Few composers are as closely identified with a single instrument as Chopin is with the piano. The 21-year-old composer took Paris by storm when he arrived from his native Poland in 1831. Just as his 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. Although Chopin was firmly grounded in tradition—J. S. Bach and Mozart were his favorite composers—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.
Chopin wrote his four scherzos in the late 1830s and early 1840s, a period when he was also working to extend the scope of his art in a series of ballades and polonaises. In these, as in his earlier works, Chopin imbued the brilliance of the salon style with unprecedented poetic depth. Robert Schumann, himself a master of character pieces, extolled Chopin’s accomplishment, in which, he wrote, “imagination and technique share dominion side by side.” It was arguably the unparalleled range and subtlety of Chopin’s keyboard technique that enabled him to cast off the shackles of musical convention so successfully. Contemporary accounts of his playing attest to his extraordinary powers at the keyboard. One witness marveled at his effortless arpeggios, “which swelled and diminished like waves in an ocean of sound.” Another recalled how his 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.”
The four scherzos have many elements in common, including their triple meter and rounded forms that feature two or three main themes. To construct these large-scale edifices, Chopin uses the basic tools of repetition and contrast, supplemented by his phenomenal command of harmony, texture, and figuration. The monumental scale of the B-Minor Scherzo is epitomized by its raging torrents of eighth notes; their raw, elemental energy accentuates the lyrical quietude of the work’s middle section, with the melody chiming softly in an inner voice, swathed in lacy filigree. The taut, pouncing triplet roulades that open the Scherzo in B-flat Minor give the piece much of its mercurial grace and brilliance. Pounding chords make way for silvery cascades, and after a ruminative interlude, the scherzo ends with a blast of Lisztian bravura. The third and fourth scherzos are even more adventurous. The Scherzo in C-sharp Minor opens ambiguously, with chromatic harmonies and four notes shoehorned into the space of three; a barrage of hurtling octaves belatedly establishes the 3/4 time signature. The E-Major Scherzo is the most fantasy-like of all, with its capricious melodies, unstable harmonies, two-against-three rhythms, and sudden starts and stops.
At once radical and traditionalist, 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 master Jean-Philippe Rameau. Debussy first made his mark in the early 1890s with a series of boldly unconventional yet quintessentially Gallic works such as the String Quartet, La damoiselle élue, and Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. The term “Impressionist” eventually became attached to him through his association in the popular mind with painters like Manet. Debussy, however, categorically rejected the label, maintaining that his music depicted not superficial impressions but underlying “realities.”
It was at least partly to counteract the Impressionist label that Debussy called his later piano works “preludes” and “etudes,” eschewing titles like Estampes and Images that evoked the visual arts. In a further effort to discourage such associations, he insisted on relegating programmatic titles to the end of the pieces—to no discernible effect, as the public remained stubbornly wedded to them. The 12 technically challenging etudes, issued in two volumes, date from the late summer and early fall of 1915. Debussy had just finished work on a complete edition of Chopin’s music for his own publisher, Durand, and was clearly inspired by his predecessor’s winning blend of poetry and virtuosity. In his annotation to the waltzes, Debussy wrote that “Chopin was a delightful teller of tales of love and war, and he often slips away to that forest of As You Like It in which the fairies are the sole mistresses of the mind.”
Debussy’s first six etudes, like Chopin’s, are essentially pedagogical exercises intended to illustrate various pianistic techniques. Thus, “Pour les cinq doigts—d’après Monsieur Czerny” (“For Five Fingers—After Mr. Czerny”) pays homage to the 19th-century virtuoso and teacher Carl Czerny—whose keyboard etudes are still widely used today—in its intricate elaboration of a child’s rudimentary five-finger exercise. The following three etudes are ostensibly designed to promote fluency and evenness of touch in chains of thirds, fourths, and sixths, respectively; but the listener’s attention is soon drawn away from digital dexterity to Debussy’s innovative, richly imaginative harmonies and textures. “Pour les octaves” (“For Octaves”) capitalizes on the wide-open sound of octaves, while “Pour les huit doigts” (“For Eight Fingers”) restricts the pianist to the use of eight fingers, since, as Debussy points out in the score, “the constantly shifting hand position in this etude makes it difficult to use the thumbs.”
Stravinsky’s long and storied career took him from the drawing rooms of czarist St. Petersburg to the tinsel-town sound studios of Los Angeles.
It was with Russian-inspired works that he rocketed to fame on the eve of World War I with a trio of ballets—The Firebird, Pétrouchka, and
Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)—written for Serge Diaghilev’s celebrated Ballets Russes. The Parisian Stravinsky of the 1920s and ’30s cut a more cosmopolitan figure, characterized by such coolly neoclassical masterpieces as the ballet Apollo and the Violin Concerto in D. After immigrating to the United States in 1939, he reinvented himself yet again in works like his opera The Rake’s Progress and the spikily serial Movements for Piano and Orchestra.
In the wake of The Firebird’s spectacular success in 1910, Stravinsky brought his family from Russia to Switzerland and began work on a piece for piano and orchestra based on the antics of the puppet Pétrouchka, Russia’s answer to the pugnacious husband of the Punch and Judy tradition. In Stravinsky’s original concept, the pianistic Pétrouchka came to life and “exasperat[ed] the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios.” Diaghilev, sensing the story’s crowd-pleasing potential, convinced the composer to expand the concert piece into a full-length ballet for his star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky. In 1911, the Ballets Russes premiered Pétrouchka in Paris to the same éclat that had greeted The Firebird, and 10 years later Stravinsky freely arranged three sections of the ballet in collaboration with pianist Arthur Rubinstein.
The exuberantly virtuosic character of the piano version is evident in the “Russian Dance,” which the puppets perform in the first scene of the ballet (or “burlesque,” as Stravinsky called it). With its propulsive rhythms, wide leaps, swirling passagework, and chains of parallel octaves, the first movement is a tour de force that sets the tone for the entire piece. In the second movement, Stravinsky evokes the surreal, penumbral ambience of Pétrouchka’s room inside the puppet theater in music characterized by acidulous bitonal clashes, capricious starts and stops, corruscating arpeggios, roiling tremolos, and tinkly grace notes. Most technically challenging of all is Stravinsky’s depiction of the rowdy, colorful dances at a Shrovetide fair, which provide ample grist for a display of dazzling pianistic acrobatics.
—Harry Haskell
© 2022 Carnegie Hall