Probably written as exercises for his eldest son, J. S. Bach’s six organ sonatas reflect the three-voice texture of the Baroque trio sonata. According to the composer’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, “By practicing them, [Wilhelm Friedemann Bach] prepared himself to be the great organist he later became. It is impossible to say enough about their beauty. They were written when the composer was in his full maturity and can be considered his principal work of this kind.” In the slow middle movement of the G-Major Sonata, two freely florid melodic lines intertwine in canonic imitation above steadily walking eighth notes in the pedal part.
Robert Schumann embodied the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms, his reliance on 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. Schumann was an inveterate improviser at the keyboard, as one might deduce 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 pianist Clara Wieck in 1840, Schumann wrote some of his most beloved piano works, including Carnaval, Kreisleriana, Kinderszenen, the C-Major Fantasie, and the Symphonic Etudes. Although Clara was the muse behind most of these masterpieces, the composer was secretly engaged to another woman, Ernestine von Fricken, when he began writing the Symphonic Etudes in 1834. The work was inspired by a theme composed by his fiancée’s father, an aristocratic amateur, leading to speculation that Schumann was trying to ingratiate himself with his fiancée’s family. By the time the Symphonic Etudes were published in 1837, however, he and Ernestine had broken off their engagement, and it was Clara who gave the first public performance of three of the 12 “etudes in the orchestral character” in Leipzig that August. The work first appeared in 1837 under the title 12 Etudes symphoniques; 15 years later, Schumann issued a revised and abridged edition, omitting numbers 3 and 9 and calling the pieces etudes “in the form of variations.” The five “posthumous” etudes/variations, which Schumann set aside early in the prolonged compositional process, were belatedly published in 1873.
Like much of Schumann’s music, the Symphonic Etudes reflect the contrasting characters of his fictitious alter egos: the stormy, impulsive Florestan and the dreamy, reflective Eusebius. The latter’s spirit prevails in the first movement: Schumann said he tried to transform the wistful C-sharp–minor theme from a funeral march into a triumphal march, but in the end he couldn’t “escape the minor mode.” In the first etude, a crisp, martial-sounding melody wells up from the depths of the keyboard and flowers in a profusion of imitative entries. The intensity of the second etude, with its passionately throbbing triplets, gives way to quicksilver brilliance in the arpeggiated staccato figures of the third. Thereafter Schumann keeps the two sides of his artistic persona in balance, alternating displays of strenuous virtuosity with gauzy textures and dreamlike moods. In the last of the five variations (which modern pianists interpolate variously with the dozen etudes), cascading 16th notes in metrically ambiguous patterns create a sense of suspended time. Florestan has the last word in the massive orchestral sonorities of the finale, which returns “home” to D-flat major, the enharmonic equivalent of C-sharp.
Brahms displayed a lifelong interest in the character piece, a popular Romantic genre closely associated with his revered Robert Schumann. The Romance in F Major, with its nobly striding melody and freely rhapsodic midsection, suggests that the 60-year-old composer was not merely turning away from the long-form works that had occupied him in the past, but embracing a genre that enabled him to distill his mastery of mood, craft, and keyboard technique to its essence.
This bold and energetic Scherzo was among the “single pianoforte pieces, partly demonic, of the most graceful form” that 20-year-old Brahms played for Robert and Clara Schumann when he first met them in Düsseldorf in 1853. By turns elfin and demonic, the Scherzo is structured like a rondo, with three stormy sections in E-flat minor alternating with a pair of sunnier interludes in major keys. Capturing Brahms’s characteristic blend of muscularity and tenderness, Robert Schumann 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.”
Rachmaninoff’s prowess as a pianist has tended to eclipse his considerable compositional accomplishments. Yet as a 15-year-old wunderkind at the Moscow Conservatory, he was singled out for greatness by no less a judge than Tchaikovsky. Shortly after graduating in 1892, he composed the Prelude in C-sharp Minor for solo piano that would become his calling card on recitals. This precocious success was followed by a period of debilitating lethargy and depression, during which Rachmaninoff found it almost impossible to compose. It was not until 1900, after he consulted a physician specializing in hypnosis, that his creative juices began to flow freely again.
