Clementi's Sonata in B flat / Clementi and Mozart: A Pianistic Duel

Muzio Clementi (1752 - 1832)

In the first days of January 1781, the court of Vienna was dressed up (more than usual) to receive the most renowned Austrian pianist facing the most renowned non-Austrian pianist of those years.
At the invitation of the music-loving Emperor Joseph II, the Salzburg-born Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Italian Muzio Clementi met in his salons to delight the noble audience with their improvisations and display of virtuoso technique, in order to define once and for all what kept such an exquisite audience in suspense: which of the two was the best pianist in that small world.

Muzio Clementi, pianist, composer, future publisher, and piano maker had long been established in England, where he was a celebrity. But he had yet to be heard on the continent. Four years older than Mozart, he would take the opportunity to show his skills before the court of the most glamorous empire of the time.

A draw

According to tradition, the competition was declared a draw. Though in his innermost self, Joseph II favored the grace and touché of his fellow countryman, as he would later tell a famed composer. Both musicians performed pieces of their own, then improvised on themes proposed by the audience, and sight-read scores on which they were asked to elaborate variations. At the end, Clementi accompanied Mozart on a second piano and vice versa.

Mozart gets ready

This information would be enough to satisfy us, but there was an eyewitness who allows us to go further. Giuseppe Antonio Bridi, Mozart's friend, left a chronicle of the evening. From him we know that Clementi was the first to jump into the ring, improvising a prelude. He then played a sonata, a sonata in B flat major that enchanted Mozart, to such an extent that ten years later he would use its opening theme in the overture to The Magic Flute. Clementi, who was delighted to meet Mozart that night, never forgave him for the trick.

Sonata in B flat major, opus 24 No 2 (erroneously catalogued as opus 47 in some editions).
As might be expected, the dates of composition and publication can only be estimated. However, due to Mozart's misappropriation of it in 1791 – a common misappropriation at the time – Clementi was obliged, each time he republished the sonata, to add a note that it had been written "ten years earlier" than The Magic Flute, i.e. in 1781, or a little earlier. And regarding the publication, recent studies also date it to that year, and in Vienna, which seems most wise given that the piece had been made "public" at the court of Joseph II, only a couple of months before.

Movements
Structured in the traditional Vivaldian fast-slow-fast style, the exquisite piece is part of the most correct and careful classical piano, a jewel.

00:00  Allegro con brio

04:18  Andante - quasi allegretto

08:35  Rondo - allegro assai

The superb version is by pianist Zenan Kwan, born in Hong Kong. It is an extraordinary experience to listen to it remembering that Mozart attended the same experience, more than two hundred years ago, although "live", coming from the hands of Clementi himself.

Chopin, Piano Sonata No 3 in B minor / Kate Liu - audition guide

It is often said that Chopin was essentially a composer of miniatures. And this is true if the label is used to describe pieces for solo piano that do not exceed ten minutes. However, he was also capable of handling the sonata form with remarkable competence, as attested by the three sonatas he composed during his lifetime, or at least, the last two (the first, a youthful work... of course, Chopin was eighteen years old). No. 2 is the famous Funeral Sonata, from 1837, which incorporates as its third movement the even more famous Funeral March.

Seven years had to go by for the third venture into the form. The Sonata in B minor was begun in the quiet and peacefulness of Nohant, during the summer of 1844, and finished the same year in Paris.

The death of the father

One might think that Nohant's calmness was excessive because the production of that year only includes two pieces, the sonata No. 3 and the Berceuse op 57, the latter the only lullaby written by Chopin. It so happened that in April of that year, the Polish master received very bad news. In Warsaw, one thousand five hundred kilometers away, his seventy-three-year-old father had died. It was a hard blow for the musician, who had seen his parents for the last time almost ten years ago.

A visit from Luisa

She had not seen either her sister Louise in fourteen years. Mrs. Sand, wise and compassionate, invited Louise and her husband to visit them in Nohant. Becoming a singular master of the house, Chopin entertained his sister with gardens, fountains and groves for three weeks. They strolled in the evenings. Chopin composed in the mornings, and some music was made in the evenings, as a family. Perhaps Luisa caught a glimpse of some sketches of the sonata.

Sonata No 3 in B minor, op 58

Considered one of his most difficult pieces, harmonically and rhythmically, it lasts about 25 minutes or more. Chopin replicated in it the structure of the previous sonata: four movements, although the "funeral march" has been replaced by the largo as the third movement. Published in Leipzig the same year of its creation, 1844, and not long after in London and Paris, it is dedicated to the Countess of Perthuis, one of many noble ladies in whose salons Chopin more than once delighted a reduced audience, the one that best suited him.

Movements:
00:00 Allegro maestoso - An impetuous first theme will be followed by a lyrical second theme (sostenuto e molto espressivo, minute 1:33) that brings to mind the composer's unmistakable nocturnes. The recapitulation rests mostly on this second theme (6:43). Two vigorous chords close the movement.

09:42 Scherzo. Molto vivace - Very brief but agile and energetic, with a restful middle section (the trio: 10:18).

