Bartók’s early works are steeped in a lush late-Romantic idiom; as composer and pianist alike, he followed consciously in the footsteps of Beethoven and Liszt. In the first decade of the 20th century, however, his exposure to the harmonic innovations of Strauss and Debussy, coupled with his pioneering research into the folk music of his native Hungary and other Slavic lands, resulted in a bold new synthesis. Freed from what he called “the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys,” Bartók forged a leaner, more muscular, and more densely dissonant musical language. Spiced with folkish modality and bitonal clashes that verged on atonality—and characterized by shifting, irregular rhythmic patterns—this new style would define his music for the rest of his life.
Bartók’s distinctive sound world owed much to the piano’s percussive brilliance. Andor Földes remembered him as an inspirational teacher whose playing was informed by an “almost uncanny sense of rhythm,” coupled with an acute sense of tone color and dynamic gradations. Bartók’s lifelong interest in music education bore fruit in Mikrokosmos, a collection of 153 short technical studies of progressive difficulty for solo piano that are still widely used today. (The Greek title, he explained, can mean either “a small world,” as represented by “pieces in many different styles,” or “world of the little ones, the children.”) The composer often played extracts from Mikrokosmos on his recitals.
In Bartók’s words, each of the eight pieces focuses on a different “musical or technical” problem. “Fourths” is an exercise in quartal harmony, based on the interval of a fourth, sounding at once archaic and ultramodern. The smoothly undulating patterns of “Boating” are transformed, in “From the Diary of a Fly,” into nervous buzzings and flittings as the pianist’s two closely placed hands dance around each other. (Bartók helpfully indicates which should be on top and which underneath.) Equally sharply characterized are the clownish antics of “Merry Andrew”; the shifting, “off-beat” accents of “Syncopation”; the short, crisply detached notes of “Staccato”; and the lugubrious dissonances and lingering resonances of “Minor Seconds, Major Sevenths.” The final “Ostinato” whizzes by in a blur of shifting rhythmic and melodic patterns.
Few musicians of our time have bridged the divide between rationality of form and spontaneity of feeling with greater aplomb than Pierre Boulez. Despite the late French composer’s reputation as a modernist firebrand who promoted a highly cerebral strain of serialism, emotion plays at least as large a role in his music as logic. For Boulez, rational, clear-headed planning never precluded the possibility of surprise. “I need, or work, with a lot of accidents, but within a structure that has an overall trajectory—and that, for me, is the definition of what is organic,” he said.
Composed in 1945, while Boulez was studying at the Paris Conservatoire, Douze notations reflects the competing claims of his teachers Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. The latter, a champion of Arnold Schoenberg’s still-controversial 12-tone technique, introduced Boulez to the serial procedures that would form the backbone of his later work. But the young composer, by his own account, “soon rebelled against the hero worship” that characterized his mentor’s classroom sessions. Douze notations was motivated in part by a desire to “make fun of Leibowitz’s dogmatism.” The number 12 informs the work at various levels: Each of the 12 highly compressed miniatures is 12 bars long, and each employs a different version of the work’s underlying 12-note tone row.
By his own admission, Boulez opted for an aphoristic, Webernesque format because “I couldn’t master long works, for the technique was still new to me.” He saw his “benevolent critique” of Schoenbergian method as a necessary step toward formulating his own, conspicuously undogmatic musical language. In its combination of formal rigor and expressive spontaneity, spiky eruptions and soft, seductive surfaces, Douze notations anticipates the alluring complexity of Boulez’s mature works. Messiaen’s spirit is apparent in the music’s multifarious timbres, metrical freedom, and precisely measured note durations, to say nothing of expressive markings like fantasque (capricious), hiératique (solemn), and puissant et âpre (powerful and harsh).
Ravel, 13 years younger than Debussy, made his mark in Paris at the turn of the 20th century with his masterful String Quartet and a group of brilliantly crafted piano pieces, including the Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess), Jeux d’eau (Waterworks), and Miroirs (Mirrors). Over the ensuing decades, he refined his art, ruthlessly pruning away superfluous notes and gestures in search of the “definitive clarity” that was his professed ideal. Ravel’s repeated failure to win the Prix de Rome, a rite of passage for French composers seeking establishment approval, only stiffened his resolve to forge his own path. Not until 1920 was he awarded the prestigious Légion d’Honneur, an honor that he rebuffed with undisguised satisfaction.
Composed in the summer of 1908, while Ravel was at work on his light-hearted “Spanish” opera L’heure espagnole, Gaspard de la nuit (Gaspard of the Night) takes its title from a cycle of poems by Aloysius Bertrand. Indeed, Ravel identified his triptych as “three poems for piano” and reproduced Bertrand’s fantastical, image-laden prose lyrics in the score. “My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words,” he explained. In the last piece, he deliberately sought to surpass such benchmarks of virtuosity as Balakirev’s Islamey and Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes; he described the fiendishly difficult “Scarbo” as “an orchestral transcription for the piano.”
