Music for 2 Keyboards

As is often the case with Beethoven, the Andante Favori offers both the performer and the listener a wide range of characters, conflicts, and contradictions.

I spend a significant amount of time thinking about the Haydn-ness of Haydn, the Schumann-ness of Schumann, the Bruckner-ness of Bruckner, and so on. But what if this uniqueness occasionally takes a slightly different form? What if a work doesn’t have a clear stylistic imprint, but rather combines elements from various styles in order to form its own narrative?

Brahms's Eight Piano Pieces, Op. 76, published in 1879, marked a beginning and an end for Brahms: the end of a hiatus in writing for piano solo and the beginning of Brahms’s new style of writing for piano, where cycles of small miniatures supplanted the earlier monumental works, such as the three sonatas and the Handel Variations.

Some years ago, in a masterclass with the renowned American pianist and teacher Jerome Lowenthal, I played Rachmaninoff’s beautiful E-flat minor Étude-Tableaux Op. 39/5. After I finished playing, he pointed his finger at the first page and asked me: “Harmonically, what’s going on here?” Although I thought I was quite adept in harmony, I found myself scratching my head with intermittent “uh”s and “oh”s, until Mr. Lowenthal spread his hands and exclaimed “Nothing! Absolutely nothing! The poor guy just couldn’t modulate!”

In a century musically defined by works such as Pictures at an Exhibition, Zarathustra, and the New World Symphony, Brahms found an almost materialistic oasis of self-describing music. Unhindered by extramusical ideas, the Op. 76  cycle finds its own path, writes its own plot, and declares its own endings.

In the last three entries I dealt with Brahms’s Op. 76 cycle, a quintessentially anti-programmatic work, propelled solely by its own development and needing no extramusical content to accompany it. The subject of this post, Suisse, Liszt’s first volume of Années de pèlerinage, is the polar opposite of that. 

Autumn Sonata is a mother-daughter drama played out between Ingrid Bergman (a concert pianist) and Liv Ullmann (her daughter). But Bergman (Ingmar) injects a third character into this relationship: Chopin. It is Chopin who delivers the bad news of the unresolvable nature of the mother-daughter conflict. The look of awe and dismay on Liv Ullmann's face as her mother plays the A minor Prelude says it all. Listen to my take of this short Prelude and read my blog about it.

Beethoven's game. What kind of music would you write if you were a deaf composer. The answer is: physical.The shortest of the 33 D variations, a mere 30 seconds, holds the key to the monumental structure of this hour-long cycle. Music for 2 Keyboards Bemusement and unlikeliness in Beethoven’s Diabelli variations -

The art of the rest
What is the pianist to do when the rests are as meaningful (and as long) as the sounds?
This blog looks at the physicality of Beethoven's music, those qualities that reach us not through the ears but through the eyes, as we observe the performer's contortions and awkward embarrassment.

The cliché of the 3 Beethoven periods. Did Beethoven, just as he was putting the finishing touches on the last chords of the 5th symphony, say something like, "Now that I'm coming to the end of my heroic middle period, and starting my late period, I should be thinking seriously about some greater intellectual depth, more polyphony à la Handel and Bach, and somewhat longer and more involved compositions?" Unlikely. It is entirely in the nature and spirit of Beethoven to give pundits the lie and defy any attempt to categorize, rank, or classify his work.

Haydn: Expect the unexpected.
Haydn, the grandfather of irony in music, will stop at nothing to surprise, even at the cost of being unsurprising. In this miniature sonata in C major, he crams in a little over four minutes not only many of the rules of the classical forms he was in the process of inventing, but also shows how to break them.

Medtner: The poor man's Rachnaninoff (or is it the other way around?) -- Rachmaninoff and Medtner, both Russian pianist-composers living in the West, were close friends. They both agreed that Medtner was the better composer of the two. Indeed, Rachmaninoff considered Medtner the leading composer of his generation. But of course, they were both throwbacks to an earlier time, writing 19th century music in the first decades of the 20th century. Eventually, Rachmaninoff, who had a serious dose of Hollywood in his music, became by far the more popular of the two. Medtner, whose music is much richer, denser, and more complex, has developed a narrow following among experts and sophisticated amateurs.

Is music an emotional or an intellectual experience? (This is the million-dollar musical equivalent of the mind-body problem.) There is no good answer to it, or maybe there are too many good answers. One of them is in my blog about Mozart's lovely K 283 sonata.

What is this collage of almost recognizable snippets and objets trouvés -- like some Marcel Duchamp of the piano?It is Satie, of course, in this case poking fun at Chopin and Debussy. If we're looking for a musical expression that came close to Dada, Satie is the most prominent name that comes to mind -- although this piece actually predates Dada by a few years. But the spirit is unmistakable. This short piece is in fact a double parody. I'm sure you'll recognize the reference to Chopin's funeral march right away. Somewhat more subtle is the parody of his friend, and later rival, Debussy. Here is a version of the unpronounceable "Edriophthalma" (you'll just have to look it up).

