Born in 1810, 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 a composer and pianist. 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. One contemporary 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 mazurka, a triple-meter folk dance from his native Poland that was enthusiastically adopted by the haute monde of Paris. The 60-odd mazurkas that he wrote between the mid-1820s and the last year of his life are marked by a unique blend of folk-like simplicity and sophistication. Although Chopin had little firsthand experience with 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). The bittersweet and modally inflected melodies of the Op. 59 set epitomize Chopin’s close identification with the genre.
Chopin’s mazurkas typically share a basic A-B-A song form, the outer sections framing a middle section in a contrasting key. Simple “oom-pah-pah” accompaniments are set against florid, metrically playful figurations in the right hand. Of the three Op. 59 mazurkas, only No. 3 in F-sharp Minor conforms to that model. The other two are somewhat freer—not to say more sophisticated—both structurally and harmonically. The languidly looping theme of the A-Minor Mazurka, for instance, ventures first into conventional A major and then into the remote territory of G-sharp minor before circling back to roost in the home key. The second mazurka is content to remain in A-flat major throughout, its regular succession of four-bar phrases conveying a sense of stability amid the protean transformations of the melody.
Of Venice’s many cultural associations, none is more evocative than the barcarolle, a song traditionally sung by Venetian gondoliers as they steered their long, flat-bottomed boats through the city’s byzantine network of canals and lagoons. (The word barcarolle comes from barca, the Italian word for “boat.”) Chopin’s piece belongs to a long line of concert-hall barcarolles by composers as diverse as Schubert, Offenbach, Bartók, and Bernstein. True to type, the Op. 60 Barcarolle is distinguished by its lilting 12/8 rhythm that mimics the repetitive motion of the boatmen’s oars. Chopin ingeniously varies the basic pattern so that it never becomes predictable or monotonous. Above the rocking bass line, he gives free rein to his melodic and harmonic invention, embellishing the texture with double trills and other virtuosic devices. Eventually, the music cuts loose from its rhythmic moorings and floats free in a fantasy of rippling passagework.
The Prelude in C-sharp Minor was Chopin’s contribution to the “Beethoven Album” of 1841, the proceeds from which helped defray the cost of a new Beethoven monument to be erected in Bonn. His rich palette of harmonies bathes the theme in ever-changing colors. Toward the end, in an extraordinary cadenza-like passage built entirely of stair-stepped chords, the music seems to dissolve in a kind of tonal mist.
Chopin wrote his four scherzos in the late 1830s and early 1840s, a period when he was also striving to extend the scope of his art in a series of ambitious ballades and polonaises. They epitomize both Chopin’s innovative approach to the keyboard and the extraordinary range and subtlety of his musical language. The scherzos have many elements in common, including their triple meter and rounded forms featuring two or three main themes. To construct these large-scale edifices, Chopin used the basic tools of repetition and contrast, supplemented by his phenomenal command of harmony, texture, and figuration. The Scherzo in C-sharp Minor opens ambiguously, with chromatic harmonies and four notes shoehorned into the space of three; a barrage of hurtling octaves belatedly establishes the 3/4 time signature.
Chopin often mixed genres in ways that challenged listeners’ expectations and broadened his music’s expressive range. In combining the jaunty brilliance of the polonaise with the nocturne-like Andante spianato, he validated the encomium that Robert Schumann bestowed on him as “the boldest and proudest poetic spirit of the time.” The bravura Andante spianato and Grande polonaise brillante dates from the first flush of Chopin’s international celebrity. The Italian word spianato, “smooth,” aptly describes the slow introduction, with its tender cantilena melody and undulating left-hand arpeggios. The title of the main section describes the work in a nutshell: “Polonaise” alludes to another national dance of Chopin’s homeland, while “brillante” reflects the cosmopolitan influence of the glittering salon style that he cultivated in exile.
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 the final decade of Liszt’s life, the poetic ardor and grand romantic gestures of his early works gave way to an introspective and often grimly fatalistic tone. None of his music from this period is more forward-looking harmonically than the brief Bagatelle ohne Tonart (“Bagatelle without Tonality”), the last piano piece he wrote before his death in 1886. Originally titled “Fourth Mephisto Waltz,” it may have been conceived as part of Liszt’s cycle based on Nikolaus Lenau’s poetic retelling of the Faust legend. That the Bagatelle remained unpublished until 1955 suggests that the composer may have regarded it as unfinished.
Unlike the dark, brooding, death-haunted works that the aging Liszt called his “mortuary pieces,” the Bagatelle ohne Tonart is light and playful in tone—a bagatelle in spirit as well as name. Nevertheless, its skittish waltz rhythm, obsessive repetitions, and woozy chromatic noodlings conjure an atmosphere at once manic and disturbingly unhinged, recalling the diabolical intensity of his earlier Mephisto Waltzes. The piece culminates in a flurry of rising diminished-seventh chords, leaving both the listener and tonality itself suspended in a nebulous harmonic haze.
Like the Bagatelle ohne Tonart, Unstern! Sinistre, disastro (“Unlucky Star! Sinister, Disaster”) exemplifies the radically experimental tonal language of Liszt’s late period. Dating from 1881, around the time the 70-year-old composer was seriously injured in a household accident, the music reflects a deepening awareness—if not yet a positive acceptance—of his own mortality. Over the years, Liszt, who took holy orders in 1865, had become fixated on the inevitability of death as a welcome release—a “deliverance,” as he put it, “from the involuntary yoke of original sin.” Yet the morbidity he expresses in Unstern! is unrelievedly dark. As he wrote on the manuscript of another of his “mortuary pieces”: “May one write or listen to such a thing?”
A sense of foreboding is palpable from the opening measures, with their hollow-sounding octaves trudging lugubriously like a dirge. Each of the four successive phrases comes to rest on a tritone, the harmonically disorienting diabolus in musica (“devil in music”), whose ill-starred resonances permeate Unstern! The portentous atmosphere is reinforced by pounding octaves and murky tremolos, coupled with a restless chromaticism that foreshadows what Schoenberg would later call the “emancipation of the dissonance.” In this bleak and haunting meditation, Liszt seems to peer into a musical and emotional abyss.
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