Beethoven burst onto the scene in cosmopolitan Vienna in late 1792 and spent the remainder of the decade burnishing his reputation as a pianistic powerhouse. Upon hearing him play, a fellow virtuoso was so overcome with emotion—or possibly envy—that he couldn’t bear to touch his own instrument for days. In a city crawling with top-flight pianists, Beethoven was in a class by himself. “Nobody equaled him in the rapidity of his scales, double trills, skips, etc., not even Hummel,” his pupil Carl Czerny recalled in later years. “His bearing while playing was perfectly quiet, noble, and beautiful, without the slightest grimace—but bent forward low, as his deafness increased; his fingers were very powerful, not long, and broadened at the tips from much playing, for he told me that in his youth he generally had to practice until after midnight.”
Notable for its many daringly unconventional features, the “Grande Sonate Pathétique” was instantly recognized as a pathbreaking work when it was published in 1799. Some idea of its novelty can be gleaned from the testimony of the young pianist-composer Ignaz Moscheles. As a student in Prague in 1804, he heard “that a young composer had appeared at Vienna, who wrote the oddest stuff possible—such as no one could either play or understand; crazy music, in opposition to all rule.” Intrigued, Moscheles went to the library and checked out the score of the C-Minor Sonata. Thereafter he eagerly “seized upon the pianoforte works of Beethoven as they successively appeared, and in them found a solace and a delight such as no other composer afforded me.”
The “Pathétique” Sonata’s slow, intensely harmonized introduction lasts just long enough to establish a mood of C-minor pathos (Beethoven’s subtitle connotes a passionate or sublime character) before the heavens burst open, unleashing the raw, elemental fury of the first Allegro. Listen for the echoes of the opening theme that Beethoven inserts as lead-ins to the development section and the final coda, knitting the movement together and replenishing its explosive energy. The radiant Adagio cantabile in A-flat major provides a brief lyrical interlude that contrasts sharply with the finale, another helter-skelter Allegro whose irrepressible rondo theme keeps bouncing back like a jack-in-the-box.
As revolutionary in his day as Beethoven was in his, Schoenberg stood at the vanguard of the early 20th-century movement to dissolve the bonds of traditional tonality and musical structure. To many contemporary critics and concertgoers, the “atonal” music of Schoenberg and his pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg was both alien and alienating: Performances of their works routinely provoked vitriolic attacks in the musical press and riotous protests in concert halls. Yet the so-called Second Viennese School endured and became a seminal force in musical modernism. Although Schoenberg is best known as the originator of 12-tone composition in the 1920s, his earlier atonal music, in which old and new elements coexist in a state of unresolved tension, is in many ways more approachable for the average listener.
At the beginning of his career, Schoenberg took up the legacy of Liszt, Wagner, R. Strauss, and G. Mahler in a series of large-scale works such as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht and the orchestral cantata Gurre-Lieder. But his appetite for late-Romantic luxuriance diminished as he entered his third decade. “I had become tired—not as a listener, but as a composer of writing music of such length,” he explained. Thereafter he resolved to cultivate “a style of concision and brevity, in which every technical or structural necessity was carried out without unnecessary extension, in which every single unit is supposed to be functional.” The Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, composed between February and August 1909, were among the first fruits of this stylistic overhaul.
The dreamy, relaxed atmosphere of the first two pieces contrasts sharply with the explosive energy of the third. The first, by turns ruminative and mercurial, is built around a plaintive descending melody—heard at the very beginning—that provides audible structural support in the absence of cadences and other familiar tonal features. Ominously oscillating eighth notes play a similar thematic role in the outer sections of the second piece, framing a phantasmagorical middle section. In both, Schoenberg aimed for what he called “unshackled flexibility of form uninhibited by ‘logic.’” Most protean of all is the third piece: Stentorian octaves and dense, cluster-like chords alternate with shimmering sonorities and delicate arabesques.
