9
J. BARRIE JONES
Piano music for concert hall and salon c. 1830–1900
Salon and concert hall
Britain was an early pioneer in the development of public concerts: they were well established throughout the country by c. 1750. In France, concerts were equally popular but, as in other aspects of French life and culture, were centred mainly on the capital to a greater extent than were their British counterparts. Public concerts were less in evidence in Germany and Austria until the early nineteenth century, though by then the citizens of Frankfurt, Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna were able to participate in a relatively thriving concert environment.
The salon is less easy to describe than a public concert. There had been a long tradition of intellectual gatherings of connoisseurs and aristocrats, but today ‘salon’ usually refers to ‘a part-intellectual and part-social gathering in a domestic (aristocratic or bourgeois) setting: a peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon principally found in the larger European capitals’. 1 This is fine as far as it goes, though it is hardly comprehensive, since an all-embracing definition is far from easy. (It is therefore curious that most music dictionaries, including The New Grove , make no attempt to define ‘salon’.) When Amy Fay, 2 the American piano student from Boston, studied with Liszt in Weimar during the 1870s, the salon in which she was invited to perform from time to time was a large room in the ducal palace. These essentially private functions were attended by highly intelligent and articulate, frequently titled, persons: here the depreciatory overtones sometimes suggested by ‘salon’ are inappropriate. The same is equally true of many of the Parisian salons throughout the nineteenth century. The new ‘difficult’ music of Fauré, for instance, was usually appreciated there, less so in the concert halls. Indeed Fauré probably intended most of his piano music and mélodies for the salon and his chamber works for large halls: the character itself of the music makes this evident. Fifty years earlier Chopin’s music had exhibited a similar dichotomy. The waltzes, nocturnes and many of the mazurkas are clearly salon music (in the best sense). The sonatas, ballades, scherzos and polonaises, though played by Chopin and others in the salon, seem more obviously concert music, appropriate for large halls. As is well known, Chopin’s concert appearances were rare and undertaken with reluctance; critics, while admiring his technical dexterity, frequently remarked on the quietness of his playing in respect of the size of the hall. The finesse and subtlety of Chopin’s performances were shown to best advantage in the salon. Those were relatively private affiairs where the nobility, literati, artists, musicians and cognoscenti intermingled at will, though incidentally, this was much less true of the London salons at this period.
It is a small but significant step from the virtually private salon to the absolutely private domestic dwelling: the essentially bourgeois home of the new wealthy middle class. The piano was an indispensable fixture in such homes, representing as it did both wealth and culture. The young ladies (almost never gentlemen) of the household required an appropriate repertory: hence the rise of domestic music. Appropriately graded examples (Schumann’s Album für die Jugend ), pieces both reflective and virtuoso (Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte , ‘Songs without Words’), an enormous number of transcriptions, from the easy to the almost impossible, many of these became the pinnacle of an amateur’s musical ambition.
Felix Mendelssohn
Mendelssohn played a leading role in the formation and development of a nineteenth-century piano style. For all his indebtedness to keyboard figurations ultimately deriving from Hummel and Weber, Mendelssohn’s best piano works exemplify a number of features sometimes associated with more innovative composers. As Hutcheson observed, 3 Mendelssohn’ s substitution of the double broken octaves as found in the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 2 No. 3 by the more practical and brilliant alternating octaves, as at the end of the Rondo capriccioso Op. 14 (Exx. 9.1 , 9.2 ), proved a major and universally followed innovation. ‘Three-handed’ writing (a centrally placed melody with accompanimental figurations above and below it), a technique attributed to Francesco Pollini around 1812 though associated particularly with Thalberg (see Ex. 4.1 ), is seen in a rudimentary form as early as 1826 in the second subject of the finale of Mendelssohn’s Sonata in E Op. 6. Threehand writing is an essential feature in many of the Songs without Words, since the technique springs from the imitation of the human voice by a tune often placed around middle c, the area where a cantabile melody carries best. The fairy-like scherzos that, in the piano pieces, make considerable use of wrist staccato, though foreshadowed in Weber’s Momento capriccioso Op. 12, were raised by Mendelssohn to a peak of artistic perfection in orchestral, chamber and piano music. A piece such as the Song without Words Op. 67 No. 4 is technically more difficult to play now than it was on the lighter action of the pianos of Mendelssohn’s time. This apart, all of Mendelssohn’s technical innovations are achieved without undue strain on the performer’s abilities: the composer was able to fashion his piano-writing to suit either amateurs or concert virtuosos (often himself).
Ex. 9.1 Mendelssohn, Rondo capriccioso Op. 14, bar 227.
Ex. 9.2 Beethoven, Sonata Op. 2 No. 3, bar 252.
The forty-eight Songs without Words represent Mendelssohn’s principal contribution to the domestic music repertory. Usually in ternary form, the composer almost always reworks the final section, unlike Grieg whose ABA structures in the Lyric Pieces generally present a straight repetition of A the second time round. The most saccharine of these pieces (Nos. 9, 30, 40 and 44 for example) are invariably more inventive than the pale imitations of them by later composers. The best are still worthy of the concert platform, as Liszt and Clara Schumann had demonstrated in the nineteenth century. The celebrated Rondo capriccioso , ‘the coping-stone of every English maiden’s pianistic culture’, 4 belongs to the same category.
Amongst Mendelssohn’s most inventive and substantial concert works are the Six Preludes and Fugues Op. 35. The composer’s interest in the past was pronounced, and this baroque structure becomes in his hands a modern genre, strikingly appropriate for the concert hall. The introduction of an original chorale as the bold culmination of the E minor prelude and fugue is strikingly new and may have been in César Franck’s (1822–90) mind when, fifty years later, he wrote his Prelude, Chorale and Fugue. The Variations sérieuses Op. 54, whose title was a protest against the early nineteenth-century trivialisation of one of the oldest instrumental structures, makes a ready appeal to both performer and audience.
In assessing Mendelssohn’s work, one should remember that – most unromantically – he wrote composition exercises in addition to real music: everything published after Op. 73 was posthumous, and never intended for publication unless revision was envisaged. (The ‘Italian’ Symphony and the last two books of Songs without Words fall into this category.) The infrequency with which Mendelssohn’s piano works are heard in the concert hall is in no way indicative of their overall merit.
Robert Schumann
Schumann, by temperament Mendelssohn’s opposite, is one of the three most enduring romantic piano writers: the others are Chopin and Liszt. Schumann had originally intended to become a virtuoso pianist; his very earliest compositions (either unpublished or later reworked) show some influence of Moscheles and Hummel. Nevertheless, Schumann soon developed a style of startling originality wherein any virtuosity is put to the service of the musical thought. He avoided empty scales and arpeggios, and tended to avoid extended passages employing the extreme limits of the instrument. Textural variety, harmonic originality and a supreme gift for melody compensate for a certain reluctance to use the keyboard in an overtly colouristic manner. Schumann’s larger works avoid obvious virtuoso effiects, though they display some flamboyance and were intended for concert use. His short pieces, sometimes a page or less, were frequently assembled into collections of varying length. These collections often display an innig (that is, intimate but with an ardent warmth), highly poetic quality, comparable with Heine’s lyric poetry, although the musical influence stemmed from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and the slower-moving areas of the late sonatas. 5 Much of Schumann’s piano music dates from the 1830s.
Schumann may have had the idea of assembling a collection of short movements into a composite work from similar publications by Hummel and Schubert. Schumann’s pieces, sometimes known as ‘piano cycles’, and almost all of which were inspired by the pianist Clara Wieck, often represent the composer at his most esoteric. In fact they were played only in the salons of Leipzig and other German cities, and were virtually unplayed in concert halls until after Schumann’s death. The earliest set of pieces is Papillons Op. 2. This prototype of the composer’s later assemblages is strikingly original and inventive. The twelve movements originally bore titles taken from Jean-Paul Richter’s Flegeljahre , Schumann’s favourite novel, though these were dropped before publication. The quotation of the German popular tune Grossvaterstanz (later to become the Thème du XVII eme siècle , representing the Philistines in Carnaval ) and the clock striking 6 a.m. after a night of revelry, conspire to make Papillons a miniature precursor of Carnaval Op. 9. This is still the most famous and popular piano work of the composer, and is, in its combination of literary, musical and thematic elements, an archetypal German romantic piano work. The fashioning of many of the twenty-two pieces’ melodic material out of the notes of Asch (the birthplace of one of Schumann’s temporary girlfriends) was part of a long tradition by German composers of translating letters of the alphabet into musical notes. In German notation ‘ASCH’ can be translated in two ways:
Ex. 9.3 Schumann’s ‘ASCH’ theme.
and the ingenuity with which Schumann treats this three- or four-note cell is indeed remarkable. The fact that few of these cell transformations are audible and that the score must be perused in order to see them is symptomatic of the increasing intellectualisation of much romantic music: music outwardly spontaneous, improvisatory,‘from the heart’, but in fact carefully fashioned, almost crabbed thematically, the very embodiment of art concealing art. Carnaval also marked the public unveiling of the Davidsbund , those of like mind to Schumann battling against the commercialisation and trivialisation of music by the Philistines. The Davidsbundlertänze Op. 6 represent a more subtle and hidden aspect of the same struggle: here the eighteen pieces are untitled though some have intriguing and novel performance directions (‘Impatiently’, ‘Wild and merry’,‘As if from far away’).
The thirteen movements of Kinderszenen Op. 15 may be regarded as music for the home, but they are essentially brief musical poems raised to glorious heights. Schumann rarely said so much in so little space, in the process imbuing each of these tiny movements with great emotional warmth and expressivity. ‘Traümerei’, the best and best-known of the collection, exemplifies a movement outwardly four-square in its phrase lengths, but in actuality teeming with subtle rhythmic and melodic details, suggestions of counterpoint in what appears to be mere tune-plus-accompaniment, and a pervasive use of thematic regeneration (where the opening melody reappears many times though in ever-changing varied forms). The Arabeske Op. 18, lengthier and stylistically lighter, demonstrates Schumann’s ability to capture the essence of improvisatory thoughts and techniques by means of uncannily precise musical notation.
Kreisleriana Op. 16, eight pieces inspired by E. T. A. Hoffimann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler, is perhaps the most esoteric and certainly the most harmonically advanced – at least by comparison with any of Schumann’s German contemporaries – work from the 1830s. The movements, all markedly diffierent from one another, coalesce into half-an-hour’s music that paints perhaps the most complete picture of Schumann in a single work. Conversely, the eight pieces that make up both the Phantasiestücke Op. 12 and Noveletten Op. 21 are not linked to one another by some indefinable sense of spirituality, such as the composer demonstrated in Opp. 2, 6, 9 and 16, but are separate entities: each is a group of ‘songs’ rather than a song ‘cycle’. Op. 12 is frequently played as a set, Op. 21 rarely so.
These ‘romantic’ collections are balanced by other works owing some allegiance to classical models. Three sets of variations date from the 1830s. The opening phrase of the ‘Abegg’Variations, amongst the finest of all Opus Ones, is conveniently provided by the letters of its title. The Impromptus on a theme by Clara Wieck Op. 5 are in reality a set of variations. Here, Schumann was as interested in the bass as in the melody of the theme. His model here was the finale of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony: both sets of variations begin in a remarkably similar way. The magnificent Etudes symphoniques Op. 13 are rightly described by Hutcheson as ‘one of the peaks of the piano literature, lofty in conception and faultless in workmanship’. 6 The work combines variation form, étude-like figurations, and in three of its twelve variations, implied homage to Bach, Mendelssohn and Paganini. The work is particularly innovative in that frequently only the first few notes of the theme permeate many of the variations: these opening notes then generate new melodies as the variation proceeds. The Toccata Op. 7, in both C major and sonata form, may well be a musical tribute to Czerny, famous at the time for his Toccata in C. However, the quiet ending of Schumann’s Toccata makes it unique in this most energetic of musical genres.
