“Sitting at the piano, he proceeded to reveal to us wondrous regions. We were drawn into circles of ever deeper enchantment. His playing, too, was full of genius, and transformed the piano into an orchestra of wailing and jubilant voices.” Thus did Robert Schumann introduce the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms to the world in an encomium published in Europe’s leading music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, on October 28, 1853. Pinpointing Brahms’s characteristic blend of muscularity and tenderness, Schumann famously likened his pianism to a waterfall, “the cascades of which were overarched by a peaceful rainbow, while butterflies played about its borders accompanied by the voices of nightingales.”
Brahms had been the Schumanns’ houseguest since arriving in Düsseldorf four weeks earlier, and Robert’s favorable initial impressions had been amply confirmed. “You and I understand each other,” the older composer remarked after hearing Brahms play a sampling of his early piano music. Ambitious and impatient for recognition, the young tyro whom Schumann hailed as a “genius” was determined to make his mark before returning to his native Hamburg. “I must see two or three of my compositions in print so I can cheerfully look my parents in the face,” he had written lightheartedly that summer to Joseph Joachim, the Hungarian violinist-composer to whom the C-Major Sonata is dedicated. By the end of the year, thanks to Schumann’s enthusiastic recommendation, his first two piano sonatas had been accepted for publication by the prestigious firm of Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig.
The Sonata No. 1 opens in a full-throated heroic vein, with a thunderous barrage of block chords in crisp, tautly sprung rhythms. As the tension gradually ratchets down, a lyrical countertheme emerges, underlaid with flowing arpeggiated figures. Brahms modulates to C minor for the Allegro’s development section, investing the lyrical melody with an increasing drama and urgency that prefigure the return of the original theme. The somber Andante, based on a medieval German love song, reflects Brahms’s lifelong interest in folk song and variation form; decades later, he would revisit “Verstohlen geht der Mond auf” (“Stealthily the moon rises”) in the last of his 49 Deutsche Volkslieder. The sonata’s remaining two movements are aptly marked “con fuoco” (“fiery”): a rollicking Scherzo in E minor, with a contrasting midsection in C major, and an athletic, rondo-form finale that seethes with raw, volcanic energy.
Brahms discovered J. S. Bach’s music in his student days in Hamburg, an experience that laid the foundation for his mastery of counterpoint and variation form. An avid student of music history, he relished the challenge of erecting new structures on old foundations, particularly the repeating “ground bass” patterns characteristic of the Baroque chaconne. “In a theme for variations,” he wrote, “it is almost only the bass that actually has any meaning for me ... What I do with melody is only playing around.”
Although a number of earlier composers had written music for solo violin, the breathtaking contrapuntal and harmonic complexity that Bach achieved in his six unaccompanied sonatas and partitas was unprecedented. As Johann Nikolaus Forkel observed in 1802, Bach “so combined in a single part all the notes required to make the modulations complete that a second part is neither necessary nor desirable.” Brahms’s arrangement of the D-Minor Chaconne is one of three piano “studies” based on Bach’s music that he published in 1878, not long before he turned down the offer of Bach’s old cantorship at St. Thomas’s Cathedral in Leipzig.
The majestic architecture of Bach’s chaconne rests on the sturdiest, and simplest, of foundations: Its 256 bars are supported by a repeated but ever-changing bass line that provides the harmonic underpinning for a series of 32 stunningly imaginative variations. Brahms wisely refrained from dressing the Baroque master’s polyphony in quasi-orchestral finery. Apart from a smattering of anachronistic dynamic and expressive markings, his version of the chaconne is scrupulously faithful to the original. He told Clara Schumann that the best way to appreciate the work, short of listening to a performance by “the most outstanding violinist,” was to hear it in one’s mind. Only in playing it with one hand instead of two did he “succeed in procuring myself a much reduced but acceptable and quite pure enjoyment of this work.”
Liszt was second to none in his regard for Schubert. Although the great Hungarian pianist 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.” Liszt composed more than 80 lieder of his own, many of which he recast as piano solos. The magic of his playing was captured by a critic for the London Times, who compared him to one of the leading Italian tenors of the day. Liszt “made the instrument sing,” he wrote. “The soft whisperings of his piano passages seemed to compete with the tones of Rubini’s voice, and the showers of light notes which he scattered through some of the variations realized every idea that can be formed of fairy music.”
Over a period of some 50 years, Liszt lovingly annotated, adapted, and transcribed dozens of Schubert’s works, including many of his most famous songs, in a proselytizing campaign to bring them to a wider audience. Of the five Schubert lieder on tonight’s program, “Der Wanderer” (“The Wanderer”) and “Frühlingsglaube” (“Faith in Spring”) date from 1816 and 1820, respectively. “Der Müller und der Bach” (“The Miller and the Brook”) appeared in Schubert’s 1823 song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, while “Die Stadt” (“The Town”) and “Am Meer” (“By the Sea”) are drawn from Schwanengesang (Swan Song), a miscellany of late songs published after his death.
Liszt was careful to draw a line between his transcriptions, which are remarkably faithful to both the letter and the spirit of the originals, and his more freewheeling “paraphrases” of operatic arias and other works. His version of “Der Wanderer,” a listless vagabond in search of happiness, builds from simple pulsing triplets to flighty arpeggios, rumbling trills, and thunderous tremolos. The lovesick miller of “Der Müller und der Bach” seeks solace in a melodious dialogue with a placid stream that flits back and forth between minor and major modes. The simple tune of “Frühlingsglaube” migrates from the right hand to the left as the musical texture becomes increasingly complex. In “Die Stadt” and “Am Meer,” Liszt works in a more overtly dramatic vein, with an emphasis on atmospheric effects and virtuoso technique: The published scores offer alternate versions of several passages for pianists less formidably gifted than himself.
Schubert was hardly in Liszt’s league as a pianist, but he too pushed the envelope of keyboard sound and technique in works like the monumental “Wanderer Fantasy.” The warmly lyrical, human-scaled sound he coaxed from the light-framed, bell-toned Viennese fortepianos of his day contrasted sharply with the quasi-orchestral sonorities produced by virtuosos like Liszt, who favored the more powerful English and French instruments. After performing one of his sonatas at a private soirée, Schubert boasted to his father that more than one listener had come up to him to say that “the keys became singing voices under my hands, which, if true, pleases me greatly, since I cannot endure the accursed chopping which even distinguished piano players indulge in and which delights neither the ear nor the mind.”
Composed in November 1822, the C-Major Fantasy is a majestic and boldly imaginative work that anticipates the expansive time frames and formal structures of Schubert’s late piano sonatas. It takes its name from his song “Der Wanderer” of 1816, whose trudging theme forms the basis of a set of elaborate variations in the fantasy’s dark, brooding Adagio. The four movements, analogous to those of a classical symphony, are set apart by momentary pauses rather than full cadences. These seamless transitions highlight the work’s cyclical structure, with the finale recalling both the tonality and the thematic material of the first movement.
The thunderous C-major chords that open the Allegro con fuoco present the short figure in dactylic rhythm (long-short-short) that will recur throughout the fantasy as a unifying motif. Later in the movement, Schubert reverses the pattern (short-short-long) in a winsome countermelody. Modulating to the remote key of C-sharp minor for the Adagio, he further transforms it into a slow dirge and then, switching from duple to triple time, into a propulsive long-short-long figure in the scherzo-like Presto in A-flat major. In the final Allegro, the motif returns in its original key and rhythm, this time as the subject of a strenuous, stentorian fugato that steadily gathers momentum on its inexorable course toward a breathtaking, no-holds-barred climax of Lisztian splendor.
—Harry Haskell