Though comparatively little known abroad, 85-year-old Valentin Silvestrov is regarded as a national treasure in his native Ukraine. Hélène Grimaud has observed that “Silvestrov’s bucolic Bagatelles are like walking through a forest, light shining through the boughs.” The first of these 13 deceptively simple miniatures is an unassuming, but strangely haunting, essay in easy-on-the-ear tonal harmonies, delicate, pointillistic patterns, and lingering resonances. Despite the music’s “allegretto” marking, the mood is laid-back and tenderly ruminative.
In 1892, Le Figaro introduced the 30-year-old Debussy to the magazine’s readers as “a Prix de Rome winner” who was “modest, avoids the noise of the world, and takes his strength from a basis of tranquility.” The two arabesques, published the previous October, are among the earliest works on which the composer’s reputation rests. No. 1 is a genial, mellifluous exercise in rounded A-B-A form, replete with flowing arpeggios and notably devoid of harmonic complications. A contemporary reviewer praised Debussy’s music for its “classical and precise melodic line ... sculpted with delicacy and suppleness.”
In contrast to the dappled, sunlit soundscape of Silvestrov’s First Bagatelle, No. 2 enshrouds the listener in soulful gloom. Dampened, harmonically ambiguous, and tantalizingly inconclusive, the short piece conjures a mood of Chopin-esque reverie that is at once warmly nostalgic (Ms. Grimaud characterizes Silvestrov’s music as “a remembrance of things past”) and unsettlingly contemporary. What Silvestrov calls the “sublime trivia” of his bagatelles masks a deeper and, in this case, darker purpose.
Eccentric, reclusive, and hobbled by an imperfect technique, Satie nevertheless became a guru of the avant-garde and one of the most influential composers of the early 20th century. The six Gnossiennes (a neologism that may refer to the quasi-mystical gnostic philosophy to which Satie was attracted) followed his better-known Gymnopédies of 1888 and resemble them in their hypnotic harmonies, slow dance rhythms, and languorously looping melodies. In No. 4, the left hand’s billowing arpeggios are set against fragmentary melodic wisps.
Chopin had a special affinity for the wistful, romantic character of the nocturne, a genre developed by the Irish composer-pianist John Field, whom he greatly admired. Composed in the late 1820s but not published until 1855, the E-Minor Nocturne was Chopin’s first essay in the genre with which he would become closely associated. Undulating triplet arpeggios in the left hand limn the shifting harmonies and provide supple rhythmic support for the right hand’s flowing melodies. Chains of sweet-sounding thirds temper the music’s minor-key melancholy.
As in the fourth Gnossienne, the absence of both time signature and barlines gives No. 1 a free-floating, rhapsodic feeling. Unlike No. 4, the texture is primarily chordal: The spicy harmonies reflect the “exotic” (i.e., non-European) music that Satie may have heard at the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris. Pianist Alfred Cortot described the Gnossiennes as “stagnant music with imperceptible transitions, like surfaces of water in which the play of sun and breeze animates their sluggish shimmering in little ripples.”
The cryptic title of this piece translates roughly as “Giving It a Good Look.” It’s the first of three “crooked dances” that make up Part 2 of Satie’s 1897 collection Pièces froides (Cold Pieces). The latter title may allude to the bone-chilling conditions the bohemian composer endured in his cramped, unheated Montmartre apartment. With its relentlessly rolling arpeggios, searching harmonies, and bittersweet lyricism, “En y regardant à deux fois” is part cri de coeur, part battle cry of artistic freedom.
According to American violinist Arthur Hartmann, Debussy composed this sweet-tempered, harmonically off-kilter waltz after hearing a group of Romani musicians perform at Paris’s ritzy Hotel Carlton. The title La plus que lente (The Slowest) nods to the sentimental valses lentes fashionable in turn-of-the-century cafes and dance halls. Eager to capitalize on the work’s popularity, Debussy’s publisher brought out a version for violin and piano, and commissioned an orchestral arrangement that the composer nixed as being more suitable for beer parlors than chic hangouts. “Let’s think of the numberless five-o’clock teas where the beautiful audiences I’ve dreamed of assemble,” he advised.
