Download Sonata in A-flat major, Hoboken XVI:46 (1767-1768)

Sonata in A-flat major, Hoboken XVI:46 (1767-1768)
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
From his earliest clavichord divertimentos to his last set of three piano sonatas written in London, Haydn composed more than sixty
solo keyboard sonatas. The dozen sonatas that cluster around the year 1770 (half have vanished, apparently lost in a fire in 1768) mark
an important advance in Haydn’s creative evolution, coming at a time when his native genius had been fertilized by his own
experience (he turned 38 in 1770, and had been working for one of Austria’s most powerful families for a decade) and his growing
knowledge of the work of his contemporaries, most notably the powerful, proto-Romantic creations of Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach,
Johann Sebastian’s Son No. 2, who had recently been appointed music director for the city of Hamburg. Gone was the minuet of his
earlier divertimento-sonatas, reducing the structure to three concentrated and expressively rich movements; gone also was the student
accessibility of the earlier works, replaced by a brilliance of execution indebted to the concerto. Haydn himself seems to have been
wary that their heightened expression and technical demands might meet some resistance outside the confines of the musically
sophisticated court at Eisenstadt, and he withheld the three most ambitious of them (G minor, H. XVI:44; E-flat major, H. XVI:45; Aflat major, H. XVI:46) from publication until 1788.
Each of the movements of the A-flat Sonata, one of only three instrumental works by Haydn in that key (one other piano sonata,
one piano trio), addresses sonata form: the first with elegant restraint, the second with wistful introspection, the third with playful élan.
The formal divisions — exposition, with its complementary/contrasting first and second themes; development of motives from the
exposition across an unsettled harmonic landscape; and recapitulation of the themes to provide formal balance and harmonic and
expressive closure — are meticulously marked by holds, silences and even the opportunity for a brief cadenza. Subtleties of feeling
are shaped to lead passages of anticipation to moments of satisfying resolution; the sense of orderly progress through time is
unflagging; the keyboard sonorities are lean and crisp. The Sonata in A-flat documents one of music’s most gifted (and hard-working)
composers standing at the threshold of his full artistic maturity.
Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 (1911)
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
The modern world came to its maturity when the guns of August thundered across Europe in 1914. Maturity does not emerge in a
single day, however, and the start of the First World War was only the political confirmation of fundamental changes in science,
philosophy and art that had been pressing hard on Western society for at least the three preceding decades. Sigmund Freud published
his landmark work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900. Albert Einstein advanced his theory of relativity in 1905, only two years
after the Wright brothers first hung in the air in their mechanical marvel of canvas and bailing wire. In the arts, the changes were no
less profound. Isadora Duncan danced in the ruins of the theater of Dionysus in Athens in 1904; the establishment of the epochmaking Ballet Russe followed the first collaboration of Fokine and Diaghilev in 1907. The hall of the Viennese Secession was built in
1898; the Fauves held their first exhibit in Paris in 1905. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, to which the Cubist movement is often
traced, dates from 1907; Kandinsky painted his first abstract canvas three years later. And in 1909, Arnold Schoenberg thrust music
into this new world by abandoning the old system of musical tonality in his path-breaking The Book of the Hanging Gardens and the
Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11.
Schoenberg’s music from 1909 until 1913 was dubbed, much to the composer’s ire (which was considerable), “atonal.” The term
was intended to mean that these works abandoned the traditional, dominating central pitch and its hierarchy of chords that had defined
musical tonality and structure since at least 1680. (Schoenberg’s argument against the word contended that “atonal” meant “without
tones,” and that was utter nonsense since his music used the same tones — differently disposed, of course — as did that of Mozart.)
