Mozart - Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 533/K. 494
Bach - Partita No. 5 in G Major, BWV 829
Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53, "Waldstein"
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 533 / K. 494
About the Composer
By the early 1780s, Mozart was the toast of Vienna, having recently left the employ of Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg to become a freelance pianist and composer in the imperial capital. A string of public appearances, including a well-publicized “duel” with his rival Muzio Clementi, burnished his fame as a keyboard virtuoso. Having discovered that the Viennese were willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of attending his subscription concerts, he worked day and night to keep the programs stocked with a fresh supply of music.
About the Work
During the last decade of his life, Mozart composed no fewer than 17 piano concertos, as well as a variety of solo keyboard music. This diverse and masterly repertoire illustrates his determination to expand the scope of piano technique and expression, even as he breathed new life into forms and genres associated with his 18th-century predecessors. The finale of the F-Major Sonata was first published as a freestanding Rondo in 1786; two years later, Mozart appended an expanded version to a freshly minted Allegro and Andante. The resulting composite work is a characteristically Mozartean blend of playfulness and profundity.
A Closer Listen
The Sonata in F Major starts off innocently with a perky little tune whose two-bar phrases are separated by a quizzical octave leap—but the second theme, with its cascading triplets and lickety-split turns, gives a foretaste of the bravura sophistication that lies ahead. The Andante, in burnished B-flat major, is as sedate as the Allegro was energetic. The relaxed lyricism of the opening theme, harmonized in dulcet thirds and sixths, soon gives way to music of a more strenuous character, with intricate passagework and wayward chromatic harmonies. In the finale, Mozart adds layer upon layer of complexity, cloaking the gaily skipping rondo theme in embellishments and alternating it with stormy episodes. In the end, the sparkle fades and the sonata closes in unexpected baritonal repose.
FRANZ LISZT
Tre sonetti del Petrarca, from Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie, S. 161
About the Composer
A peerless virtuoso known for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, Liszt took Europe by storm in the 1830s and ’40s. Only a handful of performers, who included violinist Niccolò Paganini and pianist Sigismond Thalberg, matched his star power. As audiences in city after city succumbed to “Lisztomania,” the Hungarian’s name became a byword for showmanship as well as technical wizardry. In 1848, at the height of his fame, he virtually retired from the concert stage and devoted the rest of his life to composing, conducting, and proselytizing (with his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner) for the “Music of the Future.” In his piano music, symphonic tone poems, and vocal works, Liszt experimented with forms, harmonies, and sonorities that anticipated the musical language of impressionism and modernism.
About the Work
The Tre sonetti del Petrarca (Three Petrarch Sonnets) appeared in Liszt’s three-part collection titled Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), composed between 1838 and 1882. The pilgrimage in question was both physical and spiritual: Some of the pieces relate to Liszt’s travels as an itinerant virtuoso, while others reflect his late-life decision to enter holy orders in the Catholic Church. Petrarch’s poetry captured the composer’s imagination on his early sojourns in Italy in the late 1830s. These three bewitching settings were originally conceived as songs for tenor and piano. Liszt published piano transcriptions in 1846 and revised them a dozen years later for the second volume of Années de pèlerinage, subtitled “Italie.”
A Closer Listen
Like many of his fellow Romantics, Liszt was steeped in literary culture, so it’s not surprising that these three miniature tone poems are, in effect, “deep readings” of Petrarch’s exquisitely crafted sonnets. In “Benedetto sia ’l giorno,” the breathless ardor of the lover’s laundry list of blessings—strung together with one “and” after another—is echoed in the almost imperceptible syncopations of the melodic line. The second of the sonnets explores the conflicting emotional states engendered by love: The heartsick pilgrim begins, “Pace non trovo” (“I find no peace”). Impetuously climbing octaves give way to a pensive, yearning melody that builds to an ecstatic climax, with dazzling roulades and chains of thirds, then subsides in an achingly tender coda. In “I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi,” Liszt’s wistful theme is swathed in rolled chords and pearly chromatic runs, a ballad-like setting that emblematizes Petrarch’s “sweet concert” of feminine virtues.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Partita No. 5 in G Major, BWV 829
About the Composer
J. S. Bach was the greatest of a large family of German musicians spanning several generations. Although he spent most of his life as a hardworking church musician, his contemporaries knew him best as a celebrated virtuoso on the organ and harpsichord. He composed a wide range of secular instrumental music, from unaccompanied works for keyboard and other instruments to large-scale orchestral suites and concertos. Much of this repertoire was featured in the public concerts Bach organized at a popular coffeehouse in Leipzig in his capacity as director of the local collegium musicum.
About the Work
Bach’s six keyboard partitas are among his greatest works in suite form. When they were first published as a set in 1731, the influential composer and critic Johann Mattheson felt compelled to warn potential purchasers that they weren’t just easy-to-play dances, but formidably challenging exercises: “Etudes need to be practiced, and anyone who ventured to read them off at sight would be undertaking something very foolhardy, thinking that with his juggler’s tricks he could impose on his listeners’ credulity—were he the arch-harpsichordist himself.” Despite the partitas’ technical difficulty, however, Bach disarmingly advertised them on the title page as “galanteries, composed for music lovers, to refresh their spirits.”
