In the spring of 1789, Mozart embarked on a concert tour of Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden in hopes of replenishing his depleted bank account. It was on this journey that he undertook to compose the last of his 23 string quartets—the three so-called “Prussian” quartets—for King Friedrich Wilhelm II, an accomplished amateur cellist. But word of Mozart’s fame in Vienna had yet to reach the king’s ministers in Berlin, which the composer learned when he accompanied his patron Prince Karl Lichnowsky on a side trip to the magnificent summer palace Sanssouci.
An official memo to the monarch in Potsdam, dated April 26, advised: “One named Mozart (who at his ingress declared himself to be a Kapellmeister from Vienna) reports here that he was brought hither in the company of Prince Lichnowsky, that he desired to lay his talents before Your Sovereign Majesty’s feet and awaited the command whether he may hope that Your Sovereign Majesty will receive him.” Unfortunately, the monarch wasn’t in a receiving mood. Instead, he fobbed the composer off on the royal chamber-music director and cello teacher, Jean-Pierre Duport. Three days later, Mozart presented his credentials in the form of a set of keyboard variations on a minuet from one of Duport’s own cello sonatas.
Like many of his fellow virtuosos, Mozart often demonstrated his pianistic prowess by improvising variations on popular themes of the day. Indeed, one such improvisatory performance at a highly publicized “duel” with Muzio Clementi helped establish his reputation as a newcomer to Vienna in 1781. In the Nine Variations, K. 573, he uses Duport’s genteel D-major theme as a springboard for a bravura display of purling passagework, staggered octaves, cadenza-like flourishes, and sparkling grace notes and turning figures.
The D-Major Sonata was a product of Mozart’s travels between September 1777 and January 1779, which included extended visits to Mannheim and Paris. He and his father were chafing under the restrictions of musical life at the ecclesiastical court in Salzburg, and Wolfgang had been dispatched in search of greener pastures under the watchful eye of his mother. After she died unexpectedly in Paris, he returned to Salzburg and took up a new post as court organist. But his predilection for operas, concertos, and other secular works increasingly set him at odds with his princely employer, and in 1781 he moved to Vienna to pursue a freelance career.
Composed in Mannheim toward the end of 1777, K. 311 is the ninth of Mozart’s 18 numbered piano sonatas and one of three composed during his concert tour of Germany and France. A companion sonata in C major, K. 309, was written for Mozart’s pupil Rosa Cannabich in Mannheim, of whom the composer wrote to his father Leopold that “she reads very tolerably, has great natural aptitude, and plays with great feeling.” Little is known about the presumed recipient of the D-Major Sonata, one Josepha Freysinger of Munich, other than that her father was a former schoolmate of Leopold Mozart.
The opening Allegro con spirito, with its playful grace notes and trills, cascading passagework, and tricky hand crossings, suggests that young Josepha boasted a highly finished, not to say bravura, technique. The genial lyricism of the slow movement, in G major, is tempered by sharp contrasts of dynamics and articulation. The same elements come into play in the final Rondeau; the recurring, happy-go-lucky theme alternates with episodes of increasingly dramatic character, with a free, cadenza-like bridge passage thrown in for good measure.
Famed for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, Liszt took Europe by storm as a young man. As audiences in city after city succumbed to “Lisztomania,” the Hungarian’s name became synonymous with pianistic prowess and showmanship. 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 the B-Minor Ballade and other works, Liszt abandoned Classical models in favor of long, single-movement structures based on the cyclical transformations of a small number of themes or motives. Inspired by Chopin’s four magisterial ballades for piano, the Ballade No. 2 was composed in 1853, the same year as Liszt’s pathbreaking sonata in the same key. Often described as a symphonic poem for piano, the ballade was one of Liszt’s favorites among his own works. He once reprimanded a pupil for playing the last section too bombastically, exclaiming, “Do not make noise, make music!”
Chopin is often credited with inventing the genre of the instrumental “ballad,” a term previously applied to vocal music based on narrative poems. Like the B-Minor Sonata, the highly virtuosic Second Ballade has traditionally been linked to an extramusical program, with the rumbling chromatic bass line in the opening bars depicting the stormy waters of the Hellespont that separated the ill-fated mythical lovers Hero and Leander. Liszt subjects the first of the work’s two contrasting main themes to his novel technique of thematic transformation: The somber, minor-key melody resurfaces in sundry guises, ultimately emerging in resplendent B major.
