The Program
FRANZ LISZT
Prelude and Fugue in A Minor (after J. S. Bach); Petrarch Sonnet No. 104 from Années de pèlerinage; Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este;
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp Minor
About the
Composer
A peerless virtuoso known for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, Liszt took Europe by storm as a young man. In the
early-19th century, only a handful of performers, including violinist
Nicolò Paganini and pianist Sigismund Thalberg, matched his star power. As
audiences in city after city succumbed to “Lisztomania,” the Hungarian’s name
became a byword for showmanship as well as pianistic prowess. In 1848, at the
height of his fame, he virtually retired from the concert stage and devoted the
rest of his life to composing, conducting, and proselytizing (with his future
son-in-law, Richard Wagner) about the “Music of the Future.” In his piano
music, symphonic tone poems, and vocal works, Liszt experimented with forms,
harmonies, and sonorities that anticipated the musical language of
impressionism and modernism.
About the Works
In addition to writing a prodigious number of original works for piano, Liszt
made dozens of arrangements of other composers’ music, ranging from faithful
transcriptions to freely creative fantasies and “paraphrases.” Among the fruits
of his early exposure to Bach’s organ works is a set of six transcriptions
published in 1852, including the A-Minor Prelude and Fugue, BWV 543. Both the
Petrarch Sonnet No. 104 and Les jeux
d’eaux à la Villa d’Este appear in the three-part collection titled Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), composed between
1838 and 1882. The “pilgrimage” in question was both physical and spiritual:
Some of the pieces relate to Liszt’s travels as an itinerant virtuoso, while
others reflect his late-life decision to enter holy orders in the Catholic
Church. The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 highlights Liszt’s nationalistic side.
Written in the late 1840s, during Hungary’s war of independence from Austria,
the score is dedicated to a prominent political reformer who served as
ambassador to France during the short-lived Hungarian Republic.
A Closer Listen
Like Bach, Liszt was a master improviser,
so it makes sense that he was drawn throughout his life to Bach’s keyboard
works, which are essentially written-down improvisations. The majestic Prelude
and Fugue in A Minor needed little adapting for the piano beyond the
addition of occasional octaves to reinforce the bass line and simulate the
organ pedal points. Both Bach’s lapidary harmonies and his labyrinthine
figurations lent themselves readily to pianistic treatment. Liszt’s version, like all his transcriptions, succeeds
in keeping faith with the original while sounding thoroughly idiomatic on its
own terms.
Petrarch’s poetry captured Liszt’s imagination during his early sojourns in
Italy. (It’s worth noting that Schubert, too, set three of Petrarch’s sonnets
as lieder.) The Sonnet No. 104, from the second book of Années de pèlerinage, explores the conflicting emotional states
engendered by love. Liszt’s impetuously syncopated octaves give way to a
pensive, yearning melody, accompanied first by rolled chords, then restated con passione against surging arpeggios
in the left hand—a reminder that Liszt originally conceived the piece as a song
for tenor voice. The music builds to an ecstatic climax with dazzling roulades,
chains of thirds, and other pyrotechnics, then subsides in an achingly tender
coda reminiscent of the beginning.
In the three decades that separated the Petrarch Sonnet No. 104 from the
religiously inspired pieces of the third book of Années de pèlerinage, Liszt the dashing salon idol reinvented
himself as the pious Abbé Liszt, an ancient of days with a flowing mane of
white hair. Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa
d’Este (The Fountains at the Villa
d’Este)—with its harp-like arpeggios, tinkling tremolos, and polychromatic
harmonies—magically evokes the play of light on jets of water. But Liszt makes
his subliminal message clear in a footnote to the score, quoting from the
Gospel of John: “For the water I give him will become in him a fountain of the
eternal life.”
