Six Piano Pieces, Op.118 (1892-3)

Brahms: 6 klavierstücker op118

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Six Piano Pieces, Op.118

Intermezzo in A minor: allegro non assai ma molto passionato

Intermezzo in A major: andante teneramente

Ballade in G minor: allegro energico

Intermezzo in F minor: allegretto un poco agitato

Romance in F major: andante

Intermezzo in E flat minor: andante, largo e mesto

In the Six Piano Pieces, Op.118, the composer seems at first sight to have abandoned his concern for long-term continuity. Although there are obvious harmonic links between the Intermezzo in A minor and the Intermezzo in A major and between the Intermezzo in F minor and the Romance in F major, there is no apparent logic in the order in which the six pieces are presented - except that the tonality gradually sinks from A minor to E flat minor, leaving the sequence eloquently incomplete on the most poignant of all Brahms’s piano pieces.

The opening theme of that last Intermezzo in E flat minor is based on the traditional melody of the Dies Iræ. Although Brahms makes no dramatic point of it, elaborating it for its poetic potential rather than stressing its characteristically stark outline, he nevertheless anticipates it at several earlier points in the work, beginning with the main theme of the rhapsodic first Intermezzo in A minor. A more youthful Brahms is recalled in the cradle-song Intermezzo in A major and the famously heroic Ballade in G minor, while the Intermezzo in F minor is too preoccupied with its ingeniously concealed canonic textures to be concerned with anything but its own reflections. The theme presented in the left hand in the opening bars of the Romance in F major, on the other hand, is clearly based on the Dies Iræ plainsong, although its grim implications are far from explicit here and have not the least effect on the luminous baroque-style pastorale of the D major middle section. As for the Intermezzo in E flat minor itself, there is nothing quite like the estrangement of harmony and melodic line anywhere else in Brahms and, in spite of some characteristic defiance in G flat major in the middle section, nothing quite like the quiet resignation at the end.

Brahms wrote his last piano sonata in 1853 at the age of twenty, his last set of piano variations in 1863 and no solo piano music at all for as long as fifteen years after that. When he returned to the piano it was with the four capriccios and four intermezzos of Op.76 and, as far as the piano was concerned, he restricted himself to similarly small-scale pieces for the rest of his composing career. He had by no means abandoned large-scale forms but in the last years of his life his most intimate statements and most daring technical experiments were confided to the piano. The last four sets of short pieces, Op.116 to Op.119, were written during summer holidays at Ischl in 1892 and 1893 and dispatched from there by post to Clara Schumann who, he knew, would understand them as no one else could. “Even one listener,” Brahms said of these pieces, “is one too many.”

Clara would surely have seen the point of the apparently arbitrary organisation of the Six Piano Pieces Op.118, where Brahms seems to have abandoned his customary concern for continuity or, at least, symmetry in the sequence of pieces in the set. Although there are obvious harmonic links between the Intermezzo in A minor and the Intermezzo in A major and between the Intermezzo in F minor and the Romance in F major, there is no apparent logic in the order in which the six pieces are presented - except that the tonality gradually sinks from A minor to E flat minor, leaving the sequence eloquently incomplete on the most poignant of all his piano pieces.

The opening theme of that last Intermezzo in E flat minor is based on the traditional melody of the Dies Iræ. Although Brahms makes no dramatic point of it, elaborating it for its poetic potential rather than stressing its characteristically stark outline, he nevertheless anticipates it at several earlier points in the work, beginning with the main theme of the rhapsodic first Intermezzo in A minor. A more youthful Brahms is recalled in the cradle-song Intermezzo in A major and the famously heroic Ballade in G minor, while the Intermezzo in F minor is too preoccupied with its ingeniously concealed canonic textures to be concerned with anything but its own reflections. The theme presented in the left hand in the opening bars of the Romance in F major, on the other hand, is clearly based on the Dies Iræ plainsong, although its grim implications are far from explicit here and have not the least effect on the luminous baroque-style pastorale of the D major middle section. As for the Intermezzo in E flat minor itself, there is nothing quite like the estrangement of harmony and melodic line anywhere else in Brahms and, in spite of some characteristic defiance in G flat major in the middle section, nothing quite like the quiet resignation at the end.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Sonata (quasi una fantasia) in E flat major Op.27 No.1 (1800-1)