Standing alone is Schumann’s supreme masterpiece, the Phantasie Op. 17; originally intended as a tribute to Beethoven, it ultimately became the expression of the composer’s passion for Clara Wieck.‘The secret listener’ from Schlegel’s prefatory four-line motto, added after the whole work had been composed, constitutes a clear reference to Clara. At the same time, the quotations from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and other works 7 underline and emphasise the fact that while Beethoven was the starting point, Clara, as usual, was not far from Schumann’s mind. The first of the three linked movements constitutes an extremely free sonata structure in which the chord of C major is often ingeniously side-stepped at those very moments when it is most expected, resulting in a yearning, aching atmosphere only relieved at the very end of the movement. A triumphant march and the lengthy final Adagio in their structural simplicity complement this complex opening movement, both thematically and harmonically. With Kreisleriana , the Phantasie reveals Schumann as a consummate master of both the innig and the personal, yet it also possesses the power to move any audience.
Schumann’s music in the 1830s was truly innovative, even if Clara Wieck motivated almost everything the composer produced at this period. The tendency to aphorism and the four-bar phrase was the natural consequence of a composer steeped in German poetry who was to bring the lied to a high water mark of perfection. The regularity of such phrases is usually masked by subtleties of rhythmic detail and elaborate thematic regeneration that move the music inexorably forward. Schumann’s highly personal employment of dominant and diminished seventh chords is often explicable by their placement in new contexts: unusual resolutions of the chord or sudden tonal shifts rather than more gradual modulations, involving pivot chords. Characteristic spacings of middle-register chords, sometimes with interlocking hands, may appear to make the music conventional, or even dull, on the page; when transmuted into sound, one then realises to the full what a sensitive ear for piano sonorities this composer possessed.
Johannes Brahms
Brahms’s piano music spans a period of some forty years. It falls conveniently into three groups: the first includes the large-scale sonatas, several sets of variations and a number of miscellaneous movements; the second the ten pieces that comprise Opp. 76 and 79; and lastly the twenty relatively short pieces Opp. 116–19, most of which were written, or at least completed, in 1892. Brahms’s successful career as a composer can be ascribed to several factors: his enthusiastic championship by the Schumanns, his early emergence into maturity, his considerable powers as a pianist that enabled him to propagate his own piano and chamber music, and his unrelenting self-criticism. Brahms was over twenty years younger than the composers so far discussed, and his piano music dates from a period when the flamboyance of many virtuosos in the first half of the century was starting to be replaced by the probity and scholarly attitudes to performance by pianists such as Clara Schumann, Carl Tausig and Hans von Bülow. Moreover, in Germany the salon was facing competition from the concert hall, for which much of Brahms’s piano music was intended. Up to about 1880 he himself was frequently its foremost exponent; thereafter a number of Viennese pianist-friends of Brahms, such as Ignaz Brüll and Julius Epstein, undertook the premieres of the later piano works. Some pieces, notably the Waltzes Op. 39 and the easier and shorter late pieces, can be regarded as (superior) domestic music, but such pieces are very much in the minority, compared with those intended for the concert hall.
After the early sonatas where, in a sense, he exorcised the ghost of Beethoven, Brahms turned subsequently to variation forms, in which the seeming straitjacket of formal rigidity produced some of Brahms’s most remarkable and spontaneous music. In the longer sets of variations, such as the twenty-five on a theme by Handel Op. 24, Brahms adopted an expedient from Beethoven rendered necessary by the large number of variations. Many of these form themselves into composite groups of two or three by virtue of a common motif, figuration or piano technique, thus avoiding the potentially scrappy effiect of twenty-five separate, short ‘movements’. Beethoven had realised such possible dangers in his Thirty-two Variations in C minor (WoO 80), a work that Brahms included in his repertory as a pianist. The Handel variations conclude with a fugue, an idea reminiscent not just of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Variations but also of Bach’s C minor organ Passacaglia. The spirit of Bach also informs areas of the Variations on a theme of Schumann Op. 9 in which three of the sixteen variations are canonic; counterpoint is also a prominent feature in a number of other movements in the set. In addition, Brahms quotes the fifth of Schumann’s Bunte Blätter Op. 99, combining it with the fourth, the theme of the variations itself. The two sets of variations Op. 21, one an original, the other on a Hungarian theme, both display Brahms’s fondness for technical difficulties: not of the pianistic variety, but difficulties brought about by contrapuntal voice-leading and the resulting need for textural clarity. The two books of Paganini Variations Op. 35 are unique in Brahms’s output in being concerned with piano technique: they were therefore originally entitled ‘Studies for piano’ and were a direct outcome of the composer’s friendship with Tausig.
The first of the Four Ballades Op. 10 represents a rare excursion into the Lisztian world of avowed programme music. The Scottish story of Edward, which Brahms came across in Herder’s Stimmen der Völker , resulted in one of his most powerful and evocative piano works. More importantly, the poetic metre of the poem’s first verse matches the musical metre of Brahms’s opening bars. This ‘metric transmutation’ of poetry into music is a constant feature in Brahms. It would hardly be surprising in a composer of over 200 songs but it also permeates many instrumental melodies: explicitly as here and in the Intermezzo Op. 117 No. 1 (also taken from Herder’s collection), and implicitly (if unprovable) in many of Brahms’s tunes. The main theme of the second Ballade offiers in its F( ♯ )–A–F( ♯ ) motif one of many examples whereby Brahms translated his personal motto ‘Frei aber froh’ (‘Free but happy’) into musical notes by means, in this case, of an acronym (Ex. 9.4 ).
Ex. 9.4 Brahms, Ballade Op. 10 No. 2.
The Eight Piano Pieces Op. 76 and the Two Rhapsodies Op. 79 date from the late 1870s, around the time of the Second Symphony and Violin Concerto. By this time Brahms had refined his piano writing in the sense that the awkward and occasionally unpianistic figurations, found in particular in the early sonatas, have by now disappeared. The writing is both grateful and effiective. The four capriccios and four intermezzos – for Brahms a movement in moderate tempo – of Op. 76 are singularly satisfying when played as a group. The two works in Op. 79 may represent a pun on the composer’s part; neither is rhapsodic in a literal sense since the first is in rondo, the second in sonata form.
Opp. 76 and 79 are closer stylistically to the late piano pieces than to the earlier works. The twenty autumnal movements of Opp. 116–19 are mostly capriccios and intermezzos, and though always tautly constructed in whatever form Brahms deemed appropriate the spirit of improvisation seems seldom far away. We see Brahms’s flexible employment of sonata form in Op. 117 No. 2 where the second subject is a thematic transformation of the first (Ex. 9.5 ), while in the recapitulation the function of second subject is combined with that of coda. There is further thematic transformation in Op. 119 No. 2 where the quietly urgent main theme becomes, in the middle section, a sentimental Viennese waltz. Words are again transformed into music in Op. 117 No. 1. In the two D minor capriccios of Op. 116 we notice the familiar cross rhythms, one of the composer’s favourite devices for avoiding four-squareness. In the Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 6 the main theme employs only three notes that then herald a five-minute drama of symphonic spaciousness and remind us that even as late as 1892 Brahms was able to invest the familiar diminished seventh chord with new, unsuspected dramatic colouring, at times almost usurping the traditional function of the tonic chord. We see, in short, the storm and stress of the composer’s youth transformed into a twilight of calm in which the piano miniature became the channel for Brahms’s most personal and intimate thoughts.
Ex. 9.5 Brahms, Intermezzo Op. 117 No. 2.
Fryderyk Chopin
It was fortunate for Chopin that Paris, where he came to live in 1831, was to remain his home for the rest of his life. The artistic environment, the publishers who were willing to print his music, the wealthy and the aristocratic who paid what Chopin asked for their lessons, all these factors helped to set the seal on his maturity as a composer. The publication of the Douze grandes études Op. 10 in 1833 can be said to confirm this maturity; since Chopin had been working on them for some four years they represent a remarkable achievement for a composer barely out of his teens. By 1830 many composers had written studies, but invariably they were for classroom rather than concert use. In his own teaching Chopin made use of studies by Moscheles: some of his études indeed point forward to Chopin in their harnessing of technical figuration and musical content, but they lack the poetry and finish of Chopin’s. (Always more flamboyant when giving titles to his music, it remained for Liszt to invent the étude de concert , which at the time must have seemed a contradiction in terms.) The two collections of studies Opp. 10 and 25 equip any pianist with the technical groundwork to cope with all Chopin’s music and that of most other later composers. Many of them are constructed on the monothematic ternary principle: a single theme, idea or figuration is omnipresent, with a contrasting middle section realised by changes in tonality or other means. (A few of the preludes operate on the same principle.) Not infrequently the last bar of a study seems to resolve itself naturally in the first bar of the next; although Chopin may not have intended each set of études to be played complete, it is likely that he did envisage three or four studies in succession as an artistic entity. Most standard keyboard problems can be found in Chopin’s studies: extended arpeggios (Op. 10 No. 1), double thirds (Op. 25 No. 6), repeated notes (Op. 10 No. 7), octaves (Op. 25 No 10), cross rhythms and phrasings (Op. 10 No. 10), three-hand writing (Op. 25 No. 5). Others at first glance may seem to propagate mere finger dexterity (Opp. 10 No. 8 and Op. 25 No. 2), though if this is the case they do so much more musically than Moscheles or Czerny.
Schumann described the preludes, with some justification, as ‘the beginnings of studies’. Many of them propound a motif or figure in their opening bars that is then developed consistently throughout the prelude. The epigrammatic nature of some of these exquisite miniatures seems strangely at odds with the power and depth of the twelve-bar E major or the thirteen-bar C minor preludes. Only a few have extended middle sections. (The two most substantial are those in F ♯ and D ♭ .) It is unlikely that Chopin ever meant the preludes to be played complete in a recital; as with the études, he probably intended small groups of them to be played as and when the occasion demanded, in salon or concert hall. Charles Rosen confirms this: ‘It is clear that a complete performance of Opus 28 was not thinkable during Chopin’s lifetime, either in the salon or in the concert hall; nor is there any evidence that Chopin played the whole set privately for a friend or pupil.’ 8 However, the immensely powerful and virile last prelude in D minor certainly acts as the climax to the whole set of twenty-four.
Among the works that Chopin intended for concert use the four ballades and four scherzos stand supreme. The ballades in particular show how Chopin attempted a wholly personal amalgamation of sonata structure and ternary design with triumphant success. The overall ternary shape of three of the ballades is less obvious to the ear than the supremely satisfying organic growth of the musical material. The third ballade’s principal theme on its final appearance is cleverly stated one bar early over dominant, rather than tonic, harmony with almost incandescent splendour. The fourth ballade, in F minor, is in effiect a combination of rondo and variation forms. Only the second, Op. 38, is diffierent structurally from the others; the almost bucolic calm of F major alternates with a stormy episode in A minor. In addition the piece ends in a diffierent key from that in which it began: an example of Chopin’s interest in progressive tonality. (The second key, rather than the first, is regarded as ‘the governing tonal centre’.) 9 Chopin adopts the same principle in the Scherzo Op. 31. Chopin’s scherzos are also original in design. Two of the contrasting trios are particularly interesting in that in Op. 20 the trio is a variant of a Polish folk tune, and in Op. 39 it is a combination of chorale and filigree passage-work.
