Piano Sonata in D major K.576 (1789)

In July 1789 Mozart wrote a desperate letter to his friend Michael Puchberg asking him, in profound embarrassment, for a loan of 500 gulden but assuring him that the prospects of paying it back were good. “I am composing six easy clavier sonatas for Princess Friederike and six quartets for the King,” he explained. “The two dedications will bring me in something.” We know that he did, in fact, write three string quartets for King Frederick William II of Prussia between June 1789 and June 1790. There is, however, no trace of the six easy sonatas for his daughter – unless, that is, the Sonata in D major which he completed in July 1789 is one of them.

Certainly, the date of the composition of this last of Mozart’s sonatas supports that theory. But is it really “easy”? The plain textures of the first movement look like a concession to a technique which, though agility is required of it in the execution of scales and arpeggios, is not expected to cope with anything more complex than a few short two-part canons. There is no serious technical problem in the slow movement either, in spite of the unpredictability of the harmonies in the poetically expressive A major outer sections and a dramatic exchange of scales between left and right hand in the F sharp minor middle section. The closing Allegretto on the other hand, is a brilliantly scored rondo that calls for corresponding brilliance from the pianist. The main theme is simple enough but its treatment, often in canonic counterpoint, is anything but, while the virtuoso triplet figuration that characterises so much of the movement would surely test a developed professional let alone a Prussian princess of 22.

Piano Sonata in D major K.576 (1789)

Allegro

Adagio

Allegretto

Leos Janácek (1854-1928)

On the overgrown path (1901-8)

1 Our evenings: moderato

2 A blown-away leaf: andante

3 Come with us: adagio

4 The Madonna of Frydek: grave

5 They chattered like swallows: con moto

6 Words fail: andante

7 Goodnight: andante

8 Unutterable anguish: andante

9 In tears: larghetto

10 The barn-owl has not flown away: andante

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Kreisleriana Op.16 (1838)

1 Äusserst bewegt

2 Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch - Intermezzo I: Sehr lebhaft - Tempo I - Intermezzo II: Etwas bewegter - Tempo I

3 Sehr aufgeregt - Etwas langsamer - Tempo I

4 Sehr langsam - Bewegter - Tempo I

5 Sehr lebhaft

6 Sehr langsam

7 Sehr rasch

8 Schnell und spielend

One side of the argument about the last of Mozart’s last piano sonata is that it is one of the six “easy” sonatas he claimed at the time to be writing for Princess Friederike of Prussia. The other side is that it is far too difficult to be any such thing. It could be, however, that both are right. The first movement certainly requires some agility in scales and arpeggios, particularly in the development section, but Mozart’s interest in counterpoint is restricted here to short two-part canons of little complexity. The slow movement differs from the first not so much in terms of technical difficulty as in the quality of the material and, crucially, the composer’s emotional involvement. Being engaged to this extent, he clearly couldn’t lapse into a non-committal finale: although the main theme of the closing Allegretto is simple enough, its treatment, as a dramatic and even virtuoso two-part invention, is not.

Janácek too had ease of execution in mind when he wrote the five earliest of the ten pieces included in On an overgrown path. Those five (Nos. 1, 2, 4, 7 and 10) were originally intended for a periodical, Slav Melodies, devoted not to the piano but the harmonium and were clearly not meant to overtax the keyboard technique of its amateur readership. Even so these reminiscence of life in his home town of Hukvaldy are not without characteristically personal reverberations. A blown-away leaf, for example, he described as “a love song” and The barn-owl has not flown away is haunted by the “ominous motif of the owl” first heard in its opening bars. Seven years later Janacek arranged the harmonium miniatures for piano and added five, rather more difficult pieces to complete the collection - including three intense expressions of the composer’s grief over the death of his daughter Olga in Words fail, Unutterable anguish, and In tears.

Janácek’s model for On an overgrown path might well have been Schumann’s anthologies of short piano pieces like the Fantasiestücke and Kinderscenen. Kreisleriana, although it too was written in the agonizingly frustrating period of Schumann’s engagement to Clara Wieck, is a very much more complicated work than either of those. Not even Clara understood it: “Sometimes your music actually frightens me,” she told him. The problem is that it is inspired by both his love for Clara and his attachment to the “wild and witty Kapellmeister” figure who appears in the Kreisleriana section E.T.A. Hoffman’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier and then in the unfinished novel Kater Murr. Passionate reflections on Clara and no less passionate memories of Kreisler are interleaved in Schumann’s Kreisleriana in much the same way as Kreisler’s biography is interleaved with his mischievous cat’s autobiography in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr. They are satisfactorily reconciled at the end.

Gerald Larner ©2004