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.
—Harry Haskell
Vladimir Ryabov’s Fantasia in C minor was written in memory of Maria Yudina, a legendary artist in Russia who is becoming increasingly better known internationally thanks to a recent release of her extensive recorded legacy on CD, which spans almost the entire piano literature from Bach to Stravinsky (although she was also the first to perform Boulez and Stockhausen in Russia).
In her own lifetime, Yudina was not allowed to travel to the West, and was fired from both the Moscow Conservatory and the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music because of her deep religiosity. She was close friends with some of the greatest literary luminaries of her time; Boris Pasternak first read his novel Doctor Zhivago at her house. Never afraid to speak up against the Communists and to openly affirm her faith, she was a black sheep under the regime; yet she miraculously escaped harm, in one of those strange—and in this case, fortunate—quirks which were not rare in the history of Stalinism. When she received the Stalin Prize, she donated the money to the Orthodox Church for “perpetual prayers for Stalin’s sins.” Yet this devout Christian woman happened to be the former seminary student’s favorite pianist. According to an oft-repeated story, Stalin was so taken with her performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A Major that he demanded a copy of the recording. No one dared tell him that it had been a live broadcast and there was no recording; they had to summon Yudina to the studio in the middle of the night where, with a hastily assembled orchestra, they recorded the concerto. The next morning, Stalin was presented with a unique copy. After his death, this record was found next to his bed—it was apparently the last thing he had ever listened to.
In his Fantasia, Ryabov—a pianist-composer who had studied with Aram Khachaturian—managed to say something new and personal, even through his idiom that is strongly indebted to 19th-century Romanticism. Ryabov accomplished this by devising an approach to harmony in which he added upper and lower neighbors to the tones of traditional chords, creating rich, cluster-like sonorities in which the original harmonies are, nevertheless, still recognizable. The formal outline of the piece is also unusual: The five sections of the fantasy are marked Introduzione—Sonata I—Marcia funebre—Sonata II—Capriccio. Allusions to the classics abound, from Bach to Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mussorgsky, and beyond. The rather extraordinary fugue theme that appears in the second sonata was composed by Yudina herself, at age 18 in 1917; Ryabov used this theme to create the most shattering climax in the entire work.
The tempos and textures of the fantasy are extremely diverse; powerful chordal moments alternate with episodes filled with rapid passagework. The central funeral march is based on a stark rhythmic figure, to be played “like timpani,” against silently depressed chords in the right hand that release a set of otherworldly overtones. In the words of Italian critic Ettore Bruck, who didn’t hesitate to proclaim the fantasy to be one of the summits of 20th-century piano literature, the work unites “extraordinary power and great tenderness, clarity and enigma, a strong will and intense trepidation, a fleeting moment and all eternity.” Everything in this work, Bruck writes, happens “for the first, but also for the last time.” In the concluding Capriccio, Ryabov, in Bruck’s words, “reconciled Harmony and Chaos.” This is no ordinary capriccio; like the Brahms capriccios, it plumbs extraordinary depths as it goes to the limits of the piano’s expressive possibilities. The ending sounds almost like a hallucination: Ryabov creates a completely new sound world in which an eerie and ominous perpetual-motion figure is punctuated by a series of individual pitches above and below. The musical material seems to disintegrate completely, leaving us with feelings of hopelessness and despair as the music fades into silence.
—Peter Laki
Rachmaninoff’s prowess as a pianist has tended to eclipse his compositional achievement, but he occupies a prominent niche in the pantheon of Russian composers. As a 15-year-old wunderkind at the Moscow Conservatory, he was singled out for greatness by no less a judge than Tchaikovsky. Shortly after graduating in 1892, he composed the perennially popular Prelude in C-sharp Minor that would become his calling card on recitals around the world. Paradoxically, this precocious success was followed by a period of debilitating lethargy and depression, during which Rachmaninoff found it almost impossible to compose. It wasn’t until 1900, after he consulted a physician specializing in hypnosis, that his creative juices began to flow freely again.
Rachmaninoff produced almost all of his music for solo piano in the first 25 years of his professional career. The six Moments musicaux, Op. 16, are early works, dating from 1896, and Rachmaninoff candidly admitted that he wrote them mainly in the hope of earning money (though the market for such ferociously difficult music was surely limited). Apart from No. 2, he seldom performed the Moments musicaux in later years; nevertheless, they anticipate by some two decades the more sophisticated idiom of his Études-tableaux. These “pictorial etudes,” written before and during World War I, draw on a wide range of extramusical stimuli, from the paintings of Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin to the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” and the Mass for the Dead.
The Étude-tableau in E-flat Minor is a highly compressed tonal drama of epic proportions. Marked Appassionato (passionate), the music is notable for its feverish intensity and rhythmic intricacy. The darkly heroic melody struggles valiantly to emerge from the dense thicket of chords and passagework, only to be subsumed in the soft glow of the major-key ending. Although some commentators have detected Böcklin’s painterly influence in the C-Minor Étude-tableau, the first of the Op. 39 set is more virtuoso étude than pictorial tableau. The chromatic turbulence of this tonal maelstrom may reflect Rachmaninoff’s reaction to the recent death of his close friend Alexander Scriabin. Equally virtuosic, but less substantial musically, are the two early Moments musicaux, which epitomize the pyrotechnical elan of the young tyro who dazzled Moscow audiences in the 1890s. With their muscular melodies, roiling accompaniments, and thunderous sonorities, they exploit the piano’s resources to the full.
Although Liszt resided in Vienna for a few months as a boy in the early 1820s, he seems never to have met the composer whom he revered as the “beloved hero of the heaven of my youth.” Starting in the early 1830s, he lovingly transcribed nearly five dozen Schubert lieder to perform on his solo recitals. In “Der Müller und der Bach” (“The Miller and the Brook”), from Schubert’s 1823 cycle Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Miller’s Daughter), a young, lovesick miller seeks solace in a melodious dialogue with a placid stream that flits back and forth between minor and major modes. This lyrical gem lends itself well to solo piano, in part because Schubert’s keyboard accompaniment is so richly imaginative that it needs little elaboration.
Two of the five lieder on tonight’s program, “Aufenthalt” and “Die Stadt,” are drawn from Schubert’s Schwanengesang (Swan Song), a miscellany of late songs—often misleadingly referred to as a thematically unified cycle—published after the composer’s death. “Aufenthalt” (“Resting Place”) conjures a raging cataract in agitated minor-key music that tests the pianist’s technique to the utmost; indeed, Liszt (or possibly his publisher) provided alternative versions of several passages for pianists less phenomenally gifted than himself.
Many of Schubert’s most beloved songs feature imagery of moving water, a popular musical and literary trope in the Romantic era. Liszt treats the three stanzas of “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” (“To Be Sung on the Water”) with a light touch, letting the gently lapping wavelets of 16th notes speak for themselves, while shifting the melody from one voice to another for variety. Schubert stops there, but Liszt goes on to add a fourth “stanza” in a freer, more robustly soloistic vein.
In “Die Stadt” (“The Town”), Liszt works in a more overtly dramatic—not to say melodramatic—vein, with an emphasis on atmospheric effects and virtuoso technique. Heine’s poem depicts a turreted town seen from a boat in the misty distance, where, as we learn in the last of the three stanzas, the disconsolate speaker has “lost” his beloved. Rumbling tremolos and jetting roulades reinforce the music’s dirge-like, C-minor tonality.
One reason Schubert’s lieder lend themselves so well to the solo piano is because his keyboard accompaniments are so richly imaginative and sophisticated that they need little elaboration. In “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”), originally set to a poem by Goethe, Liszt initially reproduces Schubert’s rippling 16th notes almost exactly as written. Only later, as the love-struck spinner’s yearning for her absent beau builds to a passionate climax, does Liszt’s “song without words” become thicker and more symphonic in texture.
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