The Barcarolle Op. 60 stands apart as an example of Chopin’s rich harmonic palette coupled with an Italianate warmth of melody, employing the classic formula of long chains of thirds. Chopin had few models for the barcarolle genre except in Italian opera itself, where several examples pre-date Chopin’s piece. For instance Chopin must have seen Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s Fra Diavolo (1830) and Ferdinand Hérold’s Zampa (1831), both of which include barcarolles. Some of Chopin’s nocturnes are barcarolle-like in mood, such as Op. 37 No. 2, Op. 55 No. 2 and many areas of the three nocturnes Op. 9. John Field invented the piano nocturne but it was Chopin who invested the genre with a greater variety of mood. The highly elaborate passage-work that adorns so many of these pieces can be traced to the melodic lines, both written-out and improvised, of Italian opera, as well as similar passages in Hummel and Field. While it is now generally accepted that Chopin’s style was formed long before he could have heard a Bellini opera, he was certainly influenced by Italian opera generally. On the page the nocturnes may appear tenuous in texture but the sustaining pedal invariably contributes to the fullness of the overall sound. These pieces were essentially works for the salon, as were almost all of the waltzes. When transported from ballroom to salon many dance forms take on a considerable increase in speed; this is particularly the case with many of Chopin’s waltzes. Many are slighter than the nocturnes, but all bear witness to the composer’s unerring sense of finesse and charm, essential requirements for this genre.
Chopin’s unique position as a great composer, despite the fact that virtually everything that he wrote is for piano, has rarely been questioned. For the performer, amateur or professional, the textures are invariably satisfying. Frequently what appears to be merely an accompaniment turns out to be hidden counterpoint, where tiny fragments of melody emerge at unexpected points (Ex. 9.6 ). The two-part writing in the Impromptu in A is skilfully designed to sound full and rich, particularly when enhanced by careful use of the pedal. The harmonic audacity of many of the mazurkas (see chapter 10 ) was undoubtedly enhanced by their folk origin and if the non-Polish genres exhibit a less obviously recondite harmonic idiom they are, in compensation, perhaps more subtle, refined and endlessly fascinating. There can be few other composers who gained almost immediate popularity during their lifetimes and have subsequently retained it.
Ex. 9.6 Chopin, Prelude in B, bars 14–15.
Franz Liszt
Most public performances of piano music up to the 1840s usually involved other forces, such as vocal, chamber or orchestral music (see chapter 4 ). It was mainly due to Liszt and Thalberg that the full-length piano recital was established; the cult of the ‘artist as hero’ and an audience demand for publicly displayed virtuosity were both symptomatic of these early recitals. Even Clara Wieck had to conform to public taste, at least until around 1850. For public taste was not often high: master works were often interspersed with lighter pieces, such as operatic transcriptions. It is not going too far to say that up to about 1850 ‘the piano was more influential in the dissemination of other music (in the form of transcriptions) than for its own literature’. 10
Liszt’s transcriptions of Bach, Beethoven and Wagner remain ‘faithful’ to the originals, in the sense that he attempted to transcribe as much from the originals as possible without his own fanciful re-harmonisations or counter-melodies. These transcriptions were intended to familiarise the public with ‘great music’. The operatic transcriptions are numerous and some were undertaken after Liszt abandoned the virtuoso platform in 1847. In his old age the spareness of the pianistic textures and an increasingly recondite harmonic language lend such transcriptions as the polonaise from Eugene Onegin a visionary, almost self-questioning aspect. Tchaikovsky’s original melodies are still present, but they are extended or otherwise cleverly manipulated so that Liszt’s musical personality is superimposed. Where the opera as a whole is concerned, Liszt sometimes attempted to tell a condensed version of the original, as in his Reminiscences of Norma (Bellini) and Don Giovanni (Mozart). More often he takes perhaps a handful of themes, occasionally a single theme only, developing them in various ways to produce a kind of musical ‘chiaroscuro’, resulting in a structural working that is possibly simplistic but always effiective. In transcribing Schumann’s ‘Widmung’ Liszt had no compunction in adding two further verses to the song as well as indulging in other small changes. Similarly, in ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’ the final verse breaks away from Mendelssohn’s original; the melody soars to a climax by means of a long phrase extension: a truly Lisztian aggrandisement of Mendelssohn. Because they were so little known outside Austria, perhaps even Vienna, Liszt transcribed more than fifty of Schubert’s Lieder, of which only a handful are relatively easy to play.
Liszt is virtually synonymous with programme music; almost every one of his pieces bears a poetic title. It was quite natural for him to link music with literature or painting, and thus this relationship is not a weakness, but a strength. The three collections of Années de pèlerinage contain twenty-six pieces, varying in technical difficulty more than merit. Many pieces in the first two Années are obvious concert pieces though some exhibit a salon-like intimacy of mood. On the other hand, in much of the third volume (1867–77) Liszt achieved a tenuity of texture by paring down the musical inessentials: in so doing he forsook much of the glitter and panache of an earlier age. The first (Swiss) volume concerns itself mostly with travel and nature, and includes a fine Orage (Liszt once remarked to Amy Fay that ‘storms are my forte!’) and the almost impressionistic Au lac de Wallenstadt and Les cloches de Genève , where the pedalling and blurred harmonies form the starting point for Liszt’s own Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este in the third Année . In turn this left its mark on Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and many of the mature piano works of Debussy.
The second Année , mostly based on Italian literary and artistic subjects, contains the remarkable Il penseroso , inspired by Michelangelo’s Meditation , a statue of Giuliano de’ Medici; as has been frequently stated, its brooding chromaticism shows a remarkable foretaste of Tristan und Isolde . The most imposing piece in this collection is Après une lecture du Dante , in which the Italian bel canto style is combined with the striking bravura of Orage . The Dante Sonata, as it is sometimes called, can be regarded as the composer’s most ambitious programmatic work for the piano. The rather loose sonata structure of exposition, development and recapitulation corresponds to the three canticae of Dante’s original poem, which consists of over 14,000 lines.
Liszt was highly original in his attitudes to structure and was always concerned that in this respect his ideas should be as immediately intelligible to the listener as is consistent with the need for them. The Ballade in B minor, like the Dante Sonata, is also constructed as a free sonata-form movement where the exposition ‘repeat’ is in fact written out in full in B minor: thus Liszt preserves the old-style exposition repeat but expresses it by radical means. In the same way, Au bord d’une source from the Swiss Année is a set of variations on a theme beginning in A major but ending in B major. The seven variations are interrupted by three virtuoso interludes and the last variation has a distinct feeling of a ‘sonata-form’ recapitulation. Moreover, the variations are not consistent in length. Liszt thus takes a long-established structure and adapts it to his own ends, yet the result is not amorphous. Additionally, the increasingly complex melodic ornamentation as the piece proceeds is in reality an integral part of the structure and assists in defining the form.
Three large-scale works from the early 1860s deserve some comment. The Two Legends (St François d’Assise: la prédication aux oiseaux and St François de Paule marchant sur les fl ots ) are marked by a tradition that Liszt first played them at Rossini’s salon in Paris. 11 The Mephisto Waltz No. 1 was transcribed from the original orchestral version into a concert masterpiece of story-telling: 12 the miracle is that the piano version is so masterly that it gives the impression of being the original rather than the transcription.
Liszt’s name is linked, along with Chopin’s, with the transformation of the humble classroom exercise (or study) into the concert étude that may indeed form an indispensable aspect of conservatory study but is above all a work for the concert platform. As a pupil of Czerny in Vienna in the 1820s Liszt wrote a number of studies and exercises of a mechanical nature that were heavily indebted to his teacher. Twelve of these early studies became, nevertheless, one of the high points of nineteenth-century piano technique in the Etudes d’exécution transcendante , that were eventually published in 1852 with a dedication to Czerny. (An intermediate version, published in 1839 as Vingt-quatre grandes études – though only twelve actually appeared – is by far the most technically demanding of the three versions: it was typical of Liszt to refine and simplify unnecessary difficulties in order to produce a ‘definitive’ version.) All but two of the études bear poetic titles, a clear line of demarcation between the methods of Liszt and Chopin. The opening ‘Preludio’ is a written-out improvisation of a type common at the time whereby ‘to prelude’ meant to test the instrument and the player’s technique by means of one or more technical figuration exercises. By placing ‘Mazeppa’ and ‘Feux follets’ adjacent to each other and numbering them 4 and 5 (thus they are centrally positioned in the set as a whole) Liszt was possibly demonstrating the highest possible manifestations of two types of transcendence: the one a massive bravura movement requiring physical strength, the other an extreme example of double-note delicacy whose filigree traceries produce a sound patterning reminiscent of, but highly distinct from, Chopin’s methods.
Chopin exerted a more noticeable influence on the Trois études de concert , which make an effiective concert trilogy when played as a group. The F minor étude is particularly Chopinesque in its melodic figurations, while the last, in D and originally entitled ‘Un sospiro’, is a good example of Liszt’s sentimental though undeniably affiecting Italianate melodic line. The later Zwei Konzertetüden (1862–3) already show that paring down of textures that was to be such a feature of Liszt’s last years.
The Grandes études de Paganini , which received their final form in 1851, had also gone through an earlier version a dozen years previously. Liszt’s transfer of violinistic devices to equally effiective keyboard equivalents demonstrates his uncanny skill and unerring instinct for what will work on the keyboard. The fourth étude is the most obvious manifestation of this, though the third and sixth are the most famous and popular: the former for its obvious bravura, the latter because Paganini’s original attracted the attention of Brahms, Rachmaninoffi, Lutosl-awski and Blacher, among others.
Nothing could be further removed from either salon or concert hall than much of the music of Liszt’s last fifteen years. Increasingly recondite harmony, unresolved discords, first- and second-inversion chords to end a movement, unaccompanied melodies, frequently plainsong-like in outline, and a thinning of textures when in general musical density was becoming increasingly opulent: such procedures demonstrate Liszt’s inventive and fecund musical imagination that was to prove such an inspiration for twentieth-century composers from Bartók to Busoni. Unstern! Sinistre, disastro and Schla fl os! Frage und Antwort , and many other pieces, are proof of the extraordinary journey that Liszt had undertaken over more than sixty years, when as a boy of eleven he contributed, along with approximately fifty other composers, a variation on Diabelli’s celebrated waltz. Perhaps no other composer travelled so far.
Sonata and concerto
The development of these genres after the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert was symptomatic of the diversity in nineteenth-century musical styles. In particular, the sonata tended to develop along one of three main trajectories that might be described as the conventional, the radical and the revolutionary. To the first belong those numerous sonatas, by such composers as Moscheles, Hummel and Czerny, that were constructed on safe, formalistic lines. Contemporary audiences obviously liked this music, music that was usually played by its own composer. Individual passages can be interesting – the decorative passage-work in Hummel that frequently anticipates Chopin, for example – but as wholes such sonatas have an interest today for the scholar rather than the performer. Conversely, the young, radical Romantics, wary – perhaps fearful – of Beethoven’s achievements adopted a rather diffierent approach that was far from conventional. Mendelssohn wrote three sonatas in the 1820s, though two were possibly composition exercises not intended for publication. The third in E Op. 6 includes a barcarolle-like opening, reminiscent of the corresponding movement in Beethoven’s Op. 101, and a highly elaborate slow movement, Adagio e senza tempo, with passages of recitative and long unbarred sections of music, highly rhapsodic in style. Schumann’s three sonatas written in the 1830s exemplify a typical Romantic paradox of adhering to ‘the rules’ while at the same time exploring new paths. All three are in minor keys with their first movements’ second subjects in the orthodox relative major key. (All three of Chopin’s piano sonatas operate on the same principle.) Conversely, other areas venture into extremely remote tonalities. In the development sections the highly Schumannesque preference for lengthy stretches of music with an unrelenting obsession for persistent rhythmic patterns shows the composer’s indebtedness to, but not dependence on, Beethoven. There are other major diffierences between Schumann and his conservative contemporaries. In Op. 11 the slow introduction to the initial Allegro refers (some twelve minutes later) to the succeeding slow movement, entitled ‘Aria’. (This embryonic form of melodic interrelationship reached its peak a few years later in Schumann’s D minor Symphony where all four movements form a work of remarkable subtlety, constructed on the cyclic principle that César Franck was to espouse forty years later.) Schumann’s Third Sonata Op. 14, originally published as Concert sans orchestre , exists in two slightly diffierent versions. Both imitate the textures of a piano concerto in a work that forms an interesting link between the rondo of Mozart’s Sonata K311 and Alkan’s Concerto for solo piano. (Chopin’s apparently comparable Allegro de concert Op. 46 belongs to a diffierent category: that of a first movement of an abandoned piano concerto, frankly arranged for piano solo.) The slightly later Faschingsschwank aus Wien Op. 26 (1839–40) is a five-movement sonata in lighter mood.