Liszt’s credentials as a musical ethnographer are questionable—not until Bartók
and Kodály undertook their research in the first decade of the 20th century did
Hungarian folk music become the subject of
serious study—but there is no doubt about his enthusiasm for the
subject. He took particular pleasure in the music of gypsy bands, which he
imitated in his rousing Hungarian rhapsodies, much as Chopin imitated Polish
folk music in his polonaises and mazurkas. The C-sharp–Minor Rhapsody is in two
sections: the first bold and waywardly rhapsodic; the second light, capricious,
and dancelike. Just before the end, an improvised cadenza provides an
opportunity for a climactic display of devil-may-care bravura.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
FRANZ
SCHUBERT
16 German Dances, D. 783
About the
Composer
The same qualities that made Schubert a great song composer—his seemingly
bottomless stockpile of melody, his ability to invest the simplest of musical
phrases with dramatic significance, his quicksilver changes of keys and
moods—are equally apparent in his solo piano music. If his sonatas combine the
intimacy of the salon with a symphonic grandeur, Schubert’s dances, impromptus,
and other short pieces distill the essence of his lyrical genius in its purest
and most concentrated form. Like Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, each of these miniature musical narratives
seems to express a subliminal text that transcends the bounds of spoken
language.
A contemporary account of Schubert’s piano
playing attests the warmly lyrical, human-scaled tone he coaxed from the
instrument—so different from the powerful, quasi-orchestral sound produced by
string-snapping virtuosos like Beethoven and Liszt. After performing one of his
sonatas at a private musical soirée in Vienna, the composer proudly reported
that more than one listener had come up to him to say that “the keys became
singing voices under my hands, which, if true, pleases me greatly, since I
cannot endure the accursed chopping which even distinguished pianoforte players
indulge in and which delights neither the ear nor the mind.”
About the Work
Schubert wrote more than 400 dances for piano, most of which were probably
intended to be heard (and danced to) at the informal musical soirées known as
“Schubertiads” and other social occasions. The set published in 1825 as Op. 33
(D. 783 in the modern Deutsch catalogue) comprised 16 “German dances”—a generic
term that comprised ländler and waltzes, among other triple-time dances—plus
two écossaises (omitted on our program). All were composed in 1823 and early
1824—that is, around the time Schubert was working on his song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, and the “Rosamunde”
and “Death and the Maiden” string quartets.
A Closer Listen
Despite their conventional form (two short
repeated phrases in 3/4 time) and lack of distinguishing titles, the
German Dances are far from cookie-cutter productions. As in his lieder,
Schubert achieves variety and sophistication by astonishingly simple means. The
first dance, for example, proceeds in a straightforward “oom-pah-pah” rhythm,
but the second features a dotted upbeat figure reminiscent of a barcarolle. The
middle-of-the-bar accents in No. 5 impart a waltz-like swing, while tied notes
mask the barlines and downbeats in No. 15. The dances are equally varied in the
melodic department: Sweeping flourishes lend panache to No. 4; No. 11 is
enlivened by wide leaps in the right hand; and turns and grace notes abound.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
FRANZ
SCHUBERT
Fantasy in C Major, D. 760, “Wanderer Fantasy”
About the
Work
Composed in November 1822, this majestic and boldly imaginative work
anticipates the expansive time frames and formal structures of Schubert’s late
piano sonatas. It takes its name from his song “Der Wanderer” (“The Wanderer”)
of 1816, whose trudging theme forms the basis of a set of elaborate variations
in the fantasy’s dark, brooding Adagio movement. The four movements, analogous
to those of a Classical symphony, are separated by brief pauses rather than
full cadences. The seamless transitions highlight the work’s cyclical
structure, with the finale recalling both the tonality and the thematic
material of the first movement.
A Closer Listen
The thunderous C-major chords that open the
Allegro con fuoco ma non troppo present the short figure in dactylic rhythm
(long-short-short) that recurs throughout the fantasy as a unifying motif. Later in the movement, Schubert reverses the
pattern (short-short-long) in a winsome countermelody. Modulating to the
remote key of C-sharp minor for the Adagio,
he further transforms it into a slow dirge and then, switching from duple to
triple time, into a propulsive long-short-long figure in the scherzo-like
Presto in A-flat major. In the final Allegro, the motif returns in its original
key and rhythm, this time as the subject of a strenuous, stentorian fugato that
steadily gathers momentum on its inexorable course toward a breathtaking,
no-holds-barred climax of Lisztian splendor.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation