Beethoven the pianist, no less than the composer, was a force of nature who seemed incapable of following the rules of polite society. His no-holds-barred playing wreaked havoc on the keyboard instruments of his day, as Anton Reicha discovered in the 1790s. “He asked me to turn pages for him,” the Czech composer recalled. “But I was mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte which snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings.” Yet there was a tender, poetic side to Beethoven’s pianism as well. Comparing him to a celebrated pyrotechnician of the day, another composer wrote that Beethoven had “greater eloquence, weightier ideas, and is more expressive—in short, he is more for the heart.”
Beethoven composed his 27th sonata in the summer of 1814, almost five years after its predecessor. Pianists who purchased the published score a year later might have noticed a salient difference from the composer’s earlier sonatas: the use of German movement titles in place of traditional Italian tempo markings. As musicologist Lewis Lockwood points out, the headings “Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck” (“Lively, with feeling and expression throughout”) and “Nicht zu geschwind und sehr singbar vorzutragen” (“To be played not too fast and in a songlike manner”) attest to Beethoven’s increasing focus on music’s intrinsic emotional character.
Despite its concise two-movement format, the E-Minor Sonata is conceived on an expansive scale—not only in terms of expression, but harmonically and thematically as well. The sharp dynamic contrasts in the opening bars, and the eagerness with which Beethoven subverts the initial E-minor tonality, are early signs that his musical thought is not going to channel a well-worn path. The movement’s dramatic character is enhanced by contrasts between low and high registers, frenetic activity and repose. The second movement, a lyrical rondo reminiscent of Beethoven’s contemporary song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, almost seems to come from a different world. Carl Czerny wrote that the music called for “a delicate touch” and “fine cantabile” style, and advised pianists to play the tender E-major theme “with a different gradation of tone” each time it appears.
Few composers are as closely identified with a single instrument as Chopin is with the piano. Hailed as a “musical genius” by his teachers in Warsaw, he took Paris by storm when he arrived from his native Poland in 1831. Just as Chopin’s virtuosity defined a new school of Romantic pianism, his dozens of nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes, and other solo piano works gave new meaning to the term “salon music,” the lightweight fare popular in the Parisian drawing rooms. Although Chopin was firmly grounded in tradition—J. S. Bach and Mozart were his favorite composers—his radically unconventional conception of the piano and his unique blend of Classical discipline and Romantic freedom made him one of the most revolutionary figures in music history.
Introverted by nature, Chopin was drawn to the wistful, romantic character of the nocturne, a genre developed by Irish composer-pianist John Field and characterized by Liszt as reflecting “those hours wherein the soul, released from all the cares of the day, is lost in self-contemplation and soars toward the regions of starlit heaven.” Most of Chopin’s early nocturnes are essays in melodic embellishment, with the left hand showcasing the harmonies in shifting arpeggio patterns. The two Op. 48 Nocturnes and the ambitious F-Minor Fantasy, all dating from 1841, show the 31-year-old composer working on a more ambitious and overtly virtuosic scale.
The Nocturne in F-sharp Minor conjures a dreamlike atmosphere, its sweetly melancholy melody set against a rocking accompaniment in patterns of two notes against three. A more active and declamatory midsection in D-flat major leads to an ornamented repeat of the opening music that fades away in a series of trills and lands softly on a major chord. In the F-Minor Fantasy, several themes of sharply divergent characters are linked by common elements. The ominous, downward-marching theme in octaves heard at the beginning alternates with a surging melody built on the same dotted rhythm. Later, a series of arabesques pick up speed and transform into torrential roulades. A lightly syncopated, Schumannesque theme gives way to another march. Just as all passion seems to be spent, the quietly luminous interlude in B major is interrupted by an explosion of Lisztian fireworks.
In the fall of 1853, Brahms traveled to Düsseldorf to meet the man he admired above all living composers. He and Robert Schumann hit it off instantly. Writing a few weeks later in Europe’s leading music journal, Schumann hailed the 20-year-old Brahms as a genius capable of “transform[ing] the piano into an orchestra of wailing and jubilant voices.” Schumann may have been Brahms’s musical idol, but it was his wife, Clara—a renowned concert pianist and composer in her own right—who would be the younger man’s lifelong muse and confidante. “I have never loved a friend as I love him,” Clara told her children; “it is the most beautiful mutual understanding of two souls.”
After Robert’s attempted suicide in early 1854, Brahms rushed to Clara’s side and consoled her with music. He wrote the four Op. 10 Ballades during his stay in Düsseldorf that spring and summer and played them for Robert at the sanatorium in Endenich the following January. Clara reported that her husband “gave vent to his excitement with constant interjections” and “did everything he could” to delay Brahms’s departure. Brahms felt a special fondness for the Ballades, saying that they “remind me so much of the twilight hours I spent at Clara’s side.”
Ballade No. 1 is nicknamed “Edward” after a traditional Scottish ballad that Brahms knew in a German translation. Like the poem, the music takes the form of a dialogue between a mother and her son: Under her persistent interrogation, Edward confesses to the gruesome murder of his father. The work’s somber D-minor tonality conveys an atmosphere of grim and inexorable fatality. In the companion Ballade No. 2 in D major, horror and foreboding are transmuted into wistful tenderness, as if to atone for the unspeakable crime of patricide. The third and fourth pieces constitute another tonally complementary pair. No. 3 is a B-minor intermezzo in simple A-B-A song form, whose fluttery main theme contrasts with the middle section’s bell-like tinkling. In No. 4—a lyrical andante in B major—the serene, long-breathed melody is first buoyed by cascading arpeggios, then enmeshed in a skein of interlocking triplets and duplets marked “with the most intimate feeling.”
Encouraged by his mother, an amateur pianist, Prokofiev began composing and playing the piano at a young age. For his final examination at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1914, he brashly chose to play his own First Piano Concerto instead of a standard test piece. Throughout his career as a touring virtuoso, reviewers used words like steely, volcanic, and tempestuous to describe his playing. Yet violinist David Oistrakh was struck by the “remarkable simplicity” of his pianism at a concert in Odessa in 1927, adding that “the fact that Prokofiev could be poetic and moving came as a surprise to many.”
Prokofiev composed his Second Sonata in the summer of 1912, when he was still a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and premiered it in Moscow in early 1914. The work’s somber D-minor tonality ties it to the other three minor-key piano sonatas he wrote before leaving Russia in 1918. (Prokofiev’s biographer Harlow Robinson speculates that the minor mode facilitated the chromatic alterations that feature especially prominently in his early music.) Prokofiev, hailed in the American press as a “blond Russian giant” and a “tonal steel trust,” performed the sonata on his New York recital debut at Aeolian Hall on November 18, 1918—one week after the armistice that ended World War I.
The Sonata in D Minor is notable for its extreme contrasts of style, mood, texture, and tonality. The Allegro opens in a mood of turbulent, tonally ambiguous reverie before gradually morphing into a slightly off-kilter waltz with a modal tinge. The Scherzo (in A-B-A form) contrasts fast, pounding, toccata-style writing with a gracefully ethereal middle section characterized by the repeating melodic motif of an octave leap followed by a half or whole step. The Andante wanders into the remote key of G-sharp minor, with ostinato-like rhythmic patterns and unstable chromatic harmonies that conjure a dreamy, surreal atmosphere. The concluding Vivace pits a playfully propulsive theme—presented first in flowing triplets and later in crisp dotted rhythm—against a wistful reminiscence of the waltz melody from the first movement.
—Harry Haskell