In the first movements of his sonatas Chopin dispensed with the recapitulation of the first subject, a daring experiment in the telescoping of traditional sonata-form structure. Op. 35 in B minor includes the famous Funeral March and a short presto epilogue-finale written entirely in octaves. The larger B minor Sonata, with its concise scherzo and inventive and cumulatively textured finale, represents, along with Liszt’s Sonata, also in B minor, the peak of the Romantic sonata repertory. Liszt’s work, a supreme example of the rare revolutionary trajectory in sonata design, dates from 1852–3 and combines three movements into one continuous whole; an energetic fugato may be regarded as an ‘introduction’ to the ‘finale’. In this work, both intricate and imposing, Liszt achieved his masterpiece for piano. It combines exceptional workmanship (most of the passage-work turns out to be thematic) with material of the utmost nobility, much of which is developed by thematic transformation. (Here, as in other aspects of his music, Schubert proved extremely influential. His ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy, a four-movement work in which thematic transformation emerges almost fully fledged, was a true precursor both of Liszt’s Sonata and – rather less obviously – of Schumann’s D minor Symphony; see chapter 8 .) However, in no other work save the Faust Symphony, with which the sonata has much in common, did Liszt ever write anything less calculated to strike popular fancy. Indeed Liszt himself rarely performed the sonata, except in private, because it was always coldly received.
Brahms’s three sonatas, written before he was twenty-one, make one regret that he abandoned the genre at an early age. The first and last movements of the C major Op. 1 are built on ingenious transformations of the same theme; the slow movement is a set of variations on a German folk song. In Op. 2 in F( ♯ ) minor the slow movement is also a set of variations joined to the ensuing scherzo, an additional variation on the same theme. The imposing Sonata in F minor Op. 5 is in five movements and is Brahms’s most overtly romantic work: the slow movement is headed by three lines of poetry from Sternau. (Two lovers stand in the moonlight, their hearts entwined in passionate ardour.) After the energetic scherzo the Rückblick (retrospect) seems to indicate, by its funeral march rhythms, that some (unspecified) tragedy has occurred.
Brahms’s two concertos of 1854–8 and 1878–81 have been described as symphonies for piano and orchestra rather than genuine concertos. They are indeed very unlike the typical Romantic concerto which, after Beethoven, had become a contest between soloist and orchestra: the complete antithesis of the Classical concerto. It is true that obvious dramatic elements dominate areas of Brahms’s first concerto, though the solo part is hardly virtuoso in the usual sense. However, the second concerto Op. 83 is basically a mellow blend of soloist and orchestra (exemplified by the opening horn solo and the prominent solo cello in the slow movement), where the four movements constitute one of the longest concertos in the repertory. Liszt’s two concertos are markedly diffierent from each other. The E ♭ concerto, like the sonata, combines several movements into a single unit using thematic transformation and ingenious, at times chamber, orchestration as a unifying feature. The A major concerto, in one movement and largely based on the opening theme, is also an example of chamber scoring balanced by brasher virtuosic music for both soloist and orchestra.
The first movement of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, originally a separate Phantasie , propounds a single theme that goes through an astonishing number of transformations, each one enacting important structural areas as the movement unfolds: first and second themes, transitions, cadenza and coda. The succeeding intermezzo and waltz-like finale are also thematically linked to each other. The whole concerto is one of Schumann’s best works, not least because of its effiective, often restrained orchestration. The two early Chopin concertos took as their models works by Field and Hummel, not Beethoven, hence the slender orchestral accompaniments and unusually prominent and virtuosic solo writing. Their finales are indebted to Polish dance rhythms, and it is indeed their musical content that has kept the concertos alive, since the orchestral parts are scarcely rewarding to play. In a reduced format the Field and Chopin concertos were often performed in small venues, even salons. The programme for Chopin’s Paris début in 1832, reproduced in the New Grove , vol. 4, p. 295, shows that the F minor Concerto and Op. 2 Variations were accompanied by the string quintet players who had opened the programme.
French music
Much French piano music from the second quarter of the nineteenth century was conceived for the salon, but, unlike that of Chopin, was often directed at the amateur market, though there are numerous virtuoso pieces too. Many of the composers, such as Herz, Hünten and Kalkbrenner, lived in Paris but were of German origin. Their music spoke fluently in the current idiom of the day, but little survives in the current repertory. After 1850, a more serious approach can be detected in the work of Camille Saint-Saëns, though the most interesting piano music dates from the last twenty years of the century.
César Franck, whose musical development was relatively slow, was only eleven years younger than Liszt, though his greatest music did not appear until the 1880s. Before this, Franck had composed a considerable amount of piano music, aimed at the salon and domestic markets. Much of this is both trivial and uninteresting and it was not until the surprisingly late impact of Liszt and Wagner on Franck’s music which, allied to his ‘serious’ Walloon origins, resulted in two late masterpieces for piano. These revealed Franck as a force to be reckoned with in French music, even though his outlook and techniques were Germanic in concept. The Prélude, choral et fugue (1884) offiers a modern equivalent of a baroque prelude and fugue extended into a triptych by a dignified chorale. As in other works of his maturity, Franck here revivified those cyclic elements from Schubert and Liszt by a learned display of contrapuntal thematic combinations. Towards the close, the principal rhythmic patterns of the prelude are combined with both chorale and fugue. In addition, there are numerous cross-references between one theme and another as the work proceeds. In the slightly later and similarly ternary-structured Prélude, aria et fi nal (1886–7) the close of the aria is combined with the prelude’s principal melody towards the end of the whole work. Inevitably, the magnificence and nobility of these two pieces were beyond the comprehension of the majority of the concert public when they were first performed at the Société Nationale.
Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), musically and temperamentally Franck’s opposite, stands in many ways as a representative of those peculiarly French characteristics of reticence, subtlety and restraint. His piano works and mélodies , though intended for the salon, are epitomised by an exquisite harmonic palette allied to continually varied keyboard textures, both of which underpin a superb gift for melody. Overall, Fauré’s music demonstrates a craftsmanship worthy of Brahms, allowing for necessarily diffierent compositional methods.
In his piano writing Fauré’s supreme achievement was to develop and extend the scope of the nocturne and barcarolle to unsuspected heights after Chopin’s highly personal treatment of these genres. Fauré composed no fewer than thirteen of each, the first seven nocturnes and the first six barcarolles spanning the period c. 1875–98. At first slightly influenced by Chopin’s pianistic textures, Fauré soon developed a highly original style. Elaborate accompaniments are divided ingeniously between the hands, along with sinuous melodies centrally placed in the texture. Counterpoint plays an important role, resulting in a free employment of accented passing and chromatically altered notes. In addition, Fauré made an important contribution to the development of harmony, a development brought about in particular by his modulatory techniques. He was fond of moving rapidly from one unrelated (diatonic or chromatic) chord to another, frequently ‘looking at’ rather than stating a new key. Fauré’s undoubted interest in modal harmonies, supposedly derived from the Niedermeyer School where he was taught, has sometimes been over-emphasised. The most popular works of Fauré tend to use modal themes, though he often introduced chromatic notes foreign to the prevailing mode. In fact, Fauré was a late-romantic composer, whose aim was never to subvert tonality and ‘thus it is not so much the language which is new, it is rather the syntax, the order of words’. 13 The sixth and seventh nocturnes (1894 and 1898) are truly symphonic utterances, written on a grand scale but never descending to the grand manner. In fact they start to demonstrate an austerity and tenuity of texture that were to be the hallmarks of Fauré’s final period. Here, sobriety coupled with considerable technical difficulty results in music that is popular neither with performer nor audience. Nevertheless, Fauré’s piano music is sufficiently varied to challenge the best of Chopin and Debussy. One or two pieces, such as the Ballade Op. 19 and Thème et variations Op. 73, enjoy fairly frequent hearings. But it was in the salon where Fauré knew that his refined and aristocratic style could best be appreciated and the atmosphere of this milieu is today a relic of a bygone age. However, this music, as represented by Fauré, remains unsurpassed and unapproached.
Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94), again an artistic personality very diffierent from both Franck and Fauré, wrote little for piano though what he did write is significant. He was among the first to bring genuine wit and ebullience into French music, resulting in what has been described as a ‘café-concert atmosphere’. Yet his music, underneath its sparkle and tender warmth, was highly influential on later composers, especially Ravel and ‘Les Six’. Influenced by Wagner’s seventh and ninth chords and the folk melodies and rhythms of his native Auvergne region, the result was a highly original music that nevertheless was immediately popular. The Dix pièces pittoresques (1881) were a landmark in French piano music in their skilful combination of innovative harmony and original though often short-breathed melody, combined with superbly effiective (if occasionally orchestral) piano writing. ‘Idylle’, ‘Improvisation’, ‘Menuet pompeux’ and ‘Scherzo-valse’ are the best-known movements. It is a rare though rewarding experience for both pianist and audience to play and hear all ten pieces in sequence. The Bourrée fantasque (1891), Chabrier’s last completed major work, stands by itself as an example of flamboyant virtuosity, with extreme contrasts of nervous energy and tender, sentimental melody.
Claude Debussy, though born in 1862, was a twentieth-century composer in techniques and outlook, whose most significant piano writing dates from after 1900. Nevertheless, two works from the 1890s deserve mention. In its three movements with baroque titles, the Suite bergamasque pays homage to earlier French harpsichord composers; the oddly contrasting slow movement is the well known ‘Clair de lune’. Danse , more original, lively and inventive, is the best of the early piano works. The nervous energy of its pentatonic opening contrasts with an astonishingly spacious middle section, achieved by long vistas of swirling arpeggios allied to slow changes of harmonic rhythm.
The nineteenth-century duet repertory
‘Piano duets’ are defined in the New Grove as ‘of two kinds: those for two players at one instrument, and those in which each of the two pianists has an instrument to himself.’ 14 In fact, a piano duet invariably implies two people at one piano, as does ‘four-hand music’ also; if two instruments are involved, the term ‘for two pianos’ is usual. With few exceptions, piano duets in Germany were intended for domestic use (in France and Russia, the salon), whereas the two-piano repertory everywhere was for concert performance. With two pianos, both players are virtuosos in their own right, a relatively cumbersome proceeding when only one instrument is involved. After Schubert, the original repertory for both types was relatively small. The succeeding five paragraphs discuss the repertory for two players at one instrument.
