The Program
JOSEPH HAYDN
Sonata in C Minor, Hob. XVI:20
About the
Composer
Joseph
Haydn spent virtually his entire career either in Vienna or in the idyllic
isolation of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s country estate in Hungary. Unburdened
by financial worries and blessed with a sanguine
disposition, he composed with equal facility for both amateurs and
connoisseurs. His 60-odd keyboard sonatas span nearly half a century and offer
a capsule overview of his artistic development. Many of them were inspired by
women whose friendship Haydn cultivated, in part, to compensate for his own
unhappy marriage.
About the
Music
Haydn
was a skillful player of both harpsichord and piano, and his early keyboard
sonatas were designated for either instrument. Although he didn’t acquire a
piano of his own until 1788, the dynamic and expressive features of his later
works suggest that he had long been writing with that instrument in mind. In
fact, Haydn composed almost all his music at the keyboard. As he put it, “I get
up early, and as soon as I have dressed, I kneel down and pray to God and the
Holy Virgin that things may go well today. After some breakfast, I sit at the Klavier [the generic term for a keyboard
instrument] and I begin to improvise.”
A Closer
Listen
This
tempestuous work in the “dark” key of C minor dates from Haydn’s Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”)
period of the 1770s. Here there is no question of the appropriate instrument:
The abrupt dynamic shifts can only be realized on the piano. In fact, when the
sonata was published in 1780, Haydn altered some of the note values to take
advantage of the piano’s greater sustaining power. The first movement is
restless and tonally adventurous, its headlong momentum twice interrupted by
free, cadenza-like passages couched in unsettling Neapolitan harmonies. The
Andante con moto, a spacious essay in A-flat major enlivened by syncopations,
gives way to a bracing finale full of virtuosic passagework.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
BÉLA BARTÓK
Suite, Op. 14
About the
Composer
Like Stravinsky, Béla Bartók was a trailblazing modernist whose music was
deeply rooted in the soil of tradition. His early works were steeped in the
lush late-Romantic idiom of Liszt and Strauss. Starting in the first decade of
the 20th century, however, his pioneering research into the folk music of his
native Hungary and other Slavic lands resulted in a bold new synthesis. Freed
from what he called “the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys,” he
forged a leaner, more muscular style—spiced with bitonality and modality—that
would define his music for the rest of his life.
About the
Music
Composed in 1916, the Op. 14 Suite belongs to a group of technically and
stylistically innovative piano pieces that includes the Fourteen Bagatelles of
1908 and the Allegro barbaro of 1911.
Isolated in Hungary, Bartók fell back on arranging the folk music he had
collected before the war, while exploring its implications for his own style in
works like the String Quartet No. 2 and the fairy-tale ballet The Wooden Prince. A composer, he wrote,
should aspire to “assimilate the idiom of folk music so completely that he is
able to forget all about it.” Of the Suite’s four movements, the first three
are characterized by folk-like melodies and driving rhythms, followed by a
soft, dreamy finale. (Another slow movement, which Bartók originally put in
second place, was later excised.)
A Closer
Listen
The opening Allegretto no sooner sets up
our expectations than it thwarts them: Four bars of steady oom-pah
accompaniment introduce a jaunty tune that might be taken for a folk dance if
it weren’t for the wayward harmonies and occasional hiccups caused by “missing”
downbeats. In the fleet Scherzo, crisp staccato triplets alternate with
pulsing, mildly astringent chords built of seconds, fourths, and sevenths,
which Bartók invites us to hear as consonances rather than dissonances. A
roiling ostinato bass infuses the Allegro molto with a similarly propulsive
energy, now laced with a distinctly ominous tone and leading without a break to
the sere, somber lyricism of the Sostenuto.
—Harry
Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
CLAUDE
DEBUSSY
Images, Book I
About the
Composer
At once radical and traditionalist, Claude Debussy rebelled against the French
Wagner cult and the ponderous academic style of establishment composers like
Saint-Saëns and d’Indy. At the same time, he urged his compatriots to return to
the “pure French tradition” that he admired in the music of the 18th-century
composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. Debussy first made his mark in the early 1890s
with a series of boldly unconventional and quintessentially Gallic works—the
String Quartet, La damoiselle élue,
and Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune.
Over the next three decades, he produced the opera Pelléas et Mélisande and the great piano and orchestral pieces that
came to define musical impressionism in the popular mind.
