R.I.P. Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)

(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

Maurizio Pollini was a guiding light of my musical life: which is to say, he and his music-making were with me from the moment in my teens when I became seriously interested in music. More, composers and performers alike, are gone now than remain with us; I shall not tempt fate by naming those who are left. One of my very first cassette purchases – it may even have been the first – was his recording of Mozart’s Piano Concertos nos 19 and 23 with Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic. I love it more than I can say. Mozart’s music requires but one thing: perfection. Perfection it receives in what, I suspect, will always be one of my Desert Island Discs. 

In my first London concert, a Prom for which I took the bus up to London and back to Sheffield for a birthday treat with a friend, Pollini was the soloist, again in Mozart, this time in the C minor Concerto, no.24. It was also my first live Schoenberg and Stravinsky (the First Chamber Symphony and Pulcinella, with the CBSO conducted by Simon Rattle). And then, when, as a student, I bought my first ticket for a London piano recital, now taking a return rail journey from Cambridge, it was Pollini: in his beloved Chopin, which by now I knew well enough from recordings, above all those ever-astounding Études and Préludes. What it was, though, to hear him live, as I sat on the Royal Festival Hall stage, incredibly close to the master and his instrument. The technique was of course dazzling, Pollini’s pristine perfection taken by duller souls for a lack of depth or some other such nonsense. I read review after review in which the musical equivalent of the nouveaux riches would lament his technical ability, failing to realise that, like that of any great musician, it was in the service of a musical performance that would have been nothing without it. By now, of course, I knew among other recorded performances that simply astounding DG Originals CD, bringing together two original recordings, of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Webern, and Boulez.

 

Prokofiev and Stravinsky were no longer in his repertory by the time I heard him, but both the Webern (Variations, op.27) and Boulez (Piano Sonata no.2) I would hear live more than once. One of those occasions combined the two, in a 2006 recital at the Salzburg Festival. It had been advertised, somewhat surprisingly, as an all-Mozart recital, but then it was the composer’s 250^th anniversary year. I had longed to hear him in solo Mozart – none of which, so far as I am aware, he recorded – and so I did, in the first half. The second half of the programme, though, he changed to Webern and Boulez, initiating an exodus not only at the interval, not only after the Webern, but unforgivably, during the ice, fire, and elements unknown to this universe of the Boulez. I might have thought I could not admire him any more than I did already; now, however, I did. 

There was so much else, of course, not least the music of Luigi Nono, some of which, quite simply, would not have existed had it not been for his friendship with Pollini (and Claudio Abbado). …sofferte onde serene… I knew it a little from his recording, but to hear it live in London at the Southbank Centre’s courageous ‘Fragments of Venice’ festival in 2007, was truly to hear it for the first time. The last time I did so, at Salzburg in 2019, it was like welcoming an old friend, albeit one who could shock and surprise, as well as seduce, as brilliantly as you could imagine—and then some.

It was an important concert for me in another way too: the first time I had written a programme essay for a Pollini concert. I have no idea whether he would have read it; I am sure he had 1001 better things to do with his time, but a little part of me hopes that he might have done and not found it hopelessly inadequate. (It is perhaps best that I shall never know.) I should like, if I may, to quote the Nono part of that note, not for any intrinsic worth, but simply because in some way, that felt for me to be a moment at which I came closer to Pollini.

 

Such serenity provides both starting point and goal for the poetic idea of Luigi Nono’s 1976 …sofferte onde serene…. The waves are Venetian, so too is the tolling of bells, almost as if transposed from the Vienna of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6 [heard immediately before]. Heard, felt and answered from Nono’s home on the Giudecca, those sounds seem, as with Schoenberg’s, not only to say farewell to earlier, angrier compositional and aesthetic tendencies – tendencies that had culminated for Nono in the high-watermark of his politically committed art, the opera Al gran sole carico d’amore – but also to sustain them in distillation, in further development. ‘I could say’, Nono remarked, ‘as Schoenberg did, that, at the conclusion of each work, I wish more than ever to breathe the air of new planets’. It also continued Nono’s artistic collaboration with Pollini, initiated by Como un ola de fuerza y luz (1971–2), although the two leftist musicians had known each other since the mid-1960s. …sofferte onde serene… displayed, as Nono averred, a reduction in the multiplicity of musical material: a new path taken following a period of compositional silence.

 

That apparent simplification in itself inspired further ‘waves’ – lagoonal and sonic – in collaboration enshrined at the work’s heart, Nono’s purpose amplification rather than counterpoint. Dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini, it operates on two acoustic planes: Pollini live and on tape. They merge, realized in the air through artistry of sound direction – first Nono himself; tonight, André Richard. Vibrations, shadows and resonances sustain and transform memories of loss suffered by composer and pianist. Ghosts of other sounds and works in Pollini’s repertoire are honoured and transformed. (Late, Venetian-themed works by Liszt, La lugubre gondola and R.W. Venezia, were performed at the 1977 premiere.) The moment of Schoenbergian hyper-expressivity – sometimes stark, sometimes on the edge of audibility, sometimes even falling into silence –compels active listening. Nono’s politics have not drowned; they are revealed anew in the waters. So as not to confuse the political ‘provocations’ for earlier works with their substance, we must listen, suffering to break musical silence as the composer did, inspired by his pianist and friend as much as by the instrument. Counterpoint and conflict seem conspicuous by their absence, certainly by comparison to Nono’s preceding works. Whether we feel that absence as an integral aspect of the work is an impossible yet necessary question.

Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono

 

I could list fond memories aplenty: from the time when Pollini played those Schoenberg op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces as a single encore, one of four, to the five-concert ‘Pollini Project’ series at the Festival Hall, which took us literally from Bach to Boulez. A good number of them will be found on my blog in any case, under the Maurizio Pollini tag. There was the Bauhaus, crystalline surface-perfection of his recording of the op.25 Schoenberg Suite for piano, teeming with energy below, and the Orphic taming of the Furies in the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with Böhm. There were Stockhausen and Sciarrino, Schubert, and Schumann. I should at least mention the transition, or so it seemed, to a ‘late Pollini’, in which the technique was not quite so unwaveringly infallible as once it had been, though it certainly remained (until very late) present. Many felt a greater depth, almost as compensation. I know what they meant, but I think it was an illusion: the same old illusion that meant, dazzled and in some curious cases repelled by technique, they had never heard that depth in the first place now led them to hear it more strongly. There was, though, an instructive and touching element of humanity to the ageing process that came to us listeners as much as to the performer. 

Amidst such reminiscences, the communist Pollini’s unwavering political commitment should not be forgotten. It informed his performance as much as it did the compositional work of Nono—or Beethoven. Advocacy of Nono’s music took him and as Abbado beyond the concert hall and the opera house to the car factories of northern Italy. It would have been easier to glory in the world of ‘star performers’, but that was clearly never somewhere Pollini, however fêted, was ever at home. In many ways, his music-making was always a product of the ‘Years of Lead’ in which fascism, openly backed by much of ‘the West’, threatened to occupy much of Europe once again. Speaking in Bettina Erhardt’s wonderful film on Nono, A Trail on the Water, made after Nono’s death, Pollini recalled one incident in particular:

 

There was a lot of tension in the air. We have to remember the situation in Italy back then. People were even talking about a possible Fascist coup. There was the example of the colonels in Greece. The fear of a turn towards authoritarianism was serious. After the massacre on the Piazza Fontana in Milan and the bombs, we took it all the more seriously. I think it was the reaction of the whole country that kept it from happening. Back then, I once read, or rather tried to read, a declaration against a hideous atrocity in the Vietnam War when the United States bombed Hanoi and Hai Phong. Several Italian musicians had signed the declaration: Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono, [Giacomo] Manzoni and the Quartetto Italiano, as well as Goffredo Petrassi, Luigi Dallapiccola. Contrary to all my expectations, at the mere sound of the word ‘Vietnam’, the audience exploded in a kind of collective delirium, which made it impossible to continue my recital. I made several attempts to read this short statement. This was interrupted by the arrival of the police. Eventually the piano was closed and that was that.

He spoke at the protests against Berlusconi almost half a century later too. Maurizio Pollini was a great pianist, a great musician, but above all a great man, a great human being. However unfashionable it may be to say so, for me that shows in his music-making. In recorded form, as in our memories, that will live forever. And we shall be able to tell those younger than ourselves: ‘I heard Pollini.’

Pollini - Schumann and Chopin, 23 June 2023

Royal Festival Hall

Schumann: Arabesque in C major, op.18; Fantasie in C major, op.17
Chopin: Mazurka in C minor, op.56 no.3; Barcarolle in F-sharp major, op,60; Scherzo no.1 in B minor, op.20

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

 

‘Who is the world’s greatest pianist?’ is a silly question, although human beings have long been prone to ask and indeed to answer silly questions. So long as it remains at the level of the parlour game, it probably does no great harm, though it is unlikely ever to illuminate either. For more than half a century though, Maurizio Pollini has stood as one of the world’s greatest: not merely, or even principally, from the standpoint of technique, awe-inspiring as that long was, but as a musician of penetrating intelligence and insights, committed equally to classical and new repertory. Whether in Beethoven or Boulez, Chopin or Stockhausen, Pollini at his best might occasionally be equalled, yet, allowing for vagaries of taste and opinion, never surpassed. 

More recently, that fabled technique, out of which were born and formed performances of white-hot intensity, has proved more fallible. It has sometimes taken Pollini a little time to ‘get going’ in a recital, though the second half and encores have at least tended to show him still at his best. This Festival Hall appearance, postponed from earlier in the year, offered uncomfortable listening – and viewing – yet ultimately proved a triumph of the human spirit, one that involved audience warmth, involvement, and encouragement too. There were flashes and sometimes more than that of the younger musician alongside the memory lapses. As we progressed towards the end of the recital, aided now by sheet music and a page turner, Pollini showed something far more valuable than the sort of interchangeable, note-perfect feat of virtuoso execution one might hear from some. For those of us who have grown up with him, it was an evening of very mixed emotions, but it was ultimately a chance to remember the journey we have taken with him, how much we have learned from it, and how much we shall continue to do so.

Schumann’s Arabeske suggested Bach led in new clothes into the age of Romanticism. The whiteness of C major sounded pristine, rare, and yet far from vulnerable, possessed of a strength belying so much. Florestan and Eusebius presented themselves and did varied battle throughout the work’s episodes and return. The epilogue in particular was truly touching: light yet decisive in piercing of the heart. The Fantasie opened with a sense of its greater scale and ambition, reference seemingly made as much to the venerable history of the keyboard fantasia as to Schumann’s more obvious points of closer reference. There were passages of high Romantic vehemence when poise returned, though ultimately a performance of the whole was not to be. That setbacks had neither pianist nor audience give up, though, was something in which to take solace and always to remember. 

A plain-spoken Chopin Mazurka in C minor opened the second half, sadness seeping through as it must. Repeated rhythms and chromatic inflections took on greater, metaphysical meaning in context. In the Barcarolle, the waters rose once again, the gondola took flight, and surveyed familiar yet ever-strange landscapes, perhaps for the last time. One never knows—and for that reason should always make the most of what one has. The B minor Scherzo presented tumultuous flashes of old: in part muscle memory, doubtless, for there will always be something of that in any performance. But it was not only that; anger, tenderness, and more came to the surface via a cantilena that was unquestionably the real thing.

