Beethoven the pianist, no less than the composer, was a force of nature who seemed incapable of following the rules of polite society. His no-holds-barred playing wreaked havoc on the light-framed keyboard instruments of his day, as Anton Reicha discovered in the 1790s. “He asked me to turn pages for him,” the Czech composer recalled. “But I was mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte which snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings.” Yet there was a tender, poetic side to Beethoven’s pianism as well. Comparing him to a celebrated virtuoso of the day, another composer wrote that Beethoven had “greater eloquence, weightier ideas, and is more expressive—in short, he is more for the heart.”
The “Waldstein” Sonata is dedicated to another of Beethoven’s noble patrons, Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, who befriended him in Bonn and later smoothed the way for the ambitious young tyro’s entrée into Vienna. The sonata dates from 1803 to 1804, when Beethoven was working out the heroic style that also found expression in his contemporaneous “Eroica” Symphony and “Appassionata” Piano Sonata. As originally conceived, the “Waldstein” Sonata had a conventional full-length slow movement in rondo form. Beethoven had second thoughts, however: He published the slow movement separately as the “Andante favori” and replaced it in the sonata with a concise Adagio molto that ties the outer movements together in a decidedly unconventional fashion.
The “Waldstein” Sonata is a magisterial work that is both formally innovative and overflowing with invention. Beethoven plunges straight into the opening Allegro con brio, with pulsating eighth notes in the left hand set against wisps of melody in the right, seemingly hinting at an unheard theme. The movement’s brilliant character and feverish intensity were no doubt designed to show off the composer’s temperament as well as his technique. (He had recently acquired a new, more powerful Érard piano.) In place of the original Andante, he gives us a brief, searching, and darkly mysterious Introduzione—similar to the “bridge” movement he would write several years later for his A-Major Cello Sonata—that sets the stage for a lighthearted Rondo finale. Beethoven uses the familiar cyclical form as a vehicle for bravura passagework, bell-like effects, sustained trills in the inner voices, and other tricks of the virtuoso’s trade.
A peerless virtuoso famed for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, the young Liszt took Europe by storm. In the early 19th century, audiences in city after city succumbed to “Lisztomania.” Only the Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini and a handful of other charismatic performers matched his superstar appeal. Yet in 1848 the lanky, shaggy-haired Hungarian 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.
“En rêve” (“In a Dream”) dates from the tail end of the composer’s life, long after the dashing salon idol had taken holy orders and reinvented himself as the pious Abbé Liszt. The piece pays tribute to Chopin in the form of a wistful nocturne, a genre first developed by Irish composer-pianist John Field and characterized by Liszt as reflecting “those hours wherein the soul, released from all the cares of the day, is lost in self-contemplation and soars toward the regions of starlit heaven.” That’s a fair description of this short, subdued, echt-Romantic piece.
At the height of his fame as a concert artist, in the 1830s and ’40s, Liszt’s name was a byword for pianist prowess and showmanship. Both qualities are on display in the first of his four Mephisto Waltzes. Taking his cue from Nikolaus Lenau’s poetic retelling of the Faust legend, Liszt depicts a boisterous wedding feast at a village inn where, in the composer’s synopsis, “Mephistopheles snatches the fiddle from the hands of a lethargic fiddler and draws from it indescribably seductive and intoxicating strains. The amorous Faust whirls about with a full-blooded village beauty in a wild dance; they waltz in mad abandon out of the room, into the open, and away into the woods. The sounds of the fiddle grow softer and softer, and the nightingale warbles his love-laden song.” Liszt paints the scene in bold, vibrant colors, from the relentlessly pounding triplets and rushing rivulets of notes that give the waltz theme its giddy, almost manic energy, to the slow, syncopated, and meltingly amorous strains of the middle section.
Born in 1810, the same year as Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin graduated at the age of 19 from the Warsaw Conservatory, where his teachers praised his “exceptional talent” and “musical genius.” Eager to make his mark, he struck out to conquer Europe and soon settled in Paris, where he would make his home for the rest of his short life. Chopin demonstrated uncompromising independence as both composer and pianist. His fellow virtuoso Franz Liszt memorably characterized him as “one of those original beings” who are “adrift from all bondage.” In fact, it was arguably the unparalleled range and subtlety of his keyboard technique that enabled Chopin to cast off the shackles of musical convention so successfully. Contemporary accounts of his playing vividly attest to his phenomenal powers. One witness marveled at Chopin’s effortless arpeggios, “which swelled and diminished like waves in an ocean of sound.” Another recalled how his apparently delicate hands “would suddenly expand and cover a third of the keyboard. It was like the opening of the mouth of a serpent about to swallow a rabbit whole.”
Chopin had a special affinity for the wistful, romantic character of the nocturne, a genre developed by the Irish composer-pianist John Field, whom he greatly admired. Just as Chopin’s virtuosity defined a new school of Romantic pianism, so his many nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes, polonaises, and other solo piano pieces gave new meaning to the term “salon music,” the lightweight fare popular in Parisian drawing rooms of the 1830s and ’40s. It is astonishing to reflect that Chopin achieved artistic maturity less than a decade after the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert; the gulf that separates his music from theirs runs so deep that it almost marks the boundary of a separate world.
Both of the Op. 27 Nocturnes are built on undulating left-hand arpeggios that limn the shifting harmonies and provide supple rhythmic support for the right hand’s free-flowing melodies. The enharmonic equivalency of the nocturnes’ tonal centers, C-sharp and D-flat, suggests that Chopin was exploring two sides of the same coin: The tenderly yearning character of the first nocturne both complements and contrasts with the more extraverted passions of the second. In the midsection of No. 1, the pulse quickens, the rhythms become more sharply defined, and the music swells to a cadenza-like octave passage that leads to a recapitulation of the opening theme, this time sweetened by chains of thirds. In No. 2, the threefold repetition of the main theme is festooned with increasingly ornate filigree. At the third statement, marked triple forte, Chopin lets out all the stops in a dazzling display of delicate passagework, until little by little the passion ebbs and the rippling 16th notes dissolve in a puff of mist.
Composed in the latter half of 1844, Chopin’s third and last piano sonata reflects his late-life interest in contrapuntal textures and extended formal designs. Although Chopin was firmly grounded in tradition—Bach and Mozart were his favorite composers—his radically unconventional conception of the piano, along with his unique blend of Classical discipline and Romantic freedom, made him one of the authentically revolutionary figures in music history.
The B-Minor Sonata’s opening movement is an expansive sonata-form structure built around two sharply differentiated themes, the first boldly dramatic in character, the second sweetly lyrical. Tonally, the Allegro maestoso plies a circuitous path from B minor to B major, whereupon Chopin abruptly detours to the distant key of E-flat major for the short, lighthearted Scherzo. A portentous peal of thundering octaves heralds the beginning of the Largo. In its wake arises a limpid cantabile tune in B major that will come back in ornamented form to round the movement off; its gently rocking motion contrasts with the insistent patter of the cascading eighth-notes in the movement’s midsection. Chopin returns home to B minor in the Finale, embedding more beguiling melodies in its bravura passagework.
—Harry Haskell
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