For all Tchaikovsky’s heart-on-sleeve Romanticism and intimately revealing correspondence, much about the man and his music remains shrouded in a fog of enigma. The composer’s characteristically ecstatic effusions masked an inner life racked by anguish and self-doubt. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, he produced a string of sunny and extraverted works, including the bravura Violin Concerto, the incandescent Serenade for Strings, and the artfully simple Children’s Album. Yet the same period saw the composition of the Fourth Symphony, with its portentous “fate” motif, and the opera Eugene Onegin, whose tragic overtones mirrored Tchaikovsky’s conflict as a gay man married to a woman. By the time he traveled to the United States in the spring of 1891—among other engagements, he appeared at the Opening Festival of Carnegie Hall—he was one of the most celebrated musicians in the world. Two years later, he died in St. Petersburg under mysterious circumstances.
Composed in 1878, Children’s Album was inspired by R. Schumann’s best-selling collection of easy piano pieces, Album für die Jugend (Album for the Young), published in 1849. Like Schumann, Tchaikovsky aimed to contribute to what he called “the enrichment of the musical literature for children, which is very poor.” The two-dozen miniatures—some of which are quite challenging technically—evoke the world of the composer’s privileged upbringing as the son of a well-to-do industrial manager in the Russian provinces. Tchaikovsky’s musical idealization of childhood begins with the calm radiance of “Morning Prayer” and ends with the serene and chorale-like “In Church.” The intervening numbers range from arrangements of Russian and European folk songs to popular ballroom dances to character pieces with child-friendly titles like “Playing Hobby-Horses,” “The Accordion Player,” and “Nanny’s Story.” Tchaikovsky used or reused some of the music in other works; “Neapolitan Song,” for example, was recycled from his recent ballet Swan Lake.
In the seven years before his marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840, Schumann wrote some of his greatest piano works, including the first and second sonatas, Kreisleriana, Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), and the C-Major Fantasy. Schumann was infatuated with the budding young pianist and composer, 10 years his junior; her father’s implacable opposition to the match had the predictable result of driving the lovers into each other’s arms. The lines by the echt-Romantic philosopher and poet Friedrich Schlegel that Schumann attached to the Fantasy as an epigraph were clearly meant for Clara’s eyes: “Through all the tones in Earth’s many-colored dream, a quietly drawn-out tone sounds for one who listens secretly.”
The germ of the Fantasy consisted of a single movement titled “Ruins,” doubtless reflecting the lovesick composer’s despondency. Schumann later expanded it into a memorial triptych to Beethoven with the addition of panels labeled “Trophies” and “Palms.” By early 1838, however, he had reverted to his original conception, telling Clara that “the first movement is probably the most passionate I have ever written—a deep lamentation for you.” Like many of Schumann’s works, the Fantasy plays on the contrasting temperaments of his literary alter egos: the stormy, impulsive Florestan and the dreamy, ruminative Eusebius. Florestan takes center stage at the outset, as a broad, majestic melody soars above rippling 16th notes. But the gentle spirit of Eusebius dominates the first movement’s prayer-like middle section and the tender Adagio at the end, in which Schumann quotes a poignant snatch of melody from the song cycle Beethoven wrote to his own “distant beloved.” The second movement is a crisply energetic march that pulses with rhythmic vitality; the boldly annunciatory main theme returns several times in different guises. The finale owes its mood of reverie to Schumann’s searching harmonies and characteristic technique of embedding the melody in a rich skein of figuration.
In 1781, Mozart relinquished his post at the ecclesiastical court in Salzburg and spent the remaining decade of his life as a highly successful freelance composer and pianist in the imperial capital of Vienna. There, in addition to writing no fewer than 17 piano concertos, he produced a wide variety of solo keyboard music, ranging from multi-movement sonatas to rondos, fantasias, fugues, and other standalone pieces. This diverse and masterly repertoire illustrates Mozart’s determination to expand the range of piano technique and expression, even as he breathed new life into forms and genres associated with his 18th-century predecessors.