Pollini: Chopin and Schumann, 1 March 2022

Royal Festival Hall

Schumann: Arabesque, op.18; Fantaisie in C major, op.17
Chopin: Sonata no.2 in B-flat minor, op.35; Berceuse in D-flat major, op.57; Polonaise in A-flat major, op.53

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

No one who heard this concert will forget it. Not because it was billed as Maurizio Pollini’s eightieth birthday concert (a stretch, given his birthday had fallen two months earlier), although the warmth of audience affection, give or take a telephone call or two, was palpable from the outset. It was, rather, on account of the Chopin Second Sonata. The advertised Mazurka, op.56 no.3, did not open the second half; the Sonata did. Its first movement was vehement, immediate, perhaps the result of greater physical effort than once would have been the case, yet if anything all the more moving for it. How it sang too, not so much tugging at the heartstrings as wrenching them. Sentiment, not sentimentality. The exposition’s struggle was greater the second time around. Already, we knew. A grimly inexorable scherzo gave way to relative relief in the trio, though we knew it would not last. While it did, though, we were bade to listen anew: something needed now more than ever. 

The Funeral March was, quite simply, overwhelming. Chopin and Pollini spoke as one, with outstanding clarity, directly to humanity. Sometimes there is a case for words; Pollini has been known to use them from the platform himself, less often than his well-nigh exact contemporary, Daniel Barenboim, yet with similar moral authority. Here, there was no such case. The voice of the human spirit in the central nocturne, a veritable epiphany, rose as if a single survivor from surrounding carnage. It was far from untroubled, and all the greater for it. Nor did time stand still; rather it held us in its sweet embrace, having us believe the moment were on the scale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, or even that of Götterdämmerung, whose Siegfried had been buried only the night before at Madrid’s Teatro Real, draped in a Ukrainian flag. The ferocious, inhuman finale, quite without pity, terrified as the chill wind whose name and nature we dare not contemplate. In both movements, we knew. Applause was like none other I can recall in the middle of a recital. We knew.

The recital began with Schumann. His C major Arabeske had Bach as fons et origo, immanent, yet subtly inflected, aiding and propelling Schumann’s narrative. The dignity, moral and aesthetic, on which Pollini’s authority is founded was present from the outset. Again, sentiment, not sentimentality, the pathos of the minor-key episodes deeply moving. Half-lights of transition tended already towards Brahms. 

The Fantaisie opened, still more so, in the midst of things. If a whirlwind could be ardent and confessional, it would have been this. Again, emotional and intellectual integrity stood out. Starkness of opposition and alchemy of transition emerged not through sleight of hand, but through understanding that much lies between the notes. Formal challenges, especially yet not only in the first movement, were communicated and lived with relish, not smoothed over. This was a performance of possibilities, not of banal ‘solution’. Already, music spoke and sang as if it had words yet stood beyond them. There was an unmistakeably humanist, even heroic determination to the late Beethovenian line of a second movement that knew it could no longer be Beethoven. It was our lot as well as Schumann’s. It was, moreover, an almost Elgarian nobilmente we heard prior to temporary subsiding of the waves. If every single note were not there, so what? So much lies between and beyond them anyway. The third movement looked back at what had passed; this was the vindication of a seer (or better, a listener). Its emotional arc, founded on perfect harmonic understanding, offered a lesson in humanism as richly satisfying as those of Brahms or Schoenberg. 

An impossibly consoling Berceuse followed Chopin’s Sonata. Rock solid of rhythm, it was yet infinitely pliable. Through the truest of rubato, Chopin’s waters glistened, invited, even seduced. From an A-flat Polonaise of (fatally?) wounded swagger, there emerged a struggle worthy of Beethoven or Liszt, the foe mechanised and monstrous, heroism lying in further nocturnal depths. We knew, as we did in the cruelly if necessarily demanded encore: the G minor Ballade, its clarity of line equal to that of its moral purpose. Carrara marble of Pollini’s youth aurally gleamed once more, yet the depth of suffering was new, of our time alone. Strange realms were visited as if for the first time. In whispered confidence, in aching sorrow, in the proudest of defiance, we knew.

‘Let music not be forgotten in the meantime’: Sonatas, Fantasies, and Fragments by Schumann and Chopin

 

In Beethoven’s wake, composers, especially in the Austro-German tradition, asked themselves what should become of forms and genres he had seemingly taken to their ultimate, foremost among them the sonata and symphony. Allied to increasing interest, born of literary Romanticism, in the idea of the ‘fragment’ – for Friedrich Schlegel, ‘a small work of art, complete in itself and separated from its surrounding world, like a hedgehog’ – such pressure led in several directions: rejuvenation and rejection of old forms only two possible polarities. We shall hear in this programme Schumann wrestle with such questions; Chopin take, to Schumann’s bemusement, a very different sonata path; and much territory both between and beyond.

‘For ladies’

Writing in 1843, Schumann argued that ‘difficulties in form and content’ had prevented much of his music from gaining greater public esteem. The C major Arabeske, composed over his Vienna winter of 1838–9, had represented an attempt to offer something less elusive, less enigmatic, or, as Schumann put it, ‘for ladies’. In Classical terms, we may consider it a rondo: ABACA plus coda. Schumann’s literary alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius, appear respectively in passionately extrovert, minor-key episodes and wistful, introspective postlude. Strong interrelationships between first section and episodes, whether in thematic derivation or transitional return, suggest a fluid conception of developmental variation somewhere between Beethoven and Brahms.

A Lone First Movement

Schumann’s love of dotted quaver-semiquaver figures – the first note may be a quaver, followed by a semiquaver rest – as heard in the Arabeske also informs the Allegro in B minor op. 8. Conceived as the first movement to a piano sonata, completed or nearly so, yet otherwise destroyed, it occupies an interesting place in Schumann’s development. The pianist-composer integrates aspects of virtuoso display into a respectable, even venerable, musical form. We might suspect the opening cadenza to announce an improvisatory fantasia; it turns out instead to be a sonata-form movement’s first thematic group. The stark motto enunciated at its heart—B–C sharp–F sharp—proves to have multiple thematic consequences, serving, John Daverio observed, ‘as bass line for the elaboration of the first group, melodic backbone for the opening of the lyric second theme, head motif for the development, underpinning for the sequentially conceived retransition, and herald of the coda’. We might not be surprised to discern in those letters an extra-musical cipher, though that seems not to be the case. For Romanticism, incompletion does not itself signify a fragment; a fragment must in some sense be complete. However, like a ruin of yore, incompletion, however construed, forms a good basis on which to construct a fragment.