Mendelssohn’s Allegro brillante in A Op. 92 is a rare and rather taxing example of the virtuoso duet and inevitably diffierent from Schumann’s contributions to the repertory. These include the Ballszenen Op. 109 (1851) and Kinderball Op. 130 (1853). Both contain movements in national style (French, Scottish, Hungarian, etc.) though they are eclipsed by the Bilder aus Osten Op. 66 (1848), not especially oriental and described as six impromptus for four hands. Schumann writes imaginatively and gratefully for the two players here, and the collection affiords a panoramic view of his sober late style. Just before the composer attempted suicide in 1854 he sketched a theme that in his hallucinatory state he believed he had received from the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn. Brahms took this for his Variations on a theme of Schumann Op. 23 (1861), which ends with a funeral march. Much better and better-known are the four books of Hungarian Dances, composed between 1852 and 1869. Brahms claimed only to have arranged these popular tunes, though it is believed some of the (best?) melodies are of his own invention.
As one would expect, the French repertory is quite diffierent: keyboard colouring and sonorities assume greater prominence, and collections and pieces both tend towards poetic titles. For much of the time, as always, French composers were engrossed in opera and ballet. It was not until the last thirty years or so of the century that the repertory started to come into its own. One of the earliest and best works is the twelve short pieces Jeux d’enfants (1871) by Bizet (1838–75), in which each title is supplemented by a generic term. The whole collection is distinguished by its epigrammatic humour and wit. Bizet orchestrated five numbers (‘Trompette et tambour, marche’; ‘La toupie, impromptu’; ‘La poupée, berceuse’; ‘Petit mari, petite femme, duo’; ‘Le bal, galop’) to form a Petite Suite, today invariably entitled Jeux d’enfants also. As with everything that Bizet wrote, both versions are distinguished by clear textures, melodic charm and harmonic piquancy.
Somewhat in the same vein, though as a result rather diffierent from his other works, is the ‘Dolly Suite’ (1894–6) by Fauré. The opening ‘Berceuse’ owes something to Bizet and the final ‘Le pas espagnol’ to Chabrier; apart from the canon in the middle section of ‘Tendresse’, the whole suite shows the composer in unusually light-hearted mood. Debussy’s youthful contributions to the repertory were relatively slight; they include the popular Petite Suite (1886–9) and the Marche écossaise sur un thème populaire (1891) in which the faint suggestions of the whole-tone scale, a genuine Scottish melody and Borodin-like pedal points in the central section all co-exist very happily. The two sets of Slavonic Dances Op. 46 (1878) and Op. 72 (1886) did for Dvo ř ák what the Hungarian Dances had done for Brahms. (For the coffiers of their mutual publisher, Fritz Simrock, all four collections did even more.) In similar mood are Grieg’s attractive Four Norwegian Dances Op. 35 (1881), exhilarating mood pictures that utilise Norwegian folk idioms.
A striking anticipation of Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik principle was provided in 1879 by the paraphrases on ‘Chopsticks’ by Anatol Liadov, Nikolay Sterbatcheffi and three members of ‘The Five’ (see chapter 10 ). At a party a little girl had remarked that her favourite piece was something that she could play:
Ex. 9.7 ‘Chopsticks’ theme.
The five composers proceeded to write a set of paraphrases on this theme; actually a series of ostinato movements, since the theme is repeated unaltered many times over. (It is always at the top of the texture, thus the whole composition might be fancifully designated a ‘sky treble’ since it is exactly the opposite concept of a ground bass.) There are twenty-four variations and finale, followed by sixteen genre pieces (march, fugue, polka, waltz, etc.). For the second edition Liszt contributed a paraphrase, cheating in the process since he repeated small sections of the theme to suit his purpose. The hilarity of the piece does not detract from the composers’ overall inventiveness; it is strange that the work is now virtually forgotten.
The two-piano repertory is considerably smaller, though musically more valuable. Chopin is ill-represented by his Rondo in C Op. 73, a posthumous work and rare in this genre since the first piano part is more difficult than the second: it was Chopin’s intention to play it with a less able friend. Schumann’s Andante and Variations in B Op. 46 (1843) was originally written with additional parts for two cellos and horn, a version not published until 1893. One of the great works in the repertory, Brahms’s Sonata in F minor Op. 34b, exists in the equally fine version for piano quintet (the original conception was for string quintet). Amongst its many qualities the first movement bears clear testimony to Brahms’s unobtrusive contrapuntal skill; the slow movement is influenced by similarly mellow and serene Schubert songs. The Scherzo is one of Brahms’s most exciting, while the faintly Hungarian finale is a masterpiece of unexpected, though subtle, changes of mood: the last two bars surprise, yet are somehow inevitable. Brahms and Tausig gave the (unsuccessful) premiere in 1864. Equally fine and also existing in an alternative version (orchestra) are the Variations on a theme of Haydn Op. 56b (1873) whose theme, despite the Haydnesque irregular phrase lengths, is probably not by Haydn. (It is usually known today as the ‘St Anthony’ Chorale.) The eight variations are extremely diverse in mood, despite remaining close to the theme throughout. They are followed by a passacaglia finale in which the basso ostinato consists of an ingenious combination of the melody and bass of the original chorale.
Its closest French equivalent is Saint-Saëns’s Variations on a theme of Beethoven Op. 35 (1874), one of the composer’s best works. (Preceded by a slow introduction, the theme is the trio section of the third movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 31 No. 3.) The piece is difficult though rewarding to play, and the final fugue, often a sterile academic exercise with Saint-Saëns, is exhilarating. Chabrier’s Trois valses romantiques (1883), as usual with this composer, are both ebullient and humorous. An interesting curiosity was provided in 1877 by Grieg’s ‘accompaniments for a second piano’ (very much in his own style) to three Mozart sonatas (K533/494, K545 and K283) and the Fantasia and Sonata K475 and K457. Other important works include suites by Anton Arensky (1861–1906) and Rachmaninoffi.
Finally, an important aspect of domestic music-making in the nineteenth century was the numerous arrangements for piano duet of string quartets, orchestral works and so on. For many this was the only way it was possible to hear and get to know such pieces until the arrival of the gramophone record and piano roll. Arrangements were good, bad and indiffierent. Some of the best were of the Beethoven and Schumann symphonies for two, four and eight hands by Ernst Pauer. Mendelssohn’s orchestral music somehow transcribes well for piano duet, and it is worth remembering that the original version of the overture A midsummer night’s dream was in this form.
Conclusion
The music discussed in this chapter represents only a small fraction of the large repertory of salon, domestic, concert and teaching music written for the piano between c. 1830 and 1900. That repertory is larger by far than that for any other instrument. Even when the trivia are discarded, the remainder is impressive in quality, quantity and variety. In 1830 the solo pianist could be heard only as an assisting artist. By 1850, Liszt and Thalberg – and a little later Clara Schumann – had made the piano recital what it is today: one of the most popular forms of musical entertainment. It is obvious that without the repertory this would not have been possible. It is less obvious that for some 150 years such popularity has shown little sign of declining, though various composers have inevitably been ‘in’ or ‘out’ of public esteem. Despite the proliferation of radio, television, CDs and other forms of electronic reproduction there seems little doubt that the piano recital will survive for some time yet. While the salon is now relegated into the museum of history, domestic music – whether played on a real piano or (increasingly) its electronic equivalent – continues to thrive, taking its repertory from the music of all periods, a repertory in which the piano, or its keyboard predecessors, stands supreme.
10
J. BARRIE JONES
Nationalism
Introduction
Nationalism used to be portrayed, mistakenly, as an offshoot of nineteenth-century Romanticism, portrayed, moreover, almost exclusively as an eastern European phenomenon. We can see now that Weber’s Der Freischütz and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen are German nationalist in concept in much the same way that Mikhail Glinka’s (1804–57) A life for the Tsar and Modest Musorgsky’s (1839–81) Boris Godunov are Russian nationalist works. However, it is true that musical nationalism seems most apparent in those countries where there had been virtually no previous traditions of art music, such as one can point to in France, Italy or the German-speaking areas of western Europe. This is, of course, not to say that music was uncultivated in eastern Europe. Far from it: the Slavonic peoples have for the most part been intensely musical. Bohemian instrumentalists were justly celebrated in the second half of the eighteenth century and, as in most countries, eastern Europe enjoyed a rich cultural heritage of folk song and dance. Nor should we ignore the importance of church music, which had a strong impact on nineteenth-century Russian music. Since eastern European folk music and church music are much less familiar to western ears they seem to have acquired an exoticism and mystique that formerly contributed to the myth of musical nationalism as a purely eastern phenomenon. And one might add that in the nineteenth century social and political forces were strong factors in the emergence of nationalist sentiments: political unrest was endemic throughout Europe, particularly between about 1830 and 1870.
Nationalist feelings are expressed most forcibly in the setting of words. Thus opera and song were primary targets of many nationalist composers. The symphonic poem also proved fruitful in delineating folk tales and national heroes. Coupled with the general nineteenth-century preoccupation with orchestral opulence and colour, the piano proved less of an attraction to many nationalist composers. However, a great deal of piano music was produced, much of it aimed at the salon or domestic market rather than the concert hall.
Poland
Polish music is inevitably centred on Chopin, whose mazurkas and polonaises exemplify some of the earliest overtly nationalist sentiments in music. The mazurka epitomises the dance of the common people, one of the reasons, perhaps, why it appealed mostly to Polish or Russian composers. The polonaise, like the mazurka in triple time, was originally of folk origin, but was transformed into a processional by the nobility. This gentrification made it internationally popular: it was a regular movement in the baroque suite, and even in the classical era a number of examples were composed by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Beethoven, Weber and Schubert.
Unquestionably it was Chopin who put the mazurka on to the European musical map. Despite the sophistication that he acquired after his move to Paris, Chopin retained a deep and abiding love for Poland. It would be wrong to describe him as a countryman, but he was familiar with Polish folk songs and as a youth had enjoyed hearing the rustic bands that played al fresco in the countryside. The more than fifty mazurkas were a direct outcome of Chopin’s patriotism and first-hand experience, and they span the whole of his creative career. They are too numerous to discuss in detail, but a survey of the entire collection reveals a remarkable diversity of moods and techniques within the limited confines of the mazurka genre. As with the waltz, some of these dances acquired a degree of sophistication that befitted their performance in the salon; on the other hand many are obviously danceable (though never, of course, in salons!). The original dance was variable as to tempo, frequently with stresses on either the second or third beat of the bar. Now and again, such syncopated stresses could vary within a single piece. At times the slower mazurkas require a (not always indicated) increase in speed for their middle sections. Formally, the mazurkas are ternary in design, frequently with a coda that may introduce a short-lived new tune (Op. 59 No. 3). Chopin tended to publish his mazurkas in sets of three or four, and in every case the set gains by being performed complete.
The earlier sets (Opp. 6–33 and many of the posthumously published Opp. 67 and 68 sets) tend to a harmonic palette simple yet bold. The iconoclastic defiance of those chains of consecutive dominant sevenths in the coda of Op. 30 No. 4 (Ex. 10.1 ) and the extraordinary final VIb chord of Op. 17 No. 4 (Ex. 10.2 ) are typical examples. Chopin was particularly interested in modal experiments in the earlier sets: Op. 24 No. 2, ostensibly in C major, is actually in the Aeolian mode with a brief Lydian episode from bars 21 to 36. Now and again we see exotic scales, such as the ‘gypsy’ scale (with raised fourth) in Op. 68 No. 2 (Ex. 10.3 ) and in the remarkable middle section of Op. 7 No. 1, where the gypsy melody is supported by an unrelated pedal drone on G ♭ . At the opposite extreme stands the tonic/dominant music of much of Op. 33 No. 2. Many of the mazurkas are organised almost in cells, short phrases of two or four bars that repeat either exactly or with only minimal variation, a procedure known as cell development technique: a frequent mannerism in Slavonic music.
