piano Sonata in A major, K331, ‘Rondo alla Turca’ (i)
Quintet for Clarinet and Strings K581, influence on Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major (i)
Rondo in A minor, K511 (i), (ii)
Schubert on (i)
Sonata for Piano and Violin in B flat major, K454 (i)
Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K448 (i)
tempo markings (i), (ii)
‘Mozart Effect’ (i)
Mullins, Mazie (i)
Munch, Edvard, The Scream (i)
mushrooms, and John Cage (i)
Musical Digest (i)
Musical Times (i)
Mussorgsky, Modest (i)
anti-Semitism (i)
Boris Godunov (i)
friendship with Victor Hartmann (i)
influence on Messiaen (i)
meets Borodin (i)
member of ‘Mighty Handful’ (i)
on his own music (i)
Pictures at an Exhibition (i), (ii)
character of piano writing (i)
compared with Granados’s Goyescas (i)
contrasted with Liszt (i)
inspired by exhibition of Victor Hartmann (i)
Mussorgsky’s commentary on (i)
Ravel’s orchestration (i), (ii)
Russian folksong in (i)
Russian Orthodox chant in (i)
technical challenge (i)
taught by Balakirev (i)
Nahowski, Helene, (wife of Alban Berg) (i)
Nancarrow, Conlon (i)
adoption of player piano (i)
Boogie-Woogie Suite (i)
compared with Ives (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of blues (i)
Ligeti on (i)
politics (i)
rhythm inspired by Cowell (i)
settles in Mexico (i)
Studies for Player Piano 3a–e (i)
Study for Player Piano no. 21 (Canon X) (i)
taught by Piston and Sessions (i)
Napoleon Bonaparte, and Beethoven (i)
Nathan the Wise (Lessing) (i)
nature and the sublime
and Beethoven (i)
and Ives (i), (ii)
and Transcendentalists (i), (ii)
Nazis (i)
concentration camps (i), (ii)
occupation of Paris (i)
neo-classicism, and Ravel (i)
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, R. Schumann article on Brahms (i)
Neuhaus, Heinrich, teaches Sviatoslav Richter (i)
‘New German School’, conflict with ‘conservative’ composers (i)
New Orleans, and origins of jaz (i)
New York, USA (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi),
(xvii), (xviii)
Aeolian Hall (i)
Café Society (i)
Hickory House jazz club (i)
Juilliard School (i)
Lincoln Movie Theater, Harlem (i)
Morgan’s Bar, Harlem (i)
Philharmonic Orchestra (i)
New York Times (i), (ii)
Nietzsche, Friedrich, influence on Scriabin (i)
‘Night music’ (Nachtmusik, notturni)
in Bartók (i)
in Field, Haydn and Mozart (i)
in Ligeti (i)
in Ravel (i)
Nordraak, Rikard, introduces Grieg to Norwegian folk music (i)
Norwegian fiddle playing, influence on Grieg (i), (ii)
‘Norwegian’ melodic shape, in Grieg (i), (ii)
Nuvellist magazine (i)
Nyman, Michael (i)
The Heart Asks Pleasure First (i)

Oe, Kenzaburo, Women Listening to the Rain Tree inspires Takemitsu (i)
Oliver, ‘King’ (i)
Ondes Martenot (i)
opera
Italian popular in Germany (i)
Italian popular in Spain (i)
popular in France (i)
Saint-Saëns defends instrumental music against (i)
organ (i), (ii)
J.S. Bach (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Busoni (i), (ii)
Philip Glass (i)
in movie theatres (i)
Messiaen (i)
Saint-Saëns (i)
oriental influences
Balakirev (i)
Cage (i)
Caucasian folk music (i)
Debussy (i), (ii)
Ravel (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Takemitsu (i)
Ottomans, in Caucasus (i)
Ozawa, Seiji, on Takemitsu (i)

Paderewski, Ignacy Jan (i)

