Unlike either Mozart or Beethoven, Joseph Haydn was never primarily a virtuosic keyboard player. Nonetheless, he habitually composed at the keyboard, explaining to his biographer Albert Christoph Dies that his musical ideas arose out of his improvisations: “My imagination plays on me as if I were a keyboard … I am really just a living keyboard.”
Like Beethoven, however, Haydn wrote piano sonatas throughout his life: the authentic canon is now believed to comprise some fifty-two works. In addition, he composed some forty piano trios making brilliant use of the instrument in the context of chamber music.
Haydn’s career spanned the period during which the harpsichord - mainstay of the Baroque - was gradually being replaced by the new fortepiano the instrument that could play not only loud or soft, but all the gradations in between. Indeed, nuanced dynamics (rather than the “terraced dynamics” of the Baroque) are one of the chief aspects of the Classical style.
The Sonata in D Major, Hob.XVI:37, was published by Artaria in 1780, the third of a set of six. (The date of composition is not known precisely, though it was between 1771 and 1779.) The edition bore the Opus number 30, suggesting that these Sonatas are roughly contemporaneous with the famous String Quartets of Opus 33 (published in 1781) which Haydn himself had stated were composed “in a new and special way.”
Critics found the same to be true of the 1780 Piano Sonatas for, as one observed: “These Sonatas present new features, passages full of daring. It is to be hoped they eclipse the pieces that no longer measure up to the celebrity of this Composer due to impropriety or harshness of style.”
Though himself an accomplished pianist, Debussy turned to composition for the instrument slowly and reluctantly. His teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, Marmontel, remarked “Debussy isn’t very fond of the piano, but he loves music.” One of Debussy’s chief interests was tonal color, and it clearly took him some time to discover (and he did discover) how to bring his own magical palette to the piano.
Estampes literally means “prints,” a term borrowed from graphic arts. The title is carefully chosen: Debussy intends the three works to be small-scale evocations, miniatures, each capturing the essence of a single glimpse. (It is said that in childhood, Debussy preferred small pictures with large margins!) Nowhere does one have the sense of a large canvas capable of relating the events of a whole afternoon (with or without fauns), or portraying so vast and complex a subject as the sea.
The set was composed during 1903 and received its première at the Société Nationale the same year, performed by the Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes (a friend of Debussy and Ravel, and incidentally, the piano teacher of Poulenc).
The first Estampe is entitled Pagodes (Pagodas), and evokes the Far East. Debussy is known to have been entranced with the sound of the Javanese gamelan that he heard at the Paris International Expositions of 1889 and 1900. Comprised largely of percussion instruments (xylophones, metallophones, gongs, and drums), the gamelan is evoked at the piano through the continuous use of bell-like effects, and irregular motives, reflective of the non-Western rhythmic organization of Indonesian music. Debussy further summons the Orient through his use of pentatonic (five-note) scales: four distinct examples are heard in Pagodes.
The second glimpse is of La Soirée dans Granade (Evening in Granada), another evocation of an exotic locale. Perhaps no annotator could characterize this piece better than Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, writing in the pages of Révue musicale: “[It] contains in a marvelously distilled way the most concentrated atmosphere of Andalusia. … The power of evocation … borders on the miraculous when one realizes that this music was composed by a foreigner guided by the foresight of genius. There is not even one bar of this music borrowed from the Spanish folklore, and yet the entire composition, in its most minute details conveys, admirably, Spain.”
The final picture is Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the rain). After two visits to exotic places, Debussy closes with a picture of France. This composition is different in other ways, as well. For while the first two evoke atmosphere in a timeless way, the third tells a little story, a narrative in time.
And whereas he used no folk material to evoke Spain, here Debussy employs fragments drawn from two French nursery rounds: Dodo, l’enfant do (Sleep, child, sleep) and Nous n’irons plus au bois (We’ll not return to the woods). The music opens with the first lullaby, and then the second is heard, softly, like raindrops. (Is this a wee joke? Perhaps we shall not go to the woods because it is raining!) A storm gathers, becomes violent, then passes, and the little narrative ends with the return of the brilliant sun, whose light now glistens in the reflections of the water-drops.
Debussy’s three-movement suite Pour le piano (For the Piano) was composed between January and April of 1901, two years before Estampes.
Like Estampes, >the suite draws on exotic musical elements (especially the pentatonic scale) that Debussy heard at the two Paris Universal Expositions previously mentioned. But here, the composer also explores another kind of exoticism: that of the distant Western past. His impulse to do so is a late manifestation of Romanticism; his methods were entirely forward looking. Most critics agree that Pour le piano is the major turning point in Debussy’s writing for the instrument.
In his search for unusual colors, Debussy had previously experimented with the Medieval scales called “modes” which (in nineteenth-century France) would have been familiar as the basis of the Gregorian Chant at the time still in daily use by the Roman Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, Debussy uses the modes in unconventional, idiosyncratic ways.
In Pour le piano Debussy also looks to the Baroque era in which the “suite” was the keyboard form par excellence. The opening Prélude owes more, perhaps, to examples from The Well-Tempered Clavier of Johann Sebastian Bach than to the préludes non mesurées of François Couperin and his forerunners.
