WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Piano Sonata No. 16 in C, KV 545
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Fantasie, KV 475, and Piano Sonata in C minor, KV 457
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Piano No. 27 in E minor, op.90
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Piano No. 32 in C minor, op.111
‘Too easy for children, too difficult
for artists’
‘A
little keyboard sonata for beginners’. With those words Mozart entered the C
major Piano Sonata, K 545 in his thematic catalogue on 26 June 1788. They
encapsulate the problem posed to posterity not just by this work, but by all
of Mozart’s essays in the genre. So too does the description, ‘Sonata facile’,
under which it was first published in 1805. ‘Too easy for children, too
difficult for artists,’ was Artur Schnabel’s celebrated description of Mozart’s
piano sonatas. In that respect, this decidedly ‘late’, spare work – let us not
confuse apparently modest technical demands with dilution of artistry – offers
their ne plus ultra. The once common
relegation of Mozart’s piano sonatas to the uncomprehendingly condescending
realm of ‘teaching pieces’ receives confirmation and yet its greatest
refutation; this teaching piece is so much more than that.
There
is rarely anywhere for the performer to hide in Mozart; here, that tendency is
taken to its Webern-like extreme. Only the greatest of pianists and musicians
will emerge unscathed –and perhaps only on a lucky day. Extreme simplicity of
texture does not, however, inhibit musical expression or exploration; it
encourages them. Not only for Stravinsky (‘The more constraints one imposes,
the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit’) could
limitation serve as a spur to invention. What might seem mere ‘instructive’
features – concentration upon the white keys of the piano at times to rival
neo-Classical Stravinsky; ability to ‘sing’ a long, legato line; facility (far from facile)
with scales, arpeggios, sequences, ‘Scotch snap’ ornaments, and a good few
‘basic’ finger patterns – are explored, yet no more ‘in themselves’, without
‘musical’ expression and priority, than in, say, a Chopin Etude.
The
first movement’s structure seems to proceed according to textbook ‘sonata
form’, until a gentle jolt is received in the recapitulation: the first subject
not in the tonic, but in the subdominant, F major. The recapitulation itself
seems more to open up new paths than really to recapitulate, and the second
subject necessarily sounds different, not only in the tonic, but in a different
key from its big brother. In light of that subdominant surprise, Mozart eschews
his most typical practice for the slow movement, by moving instead to the
dominant, G major for the (apparently) effortlessly lyrical Andante. Here, as indeed in its predecessor and successor, texture
and expectations are such that the introduction of any chromatic note registers
with a harmonic effect both subtle and yet unmistakeable. The turn to G minor
offers a hint of something sterner, noble, if not quite tragic. Repeated thirds
announced at the opening of the finale offer another instance of the union of
‘technical’ and ‘musical’ requirements. The player will learn, practise,
attempt to perfect. (S)he will also hear pairs of woodwind, relate the work to
Mozart’s concertante, symphonic, operatic, and other writing, and consider how
that device and that harmony proves generative for the movement as a whole. (So
too, God willing, will the listener.) This rondo alternates between statements
of this principle theme and a typically Mozartian profusion of balancing
alternatives, returning us home to C major at just the right moment: an
instruction in form, just as much as more narrowly defined technique.
Sturm
und Drang:
Mozart in the minor mode
The
C minor Fantasia and Sonata, K 475/457, the former apparently written in 1785
as a post hoc ‘prelude’ to the sonata
composed in the previous year, stand in many ways at the other extreme of
Mozart’s solo piano output. With the possible exception of the D major Sonata,
K 576, they are the least likely to be considered ‘too easy’, whether in
technical or musical terms. Nevertheless, relative to much of Mozart’s
concertante writing for the instrument, or indeed to the overt virtuosity
required by Beethoven and other successors, Schnabel’s caution would still
hold. We hear instantiated the paradox, or better dialectic, fundamental to the
entirety of the Austro-German musical tradition from Bach (and earlier) to Schoenberg
(and beyond): freedom and organisation are two sides of the same musical coin. Likewise
all manner of other musical dialectics: major and minor; diatonic and
chromatic; fury and repose; ‘instrumental’ and ‘vocal’; and so on. The
Classical style, as Charles Rosen would have put it, is perhaps especially
adept at bringing such contests – and reconciliations – to the musical fore.
In
the Fantasia, a homage to the extemporising, Sturm und Drang tradition of C.P.E. Bach’s keyboard works, which
yet entails a mastery in navigating the tonal universe worthy of Emanuel Bach’s
father, Mozart’s minor-mode daemon delves into the deepest chromatic,
‘expressive’ reaches, vertically and horizontally. Listen to the almost
dizzying round of modulations with which the opening ‘Adagio’ section, the
first of six, takes flight, just as harmonically disorienting, and yet also
just as sure of its destination, as the celebrated opening to the development
of the first movement of the G minor Symphony, K 550. It also offers the
pianist, ‘child’ or ‘artist’, similar technical challenges, a few levels
advanced, to those in the ‘easier’ C major Sonata. (The ‘Alberti bass’
figuration in the left hand is never far away.) As the great Mozart scholar-pianist
Denis Matthews explained, the Fantasia ‘achieves unity and continuity because
each [section] (except the last) is open-ended and unresolved, as though aware
of an imminent change of scene.’ In Mozart’s instrumental music, the opera
house is never distant.
