Download Friday, March 13, 2015 at 8pm NEC`s Jordan Hall Daniil Trifonov

Friday, March 13, 2015 at 8pm
NEC’s Jordan Hall
Daniil Trifonov, piano
Notes on the Program
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)/Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542, "Great"
The G-minor Fantasy and Fugue is both fascinating and disconcerting, because the two parts, though they
are in the same key, are quite different in musical approach. This has led to the assumption that they were
not conceived together, perhaps at quite different times. Another indication, aside from the harmonic
language of the two movements, is that the fugue appears as a separate piece from the fantasy in most of
the manuscripts copies from Bach’s time.
The Fantasy is a thunderous tour-de-force of dissonant and unstable harmony, as advanced as anything to
come for perhaps a century and a half. Dynamic racing scales in octaves, diminished seventh chords,
massive chordal structures deployed against one another in the left and right hands, unanticipated twists
of harmonic direction, and extensive chromaticisms—this is one of the most dynamically driven and
rhetorically explosive works of the entire era.
Following that wild outburst, the Fugue is surprisingly light in tone. Its subject matter seems to be derived
from a Dutch song—possibly this tunefulness is one reason for its popularity among Bach fugues. Its
nearly non-stop 16th notes give it a drive that is gentler, but just as consistent as that in the Fantasy that
precedes it.
Of course, Bach wrote his piece for one of the great organs he played throughout his career. (He was
highly regarded as an expert in the construction and quality of the mammoth instruments and was
regularly called to different cities to critique a new organ built for the local church and often to play a
demonstration recital on it.) But by the 19th century, relatively few organists performed this music. Many
composers—Liszt and later Busoni among them—felt strongly that they deserved frequent performances
as masterful works for the keyboard. In order to make this possible they and others prepared
transcriptions for the piano—the dominant solo recital instrument of their own time. This required, at the
very least, some way to accommodate the bass line for the pedals within the elaborate music already
written for the two hands. For Liszt a transcription like this not only served to further the performance of
music that he admired enormously, but also provided a still more virtuosic piece to be played by his own
two hands, further bestowing the awe of listeners upon his execution.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Opus 111
On January 13, 1822, less than a month after completing Opus 110, Beethoven put the finishing touches
on his last piano sonata. The fact that it has only two movements—rare, though not unprecedented in
Beethoven’s sonata output—aroused some question as to whether it was in fact complete. The publisher
Schlesinger asked him if perhaps a movement had not been left out of the package sent to him. Schindler
replied that Beethoven did not write a third movement simply because he was too busy working on the
Ninth Symphony. Perhaps this was simply Beethoven’s practical response to his assistant when the
question arose. In any case, ending a sonata with a variation movement is hardly unprecedented, as Opus
109 indicates, and this particular movement is of such an extraordinary character that it is hard to think of
anything that might sensibly follow it. What’s more, the harmonic plan (C minor for the first movement,
C major for the last) is hallowed by tradition.
The opening movement begins with a slow introduction emphasizing diminished seventh harmony; in this
respect, it shows similarities to an earlier C-minor sonata, the “Pathétique,” Opus 13. Here, however,
Beethoven plunges straight into the tensions of the dissonant harmony, contrasting that powerful
explosion with a passage of hushed chords in which the right hand moves slowly down the scale as the
left hand gradually moves up to meet it. A crescendo sets off a final phrase leading to the main body of
the movement, Allegro con brio ed appassionato. Here, too, the tensions of diminished seventh harmony
fill the movement. The principal theme sounds as if it were designed to be a fugue subject. A contrapuntal
treatment begins soon after, though not, as yet, a fugue. Beethoven intensifies the material by expanding
his use of the keyboard, reaching one of the lowest notes available to him (D-flat) and leaping up to one
of the highest (C-flat nearly five octaves above) just before the arrival of the second theme. This begins in
the expressive style of a recitative for a few bars before a figure in the bass—derived from the main
theme with a new ending—leads off a new virtuosic passage that closes the exposition. The development
concentrates on the principal theme, with its sixteenth-note running counterpoint, building to a
recapitulation beginning with the opening theme in powerful octaves. The character of the movement
remains tense until the final bars.