Ex. 10.1 Chopin, Mazurka Op. 30 No. 4, bars 125–33.
Ex. 10.2 Chopin, Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4, end.
Ex. 10.3 Chopin, Mazurka Op. 68 No. 2.
The later mazurkas, while still rustic, become somewhat more stylised, though they are certainly more sophisticated harmonically. Phrases will sometimes cut across set harmonic patterns to produce an individual form of syncopation. Very occasionally, tempo and mood become almost a valse triste , as in Op. 63 No. 2 and Op. 68 No. 4. Since the danced mazurka was performed in couples, imitation is sometimes used to depict what has been described as ‘la fuite de la danseuse devant le danseur’ (‘the dancer’s flight from her partner’) as in Op. 50 No. 3. In Op. 63 No. 3 the imitation is at one beat’s distance and sufficiently exact to form a canon. This, and that in Mozart’s Sonata K576, are instances of the somewhat rare one-beat canon. As Thomas Fielden remarks in his edition: ‘The danseur must have been close to the danseuse !’ 1
Pedal effects are frequent to imitate the village band, as in Op. 6 No. 3, but on occasion are also used structurally to help define the form, as in Op. 17 No. 4, and Op. 68 No. 3, where complete middle sections are built upon pedal points. Chopin sometimes imitates the characteristic sounds of clarinet or violin; the pianistic fi oriture of Op. 17 No. 4 clearly had their origin in violin portamento (Ex. 10.4 ). Chopin very occasionally borrows folk tunes, but more usually he imitates them, assimilating folk idioms into characteristic melodies entirely his own. Chopin is more obviously folk-like (that is, Polish) in the mazurkas than elsewhere in his music, rather in the way that Beethoven is in the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, compared with the other eight. However, in neither case are these ‘nationalistic’ works in any way at odds with the composers’ individual identities in their music as a whole.
Ex. 10.4 Chopin, Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4, bar 18.
The larger structures of Chopin’s polonaises have made them more familiar concert works than the mazurkas. The composer’s first efforts were more tentative: several early examples, including the three in Op. 71, later published posthumously in 1855, were not intended for immediate publication. Apart from the boyish G minor Polonaise, which was published in 1817 more or less as a stunt, the first polonaises that Chopin deemed worthy to see the light of day were the two in Op. 26. Certainly both display a finish lacking in their predecessors. That they are still relatively early works is perhaps demonstrated by a rudimentary coda in No. 2 and by no coda at all in No. 1. Even so, Chopin – great melodist that he was – rarely surpassed himself in the superb arches of melody that grace the trio in No. 1. Conversely, the second in E minor is a rare example in Chopin – though it is common in Beethoven, most remarkably in the first movement of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony – of a structural edifice more dependent on a masterly agglomeration of short motifs than on cantabile melody; even the trio consists of short phrases more remarkable for their rhythmic patterns than for memorable cantilena. The two polonaises Op. 40, as has often been said, may well have been written to represent the greatness and the downfall of Poland. To avoid bombast in the A major and ensure pathos in the C minor, the tempo should be similar for both works; Hutcheson reported such constant tempos in Paderewski’s playing. 2 The A major polonaise, again devoid of a coda, seems as a result to come to a rather lame halt at the end; on the other hand, in the C minor, the manner by which the brief coda grows naturally from what precedes it is strangely impressive. In the three succeeding works, the coda was to assume increasing importance.
The Polonaise in F minor Op. 44 is one of the longest in the series, and is unique in that its middle section takes the form of a mazurka, and like Opp. 53 and 61 the introduction is thematic, not merely annunciatory. Op. 53 in A
♭
, one of the most resplendent and heroic of all polonaises, is 
celebrated for its left-hand ostinato in the middle section. Its execution requires an extremely supple wrist, and this episode contrasts tellingly with the succeeding quiet passage where the polonaise rhythm all but disappears, making the final return of the principal theme all the more effulgent. The magnificent Polonaise-fantaisie Op. 61 stands in a class by itself. Neither appreciated nor really understood until many years after Chopin’s death, its harmonic richness and the wealth of thematic ideas so convincingly brought together in the final peroration, suggest new directions that the composer might well have taken had he lived longer. After Chopin, much of the piano music produced in Poland was of the salon type, exemplified by the Scharwenka brothers, Xaver (1850–1924) and Philipp (1847–1917), and Moszkowski, who spent much of his life in Paris. Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819–72) can be compared with the Russian Glinka in that he concentrated his energies on attempting to establish Polish opera as a viable expression of nationalist feeling. The one worthy pianistic successor to Chopin was Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937).
Bohemia
In the early nineteenth century the early Romantic piano piece was pioneered by Tomá š ek and Vo ř i š ek, but the nationalist movement was initiated, then dominated, by Bed ř ich Smetana (1824–84), and later Antonín Dvo ř ák (1841–1904). Neither of these later masters appears at his best in the piano repertory. This is surprising in Smetana’s case, since he was a virtuoso pianist who in his earlier years composed voluminously for the instrument, attempting to do for the polka what Chopin had done for the mazurka. Most of his early pieces are of the superior salon type and of considerable technical difficulty. Smetana’s piano style, though effectively written for the instrument, demonstrates in the occasional massiveness of textures the composer’s predilection for orchestral writing. This is still apparent in his piano masterpiece, the Czech Dances of 1877. The collection begins with four polkas, more refined and pianistic than many of their earlier namesakes, that are then followed by ten large-scale dances, five of which re-work genuine folk melodies. (In the first polka, the sliding chromatic sequences make for an interesting comparison with bars 5–8 and elsewhere in Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 6 No. 1.) As with many nationalists, however, those melodies of his own invention that Smetana introduces could well be taken for real folk songs. This set of dances, rarely played yet singularly effective as a whole, seems to epitomise the Czech spirit in all its moods. Even when the music is at its liveliest, there is sometimes an undercurrent of poignancy, nostalgia, even melancholy.
Dvo ř ák was an eclectic genius who profited from a close study of Smetana’s music, and also learned much from Schubert, Brahms and Wagner. His best piano writing occurs in the chamber music. Solo pieces were relatively a side issue, but in so prolific a composer, such pieces are numerous. Many are somewhat trivial and were aimed at the domestic market, though the Eight Waltzes Op. 54 have an undeniable charm. The best of the earlier works is the Theme and Variations Op. 36 (1876), clearly modelled on the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 26. Other pieces include the thirteen Poetic Tone Pictures Op. 85 (1889) – the title may well have been borrowed from Grieg’s Op. 3 – containing the charming ‘Goblins’ Dance’ and an energetic ‘Furiant’; the Humoresques Op. 101 (1894), the seventh of which made Dvo ř ák’s publisher, Simrock, many millions; and the Suite Op. 98 (1894), probably the composer’s masterpiece for piano. Largely moulded in five relatively substantial movements, its piano idiom is typical of many works: alternately pianistic and straining for quasi-orchestral effects. Dvo ř ák in fact orchestrated the suite himself, to its great advantage, and it is in this form that it is more likely to be heard. As in most eastern European music, Czech music abounds in dance-like rhythms and short phrases that are often repeated, exactly or with minimal variation. There is, though, an element of greater musical continuity (often brought about by sequence) at times, reminding us that German influences were stronger on the Bohemians than on the Slovaks and eastern Moravians such as Janáček.
Russia
As in other lands, most composers of nationalist inclinations pursued a greater interest in opera and song than in ‘nationalist’ piano works. A considerable quantity of piano music was produced, however, mostly for the salon market. Within its limitations, some of this music was well written, though much is also now forgotten. Glinka, by general consent the ‘father’ of Russian music, was not particularly attracted to the piano and what he wrote for it is relatively trivial. In addition to the standard salon repertory of dances and occasional pieces, he also composed paraphrases on popular Italian operas, a genre to which he always responded with enthusiasm.
Russian music took a great step forward with the succeeding generation of composers. ‘The Five’ (or ‘The Mighty Handful’) were not, as a group, instinctive writers for the piano. César Cui (1835–1918) produced numerous salon pieces overtly facile in character, while Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) probably saw his relatively few piano works as composition exercises, since they mostly comprise fugal and other contrapuntal pieces avowedly academic in style. Alexander Borodin (1833–87) wrote relatively little in any genre, but his Petite Suite (1885) is certainly characteristic. An unhackneyed piece, ideal as an encore, might be salvaged in his deft and humorous Scherzo in A (1885). There is a famous recording of this by Rachmaninoff.
The piano music of Mily Balakirev (1837–1910), the leader and mentor of this group of composers, is perhaps long overdue for revival. Unlike his colleagues he appears at his best in instrumental music: although he produced some choral works and over forty songs, his one attempt at opera survives only in fragments. He is best known for his forbiddingly difficult oriental fantasy Islamey (1869, second version 1902), based on Caucasian folk tunes. There is, however, a large corpus of piano pieces, many of which date from the last decade of Balakirev’s life, when, in his retirement and after numerous earlier spells of depression, he felt impelled to return to composition. The bulk of his piano music may well have been conceived for concert use, though its manner is frequently of the salon. Like Smetana’s, the music is technically difficult, but it bears the undeniable stamp of the composer’s personality rather more than does his Bohemian contemporary’s. Factors that have told against it are the relative sameness of much of the music and, during that last decade, the fact that in style it was some forty years or so behind the times. There are undoubted mannerisms: a fondness, not to say obsession, for music in five flats (both sonatas are in B minor), widespread left-hand arpeggios, thin textures and melodies permeated throughout with similar intervallic shapes. But the music is pianistic, clearly textured and beautifully crafted. Balakirev was attracted to the mazurka, producing seven all told: No. 5 exists separately as the second movement of the Sonata No. 2, while No. 6 interestingly ends with a krakowiak in a different key (A ♭ ) from that in which the movement began. (The krakowiak was a folk dance in duple time from the Cracow region of Poland.) In this piece, in order to retain the same key signature for the start and finish Balakirev’s first theme is in his favourite D tonality, though since he oscillates between D and A in the first section, a four-flat signature does duty for both keys. There are also seven waltzes, three nocturnes and numerous other pieces including a charming Berceuse in the same D tonality as Chopin’s. Balakirev’s piano writing is pianistic though at times awkward, is difficult technically but not obviously so in the manner of Liszt or Rachmaninoff: hence its neglect by present-day concert pianists. But it merits an urgent revival.
Musorgsky was the only one of The Five to produce a masterpiece for the piano, Pictures from an exhibition (1874), perhaps the only monumental Russian solo piano piece in the entire century. As in his colleagues’ best works, Musorgsky here demonstrated his uncanny skill at painting those thumbnail sketches so essential in brief descriptive pieces such as these. The short stories and sketches of Gogol and Pushkin were as influential here as any work by Glinka or didactic instruction from Balakirev. As with Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, such small-scale workings made Musorgsky more responsive to the setting of words than to purely instrumental music, yet Pictures triumphs over the awkward piano writing by the sheer brilliance of the whole concept, its immediacy, and the originality of its harmonic and melodic content. The work was inspired by drawings in a memorial exhibition of the composer’s friend, the architect Victor Hartmann. It was a master-stroke to conceive of an introductory ‘Promenade’, which basically consists of one melodic shape, to represent a visitor to the exhibition, whose thoughts and emotions change while walking from picture to picture. Thus the movement recurs several times in varied melodic and harmonic guises. The theme itself embodies the Russian folk idiom par excellence . The various movements epitomise many of the nationalist techniques of Russian music: the unbroken tonic pedal in ‘Il vecchio castello’, sudden changes of mood and texture in ‘Gnomus’, clanging bells in ‘La porte des Bohatyrs de Kiew’ and persistent phrase repetitions in ‘La cabane sur des pattes de poule’. There is also what might be described as the reverse of the coin from those simple repetitive folk tunes that utilise gapped melodic intervals, often fourths: the development of a more chromatic harmony, with melodies derived from them. This type of harmony, frequently non-functionally chromatic and often used for colouristic purposes, stemmed from the whole-tone scale, found occasionally in Glinka and developed more systematically by Rimsky-Korsakov and Musorgsky in particular. Where description or word-setting is involved, whole-tone harmonies frequently portray magic or malevolence. In Pictures , non-functional chromatic harmony abounds but is particularly direct and forceful in ‘Catacombae sepulchrum Romanum’. The trio section of ‘Ballet des poussins dans leurs coques’ is mostly based around colourfully exotic whole-tone harmony. The achievement of The Five is all the more remarkable in that only Balakirev was a professional musician; the others were initially trained in other fields, Borodin and Cui remaining active in those fields throughout their lives.