Sonata or Fantasy?

The Fantasie op. 17 is a very different kettle of fish: in Charles Rosen’s words, ‘the monument that commemorates the death of the Classical style’. The idea is especially apt given Schumann’s intention at one point during its complicated genesis to offer proceeds as his contribution to a Beethoven monument in Bonn (its committee chaired by the other Schlegel brother, August Wilhelm). Schumann expanded a single movement of 1836, a ‘fantasy’ called Ruinen – ‘a deep lament for you’, he told Clara during their enforced separation – into a three-movement ‘sonata’ entitled Ruinen, Trophaen, Palmen, tension between ancient and modern, introspection and the monumental integral to its design. Many continue to view the Fantasie in relation to sonata genre and forms, yet Schumann seems to have become convinced during, perhaps by virtue of, its composition that they had ‘run their course’, at least as comprehensible to his Classical forebears. ‘We should not repeat the same thing century after century’, he wrote in 1839; by all means write ‘sonatas, or fantasies (what’s in a name!), but let music not be forgotten in the meantime’.

Form, then, must not become formula; it is experienced as interplay between sonata and fantasy and other opposing yet related forces. Outer movements begin in medias res, with something to them of the old improvisatory fantasia. On the first’s stage appear Florestan and Eusebius as equals. The third hymns the latter, seemingly have cast off the last vestiges of Florestan’s sonata-like material. They frame and are framed by Florestan’s grand second-movement march. Mediating these oppositions, there appear (at least) two ghosts from Romanticism’s past and one from its present. First is Beethoven: in musical inheritance, but also in the first movement coda’s allusion to the closing song of Beethoven’s song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte, where the protagonist bids his ‘beloved’ during their separation to accept the songs he had once sung. Second is Schlegel, in musico-literary method and, explicitly, in Schumann’s inscription from his Die Gebüsche (once set by Schubert):

Durch alle Töne tönet
Im bunten Erdentraume,
Ein leiser Ton gezogen,
Für den, der heimlich lauschet.
(Through all the sounds
in the earth’s many-coloured dream,
one faint sound echoes
for him who secretly listens.)

Third and most important is Clara. ‘Are you not’, Schumann wrote to her, ‘the tone in the inscription?’. Is she (or Robert)? Who, then, is the secret listener? It need not be either/or.

The array of reference is dizzying: internal, external, and in a strange liminal zone of the literary-musical. Tonal and thematic relationships, as ambiguous as they are complex and thoroughgoing, fuse with questions of genre. The distinction Schumann drew between ‘higher’ or ‘noble’ forms, such as sonata, symphony or ‘fantasy’, and smaller, ‘characteristic’, simpler pieces, pertains within as well as between works. ‘Im Legendenton’, a Eusebian Lieder ohne Wortre of paradoxically timeless archaism – a musical ruin – that blossoms with typical Romantic passion, is flanked by Florestan’s sonata tendencies. For Daverio, it offers an instance of Schlegel’s conception of the Arabeske: ‘humorous, witty, or sentimental digressions that intentionally disturb the chronological flow of a narrative’, yet, ‘as a total form, […] tempers a seemingly chaotic diversity through a deliberately concealed logical process’. For Nicholas Marston, it is from here that Florestan’s flanking music is derived, if only in retrospect, by way of parallel to Schlegel’s fragmentary novel La Lucinde. The idea of a single reading misses the point. A multiplicity of readings, of (potential) performances, both fragments and unifies. Such, then, are those ‘difficulties in form and content’ to which Schumann would later refer, and which seem to have discouraged even Liszt, the dedicatee of the Fantasie, from frequent performance: ‘too difficult’, he wrote to Schumann, ‘for the public to digest’.

‘Unruly children’

We turn to Chopin for the single work named a ‘Piano Sonata’: his Second, in B flat minor op. 35. Schumann commented, sceptically, that Chopin having ‘called it a “sonata” suggests a joke, if not sheer bravado. He seems to have taken four of his most unruly children and put them together, possibly thinking to smuggle them, as a sonata, into company where they might not be considered individually presentable.’ There is no evidence to back up that observation, which says more about Schumann in 1841 than Chopin in 1839, when he wrote three of the four movements. Less weighed down by Beethoven’s example, Chopin had greater liberty to strike out on his own. He used the sonata genre, to quote Jim Samson, as ‘a framework within which the achievements of his earlier music – the figurative patterns of the Études and Preludes, the cantilenas of the Nocturnes, and even the periodicity of the dance pieces –might be drawn together in a kind of synthesis’.

More readily than the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasie, we may hear Chopin’s opening movement in terms of (modified) sonata form, especially in its exposition: a brief, powerful ‘Grave’ introduction followed by a headlong first subject and songful successor. ‘There is beautiful song in this first movement, too’, Schumann wrote, adding that the younger Chopin’s Polish qualities were vanishing, ‘via Germany, towards Italy’. We may beg to differ; Schumann did himself, continuing: ‘As soon as the song is sung, the Pole flashes forth again in all his bold originality. Certainly, Bellini never would nor could have dared the interwoven chords encountered after the close of the first episode of the second part.’ Indeed, though to be fair to Bellini, he had no more wish to do so than Chopin had to follow the hallowed (German) tonal pattern of the ‘double reprise’. The question is not ‘why did he not?’ but ‘why might you think he would have done?’. In place of the archetypal tonal drama of the Beethoven sonata, Chopin reveals his nocturne-like second subject as both heart and destination.