The theme that Beethoven created for his variations is wonderfully serene and simple, almost to the point
of defying analysis. As Tovey remarked, “Heaven help the composer or critic who thinks that such
melody is built by ‘logical development’ of figures!” The variations themselves are on the one hand
treated in the most straightforward—even old-fashioned—manner, with the melodic line progressively
broken down into faster and faster subdivisions of the basic beat, with virtually no change in the harmonic
structure. Thus, as the movement progresses, the feeling seems to be rather of a color and sonority rather
than melody and rhythm, so that by the fourth variation the material has been abstracted into an endless
hovering around C major as if it were the key of the universe itself. This leads into a coda marked by a
brief change to the minor mode (a dramatic step in this context), then a return to the major and
restatement of the original theme over a running accompaniment. It seems to float away into empyrean
realms, only to sink earthward, at the very end, to close on a simple unstressed C-major chord—perhaps
the most fundamental sound in our music.
Franz Liszt (1811-1886))
Transcendental Études, S. 139
After Beethoven, the most influential composer of the 19th century was almost surely Paganini, whose
extraordinary ability as a violinist created an entirely new level of virtuosity—one that affected
performers and composers, especially those who wrote for their own purposes. This new virtuosity
appeared among violinists, then pianists, and eventually any instrument whatever. So extraordinary were
Paganini’s performances that he was accused of commerce with the devil—how else could any mortal
accomplish such feats of digital celerity and control? His tall, gaunt, emaciated frame curled around a
violin that was played so fast that the listener almost expected it to burst into flames—some of the
reviewers actually claimed to have seen smoke! He was undeniably a showman. Yet Paganini was also
devoted to exploring every conceivable technical device for playing the violin, and much of his music
was conceived with that end in mind.
The first response of many artists—Liszt very much among them—was to recreate Paganini’s music and
its spectacular effects on their own instruments. Among the works that Paganini composed for his own
concerts were a series of violin concertos which he reserved for his private use by the simple device of
not publishing them. Early on Liszt converted Paganini’s notoriously difficult études into versions for
solo piano .
In the period when he was most active as a virtuoso, Liszt traveled widely, especially between 1835 and
1839, when he was living with his mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult, who had left her husband for
him and who bore him three children (one of them, Cosima, was to become the wife of Richard Wagner).
In 1838 alone he completed first versions of his Paganini études, the Transcendental études, and most of
the works later to be included in his Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), published in three
volumes, the first of which (1855) was labeled “Switzerland,” the second (1858) “Italy,” and the third
(1883) left untitled.
As early as 1826, Liszt drafted a “Study in 12 Exercises,” a youthful set of pieces that were not yet as
challenging as he later made them to be. A later set, Twelve Grand Studies, came a decade later, now
clearly under the influence of having heard Paganini. These more difficult études were published in 1837.
The twelve works formed the basis of the final Études d'éxécution transcendente (“Studies in
transcendental execution”). This final version Liszt dedicated to his most important piano teacher Carl
Czerny, who today is primarily known as a creator of mostly dry exercises to develop the pianist’s speed
and flexibility, but who was also a composer of substance (rarely heard in that capacity today) and Liszt’s
link to Beethoven.
Listeners to the final version of the études may find it hard to believe that these dozen works, of
surpassing technical and musical challenge, are mostly simplified from the version Liszt published in
1838. Conceived at first for Liszt’s own hands, with long, slender fingers, he wrote many passages in
which the hand stretches cover a tenth (a full octave and two notes further); these he removed in the later
version so that pianists with smaller hands could hope to perform it. (The one exception is No. 4,
Mazeppa, to which he added a demanding effect of crossing of the hands to suggest the “galloping” that is
part of the tale of Mazeppa.)
