When Beethoven arrived in Vienna from his native Bonn in late 1792—a few months after Mozart’s untimely death—he was a cocky young tyro bursting with talent, confidence, and ambition. He dazzled audiences with his no-holds-barred approach to the keyboard, which wreaked havoc on the light-framed Viennese fortepianos of the day. Czech composer Anton Reicha felt the brunt of Beethoven’s elemental force when he turned pages for him at a performance of a Mozart concerto: “I was mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte which snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings. Beethoven insisted on finishing the concerto, and so back and forth I leaped, jerking out a string, disentangling a hammer, turning a page, and I worked harder than Beethoven.” Yet there was also a tender, poetic side to Beethoven’s virtuosity. Comparing him to another celebrated pyrotechnician of the day, amateur composer Carl Ludwig Junker wrote that Beethoven had “greater eloquence, weightier ideas, and is more expressive—in short, he is more for the heart.”
Beethoven’s rapid maturation as a composer was no less dramatic. He made his debut as a creative artist in the three powerfully original piano trios of 1795, the first of his works to which he assigned an opus number. The publication of Beethoven’s first three piano sonatas the following year firmly established Haydn’s 27-year-old protégé as a star of the first magnitude. By the time he was 30, Beethoven had composed a clutch of masterpieces that included three piano concertos, six string quartets, and a symphony. Despite his incipient loss of hearing, the next 12 years produced a stream of ambitious and formally innovative works that defined Beethoven’s so-called middle period, including the three Op. 31 piano sonatas, the opera Fidelio, the “Eroica” Symphony and its three successors, the D-Major Violin Concerto, and the three “Razumovsky” string quartets. By the time Beethoven wrote the last of his 32 piano sonatas in the early 1820s, he was an aging warrior battered by illness and emotional trauma. Finding social intercourse arduous, Beethoven turned increasingly inward in the works of his late period; his last three piano sonatas—opp. 109, 110, and 111—are characterized by intense soul searching.
In 1817, Beethoven received a six-octave Broadwood piano as a gift from the English manufacturer. Although he was likely too hard of hearing to appreciate the instrument’s expanded tonal and dynamic range, his music of the period reveals a similar expansion of musical boundaries, as evidenced by the mighty Sonata No. 29, “Hammerklavier,” of 1818 and its three successors. Like many of Beethoven’s late works, the Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major juxtaposes passages of great tenderness and lucidity with lacerating eruptions of raw energy and emotion. How much Beethoven’s hearing affected his music and outlook on life is to some degree a matter of conjecture, but there is no overlooking the inwardness of his extraordinary late works, with their radical discontinuities, far-flung tonal relationships, and bold reconfigurations of musical time and space.
The first movement of Op. 110 is a study in contrasts between leisurely melodies and swiftly rippling arpeggios, major-key innocence and minor-key angst, placid chordal passages and billowing crescendos. Beethoven’s tonal scheme becomes increasingly adventurous and unpredictable as the scherzo-like Allegro molto in F minor leads, by way of a quietly ruminative Adagio, to a poignant arioso section in A-flat minor marked “Klagender Gesang” (“Song of Lament”). The throbbing triplet accompaniment conveys a sense of urgency; then, suddenly, the momentum dissipates and a soft, unadorned melody—a sequence of ascending fourths—sounds out in the home key, signaling the start of the sonata’s climactic fugue. The finale proceeds for a while in familiar, almost textbook contrapuntal fashion until the lament returns, this time in the remote key of G minor. After it, too, runs its course, Beethoven neatly pivots to G major, brings back the subject of the fugue in inverted form (with descending fourths), and beats a tonally circuitous path back to the safe haven of A-flat major.
Commissioned by the Berlin publisher Adolf 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 path-breaking works, one often has the sense that the composer is not hearing but feeling his way from one idea to the next, the notes forming themselves soundlessly under his fingers, detached from their auditory moorings. In his last sonata, Beethoven painted on a more monumental scale than in its two predecessors. Yet in its way, Op. 111 is also a marvel of compression. Its two-movement format was sufficiently unorthodox that the son of Beethoven’s publisher wrote to inquire if the copyist had inadvertently overlooked the finale.
