Beethoven, Sonata No 32, Opus 111

Franz Liszt, the creator of the modern recital, suffered slightly disappointed after visiting Italy in 1838 and performing as a concert pianist at Milan's Alla Scala. The audience, no doubt, would have roared with enthusiasm if the 27-year-old Hungarian maestro had offered them part of his vast repertoire of piano transcriptions of bel canto opera. But he didn't. This time Liszt appeared with a repertoire made up entirely of Beethoven sonatas, convinced that it was time for the master from Bonn, who had been missing for eleven years, to be considered at the height of his stature by the public at large. The opposite was true: the common Milanese audience was not yet at Beethoven's level.

Waiting for the 20th century
We do not know the sonatas Liszt played for this occasion, but it is to be expected that he did not include the last three, which are more difficult to digest for the common public. In fact, a great Polish pedagogue, in the middle of the 19th century, advised his students simply not to study them, although the reason was mainly economic: there would be no audience to present them to. Liszt could attest to this. The public who loved Beethoven's complete sonatas will only emerge in the 20th century thanks to technology. Through the use of players, it was possible to bring back home that music that had been conceived a hundred years ago to be listened to serenely and attentively by a small group of people.

The triptych
In the course of three years, from 1820 to 1822, Beethoven undertook the composition of the triptych made up of his three last sonatas, publishing in each year, the opus 109, 110, and 111. During these years, the master's health deteriorated. Nevertheless, he was able to alternate this work with the writing of pieces as great as the Missa Solemnis or the resolution of the finale of the Ninth Symphony.  It seems that the maestro knew how to make the most of the moments when, despite everything, he seemed to "feel a new life", as he wrote in his notes.

Title page of the first edition

Sonata No 32 in C minor, opus 111
Certainly, the late sonatas are not Beethoven's most popular. But only a few of the latter can rival in depth and richness of sound with the last sonata, the Sonata in C minor No 32, opus 111, considered one of the greatest piano sonatas ever written, capable of leading the listener into sound worlds hitherto unknown, let alone explored.

Novel rhythmic patterns
Published in 1822, it is dedicated, like so many others, to his friend and mentor, Archduke Rudolph. In its construction, Beethoven departs from convention and writes only two movements, which he calls Maestoso and Arietta, the latter the longest, with a structure of theme and variations. Surprisingly for those who listen to it for the first time, the second movement contains rhythmic patterns that only a hundred years later will be heard again and will be a novelty to the point of receiving denominations hitherto unheard in music: swing and boogie-woogie.

Movements:
00       Maestoso: Allegro con brio ed appassionato
9:02    Arietta: Adagio molto, semplice e cantabile. Theme and variations:

   Var I:     11:43
   Var II:    13:45 (the swing starts)
   Var III:  15:30 (the boogie-woogie starts)
   Var IV:  17:39
   Var V:    20:55
   Var VI:  22:44

The performance is by Chilean maestro Claudio Arrau.

Schoenberg, Transfigured Night, sextet

Arnold Schoenberg, founder of the Vienna School together with his disciples Webern and Berg, and one of the most important composers in the evolution of Western music in the 20th century had no music lessons other than those he received from a musicologist and his brother-in-law, a conductor and composer. Born in Vienna in 1874 into a very modest Jewish family, he did not have access to what in his day was an average bourgeois education, that is, one that could not do without the presence of a piano in the living room. There was no piano in Arnold's house. So his musical vocation, although manifest from childhood, had to be satisfied almost in a self-taught way.

A remarkable cellist who would surprise the world
The future creator of atonality and twelve-tone technique in close conjunction with his disciples, before the age of twenty had become a remarkable cellist, albeit an amateur, since he owed his training as an instrumentalist mostly to himself. But at the same time, he showed clear signs of aptitude for composition, which had already surprised his composer brother-in-law at an early age. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the musical world, divided between the applause of his incorruptible followers and the unleashed anger of his detractors – which would accompany the composer throughout his life – was surprised.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951)

Transfigured Night

His early works bear the unmistakable stamp of German post-Romanticism, perhaps nowhere more evident than in his first major work, the 1899 sextet for strings Transfigured Night. However, the twenty-five-year-old Schoenberg already flirts here with atonalism, pushing tonality to its limits.

Inspired by a poem

The work, in a single movement despite its half-hour length, is inspired by a poem, making it the first "programmatic" piece written for a chamber ensemble. The episode tells the story of a woman, unfaithful to the man she really loves, who passionately and tragically confesses her infidelity to him, and the subsequent acceptance of the facts by the betrayed lover. The love of both will finally overcome the mess, "transfiguring" the night in which the confession is perpetrated.

The rendition is by the American chamber ensemble NEC Contemporary Ensemble.

