Piano Sonata Op.1

Choral et Variatons: large - vivace - un poco più vivo - calmo - prestissimo

Henri Dutilleux’s Piano Sonata was written for his wife Geneviève Joy, one of the leading French pianists of the day, who gave the first performance in Paris shortly after it was completed in 1948. Since then – unlike his older contemporary Olivier Messiaen, whose marriage to Yvonne Loriod inspired a series of major piano works – Dutilleux has not been consistently drawn to the piano and has preferred to concentrate on orchestral and chamber music. But even if he had written nothing else for the instrument he would still be acknowledged as the composer of a significant contribution to the post-War piano repertoire. While it is an early work for Dutilleux – the first he considered worthy of an opus number – the Piano Sonata is resourcefully scored, unfailingly eventful over a wide range of expression, and impressively well balanced in construction.

As he developed, Dutilleux tended more and more to discard ready-made forms. Here, however, as a “still young composer looking for myself,” he clearly had the conventional sonata image firmly in his mind. The Allegro con moto is true to the first-movement type, but in its own way. One of its most distinctive features is the fascinating harmonic ambiguity represented by the sinuously shaped main theme on its smoothly presented (legato) introduction in the opening bars. Curiously, the second subject, which makes a delayed entry by way of a dramatic crescendo in heavy octaves at the bottom of the keyboard, is similar in shape and character to the first – particularly when the emphatic articulation initially applied to it is replaced by gentle legato phrasing.

Still less conventional is the middle section of the movement which – approached by the disembodied sound of harmonics arising from strings silently opened by the right hand and vibrating in sympathy with notes picked out by the left – seems to be in a world of its own, with material of its own. As it goes on, however, gathering in speed and dynamic intensity, it associates itself with aspects of both main themes and eventually leads, by way of a legato diminuendo, into the recapitulation. The rhythmic ingenuity much in evidence so far is most effectively put to use at the risoluto climax of the construction, where the first subject is proclaimed over the same theme in double note values, and a masterfully manipulated, Stravinskyian coda. The last two bars quietly resolve the long-sustained harmonic ambiguity in favour of F sharp minor.

To a French musician Lied means “song,” as it does to everyone else, but can also imply a three-part construction, one with matching outer sections and a contrasting middle section. This is certainly the form adopted by the slow movement, headed Lied, of Dutilleux’s Piano Sonata. It opens with a sad little song presented in exquisitely sensitive chromatic harmonies in D flat major. Another melody is introduced, high in the right hand, and the first is developed before a complete change of texture marks the beginning of the middle section – a spray of delicate arabesques stiffened as it goes on by a rising scale and a crescendo. The opening section is recalled but now abbreviated and with the two themes in reverse order.

The theme-and-variations structure of the last movement is a far from conventional example of the form. The theme, a modal chorale delivered in fortissimo double octaves at first and punctuated by heavily dissonant sonorities in the manner of Messiaen, is at least one and a half minutes long. The four variations, most of which last two minutes or more, are so developed that the composer was able to refer to them as “a sonata within a sonata.” A percussive, Bartók-like equivalent to a first movement (Vivace) is followed by a brilliant scherzo (Un poco più vivo), a quiet slow-movement version of the chorale theme (Calmo) and a vigorous toccata finale (Prestissimo). The opening chorale, echoes of which have been plainly audible throughout the four variations, is recalled in its full ritual stature to end the work in a raidantly affirmative F sharp major.