Clementi, Sonatina Op 36 No 5 / Yuja Wang

The remarkable Italian pianist, composer, pedagogue, publisher, and piano maker Muzio Clementi published his "Progressive" Sonatinas opus 36 in 1797, at the age of 45, when he had been living in London for thirty years.
They are one of his most famous works as a pedagogue and were published, of course, with a pedagogical purpose, intended for young bourgeois piano lovers. It was an extraordinary contribution. And it still is, two hundred and twenty years later.
This is the author's great merit. There is no classical piano student today who has not studied and chosen at least one of Maestro Clementi's "progressive" sonatinas for an exam.

The Opus 36
Over the course of his life, the master composed no less than 110 piano sonatas. He called a group of them – the earliest and simplest – "progressive", because their difficulty increases from the first to the last. Six of them make up Opus 36. And if No. 1 does not demand much from the left hand, the last one requires great skill to play complex rhythms, as well as exquisite phrasing.

Muzio Clementi (1752 - 1832)

The Art of Playing the Pianoforte
In general terms, the complete work emphasizes the basic skills in learning the piano: dynamic control, even touch, and melodic phrasing. In a new edition of 1803, published as a supplement to yet another of his pedagogical contributions (Introduction to the Art of Playing the Pianoforte), Clementi included specific instructions on ornamentation and arpeggios. As in 1797, the work was an immediate success. It was the fate of the master, who died rich in 1832.

The six Sonatinas have different characters, but in all of them, grace and charming melodies are present.

Sonatina No. 5 from Opus 36, in G major - Movements
It is in 3 movements and is the longest of the whole set, lasting just over seven minutes. Its second movement is a "Swiss air", made up of unusual six-bar phrases.

00       Presto

02:20  Air Suisse. Allegro moderato

04:02  Rondo. Allegro di molto

The performance is by the remarkable Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, when she was nine years old.

Mozart, Mass in C minor - "Kyrie"

 
On July 31, 1782, Mozart wrote to his father Leopold requesting permission to marry Constanze Weber. But he did not wait for a reply. Four days later the couple married in Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral. Mozart was 26 years old. Constanze was 20. Mozart had finally succeeded in making Constanze his wife without Leopold's consent. In a vow of gratitude to fate, Wolfgang undertook to write a mass as an offering to Constanze. The day after the marriage, magically, Leopold's consent arrived.

The Mozart family in Salzburg
From the autumn of 1782 until the middle of 1783 Mozart worked on the score. In January 1873 he wrote to his father telling him that the mass was fifty percent finished. But when the couple visited Leopold in Salzburg, where the Mass had been arranged to be premiered, the work still remained unfinished. With fragments from other masses, it was nonetheless premiered on October 26, 1873, in a parish church (the cathedral was out of the question due to the recent break with Archbishop Colloredo). Constanze sang the soprano soloist parts.

Constanze Mozart, in 1802
(1762 - 1842)

Mass in C minor, K. 427
As curiously happened with almost all of Mozart's compositions related to Constance, the work remained unfinished forever. The traditional sections of the "common Mass" (as opposed to the Requiem Mass), Mozart would have finished are the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Benedictus, leaving the Credo begun and the Agnus Dei unbegun. However, it is also argued that the composer may have finished the work in Salzburg a few days before its premiere, with the originals being lost.

Kyrie
The most frequently appealed section is presented here as a stand-alone piece, the Kyrie, approximately seven minutes long, in a rendition by the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong and choirs, conducted by Helmuth Rilling. Soprano Louise Kwong sings what Constanze sang almost two hundred and fifty years ago.

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.