Scriabin, Prelude for the left hand

The piano and the left hand
Piano works written for the left hand alone are not few. Nor are they plentiful. But among this no lesser number, there are pieces belonging to outstanding composers of almost all times. Most of them, however, are rewritings due to the request of some momentarily crippled pianist or recreated with the purpose of serving as a gigantic exercise for the less skilled hand of an ambidextrous musician.

Wittgenstein
But there are also original pieces commissioned by a pianist crippled forever; this is the case of the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War, and who received the collaboration of Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Hindemith and, of course, Ravel (Concerto in D major), thus managing to form, order after order, a new handful of magnificent works just for the left hand.

Brahms
In the previous century, Johannes Brahms gave Clara Schumann an arrangement for the left hand of Bach's Chaconne in D minor so that the pianist would not fall into depression after suffering a minor right hand accident which, in the end, did not become serious.

Godowski
And between the 19th and 20th centuries, the Polish pianist Leopold Godowski (1870 - 1935) stands out, possessing an extraordinary technique that allowed him to rewrite no more and no less than several of Chopin's Etudes for the solo left hand, moving both by a didactic zeal and by the desire to show the world what dimensions his own technique encompassed.

Scriabin
Around the same time, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872 - 1915) wrote, albeit for his own delectation and enjoyment, a Prelude and a Nocturne, both deeply romantic, as a result of an ailment of the right arm during his adolescence, following his hard work with Liszt's most fierce pieces. Both pieces make up his Opus 9, from 1894.

In a rendition by the extraordinary Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, the less than three minutes Prelude is presented here.

Mozart, Fantasia in D minor

In 1782 Mozart had only been in Vienna for a year, and at the age of twenty-six, he had established himself there as an outstanding piano player and opera composer of some renown. In December of the previous year, he had participated in a "competition" with his colleague Muzio Clementi, which Joseph II, promoter of the candid duel, declared a "draw". Before July 1982 he had completed the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, inaugurating with it the genre known as singspiel, the German opera sung in German, which earned him all the applause. That same year he married Constanze Weber in August. Also in 1782, he would have probably composed the delightful piano work that every pianist has had to deal with in his early years of training.

Fantasia in D minor, K. 397

The original manuscript of the work has been lost, and since Mozart had not yet begun the useful recording of his own works (which he would begin in 1784), scholars have had no choice but to speculate about the date of composition. Some date the little work around 1782, others are more precise and date it between August and September of that year.

But perhaps the most curious thing is that the work as we know it today does not belong entirely to Mozart, which opens the door to other speculations.

A small unfinished work

One of the prevailing theories holds that the work may have been intended to be part of another sonata, in D major, probably the sonata K. 311 (from 1777-78), abandoned after Mozart found another solution, and therefore much earlier. What is certain is that Mozart left the work unfinished, although today we can hear it "complete" thanks to the collaboration of a composer who "finished" it by adding the ten final bars, a work probably done by the German composer and organist August E. Müller (1767-1817).

A seven-minute Fantasia

As its title indicates, the little piano piece of just over seven minutes in length exhibits an air of improvisation that makes it difficult to characterize it in any recognizable traditional form other than... fantasia.

The finale, contributed by Müller, has not been to the liking of some musicologists who have labeled it "un-Mozartinian." To us, it seems faultless. His valued collaboration begins at about minute 6:02.

The performance is by the Russian pianist Emil Gilels.

Wagner, "Ride of the Valkyries"

Composition of the tetralogy "The Ring of the Nibelung", a cycle of four epic operas based on episodes of Germanic mythology, took Richard Wagner no less than twenty-six years. The work of a lifetime was begun in Dresden, in 1848, when the author was flirting with anarchism, and completed in 1874 in the peace and serenity of Wahnfried, the neoclassical villa he had built in Bayreuth, kindly sponsored by his most conspicuous admirer, the esoteric young King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

"The Valkyrie", composed between 1854 and 1856, is the second opera in the cycle. (It is preceded by the introductory drama The Rheingold, and is followed by Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods.) And the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" is the piece that opens the third act, accompanying the Valkyries (daughters of the god Wotan, beautiful warriors, and virgins as well) who, singing their war cry, are preparing to carry out the transfer of the fallen combatants to Walhalla, a majestic hall where the unfortunate heroes end up, hand in hand with the aforementioned virgin warriors.

The so-called The Ride... is the name by which the piece has become popular, and it is so called in its purely instrumental performances, which are usually half the length of the operatic version. But Wagner never titled any section or part of The Valkyrie by that name. So much so, that in her diary, Cosima Wagner registers her annoyance at the letters she received requesting separate performances of The Ride. "I don't know what they are talking about," she wrote.

Disregarding its use in German war newsreels, accompanying Luftwaffe bombing scenes, the piece was enthroned in popular culture through Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (1979), this time accompanying the helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village, as part of the plot. In both cases, the work ended up saluting defeat.

The performance presented here (with the voices of the eight Valkyries) was part of the performance of the complete cycle of the tetralogy, in 2010 and 2012, in a gigantic production by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. It lasts little more than 6 minutes.