In his first published opus—a set of highly salable piano trios—Beethoven sought to ingratiate himself both with his aristocratic patrons and with the highly discerning Viennese public. Having thus presented his credentials, he proceeded to throw down the gauntlet: His three piano sonatas that make up Op. 2 pushed the envelope of public opinion as well as the language of musical Classicism. Beethoven played his freshly minted sonatas for Haydn in the summer of 1795, but although he respectfully dedicated the set to the older composer, he proudly refused to advertise himself as Haydn’s pupil on the title page.
The A-Major Sonata starts off in a jocular, Haydnesque vein. Soon, however, the Allegro vivace takes an ominous turn in a tempestuous Sturm und Drang passage whose repercussions will be felt throughout the work. The minor-key thunderclaps that disrupt the slow movement’s otherwise imperturbable lyricism prove no more than a passing squall; so too the darkly urgent A-minor interlude that serves to highlight the elfin gaiety of the Scherzo. In the finale, however, Beethoven strikes a more dynamic and precarious balance: The exuberant Rondo theme—a sizzling arpeggiated skyrocket followed by a vertiginous downward leap and a smoothly flowing, conjunct melody—is repeatedly interrupted by chromatic scales in jackhammer-like staccato triplets.
The death of Schoenberg’s father forced him to quit school at age 16 and take a low-level job at a Viennese bank. Although he learned to play violin and cello, and even joined an amateur orchestra led by his future teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky, his early musical education was entirely self-directed. These three short pieces, written when he was 20 years old, presage his lifelong devotion to Brahms, whose four masterful sets of late piano miniatures were published in the early 1890s. The older composer’s influence is evident not only in Schoenberg’s late-Romantic harmonies and textures, but also in his use of “displaced” rhythms that mask the music’s underlying metrical scheme. Schoenberg gave the manuscript of the Three Pieces to a childhood friend, and they remained unpublished until 1968.
Schoenberg wrote these six highly compressed miniatures in 1911, the same year he published the massive textbook on harmony that would cement his reputation as one of the century’s most influential music theorists and teachers. As a historically minded theorist, he was concerned with “making connections between what was, what is, and what is likely to be.” As a composer, he strove to distill his musical ideas to their essence. “Great art must proceed to precision and brevity,” he wrote, “lending to every sentence the full pregnancy of meaning of a maxim, of a proverb, of an aphorism.”
Note for note, the Six Little Piano Pieces of Op. 19 are as pithily aphoristic as any of Webern’s works—they average only about a minute each in performance. Yet, paradoxically, Schoenberg didn’t want them to sound too short. He criticized pianist Egon Petri for rushing through them, remarking to Webern, “For my music one has to have time. It is not a thing for people who have other things to do.” All six pieces are notable for their intense fragility, but Schoenberg’s economy of means is most apparent in the last. An homage to his friend and mentor Gustav Mahler, the music is little more than a meditation on two soft, sustained chords that fade away at the end “like a breath.”
Although increasing deafness forced Beethoven to curtail his performing career around 1805, there was no falling off in his compositional activity. His pupil Ferdinand Ries recalled that one day in the summer of 1804, while the two men were taking a constitutional, a light suddenly flashed in the composer’s head. Hurrying back to his house, he “ran to the piano without taking off his hat. I took a seat in the corner and he soon forgot all about me. Now he stormed for at least an hour with the beautiful finale of the [Op. 57] sonata. Finally he got up, was surprised still to see me, and said, ‘I cannot give you a lesson today, I must do some more work.’”
The drama of the “Appassionata” Sonata is concentrated in the outer movements, both of which are firmly anchored in F minor and can justly be described as “impassioned.” (The spurious subtitle was affixed to the work more than a decade after Beethoven’s death.) Equally impressive is the concentration of the composer’s musical thought. The Allegro assai, for instance, is constructed around two contrasting ideas—the flowing, triadic melody heard at the beginning and material of a driving, percussive nature. The Andante con moto, a set of variations in D-flat major, is an oasis of calm in the eye of the storm. Without pausing for breath, Beethoven plunges back into the maelstrom of the Allegro ma non troppo, a brilliant, perpetual-motion-style finale that has the tensile energy of a tautly wound spring.
—Harry Haskell