Chopin had a special affinity for the mazurka, a triple-meter folk dance from his native Poland that was enthusiastically adopted by the haute monde of Paris. Chopin’s mazurkas typically share a basic A-B-A song form, the outer sections enclosing a middle section in a contrasting key. Simple oom-pah-pah accompaniments are set against florid, metrically playful figurations in the right hand. In Op. 17, No. 4, the tonal contrast between A minor and A major is heightened by the distinction between the crisply dotted rhythms, chromatic harmonies, and rippling fioriture of the framing sections and the calm, steady pulse and restrained lyricism of the central panel, anchored by an insistently repeated A pedal note.
Chopin composed some 20 waltzes between 1829 and 1848 at the height of Europe’s waltz craze. Although they are stylized dances, intended for the salon and concert hall rather than the ballroom, they evince the intoxicating lilt that drew people of all classes to Europe’s popular dance halls. Although the Waltz in A Minor was styled “Grande valse brilliante” on the title page of the original 1838 publication, it’s more lullaby than showpiece: The gently swaying rhythm that Chopin introduces in the left hand stays steady, even as the melody line grows increasingly animated and ornate.
Debussy first set Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune” for voice and piano in 1882. Some eight years later, he returned to the theme, moved by the poet’s description of “the calmness of the moonlight, sad and beautiful, / Which moves the birds and the trees to dream / And the waterspouts to sob with ecstasy ...” This time Debussy evoked moonlight in purely pianistic terms: “Clair de lune” is one of four piano pieces that comprise the Suite bergamasque, whose title evokes the idealized Arcadian landscapes painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau. In this guise, “Clair de lune” has become one of the mostly widely recognized pieces in the canon of musical classics. Indeed, its very familiarity makes it hard for modern listeners to appreciate how radically unconventional Debussy’s treatment of harmony and texture seemed to his contemporaries.
Debussy dismissed this early character piece as “a thing of no importance, dashed down as a service to Hartmann” (the violinist previously mentioned in connection with La plus que lente). Nevertheless, Rêverie has earned an enduring place in the repertoire as an exemplar of what critic Henry Gauthier-Villars called musique de rêve (“dream music”). Late–19th-century publishers’ catalogs were full of such highly marketable compositions. Most, like Debussy’s, featured long, arcing melodies set against repeating, often arpeggiated patterns.
A more or less seamless continuation of Satie’s “En y regardant à deux fois”—true to form, the composer doesn’t use a conventional double-bar to mark a definitive break between the two pieces—“Passer” (“Go On”) combines the same musical ingredients to notably different effect. Once again, the gentle melody is enmeshed in rolling arpeggiated chords, but the music’s fuller textures and bell-like octaves project a distinctly upbeat, consolatory mood.
Schumann embodied the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms and lyrical utterances, his reliance on literary and other extramusical sources of inspiration, and the supreme value he placed on emotional freedom and spontaneity. Kreisleriana is among a string of masterpieces written in the seven years before his marriage to pianist Clara Wieck in 1840. Schumann was infatuated with Wieck, and her father’s implacable opposition to the match only fanned the flames. The eight fantasy-like pieces that constitute Kreisleriana were inspired by a musician-brainchild of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Like the emotional Schumann, Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler “was drawn constantly to and fro by his inner visions and dreams as if floating on an eternally undulating sea, searching in vain for the haven which would grant him the peace and serenity needed for his work.” Apart from its literary associations, Schumann’s work was a love letter in disguise. “Play my Kreisleriana sometimes!” he counseled Wieck. “There’s a very wild love in a few movements, and your life and mine and many of your looks.”
Of the two fictitious alter egos that Schumann invented for himself, the impulsive Florestan takes center stage in the first piece, marked “extremely animated,” with its fierce, almost violent torrent of racing triplets in looping patterns, while the more reflective Eusebius comes to the fore in the lyrical, placidly undulating theme of the second piece (to be played “very inwardly and not too quickly”). The contrast in character is accentuated by Schumann’s key scheme, which alternates more or less regularly between minor and major keys. But Kreisleriana is permeated with ambiguity, rhythmic as well as tonal, that highlights the music’s phantasmagorical atmosphere. Particularly in the first and last pieces, the underlying pulse is upset or obscured by changing metrical patterns and displacements of the downbeat. In the closing bars, the music’s driving, frenetic energy dissipates, and the work ends with a subterranean whisper.
—Harry Haskell