In the euphoric aftermath of his recovery, Rachmaninoff produced a string of confidently outgoing works, including the Second Piano Concerto and the Ten Preludes, Op. 23. The virtuosic character of the latter, all but one of which were composed in 1903, harks back to the young tyro who had dazzled audiences with his first Prelude 10 years before. Rachmaninoff considered the Op. 23 set far superior to his earlier effort, but ruefully admitted that “the public has shown no disposition to share my belief.” He dedicated the preludes to Alexander Siloti—his piano teacher, patron, and first cousin—with whom he concertized frequently in the first decade of the century. In the wake of his first American tour in 1909, Rachmaninoff replenished his recital repertoire with another baker’s dozen of preludes, published in 1910 as Op. 32.
Rachmaninoff’s lyrical impulse is front and center in the D-Major Prelude, with its long-breathed, gently arching melody and unstable two-against-three rhythms. It contrasts sharply with the ceaselessly eddying torrents of the C-Minor Prelude and the rippling chains of 16th-note dyads in Op. 23, No. 9. The warm G-flat–major tonality of the 10th Prelude and its mood of Schumannesque reverie conspire to make it one of the composer’s most beguiling creations.
The Op. 32 Preludes brought the textural richness that characterized his earlier essays to a new level of complexity. The bravura Prelude in E Major is built around a repeated-note motif, while the bell-like melody of the G-Major Prelude is embedded in a dense skein of arpeggios, whose shimmering luminosity briefly dims in the minor-key midsection. No. 6 is distinguished by its appassionato character and concentrated intensity. Zlata Chochieva’s final selection—the brilliant Prelude in A Minor—features an insistent motif of a descending third.
After emigrating from Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Rachmaninoff concentrated on his lucrative career as a concert pianist, dividing his time between Europe and the United States. The Variations on a Theme of Corelli, which he wrote in Switzerland in the summer of 1931 and performed at Carnegie Hall on November 7, is dedicated to Fritz Kreisler and may have been inspired by the violinist’s own set of variations on another Corelli theme. In a letter to composer Nicolas Medtner, Rachmaninoff confessed that he had never actually given a complete performance of the work. “I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing would increase, I would skip the next variation. Whenever there was no coughing, I would play them in proper order. In one concert, I don’t remember where—some small town—the coughing was so violent that I played only 10 variations (out of 20). My best record was set in New York, where I played 18.”
The theme that Rachmaninoff attributed to Corelli is actually a plaintive D-minor melody based on a standard chord progression known as the “folia,” which the Italian master used in a set of violin variations published in 1700. Like many 17th- and 18th-century composers, Rachmaninoff found that its fundamental simplicity afforded ample scope for both compositional ingenuity and virtuosic display. Once the basic eight-bar pattern is fixed in the ear, the listener is free to focus on the pianist’s dexterity. Rachmaninoff alternates sizzling passagework—notably in the rhapsodic, cadenza-like Intermezzo that separates Variations 13 and 14, leading to a reprise of the theme and a brief excursion to D-flat major—with intricate contrapuntal textures, chordal passages, and arpeggios tailored for his famously large hands.
A byword for precocity in his day, Felix Mendelssohn composed his popular concert overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1826, hard on the heels of his masterful Octet. Sixteen years later, the Prussian king commissioned his celebrated court composer to write incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s play in Potsdam. The diaphanous Scherzo served as scene-change music between acts I and II, marking the transition to the enchanted realm of Oberon, Titania, and Puck. Mendelssohn later arranged his “fairy music” for both one and two pianos. Nearly a century later, Rachmaninoff produced his own, even more virtuosic version of the intermezzo to play as an encore.
—Harry Haskell