Typically for a Chopin scherzo, the second movement is quite without humour, even of Beethoven’s gruff variety. In dark E flat minor, its central ‘Più lento’ section shifts for the Trio to G flat major, more song – echoing the first movement’s second subject – than dance. Inner part voicing delineates Chopin’s delicate balance, born more of Bach and Mozart than Beethoven, between melody, harmony and counterpoint. Written two years earlier, the celebrated Marche funèbre offers similar contrast, this time between memorial and nocturne.

The moto perpetuo Finale represented, for Schumann, ‘more mockery than music. And yet one must confess that from this songless and cheerless movement there breathes a special and dreadful spirit, suppressing with resolute fist every inclination to resist.’ The music has certainly proved an enigma to many: Chopin at his most modernistic, even athematic? Perhaps. Again, however, is that the point? There is irony, bitter or otherwise, in this display, both in character and brevity, following the funeral march. Arthur Rubinstein described ‘night winds sweeping over churchyard graves’. The music needs neither poetic nor formal naming. Like a Prelude or Étude, it sweeps across the keys with diabolical magic entirely the piano’s own.

Singing on Its Own Terms

The Berceuse op. 57 bears affinities with the central section of the Sonata’s Scherzo. Like the Sonata itself, though, it speaks, or rather sings, on its own terms. Whatever its starting point – allegedly a lullaby for singer Pauline Viardot’s baby daughter – the music’s glittering ornamentation beguiles us into believing it, not the ostinato bass, to be the form-creating substance of 15 variations. Sometimes our ears know better than our eyes or biographies. Samson observes the patterns of Chopin’s ornamentation gain ‘new meaning precisely because of their divorce from harmonic progression, dynamic curve and even melody’. They become objects of contemplation, heard, like the Sonata’s Finale, simply as themselves. Liszt, Debussy, Ravel and other composers to this day have savoured and furthered this Romantic legacy. 

Swagger and Suggestion

The A flat major Polonaise op. 53 was Chopin’s last (bar, aptly enough, a Polonaise-Fantasy, op. 61). It strides majestically across the keyboard with fierce confidence and purpose that render its genre a starting point rather than a destination. It is clearly not intended straightforwardly to ‘be’ a dance. The composer bears witness, as if prefiguring a Liszt tone poem, to both particular and universal in wounded ‘national’ pride and heroism. Chopin’s late preoccupation with ostinato refreshes the central section, once more rejecting any notion of form as formula. Orchestral suggestiveness is no mere imitation. A piano can suggest an orchestra, but an orchestra cannot suggest itself – at least not prior, say, to Helmut Lachenmann. In sonority as in form, music is certainly not, as Schumann had it, ‘forgotten in the meantime’.

 (This essay was first published in a 2021 Salzburg Festival programme to accompany a recital by Maurizio Pollini.)

Struggle and serenity: Piano works by Schoenberg, Nono, and Beethoven

Schoenberg, Nono and Beethoven: three composers and five works present a coherent programme that denies, even scorns, sentimental distinction between emotion and intellect. Dialectics of the conscious and unconscious, of struggle and serenity play out within and between, leading us not only back but also forward to Beethoven. All these works, moreover, have classic Pollini performances and recordings to their name. That does not mean we should know what to expect: both in themselves and in combination, there will always remain more to be said, played, and heard.

Illogic of the Unconscious

In 1908, Schoenberg had written his Second String Quartet op. 10, first freely breathing Stefan George’s ‘air of another planet’ – or what we, Schoenberg’s dislike notwithstanding, have come to know as ‘free atonality’. The following year proved a veritable Wunderjahr, the Drei Klavierstucke, op.11, initiating a white-heat outpouring of music: Das Buch der hängenden Gärten op. 15, the Fünf Orchesterstücke op. 16 and Schoenberg’s first completed opera, Erwartung op. 17 quickly followed. 

Brahms’s ghost often looms large in Schoenberg’s piano writing – and not only in his piano writing; the instrument had never really been Schoenberg’s ‘own’. By contrast, however, with Schoenberg’s earlier, (then) unpublished piano pieces, ‘influence’ had now been thoroughly absorbed. Crashing Romantic chords, liable to fragment horizontally and vertically at any moment, are part of the picture; so are remnants of the idea, even the form, of Brahms’s late piano works: ‘pieces’, intermezzos, rhapsodies and so on. The first piece’s ternary form (ABA) invites comparison with Brahms, as do aspects of motivic progression, though any Classicism is swiftly and, later, savagely eroded. Energy lies in a very 1909 (for Schoenberg) state of permanent flux, form and tonality dynamically annihilated almost before it can come into being: Mephistophelian or Lisztian, we might say with equal justice. That ‘almost’, though, remains.

Arnold Schönberg Center

D minor, always a favourite ‘Second Viennese School’ key, haunts the left-hand, minor-third (D–F) ostinato of the second piece, playing with thirds itself a favourite procedure of Brahms. It is nonetheless a ghost suspended and, in the third, flayed alive. ‘For a human being’, Schoenberg wrote to Busoni in 1909, ‘it is impossible to feel but one sensation at a time. One has thousands at once. […T]his variegation, this illogicality […] set forth by a soaring wave of blood, by some sense- or nerve-reaction, this I should like to have in my music.’ Schoenberg here comes close to that very ‘expression of feeling […] which connects us with our unconscious’. Ruthless deletion of all hints of repetition in manuscript emendations had him come closer still

Distilled Drama

Schoenberg’s musical thought, then, was ever dialectical, without that precluding great variety of expression, whether within and between works. In Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op.19, we hear Schoenberg at close to his most aphoristic, each piece of a brevity courting comparison with Webern. That, however, is the only point truly held in common – and places excessive emphasis on duration. Beethoven’s late bagatelles perhaps offer more meaningful kinship: apparently simpler than much of his piano writing in their distillation of drama, expression and technique, yet at least as enigmatic as the sonatas. The hyper-expressivity of op. 11 is taken less to its logical – recall Schoenberg’s insistence on illogic – than to another, different conclusion. A line, a harmony, a poetic suggestion is voiced in purest essence: continuation of and escape from Schoenberg’s earlier self. Preoccupation with intervallic relationships characterizes many of these utterances, heard as if spoken epigrams, rich in both Brahmsian homage and serial anticipation. Obstinacy of the repeated major third (G–B) in the second piece is both generative of conflict and yet serenely unchallenged by it. Violence in the fourth likewise recalls op.11, yet stands also beyond that invitation to the abyss, on the cusp of Schoenberg’s later neoclassicism. In the final piece, inspired by the bells of Mahler’s funeral, we feel the graveyard’s chill breath: ‘wie ein Hauch’. Simultaneity of subsidence and climax offers further ‘nerve-reaction’ and an unusual degree of final peace.

