Emanuel Ax is a poet of the piano. His conception is moving and utterly rewarding and comes from his sheer mastery of his craft: piano, fingers, arms, pedals, and all. A master musician, whose constitution seems to demand that he use that mastery to communicate ravishing beauty, Emanuel Ax has the skill to fully share his humanity, a rare skill indeed. Audiences will bask in
the pure poetry of this beloved pianist.

“His greatness, his overwhelming authority as musician, technician and probing intellect emerges quickly as he plays. Within minutes, we are totally captured by his intensity and pianistic achievement.”
—Los Angeles Times

Program: Program notes

Beethoven
Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Opus 2, no. 2

Schumann
Humoreske in B-flat Major, Opus 20

Schumann
Papillons, Opus 2

Beethoven
Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Opus 53, Waldstein

Encore:

Chopin
Waltz in A minor, B.150

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Opus 2, no. 2

Though he played the viola in the opera orchestra at Bonn while still a boy, Beethoven’s true instrument was the piano. It was at the piano that he experimented with musical ideas all his life—even after he could no longer actually hear the notes he was playing. As a young man he made his mark as a virtuoso. Many descriptions make it clear that Beethoven was concerned far more with expressiveness in his playing than he was with flashy show. Technical difficulties might abound, but they were put to the service of feeling. The same could be said of his improvisations and equally of the compositions he eventually wrote down and published. When he arrived in Vienna in 1792, Beethoven’s renown as a pianist and improviser spread at once throughout the musical salons of the city, where most of the performances took place (public concert life was only just beginning at that time).

We know little about the composition of the three piano sonatas that mark the beginning of Beethoven’s acknowledged published work in that genre, which was to remain so important for the rest of his life. (He had already composed a number of piano sonatas during his youth in Bonn and had even published three of them in 1783, but he did not see fit to distinguish those products of his twelfth or thirteenth year with an opus number.) A passing comment in the Jahrbuch der Tonkunst für Wien und Prag ("Yearbook of Music for Vienna and Prague") for 1796 probably refers to these works: “We have a number of beautiful sonatas by him, amongst which the last ones particularly distinguish themselves.” (The yearbook was published before the beginning of the year by which it is dated; thus the reference to Beethoven’s “last” sonatas must have been written by the late spring of 1795. At all events, Beethoven had completed the Opus 2 sonatas by August 20, the day Haydn arrived in Vienna from his second London sojourn. Soon afterward, he played them for Haydn at a Friday morning concert at Prince Lichnowsky’s, and when they were finally published during the winter, Beethoven headed the edition with a dedication to his former teacher.

Beethoven learned a great deal from Haydn—from his music directly, if not from his tutelage. But in his early sonatas he also owed a large debt to two great pianistic innovators who have not been so well remembered, the Bohemian Jan Ladislav Dussek and the Italian Muzio Clementi, both of whom had published piano sonatas during the 1780s that display both a rhetorical style and a degree of passion that we are more likely to associate with Beethoven. Still, no amount of influence-tracing can overlook the powerful unifying mind at work in these three sonatas, uniting the smallest elements of rhythm, pitch, and harmony with the largest into an organic whole of enormous variety.

The Sonata in A Major, Opus 2, no. 2, is more lyrical in mood than the others, though filled with the joyful play of contrapuntal lines in imitation or opposition—a lesson well learned from Albrechtsberger. Every musical listener in Beethoven’s day would expect a modulation from the home key of A to the dominant of E major for the secondary theme; Beethoven offers the jolt of E minor, only settling into the major just before the end of the exposition. The link to the development is another reference to E minor, though, and that is only the beginning of a far-ranging play of keys that finally returns home for a straightforward recapitulation.

The Largo appassionato presents a spacious sustained theme marked by sharply staccato bass notes; it is stated in full twice, each time followed by a contrasting episode, then summarized at the end.

By contrast to the long phrases of the preceding movement, the Scherzo (Allegretto) is built of musical molecules, short rapid figures tossed off with aplomb. The trio offers a lyrical, minor-mode theme for contrast.

The final Rondo (marked Grazioso) is regarded as the most Mozartean movement of these three sonatas, but its opening gesture—a rapid arpeggio upwards—becomes less "gracious" and more assertive as the movement goes on, at every real return of the full rondo theme, and also at the purposely misleading moments when Beethoven wants us to think it is about to return, only to lead off into wonderful surprises.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Humoreske in B-flat Major, Opus 20

In late 1838 and early1839, shortly before he was finally able to marry his beloved Clara, Schumann wrote three piano pieces that were not part of a set—Arabeske, Blumenstück ("Flower Piece"), and Humoreske. Two of these seem to have been part of a new determination to write in a more accessible and popular style (if only to increase sales of his work as well as his income, in the light of his approaching marriage). The composer himself said that the first two were "delicate—for ladies." But Humoreske was another matter entirely. It is a large-scale work, but not shaped in any standard musical form. Neither is it simply a collection of miniatures linked by key and contrasting styles, as many of his earlier sets were.

The choice of title was designed (so Schumann wrote to a Belgian acquaintance) to evoke "those two most characteristic and deeply rooted of German conceptions, das Gemütliche (Schwärmerische) [or "cozy (fantastical)"] and Humor, the latter of which is a happy combination of Gemütlichkeit and wit." Yet he also told an old friend, Henriette Vogel, that rather than being humorous, and despite the title, the work was on the melancholy side.