C
minor emphatically reinstated at the close, it provides the springboard for the
explorations of the Sonata’s ‘Molto allegro’ first movement (an unusual marking
for Mozart, another point in common with the aforementioned Symphony). Sinuous
chromaticism, once again presaging Wagner and Schoenberg in its vertical and
horizontal formulations, offers a counterweight to solidity of tonal purpose.
Such is the world of opera seria,
never more so than in the tragic yet consoling pathos of the ‘Neapolitan’ move
to D-flat major in the recapitulation. The second movement rondo offers the
‘scoring’ and mood of an operatic aria, replete with embellishments in the returns
of the theme and the coda, some of them unknown until as recently as 1990, when
Mozart’s autograph (now in the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg)
was rediscovered in Philadelphia. Elements of its form and that of the first
movement are combined, contested, sublimated in the Allegro assai finale. Will-o’-the-wisp mystery announced by
multiple syncopations in the opening theme, it finds its dialectical opposing
force in vehement, tragic eruptions, as if from Idomeneo’s Elettra or some other great seria heroine. The coda’s closing underline the return to C minor,
tonic and dominant, almost as if it were Beethoven insisting; however, the
foregoing chromaticism and sudden balm of A-flat major brook no Mozartian
argument.
Soft-spoken Romanticism
Beethoven’s
E minor Sonata, op.90, belongs to that extraordinary group of works – give or
take the execrable Wellington’s Victory
– that stand almost, yet not quite, on the threshold of his ‘late’ period: the
world of the Bagatelles as much as
the sonatas. A performance will last roughly as long as one of Mozart’s ‘Sonata
facile’, and some of the motivic building blocks are still far from dissimilar
either from that or from the C minor Fantasia and Sonata. Something of the
Fantasia’s open-ended freedom may be discerned in the opening, E minor
movement: not only is there no exposition repeat, but, as another fine
pianist-scholar William Kinderman has noted, many of the formal divisions
between exposition and development, and development and recapitulation, are
elided. Triple-time, minor-mode restlessness might seem to suggest commonality
with the Mozart Sonata, but the energy of ascending E minor arpeggios is quite
different: lonelier, more ‘Romantic’, less defiant, than Mozart’s thunderbolts
of Zeus.
The
second movement, taking a path very different from Mozart the tragedian, turns
to E major. Its kinship to Schubert has often been noted; Kinderman calls it
‘the most Schubertian movement in Beethoven.’ Indeed, there is something of the
Romantic wayfarer to it, perhaps something even of Beethoven the Lieder composer, above all the composer
of the first song-cycle, An die ferne
Geliebte. It marks the final staging post in Beethoven’s series of gently
lyrical, long-breathed rondo finales. Variation comes through the changing
character of the episodes and the light they shed upon the returning, more or
less unvaried theme.
A final reckoning: Beethoven’s last
piano sonata
With
the final sonata on the programme, we return to C minor for the work which, not
least on account of its final placing in the series of thirty-two, retains perhaps
the greatest aura of all amongst Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Beethoven revered,
arguably inherited Mozart’s C minor daemon, remarking, following a performance
of Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto, K 491: ‘We shall never have any idea such
as this.’ The third and, of course, last of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in this
key, it is, like the op.90 Sonata, written in two, greatly contrasted movements:
respectively in tonic minor and tonic major. Any parallels one might draw with
earlier works, though, will be confounded by other aspects of this
unquestionably ‘late’ world. Counterpoint and
harmony remain as two sides of the same late Classical coin: rarer, alas, in
performance than one might suspect. The diminished seventh chord, as in Mozart,
as in Beethoven’s own Pathétique
Sonata and Fifth Symphony, offers both vertical and horizontal impetus from the
very first melodic interval onwards. Fugal methods, as so often in late
Beethoven, feature strongly, melding with sonata form to offer a still more
titanic conception of struggle. The exposition’s move to the submediant, to
A-flat major, rather than to the conventional relative major, E-flat, perhaps helps
set up the possibility of the surprise, hushed tierce di Picardie conclusion in C major, presaging the finale’s
tonality (and returning to that of the first work heard tonight).
It is a set of variations on a hymn-like ‘Arietta’,
caught in the balance and/or dialectic between sublime simplicity and necessary
complexity. Rhythm – harmonic rhythm as much as ‘mere’ metre – is key to
Beethoven’s progress through the celebrated ‘boogie-woogie’ variation – in
truth, its anticipation of jazz tells us very little – and beyond. Asked by
Anton Schindler as to why he had not written a third movement, Beethoven,
should we trust his interlocutor’s account, gave the appropriately contemptuous
response that he had had no time to do so. For there can be no doubting the
transcending finality of these variations: nor the profound quality of
resolution Beethoven here offers to the violent conflicts enunciated in the preceding
Allegro. White-key C major, possessed
once more of but a very few inflections, spins its trillingly gossamer way towards
a quietly intoned and quietly unanswerable Amen.
(This essay was first published as a programme note for a 2017 Salzburg Festival recital given by Grigory Sokolov.)
