The following are Program Notes for the Masters of the Keyboard concert with Paul Lewis at the 92nd Street Y on May 10. Masters of the Keyboard series subscriptions for the 2008-09 season featuring Hélène Grimaud, Garrick Ohlsson, Peter Serkin and Shai Wosner are now on sale.

MOZART: Fantasia in C minor, K. 475
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and died in Vienna in 1791. He wrote the Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 in 1785.

During the few short years of his lifetime, Mozart witnessed the introduction and widespread acceptance of a radically new keyboard instrument, the piano. Although he kept, and used, his beloved clavichord to the end of his life, he composed for and performed on the new pianoforte, or clavier, or Piano forte, or fortepiano—it took awhile for the name of the instrument to stabilize—from his twenties onward.

Beginning around 1760, Mozart’s father, Leopold, eagerly paraded his Wunderkinder—Wolfgang and his sister, Nannerl—before the public, demonstrating their superlative harpsichord and clavichord talents. (Wolfgang also performed on a tiny violin.) Into his adulthood, his father continued to advise Wolfgang about the efficacy of this or that clavichord or harpsichord.

In his childhood and adolescence, Mozart had those two instruments in his ear as he began to compose music for keyboard—both solo and in concert with other instruments. However, by the 1770s, he had become quite captivated by the hammered-string pianos being made by Johann Andreas Stein in Augsburg. In a letter dated October 17, 1777, Wolfgang wrote to his father from a tour stop in that city:

“Mon très cher Père! Let me start right off with Stein’s Piano forte. Before I had seen Stein’s work, I favored Spät’s claviers. But now I must give Stein’s claviers preference because they have a much better damper than the Regensburg instruments. If I strike the key hard, I may keep my finger down on it, or lift it up, the sound stops the instant I produced it. No matter how I play the keys, the tone is always even. There is no jangling noise, the sound will not get louder, or softer, or stop altogether, in one word: everything remains even.

“It is true, he won’t sell a Piano forte like this for less than 300 gulden, but the effort and care he puts into the instruments is beyond any price. What distinguishes his instruments from all others is that they are built with an escapement. Not one in a hundred will bother about this, but without escapement action you cannot possibly have a Piano forte that will not have a clangy and vibrating after-effect. When you press down on the keys, the little hammers fall back the moment they have struck the strings, no matter whether you keep the keys down or release them.

“He told me himself that after he has finished a clavier, he will first of all sit down and try all sorts of passages, runs and leaps, and then he goes on filing and fitting until the clavier does everything he wants it to…indeed, his pianos really last….He has three Piano fortes finished; I just played them again today.”

This enthusiasm for Stein’s instruments evidenced itself in the musical substance of the keyboard works that Mozart wrote after that time. Whether writing solo sonatas and sets of variations, chamber works with keyboard, or keyboard concertos, Mozart composed during his last 15 years—roughly corresponding with the time of his residency in Vienna—with an expectation of more robust and varied timbres than had been available to him on the clavichord and harpsichord.

Along with the rapid growth in the manufacture of pianos, the music publishing industry experienced a parallel surge in prominence. A growing segment of the population had sufficient income—and cultural aspiration—to warrant the purchase of a piano and the musical scores to perform upon it. Many of Mozart’s keyboard sonatas, sets of variations, and other solo works were intended for that market.

Mozart was able to supplement his income as pianist through sales of his music, principally to the well-established Viennese publishing house Artaria, which understood how to serve its burgeoning clientele. Although Mozart composed the Fantasia in C minor, K. 475, as an independent work (fully six months after he had completed the Sonata in C minor, K. 457), Artaria issued both new C minor compositions in 1785 as a tandem set to be learned by aspiring pianists. The Fantasia preceded the Sonata in that, and in subsequent, published editions. However, both works gain from performing, and hearing, them separately from each other, as the independent piano pieces that Mozart had imagined.

Completed in Vienna on May 20, 1785, the Fantasia is a five-section work of substantial emotional range. The somber adagio, the abrupt drama of the allegro, the lyrical andantino, yet another dramatic scena, and the conclusion—a return to the gravity of the opening adagio—constitute a mini-opera for piano. The great emotional range derives not only from the tempo changes, but also from Mozart’s bold harmonic strokes, which presage the harmonic uses of the 19 century. In the C minor Fantasia, Mozart has exploited to their utmost the possibilities that he had heard in Johann Andreas Stein’s piano workshop.