Tchaikovsky, more versatile than any of The Five, pursued a wider range, being attracted equally to both vocal and instrumental music. Since Tchaikovsky thought primarily in orchestral colours, he is not seen at his best in his piano writing except in avowedly easy pieces (such as the Children’s Album Op. 39, one of the best of its kind) or when writing in a virtuoso manner (as in the three concertos, Fantasia for piano and orchestra and piano trio). Many of the shorter pieces, grouped into small collections, were intended for salon audiences who were attracted particularly to stylised dance forms. Tchaikovsky was able to produce such pieces without undue difficulty; thus there is a wealth of waltzes, mazurkas, polkas, Russian dances and so on. Often melodically attractive, the accompanimental figures and textures are relatively stereotyped and tend to the banal. The Twelve Pieces (‘of moderate difficulty’) Op. 40 (1878) are a fair specimen of such examples. More serious are the six pieces (prelude, fugue, impromptu, funeral march, mazurka and scherzo) based on a single theme Op. 21 (1873), an interesting extension of the Lisztian thematic metamorphosis principle. Better known than any of these are the set of twelve pieces, Les saisons Op. 37b, commissioned by a monthly periodical for each month of the year 1876. The June (‘Barcarolle’) and November (‘Troika’) movements became especially popular. The Eighteen Pieces Op. 72 move in a new direction. They were composed soon after Tchaikovsky had made his first draft of the Pathétique Symphony in March–April 1893 and break away from the essentially superficial textures of his earlier piano music. They include two waltzes, a mazurka and an over-bombastic polonaise. The pieces are unequal and less obviously melodic than usual but Tchaikovsky took particular care to extend the routine nature of his accompanimental figures, with the result that the set as a whole exhibits a careful workmanship that raises it above the normal salon level of his compositions. Two of the best pieces are No. 5 (‘Méditation’), whose compound triple metre is reminiscent of the slow movement of the E minor Symphony, and No. 8 (‘Dialogue’), a passionate duet between two lovers.
Tchaikovsky is often regarded as a westernised Russian, but he knew and appreciated Russian folk song as well as any member of The Five. He tended to favour folk idioms in the more intimate genres; thus he is often more obviously ‘Russian’ by these methods in his chamber music, some at least of his piano music, in his songs and in Eugene Onegin , which for all the glitter of the famous ballroom scenes is a surprisingly intimate and restrained opera for the late nineteenth century.
Hungary
Hungarian piano music centres essentially on Liszt, whose interest in folk music of all countries is obvious merely from an inspection of any worklist. During his years as a virtuoso pianist he composed variations or paraphrases on most of the European national anthems as compliments to his foreign audiences. It comes as no surprise that the three collections of Années de pèlerinage were inspired by Italy and Switzerland and that the original version of the first collection made use of Swiss folk melodies. Similarly the supplement to the second collection (Venezia e Napoli ) is largely a brilliant re-working of Italian popular tunes and at least one aria by Rossini. In the same way, we find pictures of Poland’s ‘downfall’ and ‘glory’ in the two polonaises in C minor and E major of 1851, essentially gloomy and bright tonalities. Written on a larger scale than Chopin’s, the C minor has a particularly beautiful second subject, and overall propounds a strong undercurrent of melancholy, despite some bravura passages. Its companion could hardly be more different. Even the A minor trio section is heroic in tone, while the main theme’s reprise is a glittering coruscade of fragmentation allied to thematic metamorphosis, and is a classic example of filigree passage-work in the highest register of the instrument. The slightly earlier Mazurka brillante demonstrates in its very title the exact antithesis of Chopin’s conception of the dance.
Liszt’s interest in specifically Hungarian idioms belongs, on the whole, to his later years. The third Année (1867–77) includes ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum’, sub-titled ‘en mode hongrois’, and utilises what has come to be known as the ‘Hungarian’ scale – basically the harmonic minor scale with a sharpened fourth, though in practice the seventh note also oscillates between a sharpened and naturalised form. The Historische ungarische Bildnisse (‘Historical Hungarian portraits’) depict seven national artists and politicians; though composed in the 1870s and 80s the set was not published till 1956. Long after the national dance, the csárdás, had first appeared in the 1830s, Liszt wrote three of his own. The dance, taken up in operetta and ballet, is generally bipartite (slow–fast), both sections being in duple metre. Liszt’s examples bear only the remotest resemblance to ‘folk style’. The title Csárdás obstiné (1886) might well be a pun since the work is basically constructed on ever-present ostinato patterns, in the best tradition of folk music. The Csárdás macabre (1881–2) propounds an extraordinary succession of chromatically moving bare parallel fifths (Ex. 10.5 ): a twentieth-century (sic ) version of organum years ahead of its time. Its trio is based on a Hungarian folk song, a number of which Liszt arranged in sensitive settings around this period.
Ex. 10.5 Liszt, Csárdás macabre , bars 58–65.
The one conspicuous Hungarian piece from earlier in Liszt’s career was the seventh of the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses , the eloquent Funérailles , which bears the inscription ‘Oktober 1849’ and was intended as a tribute to those who had died in the Hungarian revolution of that year. It stands as the finest obsequial piece ever composed for solo piano and though resplendent in quasi-orchestral sonorities they are always achieved by purely pianistic means.
There remain the nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies which, despite their somewhat misleading name, are still the most famous Hungarian works ever written. Ever the cosmopolite, Liszt misunderstood the true nature of Hungarian folk music, describing it in his book Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (1859) as synonymous with gypsy music, a misconception that earned him many enemies. The whole question is complicated since Hungarian folk and gypsy music continually interacted; but put somewhat simplistically, Hungarian folk music is like that of any other country, that is, creative, whereas gypsy music is essentially a style of playing. That style was propagated by gypsy fiddlers, and achieved by their taking pre-existing pieces (folk songs from Hungary and elsewhere, popular music of the day, well-known ‘art’ music, etc.) and dressing them up in a highly rhapsodic, improvisatory and virtuoso manner so that these pieces became almost new works in their hands. The verbunkos , an eighteenth-century dance primarily employed as a musical method of recruiting soldiers, played an important role in all this, since it was often performed by gypsy groups who treated well-known pieces in their characteristic style. The basic slow–fast formula (or lassu friss , to use the Hungarian terms) eventually developed into the csárdás, though Liszt’s contributions here lack the introductory lassu .
Liszt’s rhapsodies are in reality gypsy, not Hungarian, music. They take the form and style of the verbunkos , though the structure is often extended from two to several sections. The last four rhapsodies date from the composer’s old age and are virtually unknown. Most of the remaining fifteen, the majority of which were published in the 1850s, have remained familiar to concert audiences and there can be few pianists who do not include at least a handful in their repertory. It will probably never be known how many of these tunes, alternately catchy and melancholy, were of Liszt’s own invention and which were already generally familiar to Hungarians. This scarcely matters: Liszt transformed these essentially commonplace melodies by combining a wealth of harmonic treatments, frequently juxtaposing major and minor triads, and exciting rhythmic pungencies involving syncopation and Scotch snaps, all woven into dazzling pianistic effects. There are ingenious contrived imitations of the cimbalom and violin in the process. The cimbalom is the ‘national’ instrument of Hungary, but was also an important component of the gypsy band. Not all the rhapsodies, however, are virtuoso. No. 3, in ternary form, presents a melody that oscillates between B major and minor, with a contrasting G minor episode suggesting the violin and cimbalom. No. 5, entitled Héroïde-élégiaque , is a dignified funeral march, written in sonata form minus development section. No. 6, however, is more typical of the genre: the lassu and friss constitute sections three and four of the piece, which begins with a march-like Tempo giusto and a short Presto, directed to be played twice. Liszt’s own favourite was No. 13, though the public favoured (in the nineteenth century as now) No. 2 or No. 15, a grandiose version of the Rákóczi March, a popular tune from c. 1810 and also used by Berlioz in La damnation de Faust . The unnumbered Rapsodie espagnole (1863) is a magnificently structured fantasia on La folia and the popular Jota aragonesa . Busoni arranged this work for piano and orchestra, and Liszt himself made a similar arrangement of No. 14. This version is known as the Hungarian Fantasia. Liszt also orchestrated several of the rhapsodies himself. Many critics have dismissed the rhapsodies as superficial, but when first heard they must have seemed ultra-new, exotic and flamboyant, and their fascinating if slightly misplaced national character is all part of the immense variety and richness of nineteenth-century music.
Scandinavia
The four Nordic countries came late to the composition of nationalist music. The Finnish contribution in effect begins with Jean Sibelius (1865–1957); the salon music of the Danish Niels Gade (1817–90) has long been forgotten, while Swedish composers, as with Sibelius, came to the fore only in the twentieth century. The Norwegian composers, Johan Svendsen (1840–1911) and Christian Sinding, were completely overshadowed by their compatriot Edvard Grieg.
If Grieg was, as many assert, foremost a miniaturist, this is mostly due to his Norwegian environment. It would be absurd to look for the Wagnerian ‘unending melody’ in the sort of music that he set out to write. Actually, Grieg was pragmatic rather than dogmatic in his attitude to large structures, as is the case with many composers. Though he studied at the Leipzig conservatory, he later claimed to have learnt little in Germany, but his acquaintance there with Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s piano music lent his earliest compositions an assured competence and possibly gave him confidence to attempt large-scale pieces then and later. Grieg’s early meeting with the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull (1810–80) fired him with a lasting enthusiasm for Norwegian folk music, in which the most characteristic feature is a falling leading note. This is exemplified by the famous opening of the Piano Concerto, and found thereafter in 
numerous works by Grieg. It permeates many Norwegian folk melodies and it is this that lends to Grieg’s music that tinge of exotic melancholy, an attribute that made Grieg particularly popular in France and England.
Grieg is perhaps at his most personal in his songs, but the piano music provides an equally comprehensive view of his musical personality. Most of it was published in Leipzig. The Vier Stücke Op. 1 demonstrated what the composer could do with neo-Schumannesque textures of a predominantly simple nature. However, as early as the Six poetic tone-pictures Op. 3 3 there is a distinct advance in musical style, though here we see both Grieg’s strengths and weaknesses. There is an over-reliance on section repetition in No. 4 and on phrase repetition overall. But these faults are outweighed by a harmonic and melodic freshness, the effectiveness of the piano writing and the overall conception of the music. (Curiously, in his chamber music with piano, Grieg sometimes seems to be striving for an orchestral massiveness in the piano accompaniments.) No. 6 in E minor shows traces of the elfin fleetness of Mendelssohn’s scherzos. Here, the E minor tonality is significant: this piece stands in a direct tonal line from Mendelssohn’s Scherzo in E minor Op. 16 No. 2, continuing in Grieg’s Lyric Pieces Op. 12 No. 4 and Op. 54 No. 5.
