Programme — Wigmore 12/4/97, Toccata, Op.11

Wigmore 12/4/97

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Toccata, Op.11

Bartok’s Allegro barbaro and Prokofiev’s Toccata, written within a few months of each other in 1911 and 1912 respectively, represent the definitive liberation of the percussive instinct of the piano. While there are numerous precedents - from Balakirev’s Islamey to Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque and Ravel’s Scarbo - there is nothing as explosive and as consistently pugnacious as either of those two works. An even earlier precedent, which might well have been the direct inspiration of the Prokofiev piece, is Schumann’s Toccata, Op.7, but the essential difference is that Schumann, for all his energy, cannot long resist the lyrical impulse, whereas Prokofiev rigorously excludes it. Sustained by much the same rhythmic impulse from beginning to end, Prokofiev’s Toccata heightens the aggression with harsh dissonances, argumentative counterpoints and glaring metallic colours.

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Two Schubert Lieder

Gretchen am Spinnrade

Erlkönig

Though no virtuoso himself and composer of little virtuoso music, Schubert was a great source of inspiration to Liszt. That much would be clear from the song arrangements alone - dozens of them, including the whole of Schwanengesang and much of Die Winterreise - which are clearly not virtuoso exploitations but expressions of admiration and affection in Liszt’s own terms.

Liszt’s version of Gretchen am Spinnrade, which was published with Erlkönig among his earliest Schubert song arrangements in 1838, is a particularly persuasive example. True, it is more than a modest integration of voice and piano accompaniment, but the accumulation of colour as Gretchen’s erotic ardour increases - the application first of right-hand octaves to the melodic line and then the addition of thirds and sixths at the climax - is by no means alien to the passionate spirit of the song.

Schubert’s accompaniment to Erlkönig is already highly dramatic. While elaborating that aspect of the song, Liszt also contrives to characterise the three protagonists - on their first appearance the father is firmly set in the left hand, the son also in the left but nervously crossed over the right, the Erlkönig in eerily arpeggiated chords high in the right hand - in such a way as to make clear and miraculously emotive distinctions between them.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Nocturne in G minor, Op.15, No.3

There is an old story that Chopin inscribed the manuscript of his early Nocturne in G minor with the words, “Après un représentation de Hamlet.” Since the manuscript is now lost, it can be neither proved nor disproved. But, certainly, it would have been most unlike him to do that - another story has it that he crossed the inscription out, declaring “Let them come to their own conclusions!” - and it doesn’t fit at all with the title Les Zéphirs applied to the three Nocturnes, Op.15, when they were published in London in 1834. In fact, it is scarcely possible to align the piece with either concept, gentle breezes or the Prince of Denmark. It is true that it is cast in an uncharacteristic binary shape - a sad Lento mazurka connected by a highly chromatic transition to a Religioso chorale - which might indicate that it has some kind of programmatic background. But, given the choice of Shakespeare’s plays to associate with the piece, one would probably choose Romeo and Juliet rather than Hamlet.

Sonata in B flat minor, Op.35

Grave - doppio movimento

Scherzo

Marche funèbre: lento

Presto

Robert Schumann has never been forgiven for finding “something repulsive” in the third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B flat minor. But he did have the perception to realize that this is no ordinary slow movement and that there is, in fact, something anomalous about it. Although he could not have known it, the Marche funèbre was written two years before the rest of the sonata as a separate work - to commemorate, so they say, the anniversary of the Warsaw rising. The other three movements were designed to fit round it: “I am composing a sonata in B flat minor which will have in it the funeral march you already know,” Chopin wrote to a friend from Nohant in 1839.

Schumann could not have known either that the Marche funèbre would be performed at Chopin’s funeral in the Madeleine in October 1849, that it would be issued as a memorial by three of his publishers a month later and that it would henceforth be more closely associated with funerals than is Mendelssohn’s Hochzeitsmarsch with weddings. There is something repulsive about that, as there is in the subsequent tradition of presenting the movement as though it were a passing funeral cortège. It is a sure indication of the high quality of the sonata in general that it has survived such treatment of its central feature.

One reason why it has survived is that the Marche funèbre is so thoroughly and so carefully integrated with the other three movements that, when the sonata is performed complete, it relates more to its context than to its extraneous associations. The falling seventh in the first of the four Grave bars at the beginning of the work is not only an appropriately grim opening gesture but also the thematic cell from which much of the subsequent melodic material is derived. The agitated first subject not only relates to the falling seventh but also anticipates the tragedy implicit in the funeral march that comes later. Chopin is not prepared to shut out the light at this stage, however, and it is not the first subject - he omits it from the recapitulation - but the more lyrical second subject which assumes the greater importance in the construction, bringing about the B flat major ending of the movement.

This same lyrical inspiration illuminates the G flat major trio section of the second movement. But this time the demons which persecute the E flat minor first section return in full-scale vehemence and, although the trio section is briefly recalled, the ending in the relative major is distinctly uneasy. Schumann felt that, after this “bold, intelligent and imaginative” second movement, “an adagio in D flat, say, would have had an immeasurably more beautiful effect” than the “still more sombre funeral march” which actually does follow - and which, of course, is unquestionably appropriate in a context so thoughtfully prepared to accommodate both its ceremonial B flat minor outer sections and its consolatory but still sorrowful middle section in D flat major.