12:22 Largo - The core of the sonata. After a succinct introduction, the main theme is introduced at 12:55. The movement progresses to an articulated section in quiet eighth notes at 15:32. The initial theme returns at 20:08 with an accompanying left hand that murmurs rather than presses keys.

22:40 Finale. Presto non tanto - A rondo, of great tension. After a couple of dense bars, the main theme emerges, vehement and passionate (22:51). The contrasting element is a section in a major key that demands abysmal finger agility from the performer (beginning in bursts at 23:35 and continuing for more than twenty measures at 23:55). At 25:46, a grand coda initiates the magnificent denouement.

The rendition is by Singapore-born pianist Kate Liu during her participation in the 2015 Warsaw International Chopin Competition. She got there the third prize (bronze medal), stingy, in our opinion.

Henri Dutilleux, his only Piano Sonata (with a listening guide)

 

The French composer Henri Dutilleux did not have enough time to create an extensive and numerous body of work, despite living a long life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth century.
His catalog includes no more than thirty compositions. Nevertheless, a significant portion of them is still regarded as a bouquet of masterpieces of Western musical literature, moral heirs to the French tradition represented by Debussy and Ravel.
The author's unrelenting preference for quality over quantity and high level of self-demand led to the publication of such a small corpus. The beginning of World War II also played a role.

He returned to Paris shortly before France entered the war, having to serve his country as a stretcher-bearer until the Armistice of 1940. In the following years, he lived poorly in the occupied city. However, he had access to some positions in the Paris Opera and Radio France, continuing his training almost on his own, reading composition treatises and learning about the avant-garde by hearsay.

Henri Dutilleux (1916 - 2013)

Piano Sonata, opus 1
In 1941 he met Genevieve Joy, a fellow student at the Conservatoire, which in occupied France was still functioning as much as possible. They married at the end of the war. From then on and for a long time, Genevieve became the interpreter and disseminator of his piano works, especially his only Sonata, composed between 1948-49 and dedicated to Genevieve, as you may have guessed.

True to his overwhelming claim to his own work, the composer labeled the piece as Opus 1, thus relegating to a ghost plane the earlier, shorter works that had emerged over a ten-year period, because he considered the Sonata to be the first work up to his mature standards. 

Movements:
A work of enormous technical demands (Genevieve must have excelled at, for sure), it combines two great concerns of the mature Dutilleux: formal rigor and harmonic research. Hence the traditional three-movement structure on the one hand, and the sustained tonal ambiguity (more: sometimes tonal, sometimes atonal) on the other.

00:00  Allegro con moto: Beginning openly in 2/2 rhythm, soon there will be changes in the rhythmic structure (the "accent pattern"). The harmonic ambiguity already mentioned is also present here from the first bars, leaving the listener perplexed by the immediate change from a minor key to a major key and vice versa, giving the impression that the performer has not started where he should have, or that this particular video is badly edited. There is no such thing. The piece begins like this.

08:13  Lied: The shortest of the three movements, written in ternary form (theme A, theme B, return to theme A). Here also there are signs of tonal ambiguity, although a basic tonality is in principle discernible (D-flat major).

13:57  Choral et variations: An imposing chorale (in four voices according to scholars, though I struggle to hear three) is followed by four variations: Vivace 16:16 - Un poco più vivo 17:39 - Calmo 19:56 - Prestissimo 22:05. The work ends with a recapitulation of the opening chorale, with variations.

Some scholars have described the work as "brilliant, multi-layered with echoes of Bartók and Prokofiev". Others claim it could have been written by Debussy: a "sensual yet classical" sonata.

The rendition is by the Franco-German pianist Emil Reinert. Live recording during the European International Piano Competition, the year 2021.

Schumann Carnaval Op. 9 / Tiffany Poon

"No disapproval will be able to depress me and no praise will make me lose my head." So ended the letter with which twenty-year-old Robert Schumann asked Friedrich Wieck, the most sought-after piano teacher in Leipzig, for tutoring in 1830. 

The following year he was living with Wieck, who had a daughter, Clara, who played the piano beautifully at the tender age of twelve. On the other hand. Ernestine, also a pupil of Wieck, was already around sixteen. And by the time Robert and Ernestine von Fricken, a native of Asch, looked each other in the eyes at length, she was eighteen. The enthusiasm did not last long, but it prompted the creation of one of the most important works in the history of the romantic piano.

Ernestine von Fricken
(1816 - 1844)

Four letters

More precisely, it was the four letters of Ernestine's hometown in German musical notation (A, S, C, H) that stimulated Schumann's imagination. Such notes (A, E flat, C, B), in that order and in one or another convenient rearrangement, are featured at the beginning of most of the 21 miniatures that make up the first of his great works written for the piano, Carnaval, opus 9, from 1834-35, subtitled by the composer, in French, Scènes mignones sur quatre notes.

A romantic mystery

The motif of the four notes had already been used before (in Papillon, around 1830), so the author, in this opportunity, repeats or, as some scholars point out, relies on the laboriousness lavished in a previous experiment. What has never been clear to many is that in the midst of Romanticism, a composer evokes the beloved through the name of the town where she was born. Mysteries of the artistic sensibility of the 19th century.