Suffering Serenity

Such serenity provides both starting point and goal for the poetic idea of Luigi Nono’s 1976 …sofferte onde serene…. The waves are Venetian, so too is the tolling of bells, almost as if transposed from the Vienna of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6. Heard, felt and answered from Nono’s home on the Giudecca, those sounds seem, as with Schoenberg’s, not only to say farewell to earlier, angrier compositional and aesthetic tendencies – tendencies that had culminated for Nono in the high-watermark of his politically committed art, the opera Al gran sole carico d’amore – but also to sustain them in distillation, in further development. ‘I could say’, Nono remarked, ‘as Schoenberg did, that, at the conclusion of each work, I wish more than ever to breathe the air of new planets’. It also continued Nono’s artistic collaboration with Pollini, initiated by Como un ola de fuerza y luz (1971–2), although the two leftist musicians had known each other since the mid-1960s. …sofferte onde serene… displayed, as Nono averred, a reduction in the multiplicity of musical material: a new path taken following a period of compositional silence.

Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono, Maurizio Pollini

That apparent simplification in itself inspired further ‘waves’ – lagoonal and sonic – in collaboration enshrined at the work’s heart, Nono’s purpose amplification rather than counterpoint. Dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini, it operates on two acoustic planes: Pollini live and on tape. They merge, realized in the air through artistry of sound direction – first Nono himself; tonight, André Richard. Vibrations, shadows and resonances sustain and transform memories of loss suffered by composer and pianist. Ghosts of other sounds and works in Pollini’s repertoire are honoured and transformed. (Late, Venetian-themed works by Liszt, La lugubre gondola and R.W. Venezia, were performed at the 1977 premiere.) The moment of Schoenbergian hyper-expressivity – sometimes stark, sometimes on the edge of audibility, sometimes even falling into silence –compels active listening. Nono’s politics have not drowned; they are revealed anew in the waters. So as not to confuse the political ‘provocations’ for earlier works with their substance, we must listen, suffering to break musical silence as the composer did, inspired by his pianist and friend as much as by the instrument. Counterpoint and conflict seem conspicuous by their absence, certainly by comparison to Nono’s preceding works. Whether we feel that absence as an integral aspect of the work is an impossible yet necessary question.

Fracture and enigma

Beethoven’s final two piano sonatas, opp.110 and 111, foreshadow – or in this programme, echo – the co-dependent anger and serenity of Schoenberg’s piano pieces; we might also hear them in this context heroically responding to, retrospectively inciting, the kindred humanism of Nono’s suffering waves. There are dialectics aplenty. Furious counterpoint already strains at the bounds of tonality, even the bounds of the sonata principle. By contrast, in apparently necessary response, we find music of a doubtless illusory simplicity that comes just as close to Beethovenian rage to defining our notions of the Romantic sublime.

The A-flat major sonata, though in three movements, hardly conforms to Classical expectations, the first two far shorter together than the expansive, complex finale. The serene first movement’s songfulness extends even to typically ‘late’ trills. It is marked sanft – probably at Beethoven’s dictation, for the manuscript reveals another hand – in an attempt to render con amabilità into the language not only of Goethe but also of Romantics such as Novalis. For Donald Tovey, that did not ‘mean “soft” but, as nearly as may be, “gentle” in the most ethical sense of the word.’ A sonata form that seems almost to preclude conflict, yet cannot quite, offers in its way as great a challenge as more overtly ‘heroic’ struggle. In its final bars, a prominent third interval, C to A-flat, prepares the way for re-harmonised restatement in the second movement’s new key of F minor. A scherzo in all but name, this flash of gruff, humorous brilliance proves once more, like its composer, very much its own beast, resistant to categories that would pin down rather than liberate. It culminates in a coda of sforzando cries and whispered intimacies that here may recall Schoenberg.

Highly expressive instrumental recitative prepares the way for the finale’s Klagender Gesang (‘lamenting song’), opening out a chord of A-flat minor as if a musical version of the Romanticism’s proverbial blue flower against a wintry landscape. Beethoven alternates between arioso of great sadness and fugue in constructive chain of fourths. The latter emerges in almost conciliatory fashion, in turn rendering the arioso’s Neapolitan-hued return all the greater in tragedy. Hope is restored by fugue-in-inversion, so confident in its play as to tempt one to consider it divine, beyond those mere mortals who must listen and – perhaps – even perform it. Una corda pedal extends a twin sense of mystery and certainty: the realm, perhaps, of religious faith. Through enigmas and fractures alike, Beethoven’s humanity shines through in all its contrapuntal – and other – obstinacy. Perhaps there is something, then, of the still later Missa solemnis to Beethoven’s plan. Bach’s lessons are Romanticised in music defiantly strange and strangely defiant, played out in a tonal arena that can only make sense, and then only just, in the age of the sonata.