Debussy’s choice of a Sarabande for the central movement also looks directly backward to his forebears. He was not the first of his circle to have done so: most critics see the influence of Erik Satie’s Sarabandes of 1887, noting (in particular) Satie’s use of chains of consecutive sevenths and ninths.
The closing Toccata. Debussy’s most virtuosic piece to date, is at the outer boundary of then-contemporary piano technique. Though essentially diatonic, modal and pentatonic elements “are always elbowing their way in” (in the words of Frank Dawes).
While the Irish composer John Field may not have been the very first composer to use the term nocturne in the Romantic sense - a work evoking the night - the eighteen examples he composed between 1813 and 1835 firmly established the genre, exhibiting many of the typical features later observed in Chopin’s examples.
First and foremost is the texture: an extended cantilena in the right hand accompanied by broken-chord figuration (frequently triplets) in the left. As the music proceeds, these melodies - clearly related to the contemporary idiom of bel canto opera as practiced by Bellini and Donizetti, among others - typically accumulate layers of florid pianistic embellishment.
Opus 72, no. 1, in E Minor
Despite its opus number, the E-minor Nocturne was Chopin’s first essay in the genre, composed in 1827 when he was only seventeen (though published only posthumously in 1855). While it instantly reveals its debt to Field, it also gives a foretaste of Chopinesque things to come: For one thing, the range of the accompaniment is particularly broad, extending more than two octaves. For another, Chopin introduces dissonances within the accompanimental figure itself - the falling semitone C-B in the opening bars. (Field’s accompaniments nearly always use chord tones exclusively.) This is early evidence of Chopin’s ability to enrich the musical texture by giving “the accompaniment” a more integrated role.
Opus 13, no. 3, in G Minor
The Nocturne in G Minor is one of Chopin’s most unusual - so unusual that one might not recognize it as such without Chopin’s title - as was observed by early critics, among them Chopin’s advocate Robert Schumann. The melodies are simple not florid; the accompaniment chordal not arpeggiated. The second beat of the measure is frequently accented; the larger structure of the piece depends on chromatic moves. Indeed, the music has much in common with another favorite Chopin genre: the mazurka. Composed during Chopin’s earliest years in Paris, the G-Minor Nocturne may well represent the young composer’s yearning for his homeland.
Opus 27, no. 1, in C-sharp Minor
Opus 27, no. 2, in D-flat Minor
Published in 1836, the two Nocturnes of Opus 27 are generally conceded to be Chopin’s finest examples of the genre. More than one critic has been reminded of Beethoven’s “nocturne,” the “Moonlight” Sonata in the same key. Its companion piece in D-flat minor was a particular favorite of Mendelssohn’s. The theme appears three times, each time with different effect and ornamented with different arabesques.
Written at Nohant, George Sand’s summer home 180 miles south of Paris during the summer of 1842 and published a year later as Opus 52, the Fourth Ballade is one of Chopin’s very greatest works, accomplishing in only twelve minutes what it takes many sonatas twice that time to do.
In choosing the title “Ballade” for four of his compositions, Chopin knowingly alludes to a literary genre rather than a musical one. (He appears to have remarked to Schumann that he was “influenced by” the Ballady of his countryman Adam Mickiewicz. But whether each Chopin composition relates to a specific Mickiewicz poem or a more abstract notion remains a matter of considerable musicological debate.)
Nonetheless, it is evident that Chopin’s Ballades do not spring from formal musical concepts such as the sonata form. Just as a story’s structure depends on its specific content, so do Chopin’s four Ballades; it is thus not a surprise that no two of them are alike.
The Fourth Ballade opens cryptically: not with an expository (sonata-like) statement of a clear musical idea (or even a “Classical slow introduction”), but rather in media res, as though a distant memory were being recalled to mind.
Then, in the minor mode, a fragment of melody emerges. The rhythm is indecisive; the harmony is inconclusive. But as the music proceeds, the melodic fragments begin to accumulate musical meaning as they are juxtaposed with one another. The process is associative (Romantic) rather than linear (Classical); cumulative (Romantic) rather than developmental (Classical). Throughout, chromatic harmony casts a Romantic play of light and shadow across the central narrative strand.
As the pianist’s hands move further apart into the deep bass and high treble, the music grows in scope and power; the original melody is enriched first with countermelodies, then with chordal doublings; the accompaniment grows more complex. The music reaches its first fortissimo climax, then shatters into a shower of “Chopin fireworks.”
A gently rocking “barcarolle” theme in the major mode is heard: it, too, seems somehow undefined, in the process of coming into being. Shadows fall once more when the minor mode and the brillante figuration return. A reference to the opening material (in major mode) leads to another shower of fireworks.
Fragments of the opening material accumulate (with new contrapuntal accompaniment and in rapidly altering changes of mode from minor to major and back) until a full statement in its simple version is heard.
Brillante figuration becomes more and more insistent until a descending chromatic scale leads to a major-mode restatement of the now-fully-formed “barcarolle” theme (highly decorated with accompanimental figurations in the left hand).
The Ballade concludes with a powerful coda featuring two-hand arpeggios, the harmonic confusion of rapid, crashing chords, a pianissimo moment of repose. A “stretto” passage (where thematic fragments chromatically tumble over each other) leads to the final shower of fireworks that brings the work to a virtuosic brillante conclusion.
— © 2007 Nathan A. Randall