Clara Wieck (1819 - 1896)

The Characters 

As a whole, the goal of the piece is to make a musical representation of a creative and elaborate masquerade ball held before Lent during carnival season. It features a wide range of real-life and fictitious characters whose names are used in the titles of the miniatures. Naturally, these are the typical and unmistakable elements of the Italian commedia dell'arte popular theater: Pierrot, Arlequin, Pantaleon, and Colombina Additionally, Schumann himself, who was represented by his two alter egos: Eusebio, the dreamer, and Florestan, the realist. A tribute to Paganini and another to Chopin are also included. Moreover, Ernestina (Estrella) could not be absent. Neither could Clara Wieck (the future Clara Schumann), represented with rapture, in "Chiarina".

David's Brotherhood 

The last section, the longest, symbolically portrays the members of the Davidsbünd (David's Brotherhood), a fantasy group Schumann created for the music magazine he founded around the same time. Florestan, Eusebio, Estrella, Chiarina, Chopin, and Paganini are all part of the group, according to Schumann's imagination. They play the lead role in this musical battle against the "philistines" of their time, conservatives in the arts and music. Technically, it is the most difficult section of the entire work, giving it a spectacular ending.

Dedicated to the Polish musician Karol Lipinski, its high technical and imaginative demand made it not easy to be regularly presented in public at the time. Today, on the contrary, this brilliant set of variations on a reduced core of four notes is the most performed piece by Schumann on stages throughout the world.

The excellent rendition is by the noted Hong Kong-born pianist Tiffany Poon.

[Below the video, its sections]

The 21 miniatures
The following is a list of the 21 movements, pieces, sections, or whatever you want to call them. This enumeration, however, is out of the ordinary because it is necessary to point out that Schumann included a section in the score called Sphinxes between Replique and Papillons. In this section, scholars believe that the author reveals the mystery of the three or four notes on which the entire work was organized through three groups of "notes silent." They are rarely played, neither in public nor on a recording, although more than one has dared. Miss Poon doesn't.

00:00  Préambule – quasi maestoso

02:54  Pierrot – moderato

04:09  Arlequin – vivo

05:22  Valse noble – un poco maestoso

06:46  Eusebius – adagio

08:35  Florestan – passionato

09:38  Coquette – vivo

11:19  Réplique – l'intesso tempo

Sphinxes

Breitkopf & Härtel Edition, Leipzig, 1879, p. 11

12:21  Papillons – prestissimo

13:04  Lettres dansantes (A.S.C.H. - S.C.H.A.) – presto

13:51  Chiarina – passionato

14:48  Chopin – agitato

15:58  Estrella – con affetto

16:24  Reconnaissance – animato

18:07  Pantalon et Colombine – presto

19:08  Valse allemande – molto vivace

20:08  Paganini – Intermezzo - presto (a repetition of valse allemande)

21:26  Aveu – passionato

22:40  Promenade – con moto

25:06  Pause – vivo, precipitandosi (yes, rushing into the Marche)

25:23  Marche des "Davidsbundler" contre les Philistins – non allegro

Debussy, "Reverie" for piano

A work Debussy didn´t appreciate

Claude Debussy, the French composer and creator of dreamy atmospheres on the piano, did not hesitate to express his regret when a Parisian editor decided to publish an old manuscript he had found scattered about among the composer's other works. And he sent him a note: "I am very sorry for your decision to publish it... I wrote it long ago, in a hurry, for exclusively commercial purposes." Irritated, he added: "It is an unimportant work and, frankly, I don't think it has any value."

But the author was wrong. Along with the famous Claire de Lune, the short piano piece he titled "Reverie" is today one of his most recognized works, by all audiences.

As the straggling manuscript was forever delayed, the only irrefutable certainty, in terms of dates, is that of its publication, by the intrepid editor, in 1890. But it is supposed to have been composed between 1880 and 1884, that is, when the author was in his early twenties. Reverie must therefore be considered a milestone. It would represent the first known stage in which Debussy makes use of an "impressionistic" musical language. (His also famous Deux Arabesques – which could compete for the label – are dated between 1888-91). Thus, the language that over the years would become the author's personal stamp is present, for the first time, in Reverie.

Reverie, for piano, L. 68

The composer never assigned opus numbers to his works. In 1977, the French musicologist François Lesure created the first catalog of Debussy's works (modified in 2001). Hence, the identifying "L".

The piece begins with an arpeggiated accompaniment that relies on the weak beats of the bar. The melodic singing, on the other hand, is heard, diligently, in the strong beats, thus generating a sensation of instability that will be maintained for several measures, as if the piece could not settle down. The left hand travels widely across the keyboard creating harmonies rich in "retards" (seconds, sevenths, ninths), thus increasing the dreamy atmosphere.

The arrangements
The piece has been transposed to various instruments, arranged in a thousand ways, and used ad nauseam in advertising of all kinds. Debussy was right when he said he composed it for commercial purposes. What he did not know was that the enchantment would last more than a hundred years.

The performance is by a brilliant German pianist who uploads her own recordings to Youtube, identifying herself only as "Strawberrypianist".

Thanks, Strawberry...