Fauré’s path to immortality was far from easy. At the outset of his career, the French musical establishment held him at arm’s length. Ambroise Thomas, the powerful director of the Paris Conservatoire, regarded him as a dangerous revolutionary, and even Liszt, ordinarily the most open-minded of judges, rejected his Ballade for piano and orchestra as excessively difficult. Not until he was 51 years old did the Conservatoire belatedly bring him on board as professor of composition and, nine years later, director.
In popular works like his Pavane and Requiem, Fauré forged a uniquely personal voice, free of both the stultifying traditionalism and the self-aggrandizing pomposity of the French academic style. Although the Pavane is best known in Fauré’s version for orchestra, it has been arranged for a wide range of ensembles. The composer’s transcription for solo piano dates from 1889 and, like his many nocturnes, impromptus, and barcarolles, illustrates his esteem for Chopin.
The delicately nuanced lyricism of the Pavane reflects its historical origins as a Renaissance courtly dance. Fauré eschews virtuosic display—as can be heard on his own entrancingly understated recording for player piano—and focuses instead on the dance’s measured elegance as a processional. The wistful, continuously looping melody of Op. 50 affirms Fauré’s status as a master of French song; in fact, he added an optional off-stage chorus to the orchestral Pavane.
Schumann embodied the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms and lyrical utterances, his reliance on literary and other extramusical sources of inspiration, and the supreme value he placed on emotional freedom and spontaneity. Although he wrote four symphonies, several concertos, and even a single opera, his impulsive genius found its most characteristic expression in art songs and piano music, including a small body of chamber pieces for keyboard and strings. Schumann was an inveterate improviser at the keyboard, as one might suppose from the rhapsodic fluidity that characterizes his piano writing. In fact, only a chronic hand injury prevented him from realizing his youthful ambition to be a concert pianist. Instead, he dedicated himself to creating a new kind of music for the piano, compounded of heroic virtuosity and poetic intimacy.
In the seven years before his marriage to the pianist Clara Wieck in 1840, Schumann wrote some of his greatest piano works, including Kreisleriana, Carnaval, the First and Second piano sonatas, and the C-Major Fantasy. Schumann was infatuated with Clara, a budding pianist and composer who was his junior by 10 years; her father’s implacable opposition to the match only made their hearts grow fonder. The eight fantasy-like pieces that constitute Kreisleriana were inspired by a fictional musician created by the great Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. Like the emotionally unstable Schumann, Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler “was drawn constantly to and fro by his inner visions and dreams as if floating on an eternally undulating sea, searching in vain for the haven which would grant him the peace and serenity needed for his work.” Apart from its literary associations, Schumann’s work was a love letter in disguise. “Play my Kreisleriana sometimes!” he counseled Clara. “There’s a very wild love in a few movements, and your life and mine and many of your looks.”
Of the two fictitious alter egos that Schumann invented for himself, the impulsive Florestan takes center stage in the first piece, marked “extremely animated,” with its fierce, almost violent torrent of racing triplets in looping patterns, while the more reflective Eusebius comes to the fore in the lyrical, placidly undulating theme of the second piece (to be played “very inwardly and not too quickly”). The contrast in character is accentuated by Schumann’s key scheme, which alternates more or less regularly between minor and major keys. But Kreisleriana is permeated with ambiguity, rhythmic as well as tonal, that highlights the music’s phantasmagorical atmosphere. Particularly in the first and last pieces, the underlying pulse is upset or obscured by changing metrical patterns and displacements of the downbeat. In the closing bars, the music’s driving, frenetic energy dissipates and the work ends with a subterranean whisper.
Few composers are as closely identified with a single instrument as Chopin is with the piano. Just as his virtuosity defined a new school of Romantic pianism, so too did his waltzes, ballades, nocturnes, and other solo piano works give new meaning to the term “salon music,” the lightweight fare popular in Parisian drawing rooms of the 1830s and 1840s. Although Chopin was firmly grounded in tradition—Bach and Mozart were his favorite composers—his radically unconventional conception of the piano, and his unique blend of Classical discipline and Romantic freedom, made him one of the authentically revolutionary figures in music history. His fellow virtuoso Franz Liszt characterized him as “one of those original beings” who are “adrift from all bondage.” 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.
Chopin enriched the piano repertoire with dozens of nocturnes, waltzes, and other solo pieces that imbued the superficial brilliance of the salon style with unprecedented poetic depth. He had a special affinity for the mazurka, a triple-meter folk dance from his native Poland that was enthusiastically adopted by the haute monde of Paris, where he settled in 1831. The 60-odd mazurkas that he composed between the mid-1820s and the last year of his life are marked by a distinctive blend of folk-like simplicity and urbane sophistication. Although the expatriate Chopin had little first-hand experience of authentic Polish folk idioms, he knew enough about the mazurka to reproduce the characteristic two-part texture of a lyrical descant voice floating above a droning bass (often played by a bagpipe).
