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Composed in 1720–1722, Johann Sebastian Bach’s French and English Suites and Partitas are broadly expanded cycles of pieces in which traditional sections that are dance-like in character (allemande, courante, sarabande, jig and minuet) alternate with non-dance sections.
Bach intended some of his keyboard music for clavichord with its intimate “domestic” sound, other pieces for harpsichord, the rich colours of which and its sharper, more sparkling timbre put it in the position of being able to draw the interest of a small assembly or a salon of amateur performers. In a large and modern concert hall, this is also accepted by leading Bach historian Albert Schweizer, for whom the sound of the harpsichord was “so enchantingly close ... it appears weak and somewhat jarring or rasping at a distance of seven or eight metres.”
Today, both authentic interpretations of keyboard pieces on the harpsichord (the modern technique facilitates an intensification, a sotto voce, of its sound) and on the modern piano, which brought to life Bach’s dream of a “melodious manner of performing”, are in demand in equal measure. Schweizer was right when he stated that “In essence, all of Bach’s works were written for the ideal instrument, borrowing the possibilities of polyphonic playing from the harpsichord and all the advantages of extracting sound from string instruments.”
Iosif Raiskin
The Sonata in A Minor – one of Franz Schubert’s most original works for piano – was composed in February 1823 during a brief respite between acute medical conditions. It emerged alongside such masterpieces as the vocal cycle Die Schöne Müllerin and incidental music for the play Rosamunde.
Compared with later sonatas, that in A Minor is not vast in terms of scale. However, the three sections are unusually rich in musical ideas that crowd the score, quickly and wilfully replacing one another. (Perhaps because of the fact that this sonata was preceded by some ideas for sonatas that the composer began and then abandoned, the ideas in them that failed to produce a result here determined to find room for expression?) The first section (Allegro giusto) is filled with anxious contrasts. It is as if Schubert is throwing him from one extreme to another with no definite plan, and so the form appears chaotic. The second section (a kind of intermezzo) leaves the impression of some kind of incompleteness. The lyricism of this Andante gives an edge to the invasive and anxious motif from within, and the agitated finale (Allegro vivace) is more reminiscent of a scherzo.
Anna Bulycheva
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Frédéric Chopin composed almost two dozen nocturnes, starting in 1829 as a young man and continuing until his death. By that time, the genre already had a long history. Initially, the nocturnes were called evening services in the Catholic Church, and in the 18th century they began to be known as orchestral suites that were performed at night time – a kind of serenade. This is what Mozart’s orchestral nocturnes are like.
The genre was rediscovered in 1812 by the Irish musician John Field. He succeeded in transforming the nocturne into drawing room music for the piano – it was at this time that “night scenes” began to gain in popularity in theatres, lit by moonlight, sometimes idyllic, sometimes gloomy or “gothic”. In turn, Chopin transformed the nocturne into something akin to “songs without words”. In his nocturnes, starting with his very first opuses, he imitates various vocal genres – arias, romances and even chorales. The performer has to be able to make the piano sing. And as the bel canto style was in fashion and Chopin was a fanatical admirer of opera, the melodies of the nocturnes are typically “lit up” with extremely virtuoso ornamental passages.
Chopin wrote his Polonaise in F Sharp Minor between 1840 and 1841.
When Chopin was working on his late polonaises (and these could take over a year), Verdi and his countrymen were placing virtuoso cabalettas in the rhythm of a polonaise in the mouths of their protagonists without fear or reproof. Unfortunately, Chopin never wrote a national Polish opera as had been expected of him in his homeland... If he had done so the protagonist would undoubtedly have had an aria in the style of a polonaise. But the composer’s piano polonaises are no less virtuoso and are equally vast in form, demanding the same level of brilliance from the performer and a truly orchestral sound from the piano.
Chopin’s contemporaries knew of poetic and vocal ballades that told of fateful occurrences or of these being foretold. These ballades were fashionable during the Romantic period, but Chopin was the first to call them instrumental works. He was far from copying the strophic form of vocal ballades, instead creating something concentrated, close to the sonata. It is believed that his first four ballades for piano were inspired by Adam Mickiewicz’s Świtezianka – the story of a mermaid who kills a young man. Chopin himself never confirmed this but almost all of his ballades were written in the theme of a barcarole imitating the ceaseless movement of the waves.
The two last ballades are among the composer’s late works. Ballade No 3 was written in the summer of 1841, and Chopin never stopped refining and perfecting it. Ballade No 4 appeared in the summer of 1842, which Chopin spent together with the artist Eugéne Delacroix – the head of the French Romantic school in painting.
Anna Bulycheva
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