There seems to be no literary source or idea behind the music. Schumann invites the listener to follow a series of moods of varying character, some of them almost large enough to be a full-scale movement in another piece, others simply short linking passages, as if the composer has allowed his thoughts to dictate a free-flowing romantic state of mind. Certainly the presence of lively and cheerful music sets off the melancholy passages that much more strongly.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Papillons, Opus 2

Schumann was as much influenced by literary ideas as he was by musical influences, and the early keyboard masterpiece Papillons is an apt case in point. Indeed, the work was fundamental in shaping the course of Schumann’s development as a composer of what might be called poetic cycles in music. The origins of the piece are veiled in mystery. It is clear that Schumann has assembled a number of miniatures, often older pieces, and converted them—rather like the metamorphosis that produces the titular “butterflies”—into something entirely new. But when? And how? And why?

One influence was surely Schumann’s favorite novel, Flegeljahre ("Adolescence," with the connotation of loutishness) by Jean Paul. The next-to-last chapter takes place at a masked ball in which one of two brothers, Walt and Vult exchange masks to discover which of them their sweetheart Wina really loves. During April 1832, Schumann wrote to several people, including his mother and the poet and editor Ludwig Rellstab, urging them to read the passage and making various references to how Papillons converts the masked ball scene into tones.

The growth of the work was complex, and it is scarcely possible—without an extended discussion, reading, and listening—to compare the various short dance-based movements with Schumann’s possible literary inspiration. But he did point out that the finale of Papillons was programmatic, in that the piano sounds the hour of 6 (in the morning!)—when the dance broke up (Schumann quotes a traditional melody, the Grossvatertanz ("Grandfather’s dance") usually played at the end of a ball. And as the clock strikes six, the sounds of the revelry fade away. Schumann holds the final dominant seventh chord for several measures and has the notes drop out one by one (from the bottom) before adding a dryly perfunctory final cadence. In his first copy of Papillons, Schumann apparently wrote the closing words of Jean Paul’s novel, which he seems to be echoing in music: "Hark, from the distance Walt listened in rapture to the fleeing notes; for he did not realize that his brother was fleeing with them."

It may be difficult to define precisely what Schumann took from Jean Paul in shaping the music (and what he simply applied to the finished composition as a kind of explanation for his audience), but another influence is far more evident. In 1829, Schumann had written to his teacher Friedrich Wieck (later his father-in-law) that his idols were Jean Paul and Schubert, and he asked for copies of all of Schubert’s waltzes. These clearly inspired his own waltz compositions and no doubt generated some of the miniatures that ended up in Papillons.

When the work appeared, it astonished virtually everyone. First of all, the keyboard technique was often novel. But most of all, listeners were taken aback by the structure of many very short movements—sometimes as little as 8 measures (repeated), so that one barely gets the music into one’s head before it has been left behind and something entirely different comes along. When Clara Wieck played the piece for a soirée in her father’s house in May 1832, the members of the audience "looked at one another in amazement" because the rapid progression of short pieces left them bewildered. The mercurial nature of the work and the harmonic daring with which Schumann projected it put him, in his own time, in the category of a daring and "difficult" composer. Now we hear him as a quintessential exponent of the romantic sensibility.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Opus 53, "Waldstein"

When the young Beethoven left Bonn to move permanently to Vienna in 1792, he carried an autograph album in which were inscribed these words: "Dear Beethoven, You are going to Vienna in fulfilment of your long frustrated wishes....With the help of assiduous labor you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands." This note had been written by Count Ferdinand Ernst Waldstein, a Viennese aristocrat who had spent some years in Bonn and who had come to know Beethoven well. Beethoven appreciated his interest (and his letters of introduction to prominent Viennese patrons), and he repaid it a dozen years later with the dedication of one of his most popular sonatas.

The Waldstein Sonata, along with its minor-key companion piece, the Appassionata (Opus 57), reflects the new dynamism that Beethoven achieved in the composition of the Eroica Symphony. Indeed, he began sketching the Waldstein Sonata in the same sketchbook that contains material for the symphony. This was the first sonata that Beethoven wrote for the new larger keyboard, too, so that he could exploit higher regions of the piano for the first time.

All three movements begin quietly, and the most frequent dynamic in the score is “pp,” yet the overall effect is one of controlled power. The hushed reiteration of the opening C major triad, followed by a repetition of the phrase a whole step lower, begins a daring harmonic adventure that leads to the surprising key of E major for the second theme. The energy of the development also derives in large part from harmonic surprises, which continue to the very end of the movement.

The last two movements gave Beethoven a good deal of trouble. He planned an Andante in E before rejecting it (this was later published separately as Andante favori, WoO 57) in favor of an extended link to the finale, rather than a self-sufficient movement; chromatic passages frame a lyric melody in F. The finale proved most problematic. Beethoven first cast it as a simple 3/8 movement, but later decided on an extended rondo in 2/4, for which he refined the main theme through a series of sketches. With this finale he achieves a new brilliance of effect, though without ever losing a clear sense of the overall shape.

© Steven Ledbetter; www.stevenledbetter.com