In the years before and after his move to Leipzig in 1723, Bach devoted much of his energy to composing didactic works for the clavier (the generic term for a keyboard instrument in the 18th century). Among them were his Inventions and Sinfonias, the first part of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, and the two anthologies he compiled for his son Wilhelm Friedemann and his wife. The latter collection, the so-called Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach of 1722, contained early drafts of five of the six French Suites—so called, in the words of Bach’s early biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, “because they are written in the French taste. By design, the composer is here less learned than in his other suites, and has mostly used a pleasing, more predominant melody.”
Based on courtly dances of the day, the French Suites illustrate the suavely melodious galant style, long on elegance and short on contrapuntal complexity, that appealed to well-bred amateurs and cultured aristocrats alike in Bach’s time. Each suite is built around a core group of four dances of contrasting characters, meters, and tempos. By convention, all four of these dances—allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue—within a given suite are in the same key, although they are seldom related thematically. Bach varies the standard pattern by inserting other dances, chiefly of a lighter character, after the obligatory slow sarabande.
The quasi-improvisational character of the C-minor Allemande serves a purpose similar to that of a prelude in fixing the listener’s attention and giving the performer a chance to stretch her or his fingers. Rippling runs impart a sense of restlessness and renewal to the music, like freshets bubbling from the earth in early spring. Only here and in the serenely meditative Sarabande, also in three voices, does Bach depart from the two-part texture that gives the other movements of the suite their beguiling transparency. Between these two dances comes a fleet Courante in the Italian manner (the brisk tempo belies the French form of the dance’s name). The Air, as its title implies, is simple and lyrical, like a two-part invention, while the Minuet sounds less complicated than it really is. (Listen for the melodic sequences—the same music repeated at different pitch levels—in the second half.) The final Gigue is similarly delicate, the dotted triple meter imparting a gentle lilt to the music.
At once radical and traditional, Debussy rebelled against the French Wagnerian cult and the ponderous academic style of establishment composers like Saint-Saëns and d’Indy. Instead, he urged his fellow composers to cultivate the “pure French tradition” epitomized by Rameau, whose operas Debussy was instrumental in reviving in the early 1900s. “For a long time, and for no apparent reason, Rameau remained almost completely forgotten,” he wrote in an appreciation that revealed just how closely he identified with the Baroque master. “His charm, his finely wrought forms—all these were replaced by a way of writing music concerned only with dramatic effect … Rameau’s major contribution to music was that he knew how to find ‘sensibility’ within the harmony itself; and that he succeeded in capturing effects of color and certain nuances that, before his time, musicians had not clearly understood.”
At once ultramodern and historically evocative, the three pieces that Debussy’s Pour le piano (For the Piano) comprise pay homage to his Baroque predecessors. In eulogizing Rameau, Debussy might have been describing his own contribution to Western music. He first made his mark in the early 1890s with a series of boldly unconventional and quintessentially gallic masterpieces, such as the emotionally turbulent String Quartet; La damoiselle élue, a Wagnerian “lyric poem” for women’s voices and orchestra; and his revolutionary masterpiece Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. By the time Debussy published his first book of Images for solo piano in 1905, the composer and his aesthetic principles—loosely subsumed under the rubric “Debussyism”—had garnered praise and censure in equal measure. Together with his symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s pathbreaking piano and orchestral pieces came to define musical impressionism in the popular mind.
Published in 1901, Pour le piano inaugurated a decade that saw the creation of Debussy’s most iconic keyboard works, including two sets of Images, Estampes, and the first book of Préludes. The opening Prélude—true to its 18th-century models—is a bravura essay in rippling scales, arpeggios, tremolos, and glissandos, punctuated by deep, gonglike sounds in the bass. The melody moves from the left hand to the right, and culminates in a swirling, freely measured cadenza. Although the title of the ensuing Sarabande alludes to a Baroque dance, Debussy’s point of departure seems to have been visual: He likened his music to “an old painting in the Louvre” and instructed that it be played “with a slow, solemn elegance.” Pour le piano ends with a characteristically propulsive Toccata, a nonstop torrent of 16th notes in supple, ever-changing patterns that highlight the novel sonorities and resonances Debussy coaxed from the piano.
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 fully appreciate the instrument’s expanded tonal and dynamic range, his keyboard music of the period—beginning with the titanic “Hammerklavier” Sonata—reveals a similar expansion of musical boundaries. Like other of Beethoven’s late works, the last four of his 32 piano sonatas juxtapose passages of great tenderness and lucidity with lacerating eruptions of raw energy and emotion. How much the composer’s loss of hearing affected his music and outlook on life is to some degree a matter of conjecture, but there is no mistaking the inwardness of these extraordinary works, with their radical discontinuities, far-flung tonal relationships, and bold reconfigurations of musical space and time.
More than a year in the making, the “Hammerklavier” was the most ambitious—and by some degree the longest—piano sonata Beethoven had ever composed. Unlike such works as the “Moonlight” and “Appassionata” sonatas, the conventional subtitle offers no clue as to the music’s distinctive character. In what seems to have been a burst of patriotic feeling, Beethoven insisted that the publisher advertise the B-flat–Major Sonata as written for the Hammerklavier, the German word for “pianoforte.” In all but name, however, the composer’s 29th sonata was radically unconventional. A notice in the Viennese press accurately described it as inaugurating “a new period in Beethoven’s keyboard works.” Uncertain of how his creation would be received in the marketplace, he encouraged his British publisher to issue the score in two separate volumes, with the freestanding finale retitled “Introduction and Fugue.”
Beethoven signals his intention of working on an outsized scale at the outset. No sooner have a pair of mighty chordal thunderclaps fixed the listener’s attention than he switches abruptly to a lighter, more transparently lyrical mode. Sharp dynamic contrasts, sudden shifts of register and texture, and bold juxtapositions of keys are the very essence of the opening Allegro. Listen for the playful mini-fugue in the development section, which reflects Beethoven’s abiding interest in the contrapuntal techniques of Bach. The short Scherzo—with its springy, tautly wound theme and ominously roiling midsection—reinforces the sense of dynamic instability that pervades the sonata. The heart of the work is the richly introspective Adagio sostenuto, whose transcendent spirituality points the way toward Beethoven’s last piano sonatas and string quartets. After a strange, improvisatory-sounding interlude, the finale proper begins with a series of sustained trills that launch an energetic three-voice fugue. Midway through the movement, Beethoven pauses to introduce a placid second subject in quarter notes, which he proceeds to interweave with the first subject in a dazzling double fugue.
—Harry Haskell