There is an inexplicable disparity between the general perception of Bartók's music and what that music is in reality. His music is often played aggressively, even brutally, emphasizing his motoric and percussive qualities, whereas in Bartók's playing, the music strikes the listener as intelligent, refined, and elegant. When Bartók made his first appearance in the US, audiences were in shock. Because of his reputation for wild modernism, they expected to see a prefiguration of Frank Zappa or Rod Stewart. Instead, they got a demure gentleman in a gray suit, looking something like a cross between a school principal and a postal clerk. He played his own music from notes, someone turning pages for him. He had none of the pose or ostentation of the piano virtuoso.Unfortunately, Bartók has not recorded the Out of Doors cycle, so we must guess whether he considered the five pieces to form an organic whole or whether he regarded them as individual works.

Beethoven in a nutshell. Beethoven's oeuvre is one of the richest in all of music. It straddles the classical and romantic idioms, and includes abundant elements of both. But it also harks back to the baroque period and foreshadows the future, reaching as far ahead as the 20th century.Can all this variety be encapsulated in a practically unknown bagatelle that doesn't even have its own opus number? Apparently yes, as I try to show in my blog.

What exactly makes kitsch what it is? One telltale sign is its excessive sentimentality. Oscar Wilde said that sentimentality is wanting to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. Think about this statement for a moment. You want the warm feeling of the isolated inviting home in the woods, by the running brook, with the smoking chimney, but without having to renounce the familiar comforts of modern high-tech living. In other words, you have no skin in the game. The feeling is an empty one. How do composers, when writing those lovely, heartbreaking tunes, avoid falling into the trap that kitsch lays for them? This blog describes how Grieg does it in his masterful Ballade.

Looks like Schubert learned a thing or two from Beethoven about stretching his arms. Can we call this Beethoven's 33rd sonata? Well... that's a loaded questions. Certainly there is a Beethoven-inspired thread here. But in parallel, there is another one that is entirely Schubert's own. This blog looks at how the two play off each other.

It's Judgment Day. Who do you have to plead for you?
I for one, would take Schubert.
Any slow movement of one of his late 4-part works would do: the ninth symphony, the G major string quartet. The sonata in A minor, D845 is a case in point. Read my blog to see how Schubert goes from Dies irae to lacrimosa to amen in the breathtaking variations of the Andante movement of this sonata.

You know that something is amiss with the scherzo if the humor is dry and the dance lame. The scherzo of Schubert's sonata in A minor seems to have been written for a clod with no sense of humor and feet of lead. So where is the tender, lyrical Schubert we have come to love? He's still there, hiding between the rough edges of the scherzo, but this is the first of the six late sonatas, and the atmosphere has changed a lot from the time of the Valses Sentimentales and the Moments. The blog describes this unlikely scherzo and the torment in the final movement of the sonata.

The beauty and glory of Viennese classicism reflected in one Beethoven sonata. Beethoven's two great predecessors, Haydn and Mozart, are often present in his works. But in Sonata No. 6, in F major, like in a Gestalt figure-ground image, both are present simultaneously; now you hear one, now the other. The blog describes the many transformations that take place in this exuberant sonata.

Schumann was the father of organic unity and the obsessive musical idea running through all movements of a piece --an early instance of what was later to be known as the leitmotiv. His first sonata, in F-sharp minor, is a perfect example. As I show in the blog, this masterpiece of gigantic proportions (both in length and in expressive scope) seeks to reconcile the structural boundaries of the four-movement sonata with the composer’s cyclical ambitions.

The insights of composer and pianist Michael Alec Rose into Beethoven's early, humorous, vivacious sonata, a hybrid of Haydn’s and Mozart’s melodic gifts.

The orderly chaos inside Schumann's head. Schumann has managed to acquire a reputation for somewhat disorganized music. Gould, for example, who was obsessed with the architecture of the musical text, never touched any of Schumann's piano repertoire. But a closer, or rather different look reveals a logic all its own and a glimpse inside Schumann's head--as it were. And even if by classic architeral standards Schumann's edifice wouldn't stand, on its own terms, the structure holds together remarkably, as I show in the blog.

Can a sonata exist under water? This is the question I try to answer in my blog about Ondine, the first of the three parts of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. There is no proper sonata among Ravel's many piano works. But Ravel comes close to sonata form in his two aquatic works, Jeux d'eau (1901) and Ondine (1908). In both works, however, the water motif ends up undermining the sonata form.