In 1817, Beethoven received a six-octave Broadwood piano as a gift from the English manufacturer that featured an expanded tonal and dynamic range. Despite his diminished hearing, his keyboard music of the period—beginning with the mighty “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Op. 106, of 1818—reveals a similar expansion of musical boundaries. Like many of Beethoven’s late works, these sonatas juxtapose passages of great tenderness and lucidity with lacerating eruptions of raw energy and emotion. How, and how much, the composer’s deafness affected his music and outlook on life has long been a matter of conjecture, but there is no mistaking the “inwardness” (mentioned in the final movement’s title) of these extraordinary works, with their radical discontinuities, far-flung tonal relationships, and bold reconfigurations of musical time and space.
Commissioned by the Berlin publisher Adolph Martin Schlesinger, the last three of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas were composed between 1820 and late 1822, the period in which he was struggling to bring the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony to completion. In these pathbreaking sonatas, one often has the sense that the composer is feeling his way from one idea to the next, the notes forming themselves soundlessly under his fingers, detached from their auditory moorings. Improvising had always been a vital element in Beethoven’s creative process, but it became even more so as deafness forced him to rely increasingly on his inner voice. “Real improvisation comes only when we are unconcerned [with] what we play,” he said, “so—if we want to improvise in the best, truest manner in public—we should give ourselves over freely to what comes to mind.”
The staggering of the two hands creates a delicately pointillistic effect in the opening of the E-Major Sonata, betraying the Vivace’s origins as a stand-alone teaching piece. Vast registral expanses soon open up in the first of the movement’s two Adagio interludes. A hushed, coda-like reprise of the main theme flows directly into an explosive triple-time Prestissimo, which veers between extremes of motion and affect. Storm and fury give way, in the sonata’s third movement, to incandescent lyricism. “Songlike, with the greatest inwardness of feeling” is Beethoven’s marking for the tender E-major theme, which unfolds in two eight-bar strains, each stated twice. Then follow six contrasting variations: a slow, achingly poignant waltz; a vivacious scherzo; a short, Czerny-like exercise, full of spitfire runs; a lilting andante, to be played “a little slower than the theme”; a briskly contrapuntal version of the theme; and an extended tailpiece that plunges into a dense thicket of passagework and trills before emerging into the calm, clear air of the opening melody.
Best known as a jazz pianist and prolific recording artist, Fred Hersch has in recent years pursued a second career as a composer of concert music. The range of his works include solo piano pieces, a setting of excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for two voices and eight instruments, and an ambitious multimedia theater piece titled My Coma Dreams, inspired by his own coma-induced visions. Growing up in Cincinnati, Hersch has a solid grounding in classical music and briefly considered becoming a concert pianist. “My parents and I went to concerts almost weekly—the Cincinnati Symphony, Byron Janis, Gina Bachauer, David Oistrakh. I heard all of the heavies of the early ’60s in their prime,” he told an interviewer recently. The experience of playing in a piano-violin-cello trio at Grinnell College in the early 1970s introduced him to the collaborative aspect of music making that is central to the jazz ethos.
Hersch describes his compositional style as his own fusion of jazz and European traditions. “My Coma Dreams is what I call a jazz-theater piece with elements of both. In Leaves of Grass there are jazz elements, but the goal of that piece was to honor and amplify his inspiring words. My newest album, Breath by Breath, features a jazz trio and string quartet. I write quite tonally and most everything I hear and play is based on four voices. I don’t tend to hear or go into wild upper-structure harmony for whatever reason. Sometimes I think I should be able to do that, but then I think again, ‘Does it really matter?’”
I first met Igor Levit in the fall of 2018 when he attended a performance of me with my trio at New York’s legendary jazz club the Village Vanguard. He was in town for a few days, and we ended up at my place downtown, spending a great afternoon together talking about music and books and playing for each other. Thus began an important friendship and mutual admiration that has grown steadily over these few years. He has been performing some of my shorter concert works and transcriptions as encores since then—and I wrote a short a piece for him entitled Trees.