The Maestoso introduction sets the tone for the Op. 111 Sonata in its wayward harmonies (the key of C minor isn’t definitively established until the beginning of the Allegro proper), its explosive outbursts and ominous rumblings, and the stinging syncopations that blur the outlines of its sharply etched rhythmic figures. The heraldic three-note motto (C–E-flat–B) that opens the Allegro contains more than enough energy to fuel the entire movement. The contrast with the luminous second-movement Arietta in C major could hardly be greater. Here, within a nominally conventional theme-and-variations framework, Beethoven gives free rein to his poetic imagination, transporting the listener—and, one imagines, himself—to places we have never been before. Entwined in increasingly elaborate figurations, the simple tune takes on increasing shades of grandeur until, in the final section, it shines forth transcendently amid a chorus of high, shimmering trills.
In the seven years before his marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840, Schumann wrote some of his best-loved keyboard works, including the First and Second piano sonatas, Kreisleriana, the C-Major Fantasy, and Kinderszenen. Schumann was infatuated with Wieck, a budding pianist and composer 10 years his junior; her father’s implacable opposition to the match had the predictable result of propelling them into each other’s arms. Nevertheless, living in different cities—Schumann in Leipzig and Wieck in Vienna—the young lovers were compelled to conduct their clandestine courtship through letters and music. Schumann declared that his Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, was “a cry from my heart to yours.” And Wieck wrote to him that “my wonderment increases” each time she played the Kinderszenen. “You lay bare your entire inner life in these scenes of touching simplicity.”
Schumann originally intended to include these short pieces in his Novelleten, Op. 21, but later decided to publish them separately, in part because their simplicity made them “accessible to everyone” (and thus more salable). In a letter to Wieck, he described his Op. 15 as “an echo of the words you once wrote to me to the effect that ‘you considered me at times almost like a child.’ In short, I really felt like a youth again, and I jotted down about 30 of these charming little things, from which I selected 12 [later 13] and called them Scenes from Childhood. I’m sure you will enjoy them, but of course they will not satisfy you as a virtuoso.” Schumann added that the pieces “can be grasped at a glance, and are as light as a bubble.” To another friend he remarked that he had not sketched his childhood scenes for children, but as “reflections of an adult for other adults.”
Their apparently programmatic nature notwithstanding, Schumann conceived the Kinderszenen as abstract music and added the descriptive titles as an afterthought. Simplicity was indeed his watchword. Each of these 13 captivating miniatures is characterized by clear, uncomplicated harmonies, symmetrical phrase structures, and memorable tunes or rhythmic patterns, with abundant repetition. There is no attempt to tie the pieces together thematically, although three of them—“By the Fireside,” “Knight of the Hobby Horse,” and “Almost Too Serious”—are loosely linked by the use of a similar syncopated figure. The scenes range in mood from the playful staccato of “Blind Man’s Bluff” to the self-conscious pomposity of “An Important Event” and the tender yearning of “Dreaming.” In the end, Schumann puts away childish things and leaves us, in “The Poet Speaks,” ruminating on the meaning of it all.
Rachmaninoff’s prowess as a pianist has tended to eclipse his compositional accomplishments. Yet as a 15-year-old wunderkind at the Moscow Conservatory, he was singled out for greatness by no less a judge than Tchaikovsky. Shortly after graduating in 1892, he composed the Prelude in C-sharp Minor for solo piano that would become his signature piece on recitals. This precocious success was followed by a period of debilitating lethargy and depression, during which Rachmaninoff found it almost impossible to compose. It was not until 1900, after he consulted a physician specializing in hypnosis, that his creative juices began to flow freely again.
Compared to Rachmaninoff’s sprawling First Piano Sonata of 1907–1908, the Second Sonata is a model of concision. Rachmaninoff wrote it in 1913 and gave the first performance in Moscow on December 3, 1915. As was often the case with his works, however, he was less than fully satisfied with the original version. In 1931, when he finally got around to revising the sonata, he made substantial cuts—particularly in the transitions between sections—and succeeded in reducing the overall length by some 25 percent. Other pianists, including Horowitz and Van Cliburn, felt he had gone overboard and later conflated the two versions of the sonata to produce their own performing editions. It is Rachmaninoff’s 1931 version that will be heard tonight.
The sonata is divided into three movements, fast-slow-fast. But the movements are integrally related thematically and played with only one significant break, between the Allegro agitato and the Non allegro (“not allegro,” one of Rachmaninoff’s more idiosyncratic tempo markings). As a result, the listener is likely to perceive the musical architecture as a single span tracing a majestic arc from B-flat minor to B-flat major, and from the impetuous ardor of the opening theme to the bacchanalian frenzy of the final Allegro molto. The dense, roiling textures and fast-changing harmonies contrast with crystalline bell-like effects reminiscent of Rachmaninoff’s “choral symphony” The Bells, on which he was working simultaneously with the sonata in 1913.
—Harry Haskell
© 2022 Carnegie Hall