Akio Yashiro was widely decorated as a composer in his own time, garnering scholarships for a lengthy period of study in Paris and an eventual professorship in Tokyo. One of his earliest works, the Twenty-Four Preludes showcase the young composer’s wide-ranging knowledge of repertoire and a healthy dose of humor. Following in the footsteps of Scriabin’s preludes, the cycle’s nominal keys walk around the circle of fifths, with every second prelude in the relative minor. The third prelude mashes up multiple composers, not least Scriabin, while the ninth comes across like a modern tongue-in-cheek send-up of Liszt’s piano works. For his 17th prelude, Yashiro appends an unusual performance marking, pesante (“heavy”), highlighting a forthright parody of the interwar transitional period of modernist and Neoclassical sound worlds, setting florid passagework against restrained parallel harmonies. Finally, the last prelude speaks most clearly to Yashiro’s equal interest in contemporary art music. Together these preludes offer a stunning collection of musical ideas from a keen listener at the end of the Second World War.
After growing up in a supportive family of military bureaucrats and minor nobles, Alexander Scriabin attended the Moscow Conservatory, studying under a group of professors from similar backgrounds. He eventually returned to teach at the very same institution, where he wrote the dramatic Fantasy in B Minor. Biographers and academic commentaries now tend to describe this piece as a transitional work: Scriabin completed it as he settled into composing full-time, between the births of his first two children, between the major successes of his first two symphonies, and between the harmonic vocabularies of his third and fourth piano sonatas, with the latter held up as a thorough departure in compositional technique.
On many levels, this fantasy shows Scriabin’s interest in building on prominent features of Liszt’s solo piano works. Despite the title, Scriabin presents a single-movement sonata form with what initially sounds like a relatively conventional reprise for the original pair of infernal and lyrical themes before escaping into a lengthy coda that synthesizes both thematic groups. The score’s rhythmic precision and complexity of Scriabin’s physical demands on the performer also indicate an eye toward visual showmanship in performance: Multiple passages call for acrobatic gestures, with the pianist’s hands rapidly replacing and interlacing one another, often in the middle of covering long spans across the instrument’s range. Many of these impressive feats serve largely to add theatrical ornamentations around otherwise straightforward transformations of the core thematic subjects. It is this underlying formal control that sets Scriabin apart, indicating a distinct approach to fantastic spectacle.
As Franz Liszt transitioned from his life as a traveling performer to an appointment as composer-in-residence in Weimar, he revised some earlier compositions for publication. The collected volumes Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) leaned on his reputation as a well-traveled virtuoso, functioning as a form of travel writing, or a suggestion to customers who might not have a chance to be tourists themselves that they could purchase a musical grand tour for their home. Liszt previously wowed crowds by performing elaborate solo piano transcriptions of popular songs; in this second volume, he responds instead to famous Italian cultural icons, cutting across multiple forms of art, whether a painting by Raphael or a sculpture by Michaelangelo. His publishers also lavished the score with accompanying prints of the subjects. The collection of subjects dovetailed with Liszt’s persistent interest in positioning music as the premier art form for intuitive expression. The provocative titles invite listeners to examine tensions between understanding these pieces as musical translations, or a musician’s response to canonical touchstones of other art forms.
The fifth entry in the set, “Sonetto del Petrarca No. 104” revised an earlier publication of the same work, itself derived from Liszt’s prior vocal settings of the same sonnet. Even for listeners unaware of these reworkings, Liszt’s treatment of the primary lyric theme recalls song transcriptions, alternated with keyboard theatrics, as he gradually blends the two approaches. Petrarch’s sonnet “Pace non trovo, et non ò da fa guerra” (“I find no peace, yet make no war”) also deploys a series of contradictions to describe a lover’s longing, a ready template for the musical structure. The virtuosic asides, on the other hand, land more like improvised responses to his encounter with Petrarch’s poem.
