Programme — wigmore/melnikov, Sonata in E minor, Op.90, Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck …

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Sonata in E minor, Op.90

Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck

Nicht zu geschwind and sehr singbar vorgetragen

The Piano Sonata in E minor, like its immediate predecessor, Les Adieux, is one of the few Beethoven works of its kind to have been inspired by events in life around him. Dedicated to Count Moritz Lichnowsky, Op.90 is said to relate to the Count’s controversial marriage in 1814 to a woman - variously described as an actress and an opera singer - below his social station. According to his contemporary and biographer, Anton Schindler, Beethoven referred to the first of the two movements as a “struggle between the head and the heart” and to the second as a “conversation with the beloved.”

Although not everything Schindler wrote can be taken at face value, the character of the music does seem to bear him out in this particular case . The E minor first movement (“Lively and with feeling and expression throughout,” according to the German heading) is tersely argued with little time in it for lyrical reflection and none at all for playfulness. We are, however, presented with both sides of the argument. The first theme is a peremptory five-note motif, repeated three times in sequence. Immediately contrasted with it is a soft and syncopated theme with wider and more expressive intervals. The tough first theme of the second subject also has its direct contrast, in another quietly syncopated melody. Although the more expressive of the two first-subject themes is given sympathetic treatment in the development section, the general tendency of the movement is to sweep such sentiment aside.

The first movement ends on a sigh in E minor. The second (“Not too fast and very songlike”) begins in E major with a delightfully serene melody which suggests that the heart has won the struggle after all. This melody, with its Schumannesque left hand and cadence pattern, is precisely this sort of lyrical material which made the sonata such a difficult form for Beethoven’s romantic successors. It does not lend itself easily to development. Beethoven simply brings it back three times in its entirety, developing it scarcely at all, separating its appearances with more dramatic episodes - the conversation does not always run smooth - and incorporating it in a quietly happy coda.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Etudes symphoniques, Op.13

Schumann completed his Etudes symphoniques in 1837, the year in which he got engaged to Clara Wieck. Exceptionally in Schumann’s work at this time, however, the Etudes have little to do with Clara. They have more to do with a former fiancée, Ernestine von Fricken, whose father was an amateur musician and the composer of a set of variations on a funeral-march theme in C sharp minor. In 1834 Baron von Fricken sent the manuscript of his variations to Schumann, who promptly set about writing variations of his own on the same theme. Although he abandoned the project almost as quickly as he abandoned Ernestine, he did not forget the theme.

Schumann returned to the theme two years later, stimulated this time by his long-standing interest in the problem of writing technical studies which, like Chopin’s, are also “true poetic images.” He was concerned too that his studies should be part of a continuous “symphonic” construction. Variation form was clearly the answer. But of the ten variations he had written on the Fricken’s theme in 1834, only two were suitable for the new set of studies. One of them, originally intended as the finale, became the first study in the new set. Its place at the end was taken by a finale which owes its existence to the inspiration of William Sterndale Bennett’s visit to Leipzig in 1836. As a tribute to Bennett - “thorough Englishman, glorious artist, a beautiful and poetic soul” - Schumann devised a movement based on Ha, stolzes England, freue dich! (“Proud England rejoice”) from Marschner’s Ivanhoe opera Der Templar und die Jüdin.

The complete work, now consisting of a theme with eleven study-variations and the finale, was dedicated to Sterndale Bennett and published in 1837 under the title of Etudes symphoniques. In 1852 Schumann issued a revised version under the title Etudes en forme de variations, dropping the third and ninth studies, relabelling the studies as variations and tightening up the construction of the finale. The Etudes symphoniques title was reinstated in the posthumous edition of 1857 and is now used to identify the work in whatever version it is to be performed.

