Three Impromptus, D.899

Wigmore 23/1/96

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Three Impromptus, D.899

No.2 in E flat major: allegro

No.3 in G flat major: andante

No.4 in A flat major: allegretto

It would be difficult to construct an attractive and balanced recital of Schubert and Brahms piano music with not one piece in sonata form and without even a set of variations. Today’s programme is not far off it, however. Of the eighteen pieces represented here, all but one of them are ternary constructions - abbreviated by Brahms or extended by Schubert though they might be - and there are no variations.

The three pieces chosen from Schubert’s first set of Impromptus, D.899, are a revelation of how versatile ternary form can be. The first section of the Allegro in E flat major is itself a ternary construction, enclosing a not quite so carefree episode in the minor. The triplet figuration runs on without interruption towards an abrupt modulation to B minor for the belligerent middle section - which, though only briefly recalled after the reprise of the first section, secures an unexpectedly grim ending in E flat minor. The Andante in G flat is a wonderfully sustained song not quite without words - it is closely related to Schubert’s Schlegel setting Die Gebüsche - which retains its characteristic broken chord accompaniment between melodic line and bass line from the first bar to the last. In spite of its seamless continuity, however, there is a clearly defined middle section where, stirred by the change of harmony to E flat minor, the left hand joins in a passionate duet with the right. Structurally, the Allegretto in A flat major seems to be little different from the Allegro in E flat major. In fact, it is its exact opposite in that the charming melodious first section remains quite unaffected by the dramatic and recklessly modulating middle section in C sharp minor and, on its reprise, waltzes unconcernedly towards its A flat major ending.

Two Impromptus, D.935

No.1 in F minor: allegro moderato

No.4 in F minor: allegro scherzando

The second set of Impromptus was clearly intended as a companion to the first: the four pieces are unambiguously labelled as Impromptus in the manuscript where they are numbered from 5 to 8. When they were first published in 1839 no one could have been aware of that, however, and Robert Schumann, who reviewed the publication in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, found it “difficult to believe that Schubert really gave them the title of Impromptus.” He was convinced that at least two and perhaps even three of them were movements of a possibly incomplete sonata which Diabelli was offering to the public under a more commercial title. Obviously, he was wrong but he did have good cause both to suspect the integrity of Schubert’s publishers - though not in this particular case - and to sense something of the presence of a sonata. After all, the first Impromptu is in sonata form.

Or is it? The Allegro moderato in F minor has all the attributes of sonata form except the one element which, by 1827, had become essential to it. Where the development section ought to be there is an episode which is not only more interesting than the rest but also quite independent of it. A miniature impromptu in itself - the right hand sustaining a broken chord figuration while the left crosses it in a seriously poetic conversation between treble and bass - the central episode enjoys the privilege of being recalled, if in abbreviated form, in the recapitulation. To give Schumann credit where it is due, he did doubt that the fourth Impromptu, though appropriately in F minor, could have been the finale to a sonata beginning with the Allegro moderato. It could be the scherzo in such a work except thatits extraordinary spontaneity and unpredictability, this Allegro scherzando is the most impromptu of all Schubert’s Impromptus and as capricious as any of Brahms’s Capriccios.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Seven Fantasies, Op.116

Capriccio in D minor: presto energico

Intermezzo in A minor: andante

Capriccio in G minor: allegro passionato

Intermezzo in E major: adagio

Intermezzo in E minor: andante con grazia

Intermezzo in E major: andantino teneramente

Capriccio in D minor: allegro agitato

Brahms wrote his last piano sonata in 1853 at the age of 20, his last set of piano variations ten years later and no solo piano music at all for as long as fifteen years after that. When he returned to the piano it was with the four Capriccios and four Intermezzos of Op.76 and, as far as the piano was concerned, he restricted himself to similarly small-scale pieces for the rest of his career. He had by no means abandoned large-scale forms - his last two symphonies, his last two concertos and a dozen major chamber works all date from this period - but in the last years of his life his most intimate statements and most daring technical experiments were confided to the piano. The last four sets of short pieces, Op.116 to Op.119, were written during summer holidays at Ischl in 1892 and 1893 and dispatched from there by post to Clara Schumann who, he knew, would understand them as no one else could. “Even one listener,” Brahms said of these pieces, “is one too many.”

Although the long-term structural effect was clearly not a major preoccupation in Brahms’s thinking in these works, he did not ignore it. The Six Fantasies, Op.116, begin and end with a Capriccio in D minor and include a coherent sequence of three Intermezzos in E major, E minor and E major respectively. It is interesting too that, while at least one or two of them might well have been written some time before 1892, a subtly but consciously recurrent motif confirms that Brahms was not content merely to string these pieces together without postulating an internal relationship between them.

The falling thirds which, in one form or another, are such a prominent feature of the opening Capriccio in D minor reappear in the first bar of the Capriccio in G minor and echo throughout its outer sections. Although there is scarcely a trace of them in the Intermezzo in A minor - the affectionate tribute to Schubert which comes between the first two Capriccios - they are quite deliberately introduced into the Intermezzo in E major as a counterpoint to the second statement of the main theme. They appear again in the middle sections of both the worryingly hesitant and precariously harmonised Intermezzo in E minor and the contrastingly stable second Intermezzo in E major. The final Capriccio in D minor takes a firm hold on them in its dramatic main theme and presents them in virtuoso profile in the brief baroque-style cadenza.

Six Piano Pieces, Op.118

Intermezzo in A minor: allegro non assai ma molto passionato

Intermezzo in A major: andante teneramente

Ballade in G minor: allegro energico

Intermezzo in F minor: allegretto un poco agitato

Romance in F major: andante

Intermezzo in E flat minor: andante, largo e mesto

In the Six Piano Pieces, Op.118, Brhams seems at first sight to have abandoned his concern for long-term continuity. Although there are obvious harmonic links between the Intermezzo in A minor and the Intermezzo in A major and between the Intermezzo in F minor and the Romance in F major, there is no apparent logic in the order in which the six pieces are presented - except that the tonality gradually sinks from A minor to E flat minor, leaving the sequence eloquently incomplete on the most poignant of all Brahms’s piano pieces.

The opening theme of that last Intermezzo in E flat minor is based on the traditional melody of the Dies Iræ. Although Brahms makes no histrionic point of it, elaborating it for its poetic potential rather than stressing its characteristically stark outline, he nevertheless takes it seriously enough to anticipate it at several earlier points in the work, beginning with the main theme of the rhapsodic first Intermezzo in A minor. A more youthful Brahms is recalled in the cradle-song Intermezzo in A major and the famously heroic Ballade in G minor, while the Intermezzo in F minor is too preoccupied with its ingeniously concealed canonic textures to be concerned with anything but its own inner reflections. The theme presented in the left hand in the opening bars of the Romance in F major, on the other hand, is clearly based on the Dies Iræ plainsong, although its grim implications are far from explicit here and have not the least effect on the luminous baroque-style pastorale of the D major middle section. As for the Intermezzo in E flat minor itself, there is nothing quite like the estrangement of harmony and melodic line anywhere else in Brahms and, in spite of some characteristic defiance in G flat major in the middle section, nothing quite like the sense of resignation at the end.

Gerald Larner©