LIGETI: Musica ricercata
György Ligeti was born in Tîrnăveni, Transylvania in 1923 and died in Vienna in 2006. He composed the Musica ricercata between 1951-53.

Only a few composers have earned the admiration and respect that were accorded György Ligeti in his lifetime, nor have many people inspired such heartfelt memorial tributes after their deaths. Even though he was relatively unknown by the general public (the widespread familiarity with his music, which Stanley Kubrick used in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, did not register his name in society at large), Ligeti’s reputation among his colleague composers and other musicians was pure gold.

That Ligeti survived the worst cruelties that the 20th century offered is almost incomprehensible; that he did so with a will not just to live but to live fully made his life a model of grace. The German Nazi occupiers in Hungary pressed him, as a young Jewish man, into forced labor, even as several family members were sent to extermination camps. Resuming his music studies at the end of World War II, Ligeti attempted to keep a low profile under the Communist Russian occupation of his country. In 1956, as the Soviets put down the Hungarians’ attempt at freedom, the 33-year-old composer escaped his country under bags of mail in a postal train car and began his new life abroad.

Throughout his life, Ligeti evinced a burning curiosity to explore all fields of learning, from philosophy to the sciences to the visual and musical arts. Although that curiosity led him to association with various schools and movements in composition, he always continued on his own path, insistently organizing sounds into fresh, expressive, and personal ways while—and this was important to him—maintaining connections to his musical roots.

“There is another way of continuing the work of the great masters of the past,” he said in a 1983 interview, “composing at the same level as represented, say, by the late Beethoven sonatas, but in a new language, a new style. There is a task for you! Going back to the same musical idiom will not do….Knowing how to analyze traditional forms is indispensable, but God save us from atonal sonatas.” In 1993, he was holding resolutely to his intention to walk that fine line: “We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.”

Ligeti escaped again and again, holding himself to the standards of his forebears while finding idiosyncratic and honest musical means of expression. He repeatedly asserted his musical independence, from the deceptively simple sounding piano-writing of the first of the Musica ricercata movements, to the thick and complex vocal/orchestral writing of such works as his fabulous Requiem, the micropolyphonic Lontano, and the ethereal clouds of Atmosphères.

The Musica ricercata was composed between 1951 and 1953, while Ligeti was still engaged as professor at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. Within “ricercata” lie multiple allusions—to the lute and keyboard pieces of the Renaissance; to the Italian and French cognates, “ricercare” and “recherché,” that refer to searching out, or seeking after; to the contrapuntal works of such earlier composers as Gabrieli and Frescobaldi. Ligeti’s suite comprises 11 ingeniously sculpted explorations of sound through a self-imposed structure that required the composer to begin by using only one pitch, and to add just one more pitch in each subsequent movement, up to the finale, the eleventh movement, in which Ligeti uses all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale.

Thus, in I, the Sostenuto – Misurato – Prestissimo, Ligeti explores the pitch A in various dimensions of rhythm, timbre, register, and dynamics. At the end of the movement, he adds a second pitch, D; A and D become the basis for II, Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale. And so he continues, through the 11 units of the suite, adding one new pitch to each movement and exploring the ever-increasing pitches in a tour de force of stylistic inventions.

The moods range from the drama of the single-pitch beginning, through the mystery and tension of the second movement; the humorous, jaunty third movement with its fanfares and leaps; the wacky barrel organ waltz—which occasionally winds down, or slips into 2/4 meter—of the fourth; the tolling bells of the Rubato-Lamentoso, with its echoes of Hungarian rhythmic and melodic folk elements; and the sixth movement’s rapidly shifting dynamics and registrations.

In the seventh movement, Cantabile, molto legato, Ligeti demands of the pianist a rapid, seven-note perpetual motion ostinato in the left hand, while the right hand sings a contemplative serenade that floats freely and independently above its accompaniment. This evening song is interrupted by the wild dance of the eighth movement, with its folk-like open fifths in the accompaniment figures. The memorial to Bartók once again calls upon tolling bells to evoke the feeling of Hungarian folk dance and song, with a low C-sharp ringing at the beginning and at the end.

The music of the tenth movement is extremely chromatic and dissonant (leaning on the pitches D and C-sharp), not to mention emotionally overt. Barely more than a minute long, the movement sparkles with the composer’s instructions: “capriccioso e burlesco,” “insistent, spiteful,” and “played as if mad.” The suite ends with an homage to Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), renowned for his contrapuntal skills, which Ligeti emulates in the fugal complexities of this measured, tranquil finale.