I offered to write Igor a more substantial work, and the result is Variations on a Folksong. I knew I wanted to write a set of variations—as a jazz pianist, that is essentially what I do is play variations on themes in real time. It took a while to settle on the American folksong “O Shenandoah,” which I learned as a child and has much emotional resonance for me; it was sung by settlers moving to the American West and was also a popular sea shanty. Most important, it has a well-known and memorable melody that provides numerous possibilities for variations. In this set, there are 20 variations in a wide variety of approaches that play off both the melody and the harmony.
This piece was composed for Igor Levit and is dedicated to the memory of Stuart K. Nelson, who with his wife, Linda, commissioned more than 100 pieces by living composers.
—Fred Hersch
In 1864, Ludwig II—the newly crowned king of Bavaria—lured Wagner to Munich with a generous stipend, a sumptuously appointed house (which the composer, unbeknownst to Ludwig, shared with his mistress, Cosima von Bülow), and the prospect of a purpose-built festival theater for performing Wagner’s innovative music dramas. Although the construction project was derailed by local opposition, Ludwig sponsored the premiere of Tristan und Isolde at the Hof- und Nationaltheater on June 10, 1865. Conducted by Cosima’s husband, Hans von Bülow, the first performance took place exactly two months after the birth of her and Wagner’s daughter Isolde. By the end of the year, Ludwig decided the politically radical composer was a liability and sent him packing, but their continuing collaboration would bear further fruit in the founding of the Bayreuth Festival a decade later.
Wagner began planning a stage work about the legendary lovers Tristan and Isolde in 1854. “Since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love,” he explained, “I intend to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be properly sated from beginning to end.” Wagner’s paean to the redemptive power of love was as innovative musically as it was dramatically. The celebrated “Tristan chord” with which the work begins, enmeshed in a yearning sequence of unresolved dissonances, has provided fodder for composers and music theorists ever since. Wagner himself instituted the practice of excerpting the orchestral introduction—which introduces several of the opera’s principal themes—on concert programs. Confusingly, he referred to the Prelude as the “Love-Death,” or Liebestod, the name now attached to the closing section of Tristan.
The prelude’s opening phrase links a pair of chromatic motifs—one falling, the other rising—emblematic of suffering and longing, respectively. (Ironically, Wagner scholar Barry Millington notes that the composer borrowed the latter from an opera by his cuckolded maestro, Hans von Bülow.) Ensuing motifs foreshadow the opera’s major themes, from Tristan’s amorous gaze to the death potion that seals the lovers’ fate. The late Zoltán Kocsis made this highly effective piano transcription early in his career, following in the footsteps of his fellow Hungarian Franz Liszt. Like Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod, Kocsis’s prelude employs tremolos, rolled chords, runs, and other pianistic devices to simulate Wagner’s plush symphonic textures. The music rises to an impassioned climax in the middle section, then abruptly subsides and ultimately dissolves in ghostly, submerged octaves.
A peerless virtuoso famed for his transcendental keyboard technique, Liszt took Europe by storm as a young man, with audiences in city after city succumbing to “Lisztomania.” 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) for 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.
In 1848, Liszt accepted an invitation to become court Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Weimar. There, over the next 13 years, he composed his great Faust Symphony and a series of what he called “symphonic poems,” which epitomized the Romantic urge to synthesize music, literature, and other art forms. Unlike Brahms and Mendelssohn, who continued to write multi-movement works in the mold of Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt came to believe that Classical sonata form was outmoded. In its place, he erected long, single-movement musical structures based on the cyclical transformations of a small number of themes or motifs. Among the first fruits of this endeavor was the Sonata in B Minor, one of the 19th century’s most revolutionary masterpieces. Although it was completed in early 1853, the work was so ahead of its time that four years passed before Liszt’s pupil Hans von Bülow gave the premiere in Berlin.
An uninterrupted span that lasts a full half-hour, the B-Minor Sonata falls into discrete sections that correspond roughly to those of traditional sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. Within the first 15 bars, Liszt presents three of the main ideas on which the sonata will be built: a lugubrious descending scale, an energetically bounding melody, and an ominously rumbling repeated-note figure. A contrasting lyrical theme in resplendent D major serves as the framework for the sonata’s middle “slow movement,” marked Andante sostenuto. This in turn is followed by a lively, fugue-like section, based (as in a conventional recapitulation) on themes heard earlier. Resisting the temptation to go out with a bang, Liszt closes the sonata with a tender reminiscence of the Andante.
—Harry Haskell