recording of Chopin’s Mazurka op. 63 no. 3 (i)
Paganini, Niccolò, inspires Liszt (i)
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, influence on Brahms (i)
Paris, France (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
Bastille Day evoked by Debussy (i)
catacombs (i)
Conservatoire (i), (ii)
Great Exhibition (i)
liberation of (i)
Parker, Charlie (i)
Pärt, Arvo (i)
converts to Orthodox Church (i)
Für Alina (i)
bells and ‘tintinnabuli’ style (i), (ii)
challenge of performing (i)
compared with Satie (i)
lack of markings (i)
influence of religious music (i)
influence on later composers (i)
 Nekrolog, 12-note style criticised (i)
Reich on (i)
‘Le Pas espagnol’
in Fauré’s Dolly Suite (i)
in horse dressage (i)
painting by Toulouse-Lautrec (i)
Paumgartner, Sylvester (i), (ii)
Pearce, Charles W. (i)
pedalling
in J.S. Bach (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
in Bizet (i)
in Chopin (i)
in Debussy (i), (ii)
in Mozart (i), (ii)
in Mussorgsky (i)
in Pärt (i)
in Poulenc (i)
in Rachmaninoff (i)
in Satie (i)
in Weir (i), (ii), (iii)
una corda (soft pedal)
in Beethoven (i)
in Berio (i)
in Chopin (i)
in Grieg (i)
in Schumann (i)
Pedrell, Felipe
collects Spanish folk music (i)
cultivates Spanish national school (i)
influences Albéniz, Granados and de Falla (i)
pentatonic scale
in Debussy (i), (ii), (iii)
in Ravel (i)
Period instruments compared with modern (i)
and editions of Mozart (i)
Perlmuter, Vlado
on Debussy (i)
taught by Ravel (i)
teaches Susan Tomes (i)
Peterson, Oscar (i)
Philip V, King of Spain (i)
philosophy
Eastern and minimalism (i)
Nietzsche and Scriabin (i), (ii)
German Enlightenment and C.P.E. Bach (i)
Kant, Schoenhauer and the sublime (i)
Indian and Cage (i), (ii)
Japanese and Takemitsu (i)
 Moses Mendelssohn (i)
Transcendentalists and Ives (i)
Pianist, The (film) (i)
piano
action, heavy on modern (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and popular music (i)
Bösendorfer (i)
Broadwood (i)
and the rise of the middle classes (i)
affordability (i)
as a domestic instrument (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
impact of recordings on (i)
J.S. Bach encounters (i)
compared with spinning jenny (i)
compared with harpsichord (i), (ii)
computer-generated (i)
development of the instrument (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
digital (i), (ii)
dummy keyboard (i), (ii)
Erard favoured by Ravel (i)
Fazioli (i)
grand piano, prestige of (i)
growth in manufacture in Russia (i)
in China (i)
in concert (i)
in silent films (i)
its characteristics (i), (ii)
keyboard, design of (i)
period instruments compared with modern (i), (ii)
player piano (i)
‘prepared piano’ (i), (ii)
role in modern music (i)
sales boosted by ragtime (i)
Steinway (i), (ii)
una corda pedal (i)
worldwide appeal (i)
Yamaha (i)
piano concertos (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
piano duets (two players at one piano) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
performing (i)
piano duos (two players at two pianos) (i), (ii), (iii)
difficulty of playing (i)
piano quartets (i), (ii), (iii)
characteristics of (i)
heyday in 19th century (i)
piano quintets (i), (ii), (iii), (iv),
varying role of the piano in (i)
piano trios (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
Pierrot
and Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano (i)
and Banville’s ‘Pierrot’ (i)
and Verlaine’s ‘Pantomime’ (i)
Piston, Walter, teaches Nancarrow (i)
Pittsburgh, USA (i)
Platoon (film) (i)
player piano, and Nancarrow (i)
Ployer, Barbara von (i)
Poland (i), (ii), (iii)
uprising against Russia (i)
Polish Music Center (i)
polyrhythm, in Ives (i)
polytonality
in Debussy (i), (ii)
in Ives (i)
in jazz (i)
in Ravel (i)
popular music
and ambient music (i)
and the piano (i)
eclipses classical music (i)
made available by recordings (i)
Pörschach, Austria (i)
Poulenc, Francis (i)
compared with Fauré (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
The Story of Babar the Elephant (i)
compared with Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants (i)
dissonance (i)
fingering (i)
influence of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (i)
orchestrated by Françaix (i)
parody of Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy (i)
story parody of French colonialism (i)
technical challenges (i)
Powell, Bud (i)
practising the piano (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi),
(xvii) see also rehearsal
Prague, Bohemia (i)
National Theatre (Provisional Theatre) (i)
‘preluding’ (i)
‘prepared’ Piano, and John Cage (i)
Previn, André (i)
Prokofiev, Carolina (wife of Sergei) (i)
Prokofiev, Sergei (i), (ii)
and Stalin (i)
as pianist (i)
 criticised for ‘formalism’ (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
Piano Sonata no. 7 in B flat major, op. 83 (i)
dissonance and character (i)
influence of Spanish dance (i)
influence of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (i)
infuence on Gubaidulina (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
premiered by Richter (i)
quotes Schumann (i)
Richter on (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
tempo markings (i)
a ‘war sonata’ (i)
wins Stalin Prize (i)
return to Russia (i)
Proust, Marcel (i)
Psychology of Music (journal) (i)
publishers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
and the domestic market (i)
Purcell, Henry, Dido and Aeneas (i)
Pushkin, Alexander (i)

quartal harmony, and Bill Evans (i)

quarter-tones, in Ives (i)
Queen’s Hall, London (i)
Quodlibet, in J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (i)

Rachmaninoff, Sergei (i), (ii)