MOZART: Rondo in A minor, K. 511
Mozart composed the Rondo in A minor, K. 511 in 1787.

Mozart frequently turned to the Rondo form for individual movements of his larger instrumental works—chamber music, orchestral pieces, concertos—so it was a practiced hand, and ear, that produced this keyboard composition, which he dated March 11, 1787. Like the C minor Fantasia (above), the Rondo in A minor exposes Mozart’s prescient understanding of the unique capabilities inherent in this new instrument, the piano. Composed midway between the two opera pinnacles Le nozze di Figaro (premiered in May 1786) and Don Giovanni (first performed in October 1787), the ten-minute Rondo in A minor for piano evidences similar operatic characteristics—lyricism and drama—albeit on an exquisite, miniature scale.

Mozart states the lyrical principal theme in A minor, varies it in major, and then, in good arioso fashion, repeats it, with embellishments, before moving on. The two contrasting sections are secured to the three pillars of the principal theme and its variations through ingenious transitions. Indeed, Mozart pushes the Rondo form so cleverly that he could have reasonably entitled this work a Fantasia. Tension increases through the florid melismas that elaborate the third appearance of the melancholy main theme, even as the drama subsides, and the Rondo sighs to a conclusion.

SCHUBERT: Sonata in G Major, D. 894
Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797 and died there in 1828. He composed the Sonata in G Major, D. 894 in 1826.

In the spring of 1827, six months after Schubert had finished the composition of the G-major Piano Sonata, the Viennese firm of Tobias Haslinger published the work as a “Fantasie, Andante, Menuetto und Allegretto.” The most likely explanation for the change of title is that Haslinger thought that the general public would find “Fantasie, etc. etc.” more appealing than “Sonata.” Robert Schumann (1810-1856) needed no such marketing strategy to engage his interest.

As a young musician, a hopeful pianist, and a budding critic, Schumann wrote about the music of Franz Schubert with great enthusiasm. He studied several of the Viennese composer’s works with his piano professor (and future father-in-law) Friedrich Wieck, and in 1835, in his new music journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann called this G major Sonata Schubert’s “most perfect sonata in form and spirit.”

Schubert dedicated the Sonata to his life-long friend Josef Ritter von Spaun, whose name became particularly linked with Schubert’s because of the well-known Moritz von Schwind painting, “Schubertiade at Spaun’s.” The Schubertiades, private evenings of musical entertainment, chamber music, singing, and dancing, were the occasions for introducing Schubert’s latest compositions. Schubert presided at the keyboard, sharing it with other pianists for four-hand works, accompanying singers who essayed his new lieder, and playing numerous of his dozens of Ländler and Deutsche for the party’s dancing pleasure. Spaun was frequently the host of the Schubertiades.

The G major is the last sonata that Schubert composed before the famous “final three,” the trio of 1828 piano sonatas that he finished just two months before he died. Partly because those great compositions have eclipsed Schubert’s earlier piano works, and partly because the G major demands particularly fine piano skills, it is perhaps not as familiar to audiences as it deserves. The “form and spirit” that Schumann admired are laid out in a half-hour span that traverses a singing sonata-form first movement, a gently flowing Andante, a spirited dance, and a final rondo.

The opening movement—no matter that Haslinger called it a Fantasie—does bear analysis as an extended sonata-allegro piece. The pulsing chords of its opening measures, its unusual 12/8 signature, and its moderate pace give the movement a soothing lilt, which is occasionally disturbed by rippling scales and energetic chords. The tender D major melody that opens the second movement, Andante, is interrupted first by an outburst in B minor and then, after a period of calm, another great eruption, this time in D minor. The movement ends peacefully in its D major tonic.

In the third movement, Schubert continues to play with the same tonalities. A Minuet begins jauntily in B minor, modulates to D major, and swings into B major for its Ländler-style Trio. The entire movement all but demands that the listener get up and move, and one can well imagine that when Schubert introduced this Sonata at Spaun’s, the assembled party might have danced. The Sonata’s concluding movement, a rondo, confirms the mood of the whole. In spite of outbursts of temperament and excursions to unexpected keys (a surprising section in E-flat, for instance), it returns inevitably to the murmuring pulse of G major chords for its final statement.

©2008 Sandra Hyslop

[Masters of the Keyboard, Paul Lewis: 5/10/08]