Twelve Variation on “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman” K265 (1781-2)

Long thought to have been written during the fatal illness of Mozart’s mother in Paris in 1778, the Variations on “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman” are now known to have originated a few years later in Vienna – which, happily, liberates them from the sentimental associations that used to go with them. It is true that Mozart did write keyboard variations on French tunes in Paris but he also wrote three such sets, including variations on “La belle Françoise” and “Dieu d’amour” as well as “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman,” for his pupils in Vienna in the early 1780s.

A simple tune in C major, in 2/4 time and even crotchets almost throughout, “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman” is not the kind of theme to inspire any startling departure from varation conventions. On the contrary, Mozart toys with the tune, humouring its simplicity but also teasing it from time to time. Among the little surprises he springs on it are the witty exchanges of left-hand and right-hand material in the sixth variation and the dissonant suspensions applied to the melodic line in the second, fourth, eighth and ninth. The most adventurous of the latter is the eighth, the minor-key variation, where left-hand octaves add a third voice to the contrapuntal texture. As is usual in Mozart’s variations by this time, the last but one is an Adagio and the last (in a bold departure into 3/4) is extended to incorporate a coda.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

4 Moments Musicaux from Op.94/D.780 (1823-27)

No.1 in C major: moderato

No.3 in F minor: allegro moderato

No.5 in F minor: allegro vivo

No.6 in A flat major: allegretto

When Schubert died in 1828 he was just beginning to make an impression on Viennese publishers as a composer of piano music. Three of his sonatas had recently appeared in print and there was a growing demand not only for his dances but also for more thoughtful pieces like the Impromptus and the rather shorter Moments Musicaux. Two of the latter were first issued in Sauer & Leidesdorf’s Christmas albums under fanciful titles - No.3 in F minor as Air russe in 1823, No.6 in A flat as Plaintes d’un Troubadour in 1824 - and it was for the same publisher that he wrote four more pieces in the same vein to complete a set of six Moments Musicaux in 1827.

The first of the Moments Musicaux is usually described as a minuet. But, a character study rather than a dance, it is too eccentric for that. As it proceeds and the C major arpeggio presented in bare octaves as the main theme assumes more harmonic and textural interest, it develops its own distinctive personality – wistful but sometimes peevish and briefly, in the central episode of the middle section, despondent.

The Air russe title attached to the delightful little Allegretto moderato in F minor by Sauer & Leidesdorf was presumably not Schubert’s own. He would surely have thought of it more as a Hungarian dance than as a Russian song. Either way, this “Slavic or Hungarian trait” - not even Dvorák was sure about it - so intrigued Schubert that he took it up again and developed it further in his last Impromptu (also in F minor) a year later. In this context, with or without the intervening Moderato in C sharp minor, the short but dynamic Allegro vivo in F minor, with its reckless driving rhythms and its demonic harmonies, comes as a shock – which is scarcely mitigated by the late change to the major.

The last of the Moments Musicaux, a gentle Allegretto in A flat major, is commonly described as a minuet - like the first in C minor, but even less helpfully in this case. The Sauer & Leidesdorf Christmas album title of Plaintes d’un Troubadour at least acknowledged its song-like rather than dance-like character. Not plaintive enough to qualify as a lament but falling well short of serenity in spite of the comparative security of its D flat major middle section, it is wistfully poised somewhere between the two.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Sonata in C major Op.53 “Waldstein” (1803-4)

Allegro con brio

Introduzione: Adagio molto -

Rondo: Allegro moderato - Prestissimo

It was Count Waldstein who told the young Beethoven as he left Bonn for Vienna in 1792, “You are going to receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn” - a prediction which would have made him a worthy dedicatee of some major work in the future even if he hadn’t contributed as much as he did to the composer’s early development. Although he had to wait for his Beethoven dedication until 1805, the work that came with it represents the most exhilarating experience offered by any piano sonata up to that time.

The most significant feature of the Sonata in C major Op.53 is that it includes no real slow movement. Beethoven had at one time intended that an F major Andante (later published separately as the Andante favori) should occupy the central position in the construction. He withdrew it presumably because he felt that a full-length slow movement would dissipate the impetus he had carried through the first movement with the long-term aim of taking it up again in the last. In the final version of the work, the rhythmic impulse generated by the throbbing quavers of the opening bars is scarcely ever relaxed and when it is - as in the comparatively serene but elusive second subject of the Allegro con brio - it can still be sensed as a phantom pulse somewhere below the surface.

The last movement, which follows without a break on the short and unsettled Introduzione that replaces the original Andante, does not immediately fulfil all the deep-laid expectations. Here, it is true, is something like the C major serenity the first movement pursued, but there is something indefinable still missing. It is defined and supplied only in the Prestissimo coda, where the main theme of the Rondo emerges at twice its original speed, at long last picking up the momentum which has been there since the opening bars of Allegro con brio.

Gerald Larner ©2006