as pianist (i), (ii), (iii)
emigration to USA (i), (ii)
enormous hands (i)
in film (i)
influence of Grieg’s Piano Concerto (i)
influence of Russian Orthodox Chant (i), (ii)
influence of Tchaikovsky (i)
influence on Gershwin (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
on Mahler’s conducting (i)
Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor, op. 18 (i)
compared with Chopin (i)
cross-rhythms (i)
influence of Russian Orthodox Chant (i)
keys influenced by Beethoven (i)
markings exaggerated (i)
Rachmaninoff’s recording (i)
Rzewski quotes (i)
Piano Concerto no. 3 in D minor, op. 30 (i)
 and women pianists (i)
cadenzas (i)
compared with Debussy (i)
composed for US tour (i)
cuts (i)
Hofmann rejects (i)
Horowitz plays (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (i)
influence of Russian Orthodox Chant (i)
influence of Tchaikovsky (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
Mahler conducts (i)
reception in USA (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
plays Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons (i)
recordings (i), (ii)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
tours USA (i)
treated for writer’s block by Nikolai Dahl (i)
Rackham, Arthur, fairy illustrations and Debussy (i), (ii)
radio
impact (i)
and Ligeti (i)
and Marian McPartland (i)
and Billy Mayerl (i)
and Hazel Scott (i)
and Alberto Semprini (i)
and Takemitsu (i)
and Art Tatum (i)
and Mary Lou Williams (i)
jammed in Hungary (i)
Listen with Mother (i)
US Armed Forces (i)
ragtime
influence of African-American rhythm (i)
at Chicago World Fair (i)
develops into stride piano (i)
eclipsed by rise of jazz (i)
influence of Sousa’s marches (i)
influence of waltzes (i)
revival in 1970s (i)
Scott Joplin (i)
origins and character (i), (ii)
piano rolls (i)
premonition in Beach (i)
recordings (i)
‘Spanish tinge’ (i)
Rahman, Zoe (i)
Raksin, David (i)
Rameau, Jean-Philippe
Castor et Pollux, Debussy attends (i)
Debussy on (i)
Ravel, Maurice (i)
and World War 1 (i), (ii)
as pianist (i)
character (i), (ii)
compared with Mozart (i)
compared with Scriabin (i)
composition methods (i)
a dandy (i)
L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (i)
favours Erard piano (i)
Gaspard de la Nuit
‘Ondine’ compared with Debussy’s ‘Ondine’ (i)
technical challenges (i)
‘Scarbo’ inspired by Balakirev’s Islamey (i)
influence of Gershwin (i), (ii)
influence of jazz (i), (ii), (iii)
influence of Liszt (i), (ii)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
Jeux d’Eau (i)
joins ‘Les Apaches’ (i)
Ma Mère l’Oye inspired by Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants (i)
Miroirs (i)
‘Alborado del Gracioso’, evokes Spain (i)
and symbolist writers (i)
technical challenges (i)
‘Une Barque sur l’Océan’
orchestration (i)
tempo (i)
dedicated to members of ‘Les Apaches’ (i)
markings (i), (ii)
‘Noctuelles’
compared with Bartók’s ‘night music’ (i)
Ravel on (i)
rhythmic complexity (i)
‘Oiseaux Tristes’
influence on Boulez (i)
Viñes on (i)
symbolism of mirrors (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
‘La Vallée des Cloches’, influence of gamelan (i)
on copying other works (i), (ii)
on importance of jazz (i)
orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (i), (ii)
 ‘oriental’ flavour (i), (ii)
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (i)
Piano Concerto in G major (i)
compared with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (i)
compared with Mozart’s concertos (i)
compared with Saint-Saëns’s concertos (i)
compared with Stravinsky’s Petrushka (i), (ii)
cross-rhythms in (i)
influence of Gershwin (i)
influence of harpsichord music (i)
influence of jazz (i), (ii), (iii)
influence of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (i)
influence of Satie (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
Marguerite Long premiere (i)
Ravel on (i), (ii), (iii)
role of pianist in (i)
technical challenges (i)
Piano Trio in A minor (i)
compared with Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat major (i)
cross-rhythms in scherzo (i)
influence of Basque folk music (i)
influence of Fauré (i)
influence of Saint-Saëns’s Piano Trio no. 1 (i)
Ravel on (i), (ii)
rhythmic complexity (i)
second movement
based on Pantoum (i)
compared with Munch’s The Scream (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii), (iii)
tempo markings (i), (ii)
polytonality (i), (ii)
Sonata for Violin and Cello
Jourdan-Morhange on difficulty (i)
Ravel on (i)
Sonata for Violin and Piano in G major
influence on Bartók (i)
jazz influence on (i)
Sonata for Violin and Piano (Sonate Posthume) (i)
teaches Vlado Perlmuter (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Valses Nobles et Sentimentales (i)
headed by quote from de Régnier (i)
recordings (i), (ii), (iii)
Bartók records folk music (i)
encourage passive listening (i)
impact (i)
of Bartók’s Contrasts (i)
 of Grieg’s Piano Concerto (i)
Rachmaninoff’s (i), (ii)
range of music available (i)
recruiting dance (Verbunkos), in Bartók’s Contrasts (i)
Régnier, Henri de, quoted by Ravel (i)
rehearsal (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also practising the piano
Reich, Steve, influence on Glass (i)
Reitz, Rosetta, on women in jazz (i)
Rellstab, Ludwig, compares Field and Chopin (i)
Renaissance music, Fauré influenced by (i)
repeats, observing (i), (ii)
repertoire
choice of (i)
richness of (i)
Revue Musicale, commissions ‘tombeau’ for Debussy (i)
Ricercare (i)
Richter, Max (i)
Richter, Sviatoslav
on difficulty of Scriabin’s Piano Sonata no. 5 (i)
premieres Shostakovich’s Piano Sonata no. 7 (i)
taught by Heinrich Neuhaus (i)
Ries, Ferdinand, on Beethoven’s method of composing (i)
Rifkin, Joshua, plays Joplin (i)
Riley, Terry, In C (i)
Roach, Max (i)
Romanticism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi),
(xvii), (xviii), (xix), (xx), (xxi), (xxii)
Rome, Italy, Villa Medici (i)
Roosor, Louis, on Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano (i)
Rosicrucianism
Debussy’s interest in (i)
description (i)
Satie’s interest in (i)
Rubinstein, Nikolai (i)
and Balakirev’s Islamey (i)
criticises Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
director of Moscow Conservatoire (i)
Tchaikovsky on (i)
Rudolph, Archduke
plays Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto (i)
dedicatee of Beethoven’s works (i)
Russell, Curly (i)
Russia (i), (ii)
and World War II (i)
Caucasus becomes part of Russian Empire (i)
‘Mighty Handful’ (i)
Polish uprising against (i)
popularity of the piano in 19th century (i)
 Revolution (i)
rhythms of speech (i)
Russian nationalist school (i), (ii)
Tsar encourages piano manufacture (i)
see also Stalin, Joseph; USSR
Russian Orthodox Chant
influence on Rachmaninoff (i), (ii)
in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (i)
Rzewski, Frederic (i)
concern for social justice (i)
The People United Will Never Be Defeated (i)
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (i)
compared with Ives (i)
cotton mill strike (i)
quotes Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 (i)