Exorcising the daemon

The C minor sonata stands in two, highly contrasted movements, in tonic minor and tonic major respectively, symbolic in themselves of struggle and reconciliation. The diminished seventh chord, as in Beethoven’s own C minor Pathétique Sonata (op.13) and Fifth Symphony, offers both vertical and horizontal impetus from the opening melodic interval onwards: a lesson well learned later by Wagner, leading to the threshold of Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke. Fugal methods again feature strongly, heightening the sonata form struggle. The exposition’s move to the submediant, to A-flat major, rather than to the expected relative major, E-flat, helps prepare the surprise, hushed tierce di Picardie conclusion in C major, presaging the finale’s tonality.

It is a set of variations on a hymn-like ‘Arietta’, caught in the balance and dialectic – no more than with Mozart is this a case of either/or – between sublime simplicity and necessary complexity. Beethoven’s metrical shifts can hardly fail to register, nowhere more so than in the celebrated ‘boogie-woogie’ variation – in reality, nothing of the sort. Nevertheless, harmonic rhythm, as always with Beethoven, proves the true engine of progress. Asked by Anton Schindler why he had written no traditional third movement, Beethoven, should we trust his interlocutor’s account, contemptuously responded that there had been 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 a trilling gossamer path towards a quietly intoned, serenely unanswerable Amen. This, then, is truly music that breathes the air of another planet.

(This essay was originally published in a 2019 Salzburg Festival programme for a recital by Maurizio Pollini.)

Salzburg Festival (6) - Pollini: Schoenberg, Nono, and Beethoven, 18 August 2019

Grosses Festspielhaus

Image: Salzburger Festspiele / Marco Borrelli

Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11

Schoenberg: Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19

Nono: …..sofferte onde serene…

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.31 in A-flat major, op.110

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

André Richard (sound direction)

Much to admire here, as ever, from Maurizio Pollini. If not everything we heard spoke quite with the control it might once have done, and some of Schoenberg’s op.11 Three Piano Pieces sounded a little neutral, the sense not only of musical understanding but of music’s ethical role remained undimmed, arguably even heightened in the latter case. Motivic insistence was to the fore in the first of those Schoenberg pieces: Brahms singing through post-Wagnerian harmony. If the hyper-Romanticism one often finds here were not so prominent, anticipations of the serial Schoenberg, especially the Piano Concerto, were more so. The second piece received a performance of unusual intimacy; even at its starkest, sounds dissolving before our ears. The nagging obstinacy of Schoenberg’s ostinato seemed very much to attain an ethical dimension: an integrity closely allied to that of the pianist himself. If the third piece confounded Busoni, when sent the music by Schoenberg, it did not Pollini, whose clarification of texture and structure again seemed to look forward to the later Schoenberg.

The Six Little Pieces, op.19, received a wonderful performance. (Or should that be ‘wonderful performances’? I am never quite sure, a problem which perhaps tells us something about the ambiguity of such ‘pieces’ and their part in a greater whole.) The first, distilled, more intimate still – audience bronchial activism notwithstanding – displayed such variety of articulation, all at the service of the phrase and its place in the greater structure, as to further the illusion of a ‘natural’ outpouring. The starkness of obstinacy was again to the fore in the second, the third and fifth pieces offering, in work and performance, music as perfectly chiselled as Mozart. There came further contrast in between them, in the fourth, but also synthesis: latent violence and grace. And the sixth, famously inspired by Mahler’s funeral, ‘wie ein Hauch’: one could almost see and feel the graveyard and its chill: then and now. Magical.

In Nono’s …..sofferte onde serene…, written for Pollini, we heard the sounds of the city (Venice), its sights, fears, possibilities surrounding us. It was, of course, a human city, no mere collection of buildings or even waterways, though those played their parts. More strongly than ever, I was put in mind of the wonderful 2001 film by Bettina Ehrhardt, A Trail on the Water: Abbado – Nono – Pollini. This was ultimately a world not of conflict, but of cooperation: a vision of what might be, as well as a reflection of what is (or was). Such an imperative to listen, and joy in doing so, offered a communion that, if not strictly theological, was not without its religious impulse. The music’s unfolding proved as inevitable as it was surprising.

Simple yet proliferating, never quite to be reduced to either, the first movement of Beethoven’s op.110 sonata, was taken relatively swiftly. The marriage we heard of the intractable and serene, whilst unmistakeably Beethovenian, also made connections with the Schoenberg pieces heard earlier. Much the same might be said of the second movement, a few technical difficulties in the trio notwithstanding. The mystery of the third movement’s opening harmony – where were we? – led inexorably to the sadness of that final song, to the fugue, both ways up, and somewhere beyond. If, towards the close, one might have wished for a little more of the clarity of Pollini’s earlier years, direction and, again, ethical imperative remained undimmed.

Finally, op.111: one of those works in which we feel we have ventured as far as it is possible for us to go. (‘Caminantes, no hay caminos. Hay que caminar,’ as Nono read in a monastery inscription, inspiring him at the end of his life to continue to travel, a lack of paths both necessity and inspiration.) Beethoven’s reckoning, perhaps not final yet certainly late, with his life-long C minor daemon, sounded with all the impetuosity of his youth, the development section in particular a battle both fierce and tender, two sides of the same humanist coin. The second movement was possessed by a noble simplicity that yet contained so much within it. Here, Pollini sounded to me unquestionably at his greatest, continuing to question and to relish the strangeness of Beethoven’s variations, as early as the first. Transformation was very much a numinous thing of wonder, no mere ‘process’, just as in Schoenberg and Nono. And yet, there was always grit in the oyster: this was human music, not entirely transcendent, whatever that may mean. The sheer energy with which Pollini scaled this most extraordinary of peaks offered a standing rebuke to his dreary detractors, thrilling to an almost unbearable extent (in the very best way). ‘Sublime’ may be a word overused, but it is unavoidable here, the music’s close so pure, so gossamer white. Deconstruction we can leave until another day. As for the idiot who immediately disrupted the spell with a puerile shout of ‘Bravo!’…

Pollini/Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Widmann, Schumann, and Debussy, 4 October 2017