A Closer Listen
The Fifth Partita’s bright, annunciatory Praeambulum has the feel of a written-down improvisation, with rippling scales and undulating arpeggios punctuated by short, sharp chords. In the Allemande, long chains of dancing triplets flow from one hand to the other, their smoothly gliding motion offset by athletic leaps and subtle syncopations. Despite its propulsive triple meter, the Courante is more foursquare in its rhythmic impulse, its repeating kaleidoscopic patterns standing out all the more clearly for the lucid two-voice texture. The plangent Sarabande offers a vivid contrast in pace and character; its stately melodic line, bedecked with appoggiaturas and passing notes, is sweetly harmonized in thirds and sixths. A bouncy Tempo di Minuetto, artfully combining triple and duple meters, leads to an equally energetic Passepied—a triple-time dance closely related to the minuet—and the suite ends with a bracing Gigue, whose sharply etched fugal subject is flipped on its head in the second half.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Andante in F Major, WoO 57, “Andante favori”
About the Composer
Beethoven the pianist, no less than the composer, was a force of nature who seemed incapable of following the rules of polite society. His no-holds-barred playing wreaked havoc on the light-framed keyboard instruments of his day, as Anton Reicha discovered in the 1790s. “He asked me to turn pages for him,” the Czech composer recalled. “But I was mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte which snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings.” Yet there was a tender, poetic side to Beethoven’s pianism as well. Comparing him to a celebrated virtuoso of the day, another composer wrote that Beethoven had “greater eloquence, weightier ideas, and is more expressive—in short, he is more for the heart.”
About the Work
No piece better illustrates the lyrical aspect of Beethoven’s art than the rondo-form Andante that he originally intended as the slow movement of the “Waldstein” Sonata. According to his pupil Ferdinand Ries, the composer took particular pleasure in playing his “favorite andante” in recitals. (At one point, he sent the manuscript to Countess Josephine Deym hoping to charm her into reciprocating his passionate avowals of love, but to no avail.) Ries was an unwitting party to a practical joke when he played the freshly minted “Andante favori” from memory for Beethoven’s patron, Prince Lichnowsky. The following day, Ries reported, Lichnowsky called on Beethoven and “said that he too had composed something which was not at all bad. In spite of Beethoven’s remark that he did not want to hear it, the prince sat down and to the amazement of the composer played a goodly portion of the Andante.” Infuriated by what he regarded as a breach of confidence, Beethoven refused to play in Ries’s presence ever again.
A Closer Listen
Much more than a negligible clip from the cutting room floor, the “Andante favori” is part and parcel of Beethoven’s transition from the polished Classicism of his early works to the raw and more elemental Romanticism of his middle period. The piece opens in a deceptively conventional manner, with a placid F-major melody in lilting triple time. However, Beethoven soon complicates things by taking an unexpected detour to D-flat major, the first of many daring and imaginative modulations that accentuate the music’s warm and passionate character. The beguiling rondo theme returns in so many different guises that the “Andante favori” takes on the aspect of a set of variations. Perhaps unconsciously, Beethoven seems to evoke the unorthodox tonal scheme of his Six Variations on an Original Theme in F Major of 1802, a work he had singled out as representing an “entirely new manner” of composing.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53, “Waldstein”
About the Work
The “Waldstein” Sonata is dedicated to another of Beethoven’s noble patrons, Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, who befriended him in Bonn and later smoothed the way for the ambitious young tyro’s entrée into Vienna. The sonata dates from 1803 to 1804, when Beethoven was working out the heroic style that also found expression in his contemporaneous “Eroica” Symphony and “Appassionata” Piano Sonata. As originally conceived, the “Waldstein” Sonata had a conventional full-length slow movement in rondo form. Beethoven had second thoughts, however: He published the slow movement separately as the “Andante favori” and replaced it in the sonata with a concise Adagio molto that ties the outer movements together in a decidedly unconventional fashion.
A Closer Listen
The “Waldstein” Sonata is a magisterial work that is both formally innovative and overflowing with invention. Beethoven plunges straight into the opening Allegro con brio, with pulsating eighth notes in the left hand set against wisps of melody in the right, seemingly hinting at an unheard theme. The movement’s brilliant character and feverish intensity were no doubt designed to show off the composer’s temperament as well as his technique. (He had recently acquired a new, more powerful Érard piano.) In place of the original Andante, he gives us a brief, searching, and darkly mysterious Introduzione—similar to the “bridge” movement he would write several years later for his A-Major Cello Sonata—that sets the stage for a lighthearted Rondo finale. Beethoven uses the familiar cyclical form as a vehicle for bravura passagework, bell-like effects, sustained trills in the inner voices, and other tricks of the virtuoso’s trade.
