Piano Sonata in E flat minor

Modérément vite

Calme, un peu lent, très soutenu

Vivement, avec légèreté

Très lent - animé

The Piano Sonata of Paul Dukas was written just a few years too late. He started work on it in 1899, not long after he had achieved his one and only popular success with L’Apprenti sorcier. But by the time the Sonata was first performed, by Edouard Risler in Paris in May 1901, events had passed him by. Debussy had written his Pour le piano and Ravel his Jeux d’eau and the new trend in French piano music was in motion - controversially but irreversibly and clearly not in the direction so robustly adopted by Dukas in his Piano Sonata in E flat minor.

A few years earlier, when the choice seemed to be between the cool professionalism of Saint-Saëns and the idealism posthumously associated with César Franck (and religiously sustained by Vincent d’Indy and his colleagues at the Schola Contorum), a work of such epic proportions, such heroic technique and such unmistakably Franckiste allegiance might well have won a few converts to the latter cause. In fact, although it has always had its admirers, it stands almost alone in the repertoire, its one successor being d’Indy’s Sonata in E of 1907.

A curious feature of the Dukas Sonata is that it is dedicated to Monsieur C. Saint-Saëns, the least likely of the composer’s colleagues. One can imagine the older composer noting first the late-Beethoven length and ambition of the work and then, sceptically, turning to the first page and finding piano writing at the opposite extreme to his own characteristic keyboard elegance and brilliance. It is more idiomatically written than Franck’s piano music but it still looks like hard work for the pianist. And if that didn’t alienate Saint-Saëns -who didn’t even bother to acknowledge the honour done to him - the harmonies, which are remarkably adventurous for their time, surely did.

The superior qualities Saint-Saëns clearly missed in the Dukas Sonata are its unfailing seriousness of expression and its immense structural integrity. The first subject of the first movement is extended over an impressively long paragraph on a surge of semiquaver figuration clutched in the right hand while the left assumes responsibility for both the bass line below it and the melodic line above it. The second subject too is carried on a repeated pattern of semiquavers, in this case in a regular flow of arpeggios in the left hand under an expressive melody in the right. Although the tempo briefly slows down at the end of the exposition, as soon as the rhythmic impulse is restored it is then sustained, through an exhaustively thorough development section and a full-scale recapitulation, almost to the end of the movement. Whatever remains to be done to merge the identities of the two main themes is accomplished in a thoughtful coda.

The background to the A flat major slow movement might well be some such late-Beethoven inspiration as the finale of the Sonata in C minor, Op.111. Certainly it is striking how, like Beethoven’s Arietta, the simple opening melody is developed in the same slow tempo alongside an ever increasing proliferation of decorative detail. In this case, however, the intricately embroidered arpeggios and long internal trills are applied not to one theme in a series of variations but to two themes in an elaborately constructed extension of sonata form.

On one level, as a tribute to César Franck perhaps, the third movement is a toccata and fugue. On another level, since the fugue comes in the middle of the toccata rather than at the end of it, it is a demonic scherzo in B minor with a contrapuntal trio. Whichever way you take it, the contrast between the vigorously purposeful tattoo of semiquavers in the outer sections and the harmonically drifting middle section is extreme. To mediate between the two, Dukas not only effects a gradual reduction in tempo in the transition to the fugue but also, shortly before the end of the movement, tosses the hapless fugue subject onto the renewed cascade of semiquavers.

If the ocasional cyclical allusion to earlier themes is not enough to establish the composer’s Franckiste credentials - in the transitional passage in the third movement, for example, or in the slow, dramatically articulated introduction to the next - the visionary theme which emerges in B major as the second subject of the finale leaves no doubt as to his allegiance. And it is this theme which, in a manner not unlike that pusued by a similar melody in Franck’s Symphony in D minor, finally wins a long and heroic struggle to bring about a triumphant ending in the tonic major.

Gerald Larner©

NB Debussy, Monsieur Croche p178…n’avons nous guère pour représenter notre époque qu’une seule sonata pour piano: celle de Paul Dukas. Par la grandeur de sa conception elle prend place immédiatement après les sonates de Beethoven.