In October 1784, Mozart presented the dedication copy of the Sonata in C Minor, K. 457, to his favorite piano pupil, Maria Theresia von Trattner, the socially prominent wife of a Viennese music publisher. (Mozart and his wife had lodged in the Trattners’ house for a few months earlier that year; speculation that Mozart was secretly infatuated with Frau Trattner has never been substantiated.) A few months later, he wrote a fantasia in the same key, and although the two pieces can be performed separately—hence their different numbers in the Köchel catalog of Mozart’s works—they were published together in 1785 as his Op. 11. The autograph scores of the fantasia and sonata mysteriously disappeared in the late 1800s, only to be rediscovered in 1990 in a Baptist seminary in Philadelphia. The agitated, passionate, and often tragic atmosphere of these two sublime works is traditionally associated with the key of C minor. The fantasia begins and ends with a slithering chromatic theme that is repeated sequentially at different tonal levels. This ominous preamble gives way to a luminous aria in D major, followed by a torrid Allegro, a tender Andantino, and a second, even more brilliant Più allegro characterized by broken chords and intense chromaticism.
Ravel was 13 years younger than Debussy, and he made his mark in Paris at the turn of the 20th century with his masterful String Quartet and a group of brilliantly crafted, quasi-programmatic piano pieces such as Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess), Jeux d’eau (Waterworks), and Miroirs (Mirrors). Over the ensuing decades he refined his art, ruthlessly pruning away superfluous notes and gestures in search of the “definitive clarity” that was his professed ideal. Ravel’s repeated failure to win the Prix de Rome—a rite of passage for French composers seeking establishment approval—merely stiffened his resolve to forge his own path. Not until 1920 was he awarded the prestigious Légion d’honneur, an accolade that he rebuffed with undisguised satisfaction.
Composed in the summer of 1908, while Ravel was at work on his lighthearted “Spanish” opera L’heure espagnole, Gaspard de la nuit (Artful Dodger of the Night) takes its title from a cycle of poems by Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841). Ravel identified his triptych as “three poems for piano” and reproduced Bertrand’s fantastical, image-laden prose lyrics in the score. “My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words,” he explained. “Ondine,” with its shimmering tremolos and gossamer, billowing passagework, is suffused with the watery imagery associated with the carefree nymph whose unrequited love for a mortal has inspired composers and writers since the 19th century. By contrast, the music of “Le gibet” (“The Gallows”) is lugubrious and death-ridden, its slow, labored rhythms—possibly suggesting the swaying of a hung corpse—punctuated by relentlessly throbbing B-flats. In the last piece, Ravel deliberately sought to surpass such benchmarks of virtuosity as Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes; he described the fiendishly difficult “Scarbo” as “an orchestral transcription for the piano.” It evokes the nocturnal antics of the impish Scarbo in music notable for its frenzied momentum, nightmarishly dissonant outbursts, and kaleidoscopic sonorities.
Highly strung, self-centered, and relentlessly driven, Scriabin shattered the mold of musical Romanticism much as Liszt had done. As both composer and pianist, he combined a wide-ranging intellect and a tendency to mystical idealism with an exceptional sensitivity to tonal nuance. In addition to his formidably challenging piano works, he is best known for his luxuriantly orchestrated Poem of Ecstasy and the ballet Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, which illustrated his theory of the synesthetic equivalence between colors and musical keys. Composed in 1907, the Sonata No. 5 is a kind of pendant to the Poem of Ecstasy. Indeed, Scriabin described it as “a grand poem for piano” and prefaced the score with a verse epigraph that reflects his vision of the creative artist as a divinely inspired being endowed with almost supernatural powers: “I summon you to life, hidden longings! You, sunken in the somber depths of creative spirit, you timid embryos of life, to you I bring daring!”
The concentrated intensity of the sonata’s single movement belies its relative brevity. Now pummeling the keys, now caressing them, the pianist runs a gauntlet of technical challenges that would put even Liszt’s “transcendental execution” to the test. Although Scriabin eschews the widely spaced chords favored by his contemporary Rachmaninoff (his hands being too small to stretch more than an octave), the sonata’s sonorities are no less robust. Scriabin’s harmonic language verges on atonality, contributing to the sense of controlled delirium. The work’s structure is equally complex, with a welter of recurring themes embedded in the densely woven texture. For instance, the terse, stabbing gestures of the opening bars—which flash across musical space like bolts of lightning—return in the middle of the sonata, marked leggierissimo volando (“flying as lightly as possible”), and again at the very end, soaring inconclusively into the stratosphere.
—Harry Haskell
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