St Jean-de-Luz, France (i), (ii)

St Petersburg, Russia (i), (ii)
Artists’ Club (i)
Conservatoire (i)
Imperial Russian Ballet School (i)
see also Leningrad
Saint-Saëns, Camille (i), (ii)
as organist (i)
as pianist (i)
becomes ‘grand old man’ of French music (i)
Carnival of the Animals (i)
parodies Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist (i)
champions chamber music in France (i)
compared with Debussy (i)
compared with Ravel (i)
Danse Macabre, influence on Bartók (i)
dances Galatea and Pygmalion with Tchaikovsky (i)
Fauré on his teaching (i)
friendship with Tchaikovsky (i)
influence of R. Schumann (i)
influence of Tchaikovsky (i)
influence on Fauré (i)
influence on Tchaikovsky (i)
love of ballet (i)
Piano Quartet in B flat major, op. 41, influence on Fauré (i)
Piano Trio no. 1 in F major, op. 18 (i)
influence on Ravel’s Piano Trio (i)
Piano Trio no. 2 in E minor, op. 92 (i)
compared with Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio (i)
Saint-Saëns on (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
teaches Fauré at École Niedermeyer (i)
Salieri, Antonio (i)
salons
and the piano (i)
Chopin prefers (i), (ii)
Fauré attends (i)
Pauline Viardot’s (i)
Szymanowska’s (i)
Sand, George, relationship with Chopin (i)
Sandomierz, Poland (i)
San Sebastian, Spain (i)
Satie, Erik (i)
at Le Chat Noir (i)
character (i)
compared with Pärt (i)
composition methods (i)
Croquis et Agaceries (i)
Debussy supports (i)
Descriptions Automatiques (i)
drawing by Cocteau (i)
Embryons Desséchés (i)
Le Fils des Étoiles (i)
Gymnopédies (i), (ii)
harmonies (i)
inspires ambient music (i)
Satie on (i)
scarcity of markings (i)
orchestration by Debussy (i)
humour (i)
influence on Ravel (i)
interest in ancient Greece (i), (ii)
interest in Rosicrucianism (i)
‘medieval’ character of music (i)
Memoirs of an Amnesiac (i)
originator of ‘Ambient Music’ (i)
‘Le Piccadilly’ influenced by Joplin (i)
Pièces Froides (i)
response to Wagnerism (i)
self-portrait (i)
student years (i)
Savoy Hotel, London
Billy Mayerl plays at (i)
Savoy Havana Band (i)
Sayn-Wittgenstein, Caroline von, relationship with Liszt (i)
Scarlatti, Alessandro (i)
Scarlatti, Domenico
influence of Spanish, Portuguese, Moorish and flamenco guitar on (i), (ii), (iii)
harpsichord versus piano (i)
life (i)
 Phrygian mode in (i)
sonatas (i)
in D minor, K1 (i)
in G minor, K8 (i)
in D minor, K9 (i)
in F major, K17 (i)
in E major, K20 (i)
in A major, K24 (i)
in B minor, K27 (i)
in C minor, K56 (i)
in D major, K96 (i)
in D minor, K141 (i)
in A major, K208 (i)
in B flat major, K273 (i)
in E major, K380 (i)
in G minor, K426 (i)
in G major, K455 (i)
in D major, K492 (i)
tempos (i)
Schaffer, Peter, Amadeus (i)
Scheibe, Johann Adolf (i)
Schneider, Friedrich (i)
Schnitzler, Arthur, La Ronde (i)
Schoenberg, Arnold (i), (ii)
atonality (i), (ii), (iii)
‘developing variation’ (i)
early support by Mahler and Strauss (i)
early works (i)
‘emancipation of the dissonance’ (i)
on Cage (i)
teaches Berg and Webern (i), (ii), (iii)
teaches Cage (i), (ii)
Three Pieces for Piano, op. 11 (i)
Five Pieces for Piano, op. 23 (i), (ii)
compared with Pierrot Lunaire (i)
detailed markings (i)
difficult to memorise (i), (ii)
sparse piano-writing (i)
twelve-note language perplexing (i)
Gurrelieder (i)
on music and composing (i)
on writing for piano (i)
Pierrot Lunaire
compared with Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano (i)
pupils (i)
serialism (i), (ii)
inspires ‘total serialisation’ (i)
use in horror films and cartoons (i)
 Suite for Piano, op. 25 (i)
teaches Cage (i)
twelve-note (twelve-tone) method (i)
development rooted in tradition (i)
Verklärte Nacht (i)
Wind Quintet, op. 26 (i)
Schopenhauer, Arthur (i)
Schroeter, Rebecca (i)
Schubert, Franz (i), (ii), (iii)
Allegro in A minor for Piano Duet, D947 (i)
as pianist (i), (ii)
Beethoven on his songs (i)
character (i), (ii)
dances (i)
composing methods (i), (ii)
difficulty of his music (i)
Erlkönig, influence on Smetana (i)
Fantasy in C major, D760, ‘Wanderer’ (i)
parodied by Poulenc (i)
Fantasy in C major for Piano and Violin, D934 (i), (ii)
Fantasy in F minor for Piano Duet, D940 (i)
Die Forelle (The Trout) (i), (ii)
Gretchen am Spinnrade (i)
illness (i)
importance of amateur musicians to (i)
Impromptu in F minor, D935, no. 1
influence on Berio (i)
influence of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G, op. 31 no. 1 (i)
influence of Haydn (i)
influence on Beach (i)
influence on Berio (i)
influence on Brahms (i), (ii)
influence on Smetana (i)
late works, character of (i)
Schumann, Robert, on (i)
nickname (i)
on Beethoven (i), (ii)
on Mozart (i)
Pilgerweise (i)
piano duets (i)
orchestral character of (i)
Piano Quintet in A major, D667, ‘Trout’ (i), (ii)
compared with Dvořák’s Piano Quintet (i)
relationship with Hummel’s Quintet arrangement
of his Septet (i), (ii)
piano sonatas, final three (i)
Piano Sonata in G major, D894 (i)
Piano Sonata in A major, D959 (i)
 Piano Sonata in B flat major, D960 (i), (ii)
Piano Trio in B flat major, D898 (i)
