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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.
Ludwig van Beethoven. Sonata No 23 in F Minor (Appassionata), Op. 57
Sonata No 23 was written by Beethoven in 1804–1805 and is dedicated to Count Franz von Brunswick. The title Appassionata was added in 1838 by the publisher August Krantz, who produced an arrangement of the sonata for piano for four hands. In this form the piece’s virtuoso music became more accessible to amateurs, and the passion accentuated by the title attracted admirers of new and romantic art – although there is just as much iron willpower in the sonata as there is passion.
Beethoven himself mentioned a connection between this work and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The agitated contrasts and countless “chiaroscuro” effects in the first passage and the elemental power of the finale are in complete harmony with his words. The noble and lofty second passage is filled with ethereal peace. The contours of its theme, classical in their simplicity, do not become lost and may be heard clearly in each of the four variations.
The composer considered the Appassionata, similar to the Heroische symphony in spirit and scale, to be the greatest of his piano sonatas. Its tremendous popularity subsequently confirmed that Beethoven was right.
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Edvard Grieg did not always consider himself to be a Norwegian composer. Having graduated from the Leipzig Conservatoire, he moved to Copenhagen. There, in 1863, he composed his Six Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 3, where there is absolutely nothing at all that is Norwegian, though Grieg appeared as an original lyricist for the first time – the composer-to-be of the famous Lyric Pieces. The composer’s vivid individuality can be felt particularly strongly in the final two “pictures” (in F Major and E Minor).
Grieg’s only sonata – in E Minor, Op. 7, was written just two years earlier, but the Schumannesque romanticism is pleasantly blended with the national style here. Even the minuet is similar to a Norwegian dance. The four-part sonata disproves the view of Grieg as a miniaturist. The stormy temperament, not always typical for him but suddenly explosive here, did not prevent him creating a strict and precise form.
The sonata is dedicated to the violinist and composer Niels Gade, head of the Society of Music and the Conservatoire in Copenhagen, then the traditional place to live for young Norwegian composers. Musical life in the 1860s was still too provincial for them...
Images of Faust and Mephistopheles accompanied Franz Liszt throughout his life. He composed the Faust-Symphony after Goethe’s tragedy, virtuoso adaptations of highlights from Gounod’s Faust and Berlioz’ La Damnation de Faust, four original Mephisto Waltzes and a Mephisto Polka. The four waltzes were inspired not by Goethe’s masterpiece but by the poem Faust by the Hungarian Nikolaus Lenau (1836). The poem stands out for its exaggeratedly romantic interpretation of the theme and may rightly take its place in the assembly of “romantic devilry” – Lenau’s Mephistopheles is more vivid than Faust himself, which naturally did not escape Liszt’s attention.
Mephisto Waltz No 1 (with the secondary title The Dance in the Village Inn, an episode from Lenau’s Faust) was composed between 1856 and 1861 and was orchestrated immediately. The waltz deceptively opens with an imitation of a village orchestra tuning up and goes on to develop into an entire symphonic poem, a veritable apotheosis of the romantic waltz which appears languorous, fantastic and demonic... to conclude in phantasmagoria. Moreover, the first Mephisto Waltz, dedicated to virtuoso pianist Carl Tausig, is a staggeringly brilliant concert piece!
Anna Bulycheva
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