If we understand the title of the seventh entry at face value, these interpretive tensions strain even further. “Après une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi sonata” (“After a Reading of Dante, fantasy but almost a sonata”) looks to Victor Hugo’s poem of the same name from 1836, itself an idiosyncratic gloss of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The choice to present a response to a poem, itself a response to a live performance of an established classic, adds layers of interpretive filtration between Liszt and Dante, affording him a shield against critics bristling at the idea of condensing epic narrative poems into the scope of brief instrumental music. At the same time, this framing provides the sense of a more immediate experience, of something Liszt recorded in his own personal travelogue. His demanding score reads more like an impressionistic response to selected passages, especially the descent into Inferno. His additional conceit for the piece’s genre, as a fantasia quasi sonata, prepares rhetorical space to inject a lengthy middle section that resounds with Hugo’s descriptions of doomed lovers and the “misty way” toward paradise.
While today the most popular stories about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart portray him either as a child prodigy or a fully formed composer, he produced a great number of pieces in his 20s aimed squarely at building his career. Mozart probably wrote his Variations on “Ah vous dirai-je, maman,” K. 265, to satisfy the market for sheet music that advancing amateur musicians could reasonably master. Sets of variations like these also furnished didactic materials for teaching his own private students, another large source of income between large-scale commissions or performances. In many ways this work checks a series of boxes for commercial success. Although more recent poems set to the original tune include “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” in Mozart’s milieu “Ah vous dirai-je” was popular music, featuring bawdy though conventional lyrics. He then styled the work in a pared-back, “galant” manner in vogue among moneyed audiences.
His Variations (12 in total) also steadily increase in difficulty, rewarding careful listeners, as each variation’s gimmick informs at least one other variation, thus their degree of interrelationship builds as the series advances. The first six variations arrive in twinned pairs, with the fourth variation already cribbing a hand from the second variation. Some surprise chromaticism in the fifth variation later reappears within the slower eighth variation in the parallel minor, while the seventh and 10th are also close twins, contrasting their mildly contrapuntal and imitative neighbors. In the closing pair, Mozart shows his work, as he summarizes and recasts many of the previous elaborations as constituent parts of freer interpretations, now more closely resembling the familiar part-writing in his wholly original keyboard music.
Few composers attract so much biographical attention as Ludwig van Beethoven. The impulse to scrutinize every possible detail of his life stems from more than the quality of his works, or their enduring popularity, or even the fascination with his progressive deafness. Culture journalism exploded in popularity near the end of Beethoven’s life, with interpretive criticism expanding into an entire second industry that surrounded the business of performing and publishing new music. As Beethoven gradually retreated from public performances, critics and publishers capitalized on emerging trends in literary analysis, issuing psychological interpretations of Beethoven’s intentions as an enhanced form of marketing. Early biographers also leveraged their own artistic perspective as unique selling points, matching their narrative of Beethoven’s life with his musical output in order to drive sales. That tendency only accelerated after his death, at least in part so publishers could drum up interest in his less approachable musical inventions.
The same year as the original publication of his Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, Beethoven published his Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor without assigning it the prominence of an opus number, a significant choice in the rapidly shifting publishing environment. Despite the slighter proportions of the work, Beethoven wrings plenty of material from his unusual theme, which itself seems to resemble a variation on a simpler one. He proceeds to pick apart each of these “extraneous” flourishes and details to provide fodder for individual variations, oftentimes as their guiding principles, with all but the final extended variation hewing strictly to the original theme’s skeleton.
Market forces likely led to the postmortem application of the name “Appassionata” to a four-hands arrangement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor. This appended title transforms an excavated, penciled-in marking of “La Passionata” from Beethoven’s manuscript that did not appear in early editions, dangling the idea he intended an extraordinarily emotional work. By then the musical press had long since imbued his piano sonatas with a collective reputation as unusually expressive windows into an artist’s soul. Such an arrangement would have made this work significantly more accessible, as the outer movements feature some of Beethoven’s more difficult writing, both in carefully measured sonata forms. The middle movement is a series of theme and repeated variations, its fourth and final variation replacing its repetition with a rapid segue into the third movement.
—Oren Vinogradov