Haydn was a skillful player of both harpsichord and piano, and his early keyboard sonatas were designated for either instrument. Although he didn’t acquire a piano of his own until 1788, the dynamic and expressive features of his later works suggest he had long been writing with it in mind. In fact, Haydn composed almost all his music at the keyboard, as he made clear in describing his daily routine: “I get up early, and as soon as I have dressed, I kneel down and pray to God and the Holy Virgin that things may go well today. After some breakfast, I sit at the Klavier [the generic term for a keyboard instrument], and I begin to improvise.”
In the late 1770s and early 1780s, Haydn expended the bulk of his creative energy on satisfying Prince Nicolaus Esterházy’s passion for opera. (His employer maintained a resident opera company, as well as a marionette theater, at his castle in Hungary.) But the popular demand for Haydn’s instrumental music was burgeoning, and in his spare time he continued to write keyboard sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies. Although the sonatas were typically advertised as being suitable for the harpsichord, the smooth, legato phrasing and sharp dynamic contrasts in the E-Minor Sonata are unmistakably pianistic.
The sonata opens with a turbulent Presto in which the melody flies back and forth between the player’s hands. After alighting briefly on a D-major chord, the music veers off on a new, more lyrical tangent, starting in G major and exploring a wide swathe of harmonic terrain before returning home to E minor. The first movement’s fleet-footed passagework is mirrored in the florid filigree of the Adagio, a leisurely mediation on a short, twisting rhythmic figure that leads seamlessly to the bracing, minor-key finale. With his typical blend of simplicity and artifice, Haydn weaves elements of the bouncy eight-bar theme together in endlessly inventive patterns.
From an early age, Ravel was marked to succeed Debussy as the poet laureate of French music. The two men shared a poetic sensibility, an allegiance to French traditions, and a fondness for sensuous, impressionistic timbres and textures. But Debussy’s revolutionary approach to harmony and form was alien to the younger composer, who remained at heart a classicist. Many of Ravel’s works evoke composers and styles of the past, albeit in an unmistakably modern idiom. A case in point is the brief minuet he wrote to commemorate the centenary of Haydn’s death in 1909. The first five notes of the simple theme form a musical anagram of Haydn’s name, which recurs in various guises and registers throughout the piece. For all that, the misty harmonies and mood of bittersweet wistfulness are vintage Ravel.
Ravel put the finishing touches on Le tombeau de Couperin in the summer and fall of 1917, shortly after his discharge from the French army. In the Baroque tradition of the tombeau, or musical memorial, he dedicated the piano suite’s six movements to the memory of fallen comrades. Inspired by the forms and procedures of Baroque music, his music anticipates the Neoclassical style that flourished in the 1920s. Although a dance by François Couperin provided the initial impetus for the suite, Ravel wrote that “the tribute is directed not so much to the individual figure of Couperin as to the whole of French music of the 18th century.”
Ravel’s tribute is as much a matter of spirit as of form. The tombeau evokes the clarity and elegance of French Baroque music, especially that of the 18th-century harpsichord composers with an impeccably 20th-century flair. The prevailing E-minor tonality of the opening Prélude and Fugue is spiced with pungent chromatic harmonies. The ensuing pair of dances—a fast, slightly lumpy Forlane and a snappy Rigaudon—play equally fast and loose with their Baroque models. Ravel sounds an elegiac chord in the slow, dreamy Menuet, while the dazzling Toccata culminates in a burst of E-major brilliance.
A peerless virtuoso known for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, Liszt took Europe by storm in the early 1800s. Only a handful of performers, such as violinist Nicolò Paganini and pianist Sigismund Thalberg, matched his star power. As audiences in city after city succumbed to “Lisztomania,” the Hungarian’s name became a byword for showmanship as well as technical wizardry. 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.
Much of Liszt’s piano music is contained in the three-part collection titled Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), compiled between 1838 and 1882. The “pilgrimage” in question was both physical and spiritual: Some of the pieces relate to Liszt’s career as an itinerant virtuoso, while others reflect his late-life decision to enter holy orders in the Catholic Church. Volume 2 is drawn from the musical album that resulted from his travels in Italy with his mistress, Countess Marie d’Agoult, in the late 1830s. “Sposalizio” was inspired by Raphael’s painting The Marriage of the Virgin, which impressed the composer in Milan. “Il penseroso” (“The Thinker”) refers to one of Michelangelo’s sculptures for Medici’s tomb in Florence, while the “Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa” commemorates the Italian Baroque painter who was widely admired by the Romantics. The three “Sonetti del Petrarca” were originally conceived as songs for tenor and piano; Liszt published piano transcriptions in 1846 and revised them a dozen years later for the Années de pèlerinage. Like “Après une lecture du Dante,” they reflect Liszt’s deep immersion in literary culture.
“Sposalizio,” built on a three-note motif and its inversion, is notable for its blend of intense spirituality and rapturous, almost erotic abandon. (Liszt struggled with similarly contradictory impulses before renouncing the concert stage and taking holy orders.) The funereal tread of “Il penseroso” contrasts with the lightly skipping “Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa,” based on a song by Giovanni Bononcini. In the first of Liszt’s deep readings of Petrarch’s poems, the breathless ardor of the lover’s laundry list of blessings is echoed in the almost imperceptible syncopations of the melodic line. “Sonetto del Petrarca” No. 104 explores the conflicting emotional states engendered by love: Impetuously climbing octaves give way to a yearning melody that builds to an ecstatic climax, then subsides in a tender coda. In the ballad-like No. 123, the wistful theme is swathed in rolled chords and pearly chromatic runs. The centerpiece of the collection is a lengthy rumination on the damned lovers Paolo and Francesca from Dante’s Inferno.
—Harry Haskell