Piano Trio in E flat major, D929 (i), (ii)
compared with Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ Trio (i)
compared with Ravel’s Piano Trio (i)
first performance (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii), (iii)
reputation (i)
Rondo for Piano Duet in A major, D951 (i)
influenced by Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E minor, op. 90 (i)
Schumann, Robert, on (i)
Die schöne Müllerin (i)
‘Schubertiades’ (i)
Schumann, Robert, on his piano trios (i)
‘Sei mir gegrüsst’ (i)
String Quartet in D minor, D810, ‘Death and the Maiden’ (i)
String Quintet in C major, D956 (i)
Symphony no. 9 in C major, D944 (i)
Winterreise (i), (ii), (iii)
Schumann (Wieck), Clara (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
admired by Liszt and Goethe (i)
as pianist (i), (ii), (iii)
Brahms supports (i), (ii)
Chopin on (i)
composition methods (i)
concert tours (i), (ii), (iii)
discouraged by Robert from composing (i)
influence on Brahms (i)
influence on Smetana (i)
large hands (i)
marriage to Robert Schumann (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
meets Brahms (i), (ii)
on Brahms’s Piano Pieces, op. 116, (i), (ii), (iii)
on Chopin (i)
on early versions of Brahms’s Piano Quintet (i)
on Liszt’s Piano Sonata (i)
performs Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
performs Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto (i), (ii)
Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 7 (i)
compared with Chopin’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
compared with Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto (i)
performs premiere with Felix Mendelssohn (i)
Robert Schumann helps to orchestrate (i)
inspired by Chopin (i)
technical challenges (i)
Piano Trio in G minor, op. 17 (i)
influences Smetana (i)
Romances for Violin and Piano (i)
 taught by Friedrich Wieck (i)
Schumann, Felix (son of Clara and Robert)
and Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Violin op. 78 (i)
Schumann, Ferdinand (grandson of Clara and Robert) (i)
Schumann, Robert (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
allusions to Clara in his music (i), (ii), (iii)
as poet (i)
character (i), (ii)
Clara Schumann advises (i)
Clara Schumann on (i), (ii)
Clara Schumann performs (i)
compared with Brahms (i)
compared with Chopin (i)
compared with Fanny Mendelssohn (i)
composing methods (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
cryptic messages (i), (ii), (iii)
Dichterliebe (i)
Fantasie in C major, op. 17 (i)
dedicated to Liszt (i)
influence on Liszt’s Piano Sonata (i)
Fantasiestücke, op. 12 (i)
fingering (i)
Florestan and Eusebius (i)
Frauenliebe und -leben (i)
identified as ‘conservative’ composer (i)
illness (i), (ii), (iii)
influence of Chopin (i)
influence of Jean Paul (i), (ii)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence on Dvořák (i), (ii)
influence on Fauré (i)
influence on Grieg (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
influence on Saint-Saëns (i)
influence on Smetana (i)
Kinderszenen, op. 15 (i)
‘Child falling asleep’ (i)
and the Doppelgänger (i)
Clara Schumann on (i)
‘Frightening’, compared with Chopin (i)
‘Knight of the Stick Horse’ inspires Bizet (i)
Kreisleriana, op. 16 (i)
Liederkreis, op. 39, ‘Wehmut’ quoted by Prokofiev (i)
marriage to Clara Wieck (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
meets Brahms (i), (ii)
on Brahms (i)
on Chopin’s mazurkas (i)
on Schubert’s piano trios (i)
on Schubert’s Rondo in A major, D951 (i)
 on Szymanowska’s Études (i)
Phantasie for Piano and Orchestra (i)
Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 54 (i)
compared with Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto (i)
influence on Grieg’s Piano Concerto (i), (ii)
origin as Phantasie (i)
reception (i)
Piano Quartet in E flat major, op. 47 (i)
influences Smetana (i)
Piano Quintet in E flat major, op. 44 (i)
Piano Trio no. 1 in D minor, op. 63 (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
Piano Trio no. 2 in F major, op. 80 (i)
promotes Schubert’s music (i)
quotes Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (i)
quotes Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (i)
Studies for Pedal Piano, op. 56, Bizet arranges for piano duet (i)
suicide attempt (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
tempo (i)
textures (i), (ii)
Waldszenen, ‘Prophet Bird’
compared with Bizet’s ‘Le Volant’ (i)
compared with Grieg’s ‘Little Bird’ (i)
Schuppanzigh, Ignaz (i), (ii), (iii)
Schurmann, Gerard (i)
Schütz, Heinrich, influence on Brahms (i)
Scott, Hazel (i)
Scriabin, Alexander (i)
and Freud (i)
classification of harmonies (i)
death (i)
development of harmonic style (i)
early works (i)
influence of Chopin (i)
influence of Mme Blavatsky (i)
influence of Nietzsche (i)
late works (i)
‘mystic chord’ (i)
compared with Wagner’s ‘Tristan chord’ (i)
philosophy and psychology (i), (ii)
piano sonatas (i)
Piano Sonata no. 5, op. 53 (i)
compared with Ravel, Stravinsky, Ellington (i)
markings (i)
Poem of Ecstasy (poem) quoted (i)
