When Beethoven arrived in Vienna from his native Bonn in late 1792—a year after Mozart’s untimely death—he was a cocky young tyro bursting with talent, confidence, and ambition. He dazzled audiences with his no-holds-barred approach to the keyboard, which wreaked havoc on the light-framed Viennese fortepianos of the day. Czech composer Anton Reicha felt the brunt of Beethoven’s elemental force when he turned pages for him at a performance of a Mozart concerto: “I was mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte that snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings. Beethoven insisted on finishing the concerto, and so back and forth I leaped, jerking out a string, disentangling a hammer, turning a page, and I worked harder than Beethoven.” Yet there was also a tender, poetic side to Beethoven’s virtuosity. Comparing him to another celebrated pyrotechnician of the day, amateur composer Carl Ludwig Junker wrote that Beethoven had “greater eloquence, weightier ideas, and is more expressive—in short, he is more for the heart.”
Beethoven’s rapid maturation as a composer was no less dramatic. He made his debut as a creative artist in the three powerfully original piano trios of 1795, the first of his works to which he assigned an opus number. The publication of Beethoven’s first three piano sonatas the following year firmly established Haydn’s 26-year-old protégé as a star of the first magnitude. By the time he was 30, Beethoven had composed a clutch of masterpieces that included three piano concertos, six string quartets, and a symphony. Despite his incipient loss of hearing, the next 12 years produced a stream of ambitious and formally innovative works that defined Beethoven’s so-called middle period, including the three Op. 31 piano sonatas, the opera Fidelio, the “Eroica” Symphony and its three successors, the D-Major Violin Concerto, and the three “Razumovsky” string quartets. By the time Beethoven wrote the last of his 32 piano sonatas in the early 1820s, he was an aging warrior battered by illness and emotional trauma. Finding social intercourse arduous, Beethoven turned increasingly inward in the works of his late period; his last three piano sonatas—opp. 109, 110, and 111—are characterized by intense soul searching.
Commissioned by Berlin publisher Adolf Martin Schlesinger, the last three of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas were composed between 1820 and late 1822, the period in which he was struggling to bring the Missa solemnis and Ninth Symphony to completion. In these pathbreaking sonatas, one often has the sense that the composer is feeling his way from one idea to the next, the notes forming themselves soundlessly under his fingers, detached from their auditory moorings. Improvising had always been a vital element in Beethoven’s creative process, but it became even more so as deafness forced him to rely increasingly on his inner voice. “Real improvisation comes only when we are unconcerned [with] what we play,” he said, “so—if we want to improvise in the best, truest manner in public—we should give ourselves over freely to what comes to mind.”
The staggering of the two hands creates a delicately pointillistic effect in the opening of the E-Major Sonata, betraying the Vivace’s origins as a standalone teaching piece. Vast registral expanses soon open up in the first of the movement’s two Adagio interludes. A hushed, coda-like reprise of the main theme flows directly into an explosive triple-time Prestissimo, which veers between extremes of motion and affect. Storm and fury give way, in the sonata’s third movement, to incandescent lyricism. “Songlike, with the greatest inwardness of feeling” is Beethoven’s marking for the tender E-major theme that unfolds in two eight-bar strains, each stated twice. Then follow six contrasting variations: a slow, achingly poignant waltz; a vivacious scherzo; a short, Czerny-like exercise, full of spitfire runs; a lilting andante, to be played “a little slower than the theme”; a briskly contrapuntal version of the theme; and an extended tailpiece that plunges into a dense thicket of passagework and trills before emerging into the calm, clear air of the opening melody.
“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 Brahms to the world in a famous article published in Europe’s leading music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, on October 28, 1853. Throughout the four decades that followed, Brahms enriched the solo piano literature with sonatas, concertos, sets of variations, and character pieces. Although his keyboard technique was erratic, his performances of his early sonatas mesmerized Schumann, who referred to them as “veiled symphonies.”
