VIENNESE MASTERWORKS: BRAHMS & MORE FOR SOLO PIANO

i. Allegro
ii. Adagio
iii. Finale. Presto
Composed in 1794, this is the last and most imposing of Haydn’s piano sonatas. Donald Francis Tovey (who devoted the first five pages of his essay on the work to an analysis of the first twelve bars) wrote that ‘neither Haydn nor Mozart succeeded in writing many mature pianoforte solo of such importance as this sonata’. Haydn wrote it in London for one of the capital’s finest pianists, Therese Jansen. He conceived on a grand scale, but was also daringly original – even by his own standards. from the thick, almost orchestral sound of the opening chords of the large sonata for first movement. The slow movement is in the remotest possible key – E major – and it is a rich, hymn-like piece which is derived almost entirely from the figure heard in its first bar. The finale begins with a series of repeated Gs from which the main theme stutters into life, and the harmonies return to the work’s home key of E flat – a brilliant shock tactic from Haydn who proceeds to transform the start of the main theme into the movement’s main accompaniment figure, and to drive towards an exciting close.

i. Andante, after the Scottish ballad ‘Edward’
ii. Andante, espressivo e dolce – Allegro non troppo
iii. Intermezzo. Allegro
iv. Andante con moto
Brahms composed this set of four Ballades in Düsseldorf in 1854 (when he was 20), at a time when Robert and Clara Schumann were promoting the young Brahms’s career. The poetic ballad on which the musical form was based involved a verse narrative with refrains. Chopin’s famous group of Ballades had been written between 1831 and 1842 and treated this idea very freely. As Charles Rosen has pointed out, Brahms was more faithful to the medieval origins of the poetic form, describing his approach as ‘more thoroughly neo-Gothic’. The four Ballades are in two pairs, linked by related keys. The first two are in D minor and D major, while the third and fourth are in B minor and B major. The first Ballade was directly inspired by an ancient Scottish ballad that had been published in German by the poet Johann Gottfried Herder. It is a gruesome tale of Edward’s sword dripping with the blood of his father and ending with him cursing his mother, though Brahms’s piece – although stormy and passionate in the middle section – does not really evoke the mood of the poem. Instead, there’s a sense of its formal qualities and its symmetry. The second Ballade begins slowly, but the main Allegro non troppo section is dramatic, dominated by an obsessive rhythm of four quavers that returns later to provide a kind of ghostly knocking. The third Ballade is headed ‘Intermezzo’ and it is a Scherzo-like piece in B minor, with a central Trio section that introduces an ethereal idea in F sharp major. The final Ballade begins as sweeping triple-time movement, but Brahms introduces a remarkable contrasting idea, with a marking worthy of late Beethoven: Più lento. Col intimissimo sentimento, ma senza troppo marcare la melodia (Slower. With most intimate feeling, but without heavily marking the melody)

Composed between 1921 and 1923, Arnold Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano Op. 25 is the earliest work in which the composer deployed his 12-tone technique in every movement. Earlier compositions – the Five Pieces for Piano, Op. 23 (1920–23) and the Serenade, Op. 24 (1920-1923) – make use of tone rows only in a single movement. Rather than deploying traditional tonal relationships, the Suite is constructed of permutations of a sequence of all 12 chromatic pitches. The basic ‘tone row’ (order of the pitches) is: E–F–G–D♭–G♭–E♭–A♭–D–B–C–A–B♭. For the first time, Schoenberg employs transpositions and inversions of this tone row; beginning the row on a different pitch but following the same contour, and presenting the row as a mirror image (a step up of a tone becomes a step down of a tone, and so on). 

In other regards, however, the Suite is quite traditional. In form and style, it echos the Baroque Suite; an popular form for instrumental music in the 17th Century consisting of a series of dances. Schoenberg’s suite has six movements or dances: 

i. Präludium (or prelude) 
ii. Gavotte (characterized by a moderately quick quadruple meter, a distinctive upbeat, and often involving hopping or skipping steps) 
iii. Musette (a lively dance) 
iv. Intermezzo  
v. Menuett. Trio (a dance in triple time) 
vi. Gigue (a lively concluding movement) 

The suite was first performed by Schoenberg’s pupil Eduard Steuermann in Vienna on 25 February 1924.   

i. Allegro
ii. Andante
iii. Scherzo. Allegro vivace
iv. Rondo. Allegro ma non troppo
The so-called ‘Pastoral’ Sonata was composed in 1801, and the nickname is justified by the generally sunny mood of parts of the work, especially its finale. In fact it could hardly have been written at a more traumatic time in Beethoven’s life: this was the year in which he confessed to a few of his closest friends that he was losing his hearing. Published by the Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie in Vienna, it was described as a ‘Grande Sonate’ and dedicated to Joseph Freiherr von Sonnenfels (1732–1817), a friend of Mozart and a liberal thinker whose chief claim to fame was bringing about the abolition of torture in Austria in 1776. After a first movement that shows signs of real stress and tension in the turbulent development, the slow movement, in D minor, is restrained and rather despondent. The Scherzo is a startling contrast to this – playful in parts and also dramatic in the central Trio section. The last movement is a gentle and bucolic Rondo.

Nigel Simeone ©2014