There is no consolation of any kind in the ghostly flight of bare octave triplets which, exclusively, haunt the Presto last movement. Schumann said it is “more mockery than music.” Mendelssohn couldn’t understand it at all. For Chopin, who simply described it as “a short finale of about three pages…the left hand chattering unisono with the right hand,” there was apparently nothing very special about this extraordinary adventure in dry textures, sotto voce dynamics and fugitive harmonies.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

La Valse - poème choréographique

With the possible exception of Boléro, all of Ravel’s orchestral works were composed at the piano. Both the solo-piano and the two-piano versions of La Valse, for example, far from being transcriptions of the ballet score, were preliminary stages in its development. They are both finished works, however, not sketches: it was in the two-piano version that the work was first performed in public, by the composer himself with his Italian colleague Alfredo Casella, in Vienna in October 1920.

It was also in a piano version that Ravel and Marcelle Meyer had introduced La Valse to Sergei Diaghilev who, having commis­sioned the score for his Ballets Russes, now turned it down, declaring it “a masterpiece…but not a ballet…a painting of a ballet.” Although the composer was deeply offended by the incident, Diaghilev’s judgement was not unperceptive. It is true that in affording little more than glimpses of a whole variety of dances as they whirl past the observer, it is more an impression of the waltz than a waltz as such.

As the composer said, “I conceived the work as a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which is linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic and fateful whirlpool.” The fantastic and fateful events are reserved for the second half of a construction which, basically, is divided into two unequal parts. In the first part, after gradually gathering itself out of quiet and rhythmically indistinct rumblings in the bass and a few suggestive scraps of melody, a waltz-time momentum launches a sequence of more less developed dances.

As the first half ends, on a fortissimo climax, the low rumblings are heard again. The momentum is quickly recovered but it is more pressing this time. Melodies familiar from the first half reappear but now under the pressure of an accelerating tempo, rising dynamic intensity, and increasingly reckless harmonic aggression in what the composer himself described as a “frenzy.” In its civilised context, the ending is as violent as anything in The Rite of Spring.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

La cathédrale engloutie

One of the classics of musical impressionism, La Cathédrale engloutie was first published as the ninth of Debussy’s first book of Préludes in 1910. It is based on legends surrounding the sunken city of Ys off the Brittany coast and its cathedral which is said to emerge from sea at the lowest of low tides. It finds its ecclesiastical atmosphere initially in the parallel fourths and fifths of 12th-century organum, its structure in the gradual materialisation of the bell tower, its climax in the massively sonorous triads of an archaic chorale, its ending in shrouded echoes of earlier material.

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Improvisation in C sharp minor, Op.84, No.5

Fauré’s Op.84 is a collection of eight little pieces which were written at various times between 1869 and 1902 and which the composer considered too slight to warrant separate publication. The first and fifth of them, for example, a so-called Capriccio in E flat major and a so-called Improvisation in C sharp minor - the titles were supplied by their publisher in spite of Fauré’s protestations - were written for sight-reading tests at the Paris Conservatoire. The C sharp minor piece was written in 1901, when the competing students had the good fortune to find themselves confronted by a tiny masterpiece with a poetic beginning, a surprisingly passionate development and a fragrantly delicate ending.

Mily Balakirev (1837-1910)

Islamey, oriental fantasy

Balakirev, who was considered an excellent pianist, couldn’t play Islamey. Its first performance was given by Nikolay Rubinstein -“poor wretched fellow that I am” - in St Petersburg in 1869 and for decades after that it had a reputation not only as one of the most imaginative works written for the piano but also one of the most difficult. Liszt admired it so much that he awarded it a regular place in his repertoire and he got his pupils to learn it too. Ravel was so impressed that he deliberately set out to write something even more difficult in the Scarbo movement of his Gaspard de la nuit.

Actually, Ravel had long been interested in Balakirev’s music but not so much for its virtuoso pianism as for its exotic qualities, which were a revelation and an inspiration to him when he discovered the Russian “mighty handful” in his student days. Islamey is rich in exotic rhythm and melody. The first two themes of the opening B-flat-minor Allegro agitato derive from Kabardian folk dances Balakirev had heard and noted on visits to the Caucasus in the early 1860s. Both of them, but particularly the first (known locally as “Islamey”), depend for their exhilarating effect in their piano translation on the rapid repeated notes which are only the first of the many difficulties the pianist encounters in the work.

There is a respite when the tempo slows to Andante espressivo for the D major middle section and the introduction of a languorous Tartar melody Balakirev first heard when an Armenian actor sang it at a gathering in Tchaikovsky’s home in 1869. The calm does not last long however. Unexpectedly, and with astonishing technical skill on the composer’s part, the Tartar melody is not so much integrated into a reprise of the Allegro agitato material as transformed to become part of it, to take on its rhythmic impetus and, in a final variant of massive dynamic proportions and exceptional technical difficulty, to radiate even more energy than its companions.

Gerald Larner©