‘prefatory action’ (i)
Sviatoslav Richter on (i)
 reception (i)
Shostakovich on (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
Sebök, György (i)
Second Viennese School (i), (ii) see also Berg; Schoenberg; Webern
Semprini, Alberto (i)
serialism
influence on Messiaen (i)
Schoenberg pioneers (i)
Schoenberg on (i)
‘total serialisation’ (i)
use in horror films and cartoons (i)
see also twelve-note technique
Sessions, Roger, teaches Nancarrow (i)
Seville, Spain (i)
Alcázar Palace (i)
Shakespeare, William
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (i)
Hamlet (i)
The Tempest (i)
Shawshank Redemption, The (film) (i)
Shine (film) (i)
Shostakovich, Dmitri (i)
as pianist (i)
censured by Stalinist regime (i)
influence on Gubaidulina (i)
on Scriabin (i)
Piano Concerto no. 2 in F major, op. 102 (i)
influences (i), (ii)
parodies Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist (i)
Shostakovich on (i)
Piano Trio no. 2 in E minor, op. 67 (i)
and treatment of the Jews (i)
and World War II (i), (ii)
compared with Symphony no. 7 (i)
influence of J.S. Bach (i)
influence of klezmer (i)
in memory of Sollertinsky (i)
sparse piano writing (i)
tempo, Shostakovich on (i)
Symphony no. 7, ‘Leningrad’
Virgil Thomson on (i)
Shostakovich, Maxim (son of Dmitri)
premieres Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto no. 2 (i)
Silbermann, Gottfried (i)
Silesia (i)
Silver, Horace (i)
Simone, Nina (i)
slavery, Transcendentalists against (i)
Smetana, Bedřich
and Czech nationalism (i), (ii)
as pianist (i)
conductor at Provisional Theatre, Prague (i), (ii)
death of daughters (i)
influence of Chopin (i)
influence of Clara and Robert Schumann (i)
influence of Liszt (i), (ii)
influence of Schubert (i)
influence on Dvořák (i)
learns Czech (i)
Piano Trio in G minor, op. 15 (i), (ii)
influence of Chopin (i), (ii)
influence of Liszt (i)
influence of Schubert’s Erlkönig (i)
influence of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat major (i)
influence of R. Schumann’s Piano Quartet (i)
influence on Dvořák (i)
in memory of Bedřiška (i)
Smetana, Bedřiška (daughter of Bedřich) (i), (ii)
Smetana, Gabriela (daughter of Bedřich) (i)
Smith, Willie ‘The Lion’ (i), (ii)
Sollertinsky, Ivan Ivanovich
and Shostakovich (i)
Shostakovich on (i)
song repertoire (i)
Sousa, John Philip (i)
marches influence ragtime (i)
Spain
evocation of
in Albeniz’s Iberia (i)
in Debussy’s Preludes (i)
in Fauré’s Dolly Suite (i)
in Ravel’s Miroirs (i)
in Scarlatti’s sonatas (i)
the ‘gracioso’ in Spanish comedy (i)
Sparta, Greece (i)
Spinoza, Baruch (i)
Spohr, Louis, on première of Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ Trio (i)
Stalin, Joseph
and Gubaidulina (i)
and Ligeti (i)
and Prokofiev (i)
and Shostakovich (i)
death (i)
purges (i)
Stalingrad, Battle of (i)
Steinway pianos (i), (ii)
Stevenson, Ronald, on Busoni (i)
Steyr, Austria (i)
The Sting (film) (i)
Stirling, Jane, pupil of Chopin (i)
Stockhausen, Karlheinz (i)
influence on Berio (i)
Strauss, Richard
Salome (i)
supports Schoenberg’s early work (i)
Stravinsky, Igor
compared with Scriabin (i)
influence on Shostakovich (i)
music banned in Communist Hungary (i)
Petrushka
compared with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major (i), (ii)
referenced by Debussy (i)
Piano Rag Music (i)
Ansermet introduces Stravinsky to ragtime (i)
claims ignorance of ragtime (i)
complex rhythms (i)
influenced by Joplin (i)
markings (i)
on pleasure of playing (i)
Stravinsky’s recording (i)
Ragtime for Eleven Instruments (i)
The Rite of Spring (i)
Debussy hears performance on piano (i)
Debussy quotes (i)
influence on Poulenc (i)
influence on Prokofiev (i)
The Soldier’s Tale (i)
Symphony of Psalms (i)
streaming (i), (ii)
stride piano see jazz
Strinasacchi, Regina (i), (ii)
sublime, the see nature and the sublime
Switzerland (i)
‘Symphonic jazz’ (i)
Synaesthesia
and Messiaen (i)
and Scriabin (i)
Szigeti, Josef, and Bartók’s Contrasts (i), (ii)
Szymanowska, Celina (daughter of Maria) (i)
Szymanowska, Maria (i)
Anglaise in A flat major, compared with Chopin’s Écossaise op. 72 no. 3 (i)
as pianist (i)
as teacher (i)
 compared with Hummel (i)
death (i)
dress (i)
Eighteen Dances (i)
Études (i)
no. (i)
compared with Chopin’s Prelude, op. 28 no. 23 (i)
compared with Chopin’s Étude, op. 10 no. 8 (i)
no. (i)
compared with Chopin’s Étude, op. 10 no. 7 (i)
no. (i)
compared with Chopin’s Étude, op. 25 no. 4 (i)
compared with Chopin’s Variations on Là ci darem la mano (i)
R. Schumann on (i)
technical challenges (i)
family (i)
organizes tours (i)
Goethe on (i)
honoured by Tsar of Russia (i)
influence on Chopin (i)
marriage (i)
mazurkas resemble Chopin’s (i)
neglect by historians (i)
Nocturne in B flat major, compared with Chopin’s Nocturne in A flat, op. 32 no. 2 (i)
plays from memory (i)
Prince Ogiński on (i)
relationship with Goethe (i)
settles in St Petersburg (i)
tours (i)
Sławomir Dobrzański’s research on (i)
Vingt Exercices et Préludes (i)
Waltz no. 3, compared with Chopin’s Waltz in A flat major, op. posth. (i)

Takemitsu, Tōru (i)

encounters Bunraku (i)
encounters Western music on radio (i)
engagement with Japanese culture (i)
influence of Debussy (i), (ii)
influence of Messiaen (i), (ii)
on importance of ‘Ma’ (i)
on Messiaen (i)
Ozawa on (i)
Rain Tree Sketch (i)
Rain Tree Sketch II (i)
dedicated to Messiaen (i)
influence of Debussy (i)
influence of Messiaen (i)
inspired by stories of Kenzabure Oe (i)
Talich, Václav, on Janáček (i)
Tatum, Art (i), (ii)
Taubert, Wilhelm (i)
Tchaikovsky, Modest (brother of Pyotr) (i)
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich (i)
admires Bizet’s Carmen (i)
and Desirée Artôt (i)
attends Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth (i)
composition methods (i)
dances Galatea and Pygmalion with Saint-Saëns (i)
friendship with Saint-Saëns (i)
influence of Liszt (i), (ii)
influence of Saint-Saëns (i)
influence on Rachmaninoff (i)
influence on Saint-Saëns (i)
love of ballet (i)
The Nutcracker (i), (ii)
on Balakirev’s Islamey (i)
on Glinka’s Kamarinskaya (i)
on Nikolai Rubinstein (i)
Piano concertos (i)
no. 1 in B flat minor, op. 23 (i), (ii)
‘blind octaves’ in (i)
criticised by Nikolai Rubinstein (i)
dominated by male performers (i)
folk song in (i), (ii), (iii)
French song in (i)
influence of Grieg’s Piano Concerto (i), (ii)
influence on Rachmaninoff (i)
premiere played by von Bülow (i)
references to Desirée Artôt (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii)
The Seasons (i), (ii)
commissioned by Nuvellist magazine (i)
compared with Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr (i)
echoes of his ballet music (i), (ii)
influence of Felix Mendelssohn (i)
influence of R. Schumann (i), (ii)
influence on Rachmaninoff (i)
technical challenges (i), (ii), (iii)
The Sleeping Beauty (i)
Swan Lake (i), (ii)
Symphony no. 6 in B minor, op. 74, second movement influenced by Saint-Saëns (i)
teaching material, Grieg’s Lyric Pieces used as (i)
technical challenges
absence of in ambient music (i)
and the amateur pianist (i)
and the modern piano (i)
 heyday of virtuoso piano music (i)
see also individual composers
television (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Temps, Le (i)
Teöke, Marianne, commissions Kurtag’s Játékok (i)
Thalberg, Sigismond (i)
‘three-hand’ effect (i)
thematic transformation
in Beethoven (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
in Brahms (i), (ii), (iii)
in Dvořák (i)
in Grieg (i), (ii), (iii)
in Liszt (i)
in Mussorgsky (i)
in Rzewski (i)
in Saint-Saëns (i)
in Schubert (i)
in Schumann (i)
theosophy, influences Scriabin (i)
Thomson, Virgil, on Shostakovich (i)
Thoreau, Henry David
and Ives (i)
and Transcendentalists (i)
as flautist (i)
on how to live (i)
Walden (i)
‘three-hand’ effect (i)
Tibet (i)
Toledo, Ohio, USA (i)
Tolstoy, Leo
on importance of music (i)
plays the piano (i)
Tom and Jerry, Puttin’ on the Dog uses serialism (i)
Tomes, Susan
experience as pianist
Amy Beach unknown to (i)
choice of pieces (i)
disproportionate difficulty of piano parts (i)
learning Mozart’s Piano Concerto, K488 (i)
Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ Trio (i)
Dvořák’s Piano Quintet (i)
Grieg’s Lyric Pieces (i)
Mayerl (i)
Mendelssohn in Germany (i)
Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio no. 1 (i), (ii)
Ravel’s Piano Trio (i)
Saint-Saëns’s Piano Trio no. 2 (i)
Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet (i)
 Schumann’s Piano Concerto (i)
Ronald Stevenson’s classes (i)
taught by Jaki Byard (i)
taught by Vlado Perlmuter (i)
‘unsuitability’ of Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
experience as violinist
Boulez’s conducting (i)
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de (i)
‘Au Cirque – Le Pas espagnol’ (i)
Transcendentalists
and Emerson (i)
and Ives (i)
description (i)
transcriptions
J.S. Bach (i)
Busoni (i)
Liszt (i)
Transposition, in jazz (i)
Trinity College of Music, London (i)
Tristano, Lennie (i)
Turgenev, Ivan, Home of the Gentry (i)
Turks, in Caucasus (i)
Turner, J.M.W. (i)
twelve-note (twelve-tone) technique
and Gubaidulina (i)
and serialism (i)
controversial (i)
description (i)
devised by Schoenberg (i)
Schoenberg on (i)
Tyner, McCoy (i)