In the final publication, Liszt assigned titles in French or German to ten of the études (all but Nos. 2 and
10). These titles are designed to lend a programmatic character to the piece, identifying its expressive
character or, in some cases, hinting at a narrative.
No. 1 (Preludio, C major) sends forth sprays of sixteenth notes in small figures moving with or against
chromatic accompanying lines, suggesting in a small degree a Bach prelude, a warming-up process,
though far more wide-ranging harmonically.
No. 2 (untitled, Molto vivace, A minor) expands from a simple figure of repeated notes that mostly stay
tied to the tonic A or its dominant E, with surrounding lines of great energy and drive that are all but
explosive, possibly inspired directly by Paganini.
No. 3 (Paysage [Landscape], F major) is softer and gentler, with moving lines of sweet parallel thirds in
one hand and a broad melody presented in octaves at first in the left hand, though the parts switch places
occasionally.
No. 4 (Mazeppa, Allegro, D minor) is based on a poem by Victor Hugo (itself to some degree based on a
poem by Byron) about a historical figure, a Ukrainian warrior Ivan Mazeppa, and his probably mythical
experience of being discovered in a love affair with a married woman, whose husband, a Polish Count,
has him tied naked on the back of a stallion, which is taunted and released, carrying Mazeppa across
Eastern Europe. Liszt adopted this material both for the piano étude of this set and for a later orchestral
tone poem. The essence of the work is its galloping pace, but the mood changes along with the landscape
the horse traverses and the challenge to Mazeppa’s life. Following a thunderous introduction with a
cadenza, the main theme appears, Allegro. It returns again and again in different tempi and meters until
finally the end comes, to which Liszt attached Hugo’s words: “Finally he falls” (evidently the ropes
binding him eventually work loose). There is hardly a work in the entire literature for the piano to match
Mazeppa for sheer thrusting energy and drive.
No. 5 (Feux follets [Will-o’- the-wisp], Allegretto, B-flat major) is about as different from the preceding
étude as possible, except in one respect: sheer number of notes racing past. But where Mazeppa was
pounding and heavy, Feux follets is filled with light chromatic slitherings and trembling movements
between keys whose flighty, insubstantial flickering is a perfect aural metaphor for something almost
seen.
No. 6 (Vision, Lento, B-flat major) evokes the imagery in a sustained lyric melody that recurs in various
forms with lightly decorated accompaniments, but it grows more and more emphatic and vibrant to its fff
(fortississimo) close.
No. 7 (Eroica, in E-flat major) begins by quoting Liszt’s own early Impromptu on Themes of Rossini
and Spontini, but the main material, in the key that has suggested heroism ever since Beethoven’s Third
Symphony, follows his frequent custom in evoking Hungarian glory with a solidly heroic musical
character.
No. 8 (Wilde Jagd [Wild Hunt], in C minor) captures a characteristic mode of Romantic instrumental
music, a headlong race through dark and ominous forests such as had been featured in German music
from Weber’s Freischütz.
No. 9 (Ricordanza [Memory], Tempo rubato, in A-flat major) would seem to be influenced by Chopin,
yet this is not possible, because Liszt drafted it in 1826, when Chopin was still known, if at all, only in
Warsaw. But both composers were affected by Italian bel canto, which probably explains the stylistic
similarity.
No. 10 (Allegro agitato molto, in F minor) is a violent piece that maintains an extraordinary tension
throughout its exciting course.
No. 11 (Harmonies du soir [Evening harmonies], Andantino, in D-flat major), by great contrast,
evokes an evening calm in an almost impressionistic musical language with the sounds of distant bells
projected through the use of carefully planned pedaling.
No. 12 (Chasse-neige [Snow storm], Andante con moto, in B-flat minor) evokes a dark landscape being
slowly, gently, but inevitably covered by endless snowdrifts.
It is worth noting that Liszt, who is so often described as a pure showman, a mountebank, often—as
here—chooses to end a highly virtuosic work with one of its least virtuosic elements and on a note almost
of despair.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)