About the Music
By the time he published his first book of Images
for solo piano in 1905, Debussy
and his aesthetic principles—loosely subsumed under the rubric
“Debussyism”—were forces to be reckoned with in French music. (An earlier set of Images
was composed in 1894, but not published until the late 1970s.) He
whimsically predicted that the three pieces would “take their place in the piano literature” either “to the left of
Schumann or the right of Chopin.” In actuality, the Images have very little to do with either composer, or with 19th-century pianism in general.
Debussy’s approach to the keyboard
was unique. In choosing a title with visual connotations, he invited listeners
to focus more on the music’s sound than on its structure, although all
three pieces are constructed with the greatest care and artifice.
A Closer
Listen
“Reflets dans l’eau” (“Reflections in the Water”), with
its diaphanous textures and delicately rippling cascades of notes swelling to a raging cataract in the middle, sounds
so exquisitely apposite to modern ears that it is hard to remember how
revolutionary it was a century ago. “Hommage à Rameau” (“Homage to Rameau”)
pays tribute to the French Baroque
tradition in the measured tones of a stately sarabande—not a stylistic
counterfeit, to be sure, but a richly harmonized reinterpretation in Debussy’s
own language. The character of “Mouvement” (“Movement”) is summed up in the
composer’s performance instruction: “with a capricious but precise lightness.”
A dazzling display of kaleidoscopically shifting figurations, it leaves an
indelible impression on the mind’s eye.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
FRÉDÉRIC
CHOPIN
Waltz in F Minor, Op. 70, No. 2; Waltz in G-flat Major, Op. 70, No. 1; Waltz in
D-flat Major, Op. 70, No. 3; Waltz in A-flat Major, Op. 42; Ballade in A-flat
Major, Op. 47; Nocturne in B Major, Op. 62, No. 1; Ballade in G Minor, Op. 23
About the
Composer
Franz Liszt memorably characterized his
friend (and sometime rival) Frédéric Chopin as “one of those original
beings” who are “adrift from all bondage.” Chopin demonstrated an
uncompromising independence as both composer
and pianist. In fact, it was arguably the unparalleled range and subtlety of his keyboard technique that enabled him to cast
off the shackles of musical convention so successfully. Contemporary
accounts of his playing attest his phenomenal powers. One witness marveled at
Chopin’s effortless arpeggios, “which swelled and diminished like waves in an ocean of sound.” Another recalled how
the pianist’s apparently delicate hands “would suddenly expand and cover a
third of the keyboard. It was like the opening of the mouth of a serpent about
to swallow a rabbit whole.”
About the
Works
Just as Chopin’s virtuosity defined a new
school of romantic pianism, so his dozens of waltzes, ballades, nocturnes, and
other solo piano works gave new meaning
to the term salon music, the
lightweight fare popular in Parisian drawing rooms of the 1830s and ’40s. Even
today, it is astonishing to reflect that Chopin achieved artistic maturity less than a decade after the deaths
of Beethoven and Schubert. The gulf that separates his music from theirs runs
so deep that it almost marks the
boundary of a separate world. To be sure, Chopin was firmly grounded in
tradition: Bach and Mozart were his favorite composers. But his radically
unconventional conception of the piano, and his unique blend of classical
discipline and romantic freedom, made him one of the authentically
revolutionary figures in music history.
A Closer Listen
Chopin composed some 20 waltzes between 1829 and 1848, at the height of
Europe’s waltz craze. Although they are stylized dances, intended for the salon and concert hall rather than the ballroom,
they evince the intoxicating lilt that drew people of all classes to
Europe’s popular dance halls. The three Op.
70 waltzes display the basic features of the form: a steady oom-pah-pah
accompaniment in the left hand, onto which the right hand superimposes an inexhaustible
store of melody in the rhythmic give and take of tempo rubato (literally, stolen time). The Op. 42 Waltz, sometimes
called “Grande valse,” is more expansive and
elaborate in structure. It is also more metrically adventurous, with a first
section that plays on the tension between triple and duple time.
Chopin had a special affinity for the
wistful, romantic character of the nocturne, a genre developed by the
Irish composer-pianist John Field, whom he greatly admired. The tenderly
ruminative B-Major Nocturne boasts an unusual A-flat midsection and a profusion
of the composer’s trademark filigree. Chopin worked on a larger scale in his
four ballades, which can be thought of as tonal dramas, extended multi-section
works built on sharply characterized themes and tonal contrasts. Indeed, a
large part of the pleasure of listening to the A-flat Major and
G-Minor ballades lies in following the imaginative transformations of the
melodic material, a happy marriage of lyricism and virtuosity such as only Chopin
could have created.
—Harry
Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation