CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Maurizio Pollini

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 3:00 PM

Maurizio Pollini, Piano

BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, "The Tempest"
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 23 in F Minor "Appassionata"

SCHUMANN Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17
CHOPIN Four Mazurkas, Op. 33
CHOPIN Scherzo No. 2

Encores:
CHOPIN Etude in C Minor, Op. 10, No. 12, "Revolutionary"
CHOPIN Nocturne in D-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 2
CHOPIN Etude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 10, No. 4, "Torrent"
CHOPIN Ballade in G Minor, Op. 23

Program Notes:

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, “The Tempest”

Beethoven’s Sonata No. 17 received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 19, 1895, in a performance by Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

Clustered around the “Eroica” Symphony, within a few years when Beethoven was vastly increasing the dynamism and reach of his music, came an astonishing succession of piano sonatas, including the two Mr. Pollini has chosen for this recital. The “Tempest” owes its nickname to an anecdote reported by Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s ally and posthumous memoirist. Schindler, by his own account, was telling Beethoven how greatly moved the audience had been on hearing the sonatas in D minor and F minor—the very sonatas of this afternoon’s program—as performed by Carl Czerny, a Beethoven pupil and one of the foremost pianists of his day, as well as the author of innumerable études. Where, Schindler asked, did this prodigious effect come from? “Just read Shakespeare’s Tempest,” we are told was the composer’s reply.

This story, along with most that Schindler wrote about Beethoven, is now dismissed as fanciful, but it may be accurate in recording how stirred contemporary audiences were by these sonatas, and how someone at the time might seek an explanation outside the music. There is, of course, no need. The music tells its own story, independently of Shakespeare.

Tempestuous, however, the Sonata in D Minor certainly is. The opening arpeggio unleashes a crescendo of intense, driven music. In the operas of Beethoven’s time and earlier, D minor was often the key for arias of hot anger or vengeance, and there is an operatic tone to the expression here. “Friends, not these sounds!” the solo baritone rises to sing in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, another work in D minor, and something similar happens toward the end of this movement, when the arpeggio suddenly expands into melody. Perhaps Beethoven was remembering this moment when he wrote his Ninth Symphony two decades later. In the sonata, though, the interruption is ignored; the desperation goes on.

The slow movement, in B-flat major, steps aside from all this—or views it from a loftier position, for there are echoes of the first movement, even within the greater calm. Beethoven uses the extreme bass for drum rolls, and, near the end, has the two hands almost as far apart as they could be on the keyboard of his time.

Back in D minor, the finale is also back in the swirl of anxiety. This time, there is no attempt to stop it, and it is not stopped until it has exhausted itself.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata”

The “Appassionata” Sonata received its Carnegie Hall premiere in the Recital Hall (now Zankel all) on April 24, 1891, in a performance by Leopold Godowsky.

Czerny—who, we have seen, knew this sonata from the piano bench—recalled that Beethoven regarded it as his greatest before he wrote his Sonata in B-flat Major, known as the “Hammerklavier.” Many have agreed. The English composer Hubert Parry wrote, “Here, the human soul asked mighty questions of its God and had its reply.” Another distinguished observer, Vladimir Lenin, put it differently: “I would like to listen to it every day. I always think with pride—perhaps it is naïve of me—what marvelous things human beings can do.” The title, applied by a publisher in 1838, makes its own compact response, which generations have been happy to accept.

Much of the work of composition seems to have been done in summer and fall 1804, when Beethoven was on vacation, first in Baden, a spa town about 15 miles south of Vienna, then in Döbling, a village just to the north of the city. Another of his pupils, Ferdinand Ries, visited him in the latter place and recalled a walk they took together, when Beethoven had paced along “humming, and more often howling,” then rushed to the piano when they were back, to hammer out the finale of this sonata. But work continued into the next year, and perhaps into 1806. No sonata—until the “Hammerklavier”—seems to have cost the composer so much effort.

Parry—though one might not want to go all the way with his identification of the interlocutors—was surely right to hear the sonata as interrogatory. The first phrase asks a question, which is answered by the same question again, raised a semitone, whereupon the driving rhythmic motif of the Fifth Symphony reappears, but crucially changed in intervallic shape. From here, all is drama, with Beethoven using his keyboard’s full range, down to its lowest note, the F that was there in the left hand at the start and will be there again at the end. Meanwhile, the opening gesture is soon transformed into a generous melody. This is a beguiling answer, but not the right one, for the music goes storming on in search. There is a long coda, which Beethoven first sketched as affirmative, before changing his mind.

The slow movement is a hymn in D flat, in the register of a men’s choir, with decoration that becomes increasingly profuse, and increasingly fast, before falling away. Beethoven then tears straight into the finale of his Döbling walks—another big, ranging piece. Never to be resolved, the movement is stopped by a wild dance, with the storms of F minor unabated.


ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856)
Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17

Schumann’s C-Major Fantasy received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Zankel Hall) on April 24, 1891, with Leopold Godowsky.

In June 1836, at a time when Friedrich Wieck was doing everything he could to come between his daughter Clara and his pupil Robert Schumann, the latter drafted what he described as a “fantasia,” a term that implied something more improvisatory and freer in form than a sonata movement. He gave it the title “Ruins,” and quoted in it the last number from Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (“To the Distant Beloved”), thus addressing himself simultaneously to two of his idols: the composer he revered above all others, and the young woman he was determined to marry, his own “distant beloved.”

By the end of the year he had made this piece the first movement of a “Sonata for Beethoven,” with further movements entitled “Trophies” and “Palms.” But he changed his mind more than once about the work’s nomenclature before settling, two years later, on Fantaisie, in French. Perhaps we should keep these equivocations in view. The work exists on a wonderful edge between the spontaneous and the solid, between imaginative flight and elaborate design.

Restlessness in the material, which opens in grand affirmation, provokes restlessness of form. Instead of sonata-style development, the first movement has a beautiful, minor-key middle section, Im Legendenton, lengthily considering what had been introduced as a momentary idea. A full recapitulation substantiates the sonata ideal, before the movement closes with a short adagio on the Beethoven quotation.

The second movement is a heroic march, the original “Trophies,” whose progress is perturbed by dotted rhythm that takes over as driving force, often excitingly offbeat.

Functions of both slow movement and finale are fulfilled by the last movement, which maintains the whole work’s basic four-beat rhythm. Even more than in the earlier movements, the two hands produce extraordinary layered effects, often suggesting male and female voices in communion.

Schumann’s original plan was to work the main theme of the first movement back into the ending, but he decided, justly, that the work is sufficiently integrated without such a signal, sufficiently powerful and resolute in its form. In paying homage to Beethoven, he had laid his claim to be that master’s heir.


FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810–49)
Four Mazurkas, Op. 33

The Four Maurkas, Op. 33 received their first complete Carnegie Hall performance on March 9, 1997, with Christina Kiss, piano.

The mazurka (mazurek in Polish) was a dance named after the people who danced it, a mazur being an inhabitant of the great plain of Mazovia, the heart of ancient Poland. Apparently, the term covered a set of three dances, all in triple time but increasing in speed. However, it is hard to be sure what we can know of the folk tradition from before it was influenced, in a return of favor, by the spectacular example of Chopin.

Chopin, as a teenager, witnessed peasants dancing the mazurka, and no doubt the memory served him when he came to write mazurkas of his own—as he soon did: he was 15 or 16 when he composed his first pair, to be followed by over 50 more, up to near the end of his life. His mazurkas’ rhythmic life—their dotted values, and the accents placed sometimes on the second beat, sometimes on the third—came from the Polish villages, as did the clashes and tangs of unusual scales. The pride and the melancholy, though, sound like a personal contribution. We may recall that, apart from the first few, Chopin wrote his mazurkas as an exile.

This set he dedicated to Countess Rósa Mostowska, whose father, a government minister, had given the young composer a welcome and an audience at the musical-literary evenings he convened at his palace (now the Warsaw police headquarters). Typically, Chopin seems to be recalling the slow opening part of the folk mazurka rather than its more excited sections, except perhaps in the second piece. But here only the piano is dancing. The rest of us are sitting still.


FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810–1849)
Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 31

The Scherzo No. 2 received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 19, 1896, with Moriz Rosenthal.

As with the mazurka, so with the big virtuoso scherzo, Chopin invented a genre, and pretty much explored it to the limits. Just four were enough, all but the last in minor keys: tearing single movements complete in themselves, not at all seeming as if they should be part of some sonata or other large form.

The second of them has the usual middle section, here made of luminous chordal music alternating with gorgeous melody, but—unusually, yet with decisive rightness—this is followed by a rampant development before the return comes to the opening music.

In the context of this program, it might be worth noting how Chopin, like Beethoven before him, uses the full range of the keyboard, now a little more ample than it had been 30 years earlier, and how this scherzo, like the two Beethoven sonatas, starts out with a point of interrogation. We know from the reminiscences of the composer’s pupil Wilhelm von Lenz that this was Chopin’s view: “This should be a question, Chopin taught, and it was never question enough for him ... He was also heard to say that this is the key to the whole composition.”

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Paul Griffiths is the author of numerous books on music, including The New Penguin Dictionary of Music and, most recently, A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge University Press).

Maurizio Pollini, Piano
Maurizio Pollini was born in 1942 and studied with Carlo Lonati and Carlo Vidusso. After winning the First Prize in the 1960 Warsaw Chopin Competition, he went on to establish an international career of the greatest importance, performing in the world’s major concert halls and working with the most distinguished orchestras and conductors including Böhm, Celibidache, Karajan, Abbado, Boulez, Chailly, Mehta, Sawallisch, and Muti.

Mr. Pollini was awarded the Vienna Philharmonic Ehrenring in 1987 after performing the Beethoven concertos in New York, the Ernst-von-Siemens Music Prize in Munich in 1966, the “A Life for Music—Artur Rubinstein” Prize in Venice in 1999, and the Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli Prize in Milan in 2000.

In 1995 Mr. Pollini opened the Pierre Boulez Festival in Tokyo. That same year and in 1999, he organized and performed in his own concert series at the Salzburg Festival as well as in New York (Carnegie Hall), Paris (Cité de la Musique), Tokyo, and Rome at the Parco della Musica. These programs included both chamber and orchestral performances and reflected Mr. Pollini’s wide musical tastes, from Gesualdo and Monteverdi to contemporary music. In summer 2004 Mr. Pollini was the “Artist Etoile” at the International Festival Lucerne, performing a recital and orchestral concerts conducted by Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez.

Mr. Pollini’s repertoire ranges from Bach to contemporary composers, including premiere performances of works by Manzoni, Nono, and Sciarrino, and includes the complete Beethoven sonatas, which he has performed in Berlin, Munich, Milan, New York, London, Vienna, and Paris.

Mr. Pollini’s recordings of Classical, Romantic, and contemporary repertoire have received critical acclaim worldwide. His recordings of Schoenberg’s complete works for piano, as well as works by Berg, Webern, Manzoni, Nono, Boulez, and Stockhausen, are a testament to his great passion for music of the 20th century.

Mr. Pollini’s recent recording of Chopin nocturnes was received with great enthusiasm by audiences and critics alike. In 2007 he won a Disco d’Oro and a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist; he has also received an Echo Award (Germany) as well as the Choc de la Musique, Victoires de la Musique, and Diapason d’Or de l’Année (France). Mr. Pollini’s latest recording, featuring Mozart piano concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic, was released in April 2008.