“Ondine,” with its shimmering tremolos and gossamer, billowing passagework, is suffused with the watery imagery associated with the carefree nymph whose unrequited love for a mortal has inspired many composers and writers since the 19th century. By contrast, “Le gibet” (“The Gallows”) is lugubrious and death-ridden, its slow, labored rhythms—possibly suggesting the swaying of a hung corpse—punctuated by relentlessly throbbing B-flats. The third piece evokes the nocturnal antics of the impish Scarbo in music whose frenzied momentum, nightmarishly dissonant outbursts, and kaleidoscopic sonorities make exceptional demands on the performer.
Written a year after Douze notations, the first of Boulez’s three piano sonatas boldly proclaims the precocious 21-year-old’s compositional credo. For Pierre-Laurent Aimard, “what is extraordinary is how he can find a language that is so radical, so pure, so himself” at such a young age. A few years later, Boulez would famously pronounce Schoenberg dead, but in 1946 he was still under the spell of the Viennese master’s early atonal piano pieces. Both composers aimed for what Schoenberg called “unshackled flexibility of form uninhibited by ‘logic.’”
Although the underlying organizational principle of the Sonata No. 1 is the Schoenbergian 12-tone row, both the organic unity and the expressive potency of Boulez’s music ultimately rest on the elemental contrasts between loud and soft dynamics, linear and chordal textures, regular and irregular rhythms, crisp staccato and smooth legato articulations, and so on. The two movements range freely from playfulness to portentous, even savage gravity.
Pulsing with compressed energy, the notes dance across the printed page as nimbly as under the player’s fingers. The dreamy, rhapsodic atmosphere of the first movement, with its abrupt dynamic shifts, violent outbursts, and meticulously calibrated silences, counterbalances the explosive, toccata-like energy of the second.
Best known as the originator of 12-tone composition in the 1920s, Schoenberg stood at the vanguard of the early–20th-century movement to loosen and ultimately dissolve the bonds of traditional tonality and musical structure. “I feel air from another planet,” the soprano sings in the last movement of his Second String Quartet of 1907–1908. To many contemporary critics and concertgoers, the “atonal” music of Schoenberg and his pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg was both alien and alienating: Performances of their works routinely provoked vitriolic attacks in the musical press and riotous protests in concert halls. Yet the so-called Second Viennese School endured and became a seminal force in musical modernism.
Dating from the early 1920s, the Five Piano Pieces are among the first fruits of Schoenberg’s revolutionary “method of composing with 12 tones which are related only to one another.” Although only the concluding “Walzer” features a tone row that includes all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, thus fulfilling the textbook requirements for strict dodecaphony, all five pieces employ various serial procedures in their manipulation of the basic series. The third piece had special meaning for Boulez, who noted that the “series of five sounds takes on an ultra-thematic character and, in fact, engenders all the figures of the work, harmonic as well as melodic, with its various inversions and transpositions.”
The leisurely tempo, generally subdued dynamic, and elegiac delicacy of the opening piece reflect its genesis as a musical tombeau to Debussy. (Schoenberg eventually withdrew from the memorial project, which involved an international who’s who of contemporary composers.) Perhaps unready to jettison the expressive gestures of his early atonal works, he was clearly looking before he leapt into the uncharted world of his own creation. The four remaining pieces grow increasingly unfettered and fantastical, culminating in a strangely attenuated waltz characterized by shuddering tremolos and trills.
In the 1950s, Boulez began extending the serial principle to embrace not only musical pitch but rhythm, timbre, and attack as well. Yet his commitment to composer-centered “total serialization” was tempered by an interest in the indeterminacy associated with composers like John Cage. Declaring that “the search for a relative universe” meant that “the notion of form must be reconsidered from top to bottom,” Boulez experimented with works that jettisoned traditional linear trajectories in favor of labyrinthine structures that demanded active participation on the part of performers. The Sonata No. 3 was conceived as a set of five formants, or movements, whose sequence and internal structure were to be determined by the pianist. In the event, only the second and third movements were finished by the time Boulez effectively abandoned the sonata in 1963.
In a journal article titled “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” (“Sonata, What Do You Want of Me?”), Boulez acknowledged his debt to the open-ended literary forms of Joyce and Mallarmé. The second-movement “Trope,” he explained, was “conceived as a circle” in which “each autonomous development may serve as beginning or end; a general curve is described each time by the registers, the density of the writing, and the preponderant dynamics.” The form of “Constellation-Miroir,” by contrast, is “reversible,” with the original printed on one side of the page, facing its mirror image (or “retrograde,” in Schoenbergian terminology). Boulez likened his score to “the map of an unknown city”: “The itinerary is left to the interpreter’s initiative; he must direct himself through a tight network of routes.”
—Harry Haskell
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