Uchida, Mitsuko, on Schubert (i)

Una corda see pedalling
USA
United States Marine Band (i)
see also individual cities
USSR, repressive policies
Gubaidulina (i)
Ligeti (i)
Prokofiev (i)
Shostakovich (i)
purges (i)

Valdemossa, Majorca (i)

Valencia, Spain (i)
Végh, Sándor (i)
and Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Violin, op. 78 (i)
 on Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio no. 1 (i)
Velásquez, Consuelo, ‘Bésame mucho’ inspired by Granados (i)
Venice, Italy (i)
Verbunkos see recruiting dance
Verdi, Giuseppe (i)
Verlaine, Paul, ‘Pantomime’ set by Debussy (i)
Viardot, Marianne (i)
Viardot, Paul (i)
Viardot, Pauline (i)
Victoria, Queen (i)
Vienna, Austria (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
Kärntnertor Theatre (i)
Theater an der Wien (i)
Village Vanguard, New York (i)
Viñes, Ricardo (i)
on Ravel’s ‘Oiseaux Tristes’ (i)
Virginals (i)
Vysoká, Bohemia (i)
Vivaldi, Antonio (i), (ii), (iii)
Vogl, Johann Michael (i)
Vuillard, Édouard (i)

Wagner, Cosima (i)

Wagner, Richard
attacked in manifesto of Brahms and Joachim (i)
anti-Semitism (i)
Debussy on (i)
identified with ‘New German School’ (i)
in films (i)
influenced by Liszt (i), (ii)
influence on Fauré (i)
influence on Grieg (i)
influence on Messiaen (i), (ii)
Jewishness in Music (i)
on Felix Mendelssohn (i)
relationship with Liszt (i)
Satie’s reaction to (i)
Das Ring des Nibelungen
Tchaikovsky attends at Bayreuth (i)
Tristan und Isolde (i)
influence on Messiaen (i)
‘Tristan chord’ compared with Scriabin’s ‘mystic chord’ (i)
Wagnerism in France (i)
Waller, Thomas ‘Fats’ (i), (ii)
Walter, Anton (i)
Walton, Cedar (i)
Warsaw, Poland (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Weber family (i)
Webern, Anton
influence on Boulez (i)
influence on Gubaidulina (i)
taught by Schoenberg (i), (ii), (iii)
Weimar, Germany (i)
Weir, Judith (i)
The Art of Touching the Keyboard (i)
influence of Brahms (i), (ii)
inspired by Couperin (i), (ii)
Weir on (i)
compared with Kurtág (i)
Master of the Queen’s Music (i)
piano concerto
compared with Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto (i)
like concerto grosso (i)
Weir on (i)
piano writing influenced by harpsichord (i)
Weiss, Julius, teaches Scott Joplin (i)
Welsh, Moray, on Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano (i)
Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, Nocturne in Black and Gold (i)
Whiteman, Paul
commissions Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (i)
influence on Ravel (i)
whole-tone scale/harmony
Albéniz admires use by Debussy (i)
in Adès (i)
in Debussy (i), (ii), (iii)
in Gubaidulina (i)
Wieck, Clara see Schumann, Clara
Wieck, Friedrich (i)
Williams, Mary-Lou (i), (ii)
Wilson, Teddy (i)
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Rzewski (i)
Pete Seeger (i)
women composers
Beach, Amy (i)
Mahler, Alma (i)
Mendelssohn, Fanny (i), (ii)
Mozart, Anna Maria (‘Nannerl’) (i), (ii)
reasons for neglect (i)
reasons for scarcity (i)
Schumann, Clara (i), (ii)
Szymanowska, Maria (i)
see also gender issues; jazz
women pianists
and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto (i)
and Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 (i)
and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 (i)
Austin, Lovie (i)
Beach, Amy (i)
Bley, Carla (i)
Brackeen, Joanne (i)
Genzinger, Marianne von (i)
Hardin Armstrong, Lil (i)
in jazz (i)
Jansen, Therese (i), (ii)
Jones, Norah (i)
Krall, Diana (i)
McPartland, Marie (i)
Mendelssohn, Fanny (i)
Mozart, Anna Maria (‘Nannerl’) (i), (ii)
Mullins, Mazie (i)
Rahman, Zoe (i)
Schumann, Clara (i), (ii)
Scott, Hazel (i)
Simone, Nina (i)
small hands and fingering (i), (ii), (iii)
Szymanowska, Maria (i)
Tomes, Susan see individual entry
Williams, Mary Lou (i)
see also gender issues; jazz
women violinists
Strinasacchi, Regina (i)
see also gender issues
Wordsworth, William (i)
World War I (i)
and Bartók (i)
and Debussy (i), (ii)
and Ravel (i)
France enters (i)
World War II
and Ligeti (i)
and Mayerl (i)
and Messiaen (i)
and Prokofiev (i)
and Shostakovich (i)
and women jazz musicians (i)
Wörthersee, Austria (i)

Yamaha pianos (i)

Zen Buddhism, and Cage (i)