Jonathan Powell, writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians—jettisoning that encyclopedia’s customary judicious restraint—describes Scriabin as “one of the most extraordinary figures musical culture has ever witnessed.” Without question, the Russian composer and pianist was a force of nature, one who shattered the mold of musical Romanticism much as Liszt had done. Highly strung, impetuous, self-centered, and relentlessly driven, Scriabin combined a sharp, wide-ranging intellect and a disposition to mystical idealism with an exceptional sensitivity to tonal nuance. In addition to his formidably challenging piano works, he’s best known for his luxuriantly orchestrated symphonic works Poema ėkstaza (Poem of Ecstasy) and Prométhée (Prometheus, The Poem of Fire), which demonstrated his theory of the synesthetic equivalence between colors and musical keys. He devoted his final years to an unfinished, multisensory theater piece called Misteriya (Mysterium).
Between 1888, when he entered the Moscow Conservatory as a fellow pupil of Rachmaninoff, and 1896, the year he made his European debut as a pianist, Scriabin wrote a set of 24 preludes in all the major and minor keys. A compulsive perfectionist, he suffered a severe hand injury in 1893 because of over-practicing; undaunted, he composed the Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand alone, which was destined to become one of his most popular works. By the time he wrote the B-Minor Fantasy in 1900, the 29-year-old virtuoso was an established member of the conservatory’s faculty; he absent-mindedly mislaid the score, postponing the premiere for seven years.
Liszt’s influence is manifest in the fiendishly difficult Fantasy in B Minor, with its thundering octaves, complex rhythms, and dark, brooding harmonies. A contemporary critic commented that Scriabin’s playing “always had an improvisational character. It seemed as if he was creating a piece that you know well from a printed score right there on the stage, in front of the piano.” The “improvisational character” of Scriabin’s music is often deceptive, however. The Fantasy abounds in seemingly capricious—but artfully calculated—shifts of texture and tonality, such as the modulation from murky B minor to radiant D major for the lilting second theme. By the time the work reaches its transcendent resolution in B major, both listener and performer have undergone a powerfully cathartic experience.
Best known for his guitar music, Castelnuovo-Tedesco contributed to a wide range of genres, from chamber music and songs to large-scale orchestral and dramatic works. A promising career in his native Italy abruptly ended in 1938, when the fascist regime belatedly banned his works, and a year later, he joined the exodus of Jewish exiles to the US, eventually settling in Los Angeles. There, while continuing his prolific output of concert works, he wrote music (often anonymously) for some 250 Hollywood movies and mentored a generation of American film composers, including John Williams, Henry Mancini, and André Previn.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s creativity was often stimulated by nature and natural imagery. Cipressi (Cypresses), composed in 1920 and revised in 1939, was inspired by the summers he spent between the wars in the Tuscan hamlet of Usigliano, where his wife’s family owned a villa. In his autobiography, the composer painted an affectionate picture of the surrounding countryside, a fertile landscape of vineyards and olive and chestnut trees set among undulating hills that mirrored the motion of the sea. More specifically, Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music evokes Italy’s iconic cypresses, trees traditionally associated with graveyards.
Like many of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s early works, Cipressi is written in a rich, delicately nuanced harmonic idiom that reflects the lingering influence of French impressionism. At the same time, the score exemplifies the supple, freely measured lyricism of his famously conservative teacher, Ildebrando Pizzetti. The slow-moving, dirge-like chords that open this miniature tone poem combine with obsessive repetitions of the main melody to cast a spell that is alternately funereal and luminously enchanting. Castelnuovo-Tedesco would further enhance the music’s coloristic effects in his later transcription for orchestra.
As much as Debussy relished being a thorn in the side of France’s hidebound musical establishment, there was a strong streak of traditionalism in his artistic temperament. The composer who in later years proudly signed himself “musicien français” advocated for a revival of the “pure French tradition,” as exemplified by the Baroque master Rameau. Debussy made his mark in the early 1890s with a series of boldly unconventional yet quintessentially Gallic works—the String Quartet in G Minor, La damoiselle élue, and the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Together with the symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, his great piano and orchestral pieces came to define musical impressionism in the popular mind. Although critics often associated Debussy with painters like Manet, he steadfastly insisted that his music depicted not superficial impressions but essential “realities.”
By the time L’isle joyeuse appeared in 1904, both Debussy’s compositional style and his keyboard technique were fully developed. The pianist Ricardo Viñes recalled hearing the composer play early drafts of this and another work: “I told him that the pieces reminded me of paintings by Turner, and he replied that, precisely, before composing them he had spent a good while in the Turner gallery in London.” It was at least partly to counteract the impressionist label that Debussy called his later piano works “preludes” and “etudes,” rather than using titles that evoked the visual arts. In a further effort to discourage such associations, he insisted on relegating the programmatic titles to the end of the pieces. In any case, the two books of Préludes (published in 1910 and 1913, respectively) are programmatic only in the most general sense of arising in response to extramusical stimuli; and those stimuli were as likely to be literary or theatrical as visual.
Debussy’s sound world is an enchanted fantasyland of shimmering harmonies, sinuous roulades, and richly embroidered melodies. “La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune” (“The Terrace of Moonlit Audiences”) casts a bewitching spell with its misty, opalescent textures and spacious luminosity. (The dozen preludes of Book II are so texturally luxuriant that Debussy notated most of the music on three staves.) Nature imagery comes to the fore in the gusty arpeggios and tremolos of “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest” (“What the West Wind Saw”). L’isle joyeuse (The Isle of Joy) is notable for its dramatic vitality: It starts with a free, cadenza-like introduction and builds to an ecstatic climax by way of a Bacchanalian path ablaze with pianistic fireworks.
A peerless virtuoso 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 1848, Liszt accepted an invitation to become court Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Weimar. There, over the next 13 years, he composed his great “Faust Symphony” and a series of what he called “symphonic poems,” which epitomized the Romantic urge to synthesize music, literature, and other art forms. Unlike Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, who continued to write multimovement works in the mold of Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt came to believe that Classical sonata form was outmoded. In its place he erected long, single-movement musical structures based on the cyclical transformations of a small number of themes or motives. Among the first fruits of this endeavor was the Sonata in B Minor, one of the 19th century’s most revolutionary masterpieces. Although it was completed in early 1853, the work was so ahead of its time that four years passed before Liszt’s pupil Hans von Bülow gave the premiere in Berlin.
An uninterrupted musical panorama stretching across a full half-hour, the B-Minor Sonata falls into discrete sections that correspond roughly to those of traditional sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. Within the first 15 bars, Liszt presents three of the main ideas on which the sonata will be built: a lugubrious descending scale, an energetically bounding melody, and an ominously rumbling repeated-note figure. A contrasting lyrical theme, in resplendent D major, serves as the framework for the sonata’s middle “slow movement,” marked Andante sostenuto. This in turn is followed by a lively, fugue-like section, based, as in a conventional recapitulation, on themes heard earlier. Resisting his initial impulse to go out with a bang, Liszt brings the sonata to a close with a tender reminiscence of the Andante.
—Harry Haskell