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Widmann: Zweites Labyrinth

Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, op.54
Debussy: Images

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

View from my seat

Following the mixed fortunes of the opening night’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, the second night at the reopened Staatsoper Unter den Linden showed, in addition to unalloyed musical excellence, that the theatre can work once again, indeed better than ever, as a fine concert venue too. Daniel Barenboim has been conducting quite a bit of Jörg Widmann’s music recently, not least at the newly opened Pierre Boulez Saal, at which Widmann himself has appeared regularly too. This concert opened with his 2006 Zweites Labyrinth, premiered by the SWR SO Baden-Baden and Freiburg (since, unforgivably, merged) under Hans Zender. It followed his Labyrinth for forty-eight strings from the previous year, albeit with very different forces: five instrumental groups, namely (1) two pianos, two harps, Hungarian and Ukrainian cimbaloms, zither, and guitárron; (2) bass clarinet, two contrabass clarinets, two bassoons, and two contrabassons; (3) eight horns; (4) four piccolos; (5) fourteen first violins and twelve second violins. It would be a spatial challenge for the most modern of halls – say, the Boulezian salle modulable around the corner. What struck me most clearly, as well as the excellence of the performance, was, in a tribute to the Staatsoper’s acoustic, how clearly and meaningfully the work sounded, without any unusual spatial arrangement. All instruments were simply on the stage, as one would have expected expect.

The performance – and work – opened forbiddingly. Forbidding, that is, in dramatic terms, rather than denoting anything especially ‘difficult’. The harsh strength – walls of the labyrinth? – of the opening gave way to aural ricocheting across the various instrumental groups, as if the orchestra were a giant keyboard, across which giant, timbrally transforming glissandi were played. (In programming retrospect, Debussy seemed to have been echoed.) The skill with which such quicksilver threads were sewn in performance proved mesmerising in itself. What a joy it was to hear the Staatskapelle Berlin in such music, not least as different instruments seemed almost to transform before our ears into each other, Widmann and the players displaying equal mastery of extended techniques. Barenboim and his musicians brought a keen sense of drama, almost of wordless opera to proceedings: not at all inappropriate for Widmann in general, nor for a concert in the Lindenoper.

Maurizio Pollini joined the orchestra for Schumann’s Piano Concerto, picking up the thread, as it were, from the previous evening. Seated where I was, in the third row of the stalls, just slightly to the left of the centre, I could hardly have had a better view of the pianist. The combination of acoustic – clear and warm – and visual proximity meant, if this makes any sense, that I could hear precisely what I saw, and vice versa. Music so well known to many in the audience, still more so to Pollini, seemed to be recomposed on the spot, before my eyes and ears, an equal or at least appropriate weight accorded to the horizontal and vertical, as if leading to Brahms or indeed to Schoenberg. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Pollini recorded the Schumann and Schoenberg concertos together with Claudio Abbado. The richness of string tone was truly a wonder in itself, especially when experienced with such physicality. Moreover, both Barenboim and Pollini brought a command of line to all three movements such as to hold absolute attention throughout. There was chamber music intimacy too, married to an undeniable sense of playing upon oscillation between tonic minor and major, which put me in mind of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, op.73, only writ large(r). Schumann’s Beethovenian inheritance seemed especially apparent in the first movement: not just its scale, but its character too. The integrity, humanistic as much as ‘merely’ musical, of the cadenza spoke volumes: once again, Schoenberg beckoned.

The sense of derivation from a single phrase, even a single note, was perhaps still stronger still in the slow movement. I thought of something Webern writes, in The Path to the New Music: ‘To develop everything … from one principal idea! That is the strongest unity … But in what form? That is where art comes in!’ The music seemed once again to achieve an ideal balance between chamber and orchestral tendencies: not quite Mozartian, for this is not Mozart, but recognisably in his line. I was particularly struck by the way particular string sections sounded as one. The transition to the finale was emotionally as well as technically spot on, the swing from the tragic to the exultant effected within a single breath, without the slightest sense of abruptness. That was surely a brevity that would have impressed, perhaps put to shame, even Webern! And indeed, it was a quality of constant transformation, not entirely unlike the music of Liszt, that characterised the performance of the finale. Line was not sacrificed, far from it, but as in the very different work by Widmann, it proved to be a dramatic line.

The second half was devoted to Debussy’s Images, a work – and of course, composer – closely associated with one of Barenboim’s greatest musical collaborators, Pierre Boulez, Honorary Conductor of this orchestra. The opening of ‘Gigues’ sounded duly mysterious, combining haze and precision; it was as if we hearing the solo lines through an aural gauze of varying intensity. Not that the performance lacked rhythmic definition, nor indeed a strength, when required, that seemed almost to echo La Mer. There was mystery too, albeit a different mystery, to the opening of ‘Rondes de printemps’: germinative and generative, spiritual and material. The idea of ‘smudged dialectics’ may be a little too ‘Impressionist’ for some, but it is what came to me listening anyway. I loved the way in which instrumental colours and harmonies – are they actually two sides of the same coin or different ‘parameters’? – shifted into each other at times, suggesting a different variety of Klangfarbenmelodie from that generally associated with the term. Barenboim’s command of line, so different from that in Widmann and Schumann, and yet equally important, again proved crucial to the dramatic progress of the piece.

A sardonic quality marked the first panel of ‘Ibéria’, ‘Par les rues et par les chemins’: not unlike Stravinsky, yet not quite like him either. The players were clearly enjoying themselves; that one could see as well as hear. Once again, a Tarnhelm-like dissolution of boundaries between different varieties of colour was splendidly apparent. A sultry penumbra of timbre seemed to surround the pitches of ‘Les parfums de la nuit’. Harmonies shifted between ambiguity and more definite progression, preparing the way for a performance of ‘Le matin d’un jour de fête’ that was surely warmer, more southern, than Boulez’s, perhaps more sardonic too, not least in Soldier’s Tale-like fiddling (whether from the excellent solo playing of Jiyoon Lee or from the entire section). It made for a fine conclusion to a fine concert indeed.