Most modern performances are based on the 1852 edition but with the third and ninth studies retrieved from the 1837 version and the cuts restored in the finale. However, ever since Brahms included the long-since discarded 1834 variations in his edition of Schumann’ complete works (with Clara’s consent but much against her will) pianists have been moved by their youthful lyricism to find ways of incorporating some or all of them in the finished work. In today’s performance the fourth and fifth of the 1834 variations - both of them delightful examples of the spontaneity of Schumann’s initial reaction to Fricken’s theme - will be interpolated between the sixth and seventh variations of the 1852 edition.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Twenty-four Preludes, Op.28

No.1 in C major

No.2 in A minor

No.3 in G major

No.4 in E minor

No.5 in D major

No.6 in B minor

No.7 in A major

No.8 in F sharp minor

No.9 in E major

No.10 in C sharp minor

No.11 in B major

No.12 in G sharp minor

No.13 in F sharp major

No.14 in E flat minor

No.15 in D flat major

No.16 in B flat minor

No.17 in A flat major

No.18 in F minor

No.19 in E flat major

No.20 in C minor

No.21 in B flat major

No.22 in G minor

No.23 in F major

No.24 in D minor

Chopin completed his Twenty-four Preludes, Op.28, between November 1838 and February 1839 when he was staying in Majorca with George Sand and her children. It was a holiday which - as winter set in, as his piano failed to arrive, and as his health deteriorated - proved not to be the idyll it ought to have been. So much romantic literature has been written about Chopin at this time, coughing blood and banished by Majorcan ignorance to the deserted but supposedly haunted monastery of Valdemosa, that the preludes have taken on an additional, retrospective emotional colouring. Most of them were actually written in Paris before he left. No.7, a charming stray from the mazurkas, and No.17 date from as early as 1836, and only Nos.1, 2, 4, 10 and 21 were actually written on the island.

It is conceivable that the exotic sounding No.2 in A minor, with its syncopated ostinato and repeated fragments of melody has something to do with the Moorish aspect of Majorca. As for the famous “Raindrop,” No.15 in D flat, it is difficult to resist the temptation to set it in the monastery at Valdemosa, in spite of the chronological evidence to the contrary. True the repeated A flat of the outer sections would not disqualify the work from being associated with the most tranquil of the nocturnes, but the C sharp minor middle section, with its grimly obsessive G sharps and snatches of plainsong, suggests that this part at least might have been written there. On the other hand, while Liszt considered No.8 in F sharp minor as the Prelude inspired by the rainstorm at Valdemosa, No.6 in B minor would also qualify.

After the efforts of George Sand and Liszt and Chopin’s romantic biographers, the pathological aspect of the preludes does not need to be stressed here. What is more significant is that in this “cell shaped like a tall coffin,” beneath the “enormous vaulting covered with dust,” on that legendary “old square grubby box with a leaden candle stick and a little candle” was a copy of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. They more than anything else are the inspiration of Chopin’s 24 Preludes in 24 keys. The “raindrops” of Prelude No.15 in D flat major are already there in the repeated notes of the Prelude in C sharp major in Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Slightly alter the rhythm of Bach’s C major Prelude in Book 1 and there is Chopin’s “feverish” No.1 in C major. The continuous semiquaver figuration of Chopin’s No.5 in D minor, crossed by a fragment of melody in conflicting rhythm, the alternating runs and cadences of No.10 in C sharp minor, the radiant right-hand arpeggios in No.23 in F major are all anticipated in the Preludes in corresponding keys in Bach’s Book 1.

The Bach-inspired preludes are usually those which most resemble the technical studies of Op.10 and Op.25. Many of the others are studies in expression, perhaps even sketches for other works, like the flight of bare octaves crossing No.14 in E flat minor in a triplet figuration anticipating the last movement of the Sonata in B flat minor. There is an alternative funeral march in No.20 in C minor and an embryonic scherzo in No.22 in G minor. No.17 could be an experiment with the gondoliera form which he later developed even more impressively in the Barcarolle, Op.60. Nocturnes occur regularly, as in No.13 in F sharp major, the melodic style of which seems to owe something to Liszt, though the derivation here is not as clear as the Schumann influence in No.18 in F minor and Beethoven’s Appassionata melody in No.24 in D minor.

Outside the Op.24 set, incidentally, there are two other Chopin Preludes - a rarely heard example in A flat major written in 1834 but not published until 1918 and the harmonically fascinating C sharp minor, Op.45, of 1841.

Gerald Larner©