Programme — Piano Sonata No.1 in F sharp minor/A major Op.1 (1915), Allegro vivace, Piano Sonata No.4 in E flat minor/G flat major Op.6 (1918) …

Piano Sonata No.1 in F sharp minor/A major Op.1 (1915)

Allegro vivace

Piano Sonata No.4 in E flat minor/G flat major Op.6 (1918)

Presto impetuoso

As a uniquely gifted performer and a much admired teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire, Samuil Feinberg didn’t have to worry too much about his career as a pianist in Soviet Russia – even though travelling restrictions were imposed on him at one time. As a composer, however, he had to be careful to keep his head above the treacherous political water. He achieved perhaps the height of his creative development when he represented his country at the ISCM in Venice in 1925 and aroused much interest with his radical Piano Sonata No.6. But, inevitably, with the rise of Stalinism he had to moderate his style to make it more accessible, which he did in the last six of his 12 Piano Sonatas without seriously compromising his distinctive identity.

Feinberg’s identity in his earliest piano works is inextricably mixed with that of Scriabin, who was a vital inspiration to the young composer. It was surely more than a coincidence that both of his first two sonatas were started in the year Scriabin died. Like the last six of Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas, Feinberg’s First is a single-movement structure but with no lack of variety in tempo or expression. It begins calmly enough in F sharp minor with a two-bar melody which, since much later material is to be derived from it, is repeated several times over in a fluctuating tempo and in textures of varying complexity. The key changes to E major to accommodate the expressive requirements of an eloquent left hand which attracts accompanying arpeggios in the right. At the height of a quicker scherzando episode the theme from the opening bars takes flight on the essentially scriabinesque instruction of volando (flying). The opening paragraph is recalled in something like its original form to motivate progress towards a brilliant A major coda marked trionfante (triumphant). The triumph is celebrated with that eloquent, now ever more emphatic left hand, confirming that a work which had begun in F sharp minor ends in the relative A major.

Samuil Feinberg

Piano Sonata No.4 in E flat minor/G flat major Op.6 (1918)

Presto impetuoso

The Scriabin influence is still detectable in Sonata No.4, which is another single-movement construction. A very much more complex work than No.1, it begins in E flat minor with a fleeting melody in the right hand that rhythmically contradicts not only a counterpoint to it in the left hand but also the basic 6/4 metre. At the prevailing Presto impetuoso tempo this polyrhythmic idea has an irregular fluttering effect and, together with a rhythmically more even second theme of minims and crotchets with the two hands more or less in agreement, it is the main interest of the work.

In the eight or nine minutes of the sonata’s duration that material goes through many mercurial transformations in melodic shape, tempo, harmony, instrumental colouring and expressive purpose. It happens in such fine detail and at such a quick tempo that it is scarcely possible to follow the composer’s thinking, which seems to be inspired by an unfailing and burning spontaneity rather than compiled by architectural calculation.

There are clues, however, in Feinberg’s instructions to the pianist.    At an early stage in the development, for example, he requires a burrascoso (tempestuous) treatment of the opening theme before the tempo is relaxed for a brief lamentoso (lamenting) episode.The left hand is called on for an expressive version of the secondary theme in a plain 6/4 rhythm softening to poco languido (rather languid). Impetuoso (impetuous) and imperioso (imperious) passages lead to a lovely luminoso (luminous) revelation with quavers high in the right hand over a cantando (singing) bass line. So the transformations go on, some of them requiring effects, such as affanato (breathless), which cannot be literally realised in keyboard terms.

The recapitulation begins logically enough by recalling much of the foregoing and ends Prestissimo with the melodic material broadened by augmentation in the left hand, leading to an ending not in the minor key in which it began but, though the last bar is little more than a low grunt, in the relative major – the same long-term progression as in Sonata No.1

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Piano Sonata in F minor Op.57 (“Appassionata”) (1804-5)

Allegro assai – Più allegro

Andante con moto –

Allegro ma non troppo – Presto

“Appassionata,” like “The Moonlight” attached to another favourite Beethoven piano sonata, is a nickname that has stuck even though it has little to do with the composer himself. The invention of an ambitious Hamburg publisher, who applied it to a four-hand version of the work in 1838, it would have been discarded, or at least discredited, long ago if it were not so aptly applied to an essentially and inescapably impassioned inspiration. What the “Appassionata” Sonata is passionate about is its quest for the stability and serenity represented by the central Andante con moto in D flat major, a vision which is briefly glimpsed in the first movement but which entirely eludes the last.

