Programme — wigmore/goerner, Suite, Op.14, Allegretto …

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

Suite, Op.14

Allegretto

Scherzo

Allegro molto -

Sostenuto

Bartók’s researches into folk music were by no means restricted to Hungary. That is where he started in 1906 but three years later he was just as involved in Romanian folk song and in 1913 he was in North Africa collecting examples from the nomadic Arab tribes of Biskra. Unlike Kodály, he was open to “any influnce, be it Slovakian, Romanian, Arabic, or from any other source as long as it is clean fresh and healthy!”

By 1916, when Bartók wrote his Suite for piano, Op.14, the varying folk influences were thoroughly absorbed into his personal idiom. Although some of the rhythmic and harmonic innovations he was making at that time - notably in the Second String Quartet - do not derive from folk sources, they are merged in an indissoluble stylistic synthesis. In the Suite, Op.14, there is a strong whole-tone element, particularly in the opening Allegretto, which approaches its final bars with a whole-tone ascent over nearly four octaves. But there is an equally strong Romanian folk-dance flavour in it. In the middle, moreoever, there is a hint of the Arab tune sung with such fervour in the second movement of the Second String Quartet.

It is difficult to assign any national character to the augmented triads of the Scherzo, which reflects another aspect of the second movement of the Second String Quartetr. But the diminished fifths of the Allegro molto, with its swirling left-hand ostinato, seem to come straight from Biskra. It leads without a break into the Sostenuto which, though a close relation of the Arabian fourth movement of the Dance Suite, is so in form only: daringly constructed choral passages alternate with allusions to a melody which, in its more explicit form in the first movement of the Second String Quartet, is clearly Hungarian.

Etudes, Op.18

Allegro molto

Andante sostenuto

Rubato

The three Etudes, Op.18, represent the extreme point Bartok reached in terms of harmonic innovation. Completed in 1918, they are comparable not only to Debussy’s Etudes but also to Schoenberg’s Three Pieces, Op.11, both of which works he clearly knew very well. What stopped him going further and adopting the “species of 12-note music” which he confessed he was approaching at the time was the influence of the folk music he had so thoroughly absorbed over the last dozen years or so. The opening Allegro molto, in spite of its octave displacements and the awkwardly wide intervals in the right hand, remains a close relation of the Allegro barbaro of 1911: indeed, it quotes that work at one point. The Andante sostenuto could almost have been written by a Debussy under the influence of Schoenberg and yet its melodic lines and, still more, the decorations applied to it have clear folksong derivations. In the third of the Etudes, although the rhythmical and metrical elements are as liberated as the expressionist harmonies, the improvisatory style of the piece is within the rubato-parlando Hungarian folksong tradition.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Fifteen Variations and fugue in E flat major, Op.35

Beethoven’s Op.34 and Op.35 were the first sets of variations which he dignified with an opus number. Up to that time he had written a dozen sets of piano variations, none of them very ambitious, all of them confined within the limitations of what was then the most popular and the least enterprising of classical forms. In 1802 he deliberately set out to change all that, and so began the process by which the theme and variations - culminating in the “Diabelli” set of 1823 - were elevated to a status at least equal to that of the sonata.

Although Beethoven’s variation technique in his Op.35 was, as he said “quite new” to his contemporaries, his innovations were influenced by the practice of a previous generation. The baroque period was the golden age of variations, with Bach’s “Goldberg” set - which Beethoven certainly knew and admired - perhaps the greatest example of all. His indebtedness to Bach shows most clearly towards the end, in the last variations, which is a highly decorative Largo, and the fugue, which precedes the sublimated da capo of the original theme.

These are not the only baroque characteristics of Op.35. For the most part they are not the usual classical variations on a melody but variations on a bass, like Bach’s “Goldberg.” This is why - as in the last movement of the “Eroica” Symphony a year later - he begins by introducing only the bass of his favourite dance tune from his Prometheus ballet score, without the melody. He repeats the bass three times, adding a contrapuntal voice on each occasion, and only then presents the theme as a whole. Given this other dimension, with its stimulus to his wit, Beethoven can afford to observe the classical conventions: until the fifteenth (Largo) variation in 6/8 there is no change of metre from the original 2/4 and no change of tempo from Allegretto vivace; until the fourteenth (in E flat minor) there is no change of key signature from the E flat major of the theme and only one departure from the pattern of two eight-bar parts, each part repeated. But this is where the greatness of the work begins.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Two Nocturnes, Op .27

No.1 in C sharp minor

No.2 in D flat major

Of the two Nocturnes written in 1845 for the Countess d’Apponyi, pianists tend to prefer the second in D flat major. The first in C sharp minor is particularly interesting, however, for the peculiarly personal use Chopin makes of a common harmonic device - left-hand C sharp arpeggios omitting the third of the triad and a right-hand melody equivocating poignantly between E and E sharp. Any of Chopin’s contemporaries could have done it but only a composer inspired by the sound of the piano - by the contrast in colour between the dark shadow of the left-hand arpeggios and the bright line of the melodic voice - could have made anything as beautiful of it. In the end, incidentally the decision is made in favour of C sharp major, but only after and long and agitated middle section.

The attraction of the D flat major is, above all, its highly decorative passages of purely pianistic figuration. It is also a masterful example of continuous melodic development, uninterrupted by a contrasting middle section, effortlessly sustained in the right hand over a regular arpeggio in the left.

Sonata in B minor, Op.58

Allegro mæstoso

Scherzo: molto vivace

Largo

Finale: presto non tanto

Chopin was always happier inventing his own forms - as in the Polonaise-Fantaisie, the Fantasia in F minor, and the ballades - than conforming to classical precedent. Sonata form, however, was something which he had to come to terms with. On his first attempt, at the age of 18 in the Piano Sonata in C minor, he failed. But he got by very effectively in the two concertos a couple of years later and in 1839 - in the Sonata in B flat minor- he bent the form to his own will with great authority. The Sonata in B minor was written in 1844 and, bearing in mind the problems he had had to solve five years earlier, no one can blame Chopin for more or less reproducing in the first movement the structure he had carved out for himself in the Sonata in B flat minor. He was to make a different and quite masterful approach to the same problem in the Cello Conata in G minor a year or two later.

The issues of the Allegro maestoso of the Piano Sonata in B minor are not the classical ones of balance and of reconciliation of tonal conflicts. Emotions are what matter. Key relationships are important, of course, but in the first movement the contrast in mood between the unsmiling first subject and the peaceful second subject - a contrast symbolised by their key relationship - is more significant. The tendency of the movement is not so much to re-assert the original key as to assert the optimism of the second subject over the initial mood. Which is why, after an improvisatory and apparently spontaneous development section, Chopin declines to recapitulate the opening theme, preferring to devote the last part of the construction to celebrating the serenity achieved by the second subject in B major.

Having got the most difficult part over, he now abandons his 1839 model. He retains his optimism in an uncommonly happy Scherzo in E flat major, setting the lovely middle section most significantly in B major, which is not only intriguingly remote from the outer sections but also reminiscent of the serenity achieved in the first movement.

The Largo is no funeral march. It begins with an unexpectedly dramatic gesture but then melts into a melodic rapture in B major which is not only sustained but actually intensified in the liberated modulations of the middle section. But Chopin without his nightmares would not be Chopin and they return to haunt him in the Finale - a persecuted movement of rondo shape and virtuoso velocity which finds emotional relief in the major-key episodes but no definitive security until, almost playfully, the coda asserts the key and affirms the mood it has been the whole function of the sonata to secure.