Andante - allegro - andante -

Allegro molto e vivace -

Adagio con espressione -

Allegro vivace - adagio - presto

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)

Vers la flamme Op.72 (c 1914)

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Six Piano Pieces, Op.118 (1892-3)

Intermezzo in A minor: allegro non assai ma molto passionato

Intermezzo in A major: andante teneramente

Ballade in G minor: allegro energico

Intermezzo in F minor: allegretto un poco agitato

Romance in F major: andante

Intermezzo in E flat minor: andante, largo e mesto

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Impromptu No.1 in A flat major Op.29 (1837)

Impromptu in F sharp major Op.36 (1839)

Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise in E flat major Op.22 (1831-5)

Beethoven started it. While it might seem unreasonable to identify him as the source of an extravagantly mystical effusion like Scriabin’s Vers la flamme, Beethoven did establish the piano as a congenial instrument for metaphysical speculation in his visionary late sonatas. He had shaken off the most inhibiting sonata conventions long before that, notably in the two sonatas he published with the significant disclaimer “quasi una fantasia” - the so-called “Moonlight”in C sharp minor and its less familiar companion in E flat major. The latter work, which we hear today, has its own entirely distinctive shape. Designed to be played with only the shortest of pauses between the four movements, it interlocks the first two by having the Allegro intervention in the opening Andante motivate the following Allegro molto vivace and links the other two by recalling the Adagio con espressione shortly before the end of the Allegro vivace finale.

It is quite possible to be sceptical about Scriabin’s transcendental mission to regenerate the world through his art and at the same time to experience the spiritual elation of a work like Vers la flamme, which is central to the composer’s vision of an ultimate, purifying consummation in flames. It begins modestly in harmonic musing but, once it has defined its questioning two-note main theme, proceeds “with more and more tumultuous joy” to a incandescent climax of ecstatic trills and tremolandos, and the refulgent repeated chords characteristic of Scriabin’s apocalyptic keyboard apparatus.

Brahms, whose feet were more firmly on the ground, can have had little interest for Scriabin. His last piano works, however - the four sets of short pieces Op.116 to Op.119 written during summer holidays at Ischl in 1892 and 1893 - contain inspirations as poetic and as intimate as any in the Chopin works so adored by Scriabin. As Brahms wrote to Clara when he posted the pieces to her, “Even one listener is one too many.” Clara, he knew, would register the allusions to the traditional melody of the Dies Irae, in the opening and closing Intermezzos, and see the point of the gradually sinking tonality of the collection from A minor to E flat minor, which leaves the sequence eloquently incomplete on the most poignant of all his piano pieces.

Whatever reason Chopin had for withholding his earliest impromptu from publication - it was first published under the title Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor six years after his death - he did not forget it. The Impromptu No.1 in A flat major, Op.29, has so much in common with it, both in its ternary structure and its thematic material, as to qualify almost as another version of the same thing. The Impromptu No.2 in F sharp major is far more adventurous, above all in the strangely aggressive march in the middle section. “It might not be any good,” said Chopin, “I can’t judge it yet. It’s too new…We’ll see in time.”

The Grande Polonaise in E flat for piano and orchestra, which was written in Vienna in 1831, was always meant to have an introductory companion piece. The Andante spianato had to wait, however, until Chopin needed something new for an important concert in Paris four years later. Finding nothing incongruous in an extended solo-piano introduction to a piece for piano and orchestra and obviously untroubled by the stylistic disparity between the two, the Paris audience greeted the Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise with extraordinary enthusiasm. Nowadays the work is scarcely ever heard in orchestral concerts. The polonaise is easily adapted to solo use and is every bit as brilliant in that form.