An avid student of music history, Brahms had a lifelong interest in variation form. It mattered little whether the base he built upon was a popular folk song, one of his own melodies, or a theme by Paganini, Handel, or R. Schumann; the important thing, he maintained, was that variation form “must be kept stricter, purer.” The old masters were rigorous in their use of ground bass and other variation techniques, whereas contemporary composers tended to “rummage around the theme. We keep anxiously to the melody, but we do not treat it freely, do not actually create anything new from it, but only load it down.”
Brahms’s creative approach is exemplified by the slow movement of his early String Sextet in B-flat Major, Op. 18, a set of richly colored variations on a somberly emphatic D-minor theme. The influential critic Eduard Hanslick, one of Brahms’s most steadfast champions, raved about the sextet’s “peaceful, pleasurable dreamy garden mood,” adding that “we believed ourselves suddenly transported into a pure world of beauty.” In 1860, Brahms acceded to his friend Clara Schumann’s request for a piano transcription of the luminous Andante.
In adapting the Theme and Variations in D Minor for piano, Brahms unavoidably muted the quasi-symphonic sonorities of the original string ensemble. Yet the theme, introduced by the first viola over a lumbering quarter-note pulse, loses none of its magisterial eloquence in the “reduced” keyboard version. By dint of carefully calibrated transpositions, doublings, and voicings, Brahms is equally successfully in translating such sonically imaginative passages as the oceanic swells of the third variation, with the two cellos rising and falling in parallel octaves, and the droning imitation of a hurdy-gurdy in the fifth variation.
Clara Schumann (née Wieck) struggled to balance her professional career as an internationally known concert pianist with her domestic role as wife and mother. A child prodigy, she made her debut at age 11, playing one of her own compositions. After her marriage to Robert Schumann in 1840, she reared their eight children even as he inexorably succumbed to mental illness. Robert encouraged his wife’s creative work on the tacit understanding that his career took precedence over hers, but Clara virtually stopped composing after he died in 1856.
In the summer of 1853, Clara confided to her diary, “There is nothing which surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.” The Schumanns had just moved into a new flat in Düsseldorf, and Clara was basking in the luxury of having a room of her own to make music in. Her final burst of creative euphoria produced no fewer than four major works, including the Three Romances for Piano, Op. 21.
Originally a vocal genre associated with narrative poetry, the romance became a popular instrumental genre in the 19th century. The winsome lyricism of Clara’s Op. 21 Romances is characteristic, as is the simple ABA form of the first and third pieces in the set. The melancholy Andante was an afterthought: Clara wrote it in 1855, after Robert had been admitted to a sanatorium. Its dark and dreamy A-minor theme contrasts with the swirling eddies of Chopinesque filigree in the concluding Agitato. Sandwiched between them is a lightly prancing Allegretto in
F major.
Robert Schumann embodied the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms and lyrical utterances, his reliance on extramusical sources of inspiration, and the supreme value he placed on emotional freedom and spontaneity. Although he wrote four symphonies, several concertos, and even a single opera, his impulsive genius found its most characteristic expression in piano music and art songs. After a chronic hand injury prevented him from realizing his youthful ambition to be a concert pianist, he dedicated himself to creating a new kind of music for the piano, compounded of heroic virtuosity and poetic intimacy.
Inspired by his love for Clara Wieck, Robert wrote some of his greatest piano works in the 1830s, including the first two sonatas and an early version of the third. All three had protracted gestations, but the G-Minor Sonata stands out for the many revisions the composer made over a period of some eight years. The four movements were written out of sequence, starting with the Andantino, which was based on a song Robert had written as a teenager. The first and third movements were composed in 1833, but it wasn’t until 1838 that he put the finishing touches on the manuscript, having accepted Clara’s suggestion that he replace the original, densely virtuosic finale with a lighter-textured Rondo.
Like much of Robert’s music, the Sonata No. 2 juxtaposes the contrasting personalities of his fictional alter egos: the impulsive Florestan and the dreamy, reflective Eusebius. The first movement throbs with romantic ardor and urgency: As if the marking “so rasch wie möglich” (“as fast as possible”) weren’t enough, in the last section the pianist is exhorted to play “faster” and “even faster.” The tenderly lyrical Andantino was a coded billet-doux to Clara: The lover in the underlying song text bids the sun to move away “so that warmth may come to her from me alone.” A brief, boisterous Scherzo leads to a propulsive finale whose restless energy and giddily accelerating climax recall what Robert called “the inner mood of the first movement.”
—Harry Haskell
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