Chopin’s mazurkas typically share a basic ABA song form, with the two outer sections framing an interlude in a contrasting key. In this characteristic early specimen, simple oom-pah-pah accompaniments are set against florid, metrically playful figurations in the right hand.
The four Op. 17 Mazurkas of 1833 are steeped in the operatic style of Chopin’s friend Vincenzo Bellini. Both composers frequented musical soirees at the Paris home of a singer named Lina Freppa, to whom Op. 17 is dedicated.
Structured like a classic da capo aria, Op. 17, No. 2 achieves much of its pathos through the juxtaposition of E minor and G major. Listen for the slithering chromatic lines in the inner voices that bridge the return to the A section.
In Op. 17, No. 4, the contrast between A minor and A major is heightened by the distinction between the crisply dotted rhythms, chromatic harmonies, and rippling fioriture of the framing sections and the calm, steady pulse and restrained lyricism of the central panel, anchored by an insistently repeated A pedal note.
The four Op. 24 Mazurkas date from 1833, when the 23-year-old Chopin was establishing himself in Paris as a teacher, composer, and pianist. The C-Major Mazurka is notable for its harmonic and melodic simplicity, but the excursion in the middle to the remote key of D-flat major injects a note of tonal adventure.
In contrast to Op. 24, No. 2, the Mazurka in B-flat Minor is characterized by pervasive chromaticism, with lines often moving stepwise in contrary motion, as at the beginning. At the same time, syncopations subtly subvert the authority of the underlying triplet pulse.
The swashbuckling energy generated by this miniature tonal drama is accentuated by sharp dynamic contrasts and athletic leaps, as well as by Chopin’s trick of ratcheting up the tension by means of rhythmic and melodic repetition.
Compared to several of the other mazurkas on tonight’s program, Op. 30, No. 4 is considerably freer and more expansive, both formally and harmonically. Grace notes, trills, mordents, and melodic flourishes give the music a distinctly bravura character.
The gently swaying theme of this short, 135-bar mazurka sets it apart from Chopin’s weightier and more impetuous works in the genre. The repetition of short melodic phrases enhances the music’s hypnotic, lullaby-like charm.
The Mazurka in B Minor largely conforms to the dance’s characteristic two-part texture. However, Chopin departs from the mazurka’s conventional ABA form by stitching together three themes in different keys.
The main theme of this mazurka—a smooth, seesawing melody that repeats at various tonal and dynamic levels—gives way to strutting dotted rhythms in the central section. A quiet coda, built on the theme’s second phrase, trails away into airy nothingness.
The bittersweet, modally inflected melodies of the Op. 59 Mazurkas, composed in 1845, epitomize Chopin’s close identification with the genre. The third and last piece in Chopin’s Op. 59 set is based on the oberek, a fast Polish folk dance closely related to the mazurka. Grove’s Dictionary describes it as “a whirling, circular dance for couples with stamping and kneeling figures.”
Composed in 1841, on a visit to his lover George Sand’s house in Nohant, Chopin’s Op. 44 combines the heroic brilliance of the polonaise—a popular genre to which he returned repeatedly throughout his career—with the lilting gait of the mazurka. Chopin often experimented with such hybrid forms, mixing genres in ways that challenged listeners’ expectations and broadened his music’s expressive range. Like his later Polonaise-fantaisie, the Polonaise in F-sharp Minor is unfettered by the constraints of the traditional dance; in fact, Chopin described it to his publisher as “a kind of fantasy in polonaise form.” Sand left a pen portrait of the composer “fuming at his piano” in the throes of inspiration. “When his mount fails to respond to his intentions, he deals it great blows with his fist, such that the poor piano simply groans.”
After a short introductory flourish that highlights the bravura character of the piece, the characteristic clipped rhythm of the triple-time Polish dance heralds the beginning of the polonaise proper. To the jauntily strutting main theme in F-sharp minor Chopin soon adds two contrasting counterthemes: a lyrical ascending melody in B-flat minor and a barrage of snappy, drumroll-like figures. As the latter’s martial strains recede into the distance, Chopin’s fantasy takes an unexpected turn—into the pacific clime of an A-major mazurka. In due course, a pair of scintillating chromatic runs paves the way for the reemergence of the polonaise.
—Harry Haskell