Beethoven seems to have thought long and hard about how he should end the work. The unhappy resolution was decided on a long country walk with a pupil, Ferdinand Ries, who remembered how “he had hummed or sometimes even howled to himself the entire way.” When Ries asked the composer what it was, he replied, “A theme for the last Allegro of the sonata has occurred to me.” On returning to his room, Ries goes on, “he rushed to the piano without taking off his hat… He stormed for at least an hour with the new finale.”

The opening Allegro assai is based largely on the theme which is presented in F minor but not, at this stage, in any particularly intense mood in the first few bars. But then, syncopated in heavy fortissimo chords and pursued by obsessive triplet rhythms, it takes on a violently unhappy aspect. Almost immediately the theme is turned upside down and clarified in a peaceful A flat major second subject, but not for long. The always agitated development section allows only brief glimpses of the second subject. In the recapitulation, however, it reappears in a serene D flat major in what must surely be a deliberate anticipation of the second movement. But again not for long. A quicker coda takes sweeps the second subject into yet another expression of F minor urgency.

The ideal of D flat major stability is demonstrated in the Andante con moto by a characteristically imaginative use of classical variation conventions. The four variations are all in the same key, all in the same 2/4 metre, all in the same tempo, all in the same shape. While the duration of the notes becomes progressively shorter and the tessitura gradually higher, to create a foreground impression of movement and intensification in colour, the background remains static rather than dynamic and reassuringly the same.

The slow movement ends, after a final reappearance of the original theme, on a loud dissonance, out of which the Allegro ma non troppo explodes without so much as a pause. Beethoven was to adopt that device in several later works but never more effectively than here. The key is F minor and the activity escalates into a movement of sustained turbulence, with intermittent chromatic panic and a quick coda which excludes all hope of the once envisioned peace in a last expression of violence.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Fantasie in C major Op.17

Durchaus fantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen

(To be played fantastically and passionately throughout)

Mässig. Durchaus energisch

(Moderate. Energetic throughout)

Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten

(Slowly sustained. To be kept quiet throughout)

The Fantasie in C major has its origins, according to the composer, in the “sad year” of 1836. That was when Friedrich Wieck, “carrying on like a madman” according to Schumann, forbade all communication between his sixteen-year-old daughter and a young composer who, as far as he could see, had many personal failings and no prospects. “You can understand the Fantasie only if you go back to the unhappy summer of 1836 when we were separated,” said Robert to Clara after the work was published in 1839.

Clara would have had no difficulty in understanding the import of the main theme of the first movement: the phrase of five adjacent notes in descending order, proclaimed here in loud octaves over an impulsive left hand in the opening bars, they both knew as a melodic symbol for Clara herself. She would probably also have associated that phrase with the motto, from Schlegel’s poem Die Gebüsche, that stands at the head of the score:

Durch alle Töne tönet Through all the sounds

Im bunten Erdentraum In life’s colourful dream

Ein leiser Ton gezogen Runs one soft sound

Für den, der heimlich lauschet. For him who quietly listens.

She might have noted too, incorporated into the first subject, a veiled allusion to the melodic phrase which goes with the words “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder” (“Take them then, these songs”) at the end of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). And if she had missed it at this point she would certainly have recognised the direct quotation of the same phrase in the Adagio closing bars.

So the symbolism of the first movement – “the most passionate thing I have ever written, a deep lament for you,” as Robert told Clara – is clear enough. What is not clear, unless this movement was originally intended as a separate piece, is why Schumann interpolated a virtually self-contained ballade just before the recapitulation of an otherwise fairly normal sonata-form construction. As it is, the slow episode in C minor headed Im Legendenton (“in legendary tone”) – which has its own main theme, although it alludes to both the Beethoven phrase and the tender second subject of the first section – adds the dimension the movement would need if it were to stand alone.

It was probably only towards the end of 1836 that Schumann conceived the idea of extending the Fantasie into what he now thought of as a “Grand Sonata” in an inspired response to an appeal for funds (initiated by Liszt, the eventual dedicatee of the work) for the construction of a Beethoven monument in Bonn. To the first movement which he had always thought of as “Ruins” he added a “Triumphal Arch” and a “Starry Sky” – titles which are significant even though, like the “Grand Sonata” description, he eventually dropped them.   

“Triumphal Arch” is a monumentally virtuoso march in the same key as Beethoven’s Eroica. It seems to have little to do with the foregoing until, in the slower middle section, the tender second subject of the first movement is recalled in rhythmic syncopations in A flat major: Clara, imagining Robert returning home as the triumphant hero, recognised herself here “standing among the maidens and crowning you my dear warrior and companion.” “Starry Sky” is an intimate nocturne, veering between Beethoven and Chopin in style and dreaming of two themes – one the descending Clara phrase from the first movement, the other a more virile rising theme – which are united in the course of a daringly spontaneous, essentially poetic construction.     

Gerald Larner © 2018