Having abandoned the old tonal conventions, with their generative powers not only for close-range melody and harmony, but also, in
the inevitable magnetism of the central pitch to draw the work to a satisfying close, for long-range musical architecture, Schoenberg’s
greatest challenge was to invent a new technique to control not just chords and themes but also form, and he later admitted that “at
first it seemed impossible to compose pieces of complicated organization or great length.” He came to realize that this revolutionary
organizational principle might be found in the manipulation of a carefully defined group of pitches and intervals that could be
developed throughout the work, creating both variety and unity. This is the method that he tried out in his aphoristic Six Little Piano
Pieces, Op. 19, composed between February 18 and June 17, 1911; the last movement was inspired by the death of his friend and
mentor Gustav Mahler. Despite their brevity, hardly more than a minute each, these Six Pieces are potent and highly concentrated in
their expression — the composer’s biographer H.H. Stuckenschmidt suggested that “each note is endowed with the weight of an
experience.” Schoenberg’s next work was the epochal Pierrot Lunaire. Except for the Three Songs of Op. 22, Pierrot was the last
music he was to write for the next decade, the crucial time when he withdrew from active composition to formulate the hard-won
technique with which he could command the tones of his atonal world — the twelve-tone or serial system.
Three Songs Without Words (1837 and 1845)
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Mendelssohn seems to have been the first to call a piano piece a “Song Without Words,” indicating both this music’s small scale
and its essential lyricism. Op. 38, No. 6 (1837) is a warm melody suspended above a rippling background whose phrases are echoed
between the piano’s soprano and baritone ranges. Op. 102, No. 5 in A major (1845) is an elfin dance, delicate of touch and ceaseless in
motion, that is vest-pocket analogue of Mendelssohn’s incomparable scherzos. Op. 85, No. 4 in D major (1845), with its languorous
melody and undulant accompaniment, exhibits a dreaminess reminiscent of the early character pieces of Mendelssohn’s friend Robert
Schumann.
Variations Sérieuses, Op. 54 (1841)
Felix Mendelssohn
Early in 1841, Mendelssohn accepted the position as Royal Kapellmeister to Friedrich Wilhelm IV in Berlin, where his duties were
to include administering the music section of the newly instituted Royal Academy of Arts, composing for the Royal Theater, directing
the Royal Orchestra, and conducting the Cathedral Choir. In July, just before leaving Leipzig to take up his demanding new job in
Berlin, he fulfilled a request from the Viennese publisher Pietro Mechetti for a musical contribution to an album of original piano
works whose sale would benefit the effort to build a memorial to Beethoven in his native city of Bonn; Chopin, Liszt, Czerny,
Moscheles and five other notable composers also participated. In tribute to Beethoven’s life-long dedication to the variations form,
Mendelssohn created the Variations Sérieuses. The theme of the Variations Sérieuses, as the title implies, is thoughtful and
melancholy. The seventeen variations that Mendelssohn built upon it exploit a wide range of virtuoso techniques and musical styles,
but maintain their singularity of mood throughout.
Bagatelles, Op. 126 (1823-1824)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word “bagatelle” — “a trifle, a thing of little value or importance” — to the Italian root
“bagata,” meaning “a little property.” (The OED speculates that the term “baggage” may have come from the same source.) The word
entered the English language no later than the mid-17th century, and was later used in France by François Couperin as the title for one
of the movements in the Tenth Ordre of his Pièces de Clavecin, issued in 1716. Beethoven applied the name to some two dozen of his
small piano compositions dating from his teenage years to his fullest maturity, and Dvořák, Bartók, Dohnányi, Sibelius and Webern all
later contributed pieces to this diminutive genre.
Unlike Beethoven’s first two sets of Bagatelles, which were collections of independent pieces composed over a period of several
years, the Op. 126 set was apparently conceived as an integrated cycle. He wrote on the manuscript that this was a Ciclus von
Kleinigkeiten (“Cycle of Trifles”), and arranged the numbers according to a rigorous sequence of keys, separating them (except for the
first two numbers) by the interval of a major third: 1. G major — (2. G minor) — 3. E-flat major — 4. B minor — 5. G major — 6. Eflat major. Stylistically, they favor the meditative over the dramatic, with all but one of the movements (No. 4) bearing a marking of
cantabile (“singing”), amabile (“amiable, with love”) or dolce (“sweetly”). As do several other of his late works (Op. 126 was his last
music for piano except for the Diabelli Variations), the Bagatelles seek to synthesize the essence of Classical musical form by making
bold juxtapositions of starkly contrasting material, a quality most noticeable in the closing movement, where a tiny, violent Presto
passage surrounds the nocturnal body of the movement, but also encountered, with less vehemence, elsewhere in the set. “They are in
their own way as original and representative as anything he wrote in the last three or four years of his life,” concluded Eric Blom, “and
doubly precious because they are not quite like anything else.”
Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, Op. 81a, “Les Adieux” (1809-1810)
Ludwig van Beethoven
Among the most important and durable of Beethoven’s many aristocratic Viennese patrons was the Archduke Rudolph, the
youngest son of Emperor Leopold II and the brother of Emperor Franz. Rudolph first appeared in the composer’s life around 1803 as a
piano student, an indication of the high regard that Beethoven had won among Austrian music lovers by even that early date in his
career. Rudolph received instruction in both performance and composition from Beethoven, and he displayed a genuine if limited
talent for music. It was for his noble pupil that Beethoven created the “Triple” Concerto for Piano, Violin and Cello, in whose
premiere Rudolph participated sometime in 1805 or 1806. When Beethoven was considering abandoning Vienna in 1808 to accept the
offer of a position in Kassel from Jerome Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon and King of Westphalia, Rudolph joined with the Princes
Lobkowitz and Kinsky in establishing an annual stipend for the composer to encourage him to remain in the city. Beethoven accepted
their proposal and made Vienna his home for the rest of his life, though the financial reverses and difficulties inflicted by Napoleon’s
invasions forced Kinsky and Lobkowitz to suspend their payments after a short time — Rudolph fulfilled his part of the bargain until
Beethoven died. In appreciation for Rudolph’s unflagging support, Beethoven dedicated some fifteen of his most important works to
him — including the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos, the “Les Adieux” and “Hammerklavier” Sonatas, the Op. 96 Violin Sonata, the
Op. 97 Piano Trio and the Grosse Fuge — and wrote the Missa Solemnis to celebrate his election as Archbishop of Olmütz in 1819.
On May 4, 1809, as the French forces swept inexorably toward Vienna (so ill prepared to defend itself that some soldiers had to be
armed with muskets and swords commandeered from the prop rooms of the city’s theaters and opera houses), the imperial family,
including the twenty-year-old Rudolph, was evacuated to safety in the distant countryside. That very day, Beethoven began a piano
sonata “written from the heart on the occasion of the departure of His Imperial Highness, Archduke Rudolph,” as he recorded on the
title page; he headed the first movement “Das Lebewohl” — “The Farewell.” (When Breitkopf und Härtel published the score in July
1811, they changed Beethoven’s preferred German titles to more easily marketable French. The Sonata is still most widely known
with its French sobriquets, though Beethoven did not like them.) The slow movement (Abwesenheit — L’Absence) was written before
the French withdrew from Vienna on November 20th; the finale (Das Wiedersehen — Le Retour) was begun when Rudolf and his
royal clan returned to the city, on January 30, 1810. Beethoven, fulfilling a promise made during the autumn to Breitkopf und Härtel to
“let you have a few pieces for solo piano,” sent the “Les Adieux” Sonata to the publisher the following week, along with the Op. 78
Sonata and the little Sonatina in G major (Op. 79).
The comings and goings of 18th-century carriages were customarily signaled by blasts on the postilion’s horn, and the sound of the
post horn was taken over into cultivated music as a symbol for parting. Beethoven opens “Les Adieux” with just such a musical
gesture, here enriched with the open-interval harmony of the old valveless instruments (“horn fifths”) and inscribed with the phrase
“Lebewohl” — “Fare Thee Well.” An upward leaping motive immediately balances the descending horn fifths, and is transformed into
the movement’s main theme when the arrival of the fast tempo marks the beginning of its sonata form. The descending scale notes of
“Lebewohl” are recalled in the second theme, and are combined with the leaping motive in the compact development section. A full
recapitulation and a reflective coda round out the movement. Beethoven summarized the emotional essence of the Andante with its
title — Abwesenheit (Absence) — and its performance instruction: “with much expression.” A sudden shift of mood and tempo (“as
fast as possible”) indicates the start of the exuberant sonata-form finale (Das Wiedersehn — Return or, better, Reunion), which is based
on a main theme of joyous naivete and a second theme whose fast, rocking rhythms may be intended to evoke the swaying of the
coach heading home.
©2010 Dr. Richard E. Rodda