By the early 1890s, Brahms had begun making noises about retiring from composition. Since writing another major solo work for the piano was out of the question, he produced four sets of short piano pieces, of which the three Op. 117 Intermezzos are the second. In these fantasy-like miniatures, Brahms explored the characteristically Romantic genre of the instrumental character piece. Clara Schumann, the composer’s trusted confidante, enthused about the Intermezzos in her diary, describing them as “a veritable fountain of pleasure,” awash in “poetry, passion, rapture, heartfelt emotion,” and “the most wonderful tonal effects.”
Laid out in A-B-A form, all three pieces are built on contrasts of mood, texture, and tonality. The First Intermezzo is based on a Scottish lullaby, whose wistful strains sing out in an inner voice beneath a peal of chiming E-flats. The characteristic rocking rhythm is interrupted in the dark, hauntingly ethereal middle section, characterized by billowing arpeggios in the bass. The Second Intermezzo plays on the alternation of two basic textures, one linear—a chain of melodic notes embedded in smoothly interlocking figurations—the other chordal. In the Third Intermezzo, Brahms uses a turbulent, rhythmically unstable interlude as a foil for the dogged, dirge-like tread of the outer sections.
In December 1890, Brahms presented his publisher with the manuscript of his Second String Quintet, along with a terse message: “With this slip, bid farewell to notes of mine.” As it turned out, the composer’s valedictory was premature; he soon got a fresh wind and went on to pen some of his most beguiling works, including the Clarinet Trio and the Clarinet Quintet, Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), and four sets of piano pieces, beginning with the seven capriccios and intermezzos of Op. 116. In these fantasy-like miniatures, Brahms returned to the characteristically Romantic genre of the instrumental character piece, a time-honored vehicle for distilling a particular mood or musical idea to its essence.
The mixture of lively, outgoing capriccios with slower, more introspective intermezzos gives the Op. 116 set a deeply satisfying sense of balance. The muscularity of the opening Capriccio in D Minor is tempered by lilting rhythmic displacements. The A-Minor Intermezzo’s wistful, insistently lapping theme contrasts with the plunging cascades and gently undulating triplets of the G-Minor Capriccio. In contrast to the rounded A-B-A form of the other six pieces, the central Intermezzo in E Major plies a waywardly rhapsodic path that accentuates the music’s ruminative, improvisatory character. Brahms unites it and the two ensuing intermezzos—the first halting and hesitant, the second marching tenderly but confidently—through the common keys of E major and E minor. An agitated capriccio brings the Seven Fantasies to a close in the same mood and key as they began.
Although J. S. Bach’s music fell out of fashion after his death in 1750, he was restored to his place in the German pantheon in the mid-1800s through the efforts of Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and other historically minded musicians. But the 19th-century Bach revivalists were not concerned with authenticity in the modern sense. Editions of the six solo sonatas and partitas by famous violinists like Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim were typically romanticized. David may have introduced Bach’s solos to the public in 1840 when he played the D-Minor Chaconne in Leipzig with Mendelssohn accompanying him on the piano. Not until the Bach Gesellschaft’s collected edition got under way in 1850 did scholarly texts of Bach’s music become widely available.
Like Mendelssohn, the Italian composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) was weaned on a diet of Bach’s keyboard music. He edited many of Bach’s works for publication and emulated the Baroque master’s elaborate contrapuntal style in his own music, notably in the monumental Fantasia contrappuntistica of 1910. His transcription of the D-Minor Chaconne appeared in multiple versions between 1892 and 1916. Like many 19th-century modernizers, Busoni felt he was doing Bach a favor, since in his view the grandeur of Bach’s musical conception clearly exceeded the capabilities of the solo violin and could only be adequately realized on the modern piano.
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. Busoni preserves both the structure and the contrapuntal textures of the original score, while adding colorings and other effects appropriate for piano, organ, or orchestra. (At one point, he instructs the pianist to imitate the sound of trombones.) With its octave doublings, transpositions, and occasional newly composed lines, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne is almost as much Busoni’s work as it is Bach’s.
—Harry Haskell