Specifically Norwegian pieces can be explicit, for example the extremely pianistic arrangements of genuine folk melodies such as the twenty-five in Op. 17 (1869) and the nineteen in Op. 66 (1896). In a class of their own stand the magnificent Slåtter Op. 72, composed in 1902–3, which are arrangements of peasant tunes as played on the Hardanger fiddle by Knut Dale. These are Grieg’s most dissonant pieces, strongly twentieth-century in outlook, where the ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ may have had some influence on Bartók. In addition to the free employment of seventh and ninth chords, which had been a hallmark of Grieg’s style for many years, the frequent added-note chords look ahead to Stravinsky. The Ballade Op. 24 (1875–6), a set of variations on a Norwegian folk tune, is one of Grieg’s most ambitious works for piano. The Holberg Suite Op. 40 is an unusually successful essay in recreating a baroque suite in Norwegian style.
Norwegian colouring is implicit in most of Grieg’s remaining piano works, the most distinctive of which are the ten books of Lyric Pieces composed at regular intervals between 1864 and 1901. These pieces made Grieg internationally famous. Their greatest weakness lies not so much in the short-breathed melodies as in the composer’s unwillingness to recompose the last section of an ABA formal scheme. The ABA structure 
may well tempt some performers to omit the second repeat, always much longer than the first, but in many cases Grieg actually writes out the BA repeat in full as though to forestall any curtailment on the part of the performer. Occasionally there may be a coda (‘She dances’ Op. 57 No. 5) but usually Grieg is content either with nothing or with just a few bars to round off the movement. A through-composed piece such as ‘Phantom’ Op. 62 No. 5 is very much the exception. That said, Grieg never ceases to astonish by the variety of his conceptions: in the memorability of the melodies and, in particular, the resourcefulness of the harmony, often presented with so light a touch and in so transparent a texture that its audacities go unnoticed. Very occasionally, as in ‘Bell ringing’ Op. 54 No. 6, there is a foreshadowing of impressionism, though here this is an avowed imitative exercise for colouristic purposes.
After a long period when the cultivation of music in the home made these pieces universally familiar, Grieg’s piano music has become relatively obscure, there being a wealth of twentieth-century music to take its place. Grieg’s harmonic colourings were taken up by Delius, Warlock and Grainger and, less attractively, by twentieth-century composers of light music, revues and film scores, so that what was at first original eventually became merely hackneyed, superficial or sentimental in the hands of third-rate imitators. This, needless to say, in no way detracts from Grieg’s overall achievement.
Sonata and concerto
On the whole, these genres did not attract the nationalists: Chopin’s and Liszt’s contributions are universal as opposed to specifically nationalist. Balakirev, as might be expected of a composer instinctively drawn to piano music, wrote two sonatas in B minor. The second, though written mostly between 1900 and 1905, presents in its second movement a reworking of its equivalent in the first sonata of nearly fifty years earlier. The fugal elements of the first movement and the fiery energy of the finale enclose a mazurka and nocturne in a wholly attractive work. As usual, the player’s technique needs to be formidable, and since all four movements end quietly it is easy to see why concert pianists fight shy of it.
After an early sonata, written in 1865 but not published till 1900, Tchaikovsky composed a second sonata in G, of imposing dimensions and considerable difficulty, in 1878 contemporaneously with the Violin Concerto. The sonata is much maligned but it is unsatisfactory more because of the ultra-massive textures of its chordal passages, which are too orchestral, than for any inadequacies in the material as such. As so often, the more lyrical episodes are wholly delightful and characteristic; the slow movement and scherzo, despite the awkward and unpianistic nature of the latter, are the most convincing areas of the work.
Grieg’s solitary Sonata in E minor Op. 7 (1865, revised 1887), though hardly showing the composer at his best, has a faded charm and can convince an audience if the player is in sympathy with the piece. Neither Smetana nor Dvo ř ák contributed to the sonata repertory, save for an early essay by Smetana that remained unpublished during his lifetime.
Dvo ř ák wrote his single piano concerto in 1876, a spacious, not to say prolix composition, as was so often the case with works from his early period. It has attractive themes and succeeds in the concert hall, though its relatively unvirtuoso (by nineteenth-century standards) textures have not commended it to most pianists. Balakirev produced two concertos, one early, the other late in his career, though both are relatively insubstantial. However, Rimsky-Korsakov produced in his solitary concerto in C minor (1882–3) a strikingly original one-movement work based on a Russian folk song: its opening high bassoon solo almost suggests Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps . Like most Russian music the concerto is episodic, a charming succession of mosaics – and none the worse for it.
It was Tchaikovsky, however, in his B minor Concerto (1874–5) who produced by far the finest concerto of all the nationalists. It stands as a classic example of the traditional contest between soloist and orchestra. The extremely original opening movement is rather longer than the two remaining movements combined. The lengthy introduction, with a ‘big tune’ in the ‘wrong’ relative major key of the work’s tonality as a whole (a tune that never returns thereafter), is followed by a sonata allegro whose principal theme is borrowed from a folk tune. The slow movement juxtaposes two wildly differing sections with complete conviction, while the energetic finale is symptomatic of a number of late nineteenth-century concertos in that the most memorable melody of the whole work occurs in the second theme: quietly the first time round, grandioso in the coda. This is true of Bruch’s three violin concertos, Rachmaninoff’s first two concertos and Grieg’s Concerto (1868, revised 1906–7). Tchaikovsky’s concertos in G and E ♭ , understandably overshadowed by the B ♭ minor, are by no means negligible works that deserve more frequent hearings.
Grieg’s Piano Concerto, probably modelled on Schumann’s, is nonetheless a remarkable piece in its own right. Its first movement is full of memorable, if short-lived, themes with one of the most subtly integrated cadenzas of any concerto. This is followed by a compact and rapt slow movement, much of whose piano writing is improvisatory in style, and a lively folk-style finale using the rhythms of the halling , a duple metre dance derived from the Scottish reel.
Coda
The nineteenth century saw two very different American composers who may both be described as nationalists. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a virtuoso pianist and composer, made his debut in Paris at the age of fifteen playing Chopin’s E minor Concerto in the composer’s presence. His compositions were influenced by black American rhythms, and his numerous salon and concert pieces foreshadow both ragtime and jazz. Conversely, Edward MacDowell (1860–1908), conventionally trained in Germany and heavily swayed at first by European influences, became both university professor (at Columbia) and America’s most celebrated composer. There is a considerable corpus of piano music including two concertos, four sonatas and a quantity of genre pieces bearing poetic titles. Traces of Grieg, the virtuoso manner of Liszt and an almost puritan style that is wholly New England American, combine to produce a composer with a personal voice: racy and fantastical in his scherzo movements; with a solemnity and poise, not unlike that of Elgar, in the more nobilmente moods. MacDowell’s music is now out of fashion but scarcely deserves its neglect. He stands as a salutary reminder that, despite the immense fame that he enjoyed during his lifetime, the vagaries of fashion have now deemed his music unworthy and inconsequential, a fate that has overtaken a number of other composers.
11
MERVYN COOKE
New horizons in the twentieth century
‘Take it for granted from the beginning that everything is possible on the piano, even when it seems impossible to you, or really is so.’ 1 So wrote Busoni two years before the beginning of the twentieth century, prophesying the extraordinary explosion of compositional innovation which the new epoch would bring, and in which the development of the piano’s technical and sonorous capabilities would play a crucial role. Yet in spite of the apparent desire on the part of several composers at the turn of the century to break firmly with tradition and cultivate an almost avant-garde approach to pianoforte composition, with hindsight it now seems abundantly clear that the exciting new developments in piano music in the early years of the century were firmly rooted in nineteenth-century precedent.
By 1916 the piano’s impact on compositional developments had become sufficiently evident for E. J. Dent to publish an article entitled ‘The pianoforte and its influence on modern music’, 2 in which he expressed the opinion that Liszt had been the ‘foundation of modern pianoforte-playing and pianoforte composition’ in spite of his various ‘shortcomings as a composer of real music’. The influence of Liszt’s technical virtuosity and harmonic experimentation is to be seen clearly enough in Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901), which owed much to the water-figurations of Liszt’s Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este (1877). The impressionistic application of virtuoso figurations to create atmospheric effects was adopted by Debussy in his piano music from the Estampes (1903) onwards, and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908) marked the apparent limits to which such technically demanding figurations could be stretched. Although Debussy had independently found a use for Lisztian models as early as 1888, when his First Arabesque borrowed both its key and pentatonic triplets from Liszt’s Sposalizio (1858), his debt to Chopin proved to be of more lasting significance; Chopin’s extended residency in Paris from 1831 until his death had resulted in the strong influence of his piano style on many later French composers, Fauré in particular. Liszt was posthumously to influence one further strand of twentieth-century piano music, however, through the absorption of his style by a new generation of Hungarian composer–pianists. Dohnányi’s piano music represents the conservative side of this influence, owing as much to Brahms as to Liszt, but Bartók extracted certain modernistic and folk-inspired features from Liszt’s style and went on to create a new nationalism, ultimately taking Hungarian music well away from the Austro-German domination under which it had languished during the nineteenth century.
The emancipation of the sustaining pedal
Nineteenth-century influences on the piano music of the early twentieth century were not confined to matters of virtuosity alone. One specific area of technique which was soon liberated from all restraints, an emancipation signifying both the new harmonic freedom and a widespread interest in cultivating innovative sonorities, was the use of the sustaining pedal. The first major composer to have been aware of the creative potential of blurred pedalling was Beethoven. Oft-cited examples are the recitative from the first movement of the Sonata in D minor Op. 31 No. 2 (Ex. 11.1 ), or the first movement of the Sonata in C ♯ minor Op. 27 No. 2. These striking passages are prophetic not only of later impressionistic pedalling effects, but are also symptomatic of Beethoven’s fondness for harmonic experimentation, since the prolonged depression of the sustaining pedal results in a confused blur of unresolved harmonies. Pedal techniques were further refined by Chopin, from whose example many of Debussy’s innovations seem to stem. Margeurite Long (Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire from 1920 until 1940) famously recalled that Debussy shared Chopin’s conviction that subtle use of the sustaining pedal could simulate a kind of musical ‘breathing’. 3
Ex. 11.1 Beethoven, Sonata Op. 31 No. 2, first movement.
Although Debussy’s colouristic use of pedalling has often been singled out for praise, it is a singular fact that his piano scores are almost entirely devoid of clear pedalling instructions to the performer. ‘Pedalling cannot be written down … entrust it to your ear’, was Debussy’s advice, 4 and his strict avoidance of the conventional markings ‘Ped.’ and ‘∗’ verged on the obsessional. Instead, Debussy attempted to convey the subtlety of his harmonic blurring or promotion of lingering sonorities by the use of ties which imply that the sound of a note or chord is to be prolonged well into the succeeding rests; the precise sequence of pedal changes is left to the performer’s discretion. In cases where a bass note is to be sustained in this fashion, Debussy sometimes breaks notational rules by using both bass clef and treble clef simultaneously on the left-hand stave. An early example of this unorthodox procedure is to be seen in the ‘Prélude’ from the suite Pour le piano , written in c. 1895 (bar 15; cf. also Example 11.2 , bar 2). In later piano works he generally preferred to notate the music on three staves instead of two (see, for instance, D’un cahier d’esquisses from 1903) – a notational convenience which proved increasingly useful and was widely adopted by later composers as the texture of their piano music attained still higher levels of complexity (cf. Example 11.3 ).
Ex. 11.2 Debussy, ‘Pagodes’ from Estampes , bars 39–40.
Ex. 11.3 Messiaen, ‘La colombe’ from Préludes , end.
The wide variety of impressionistic effects created by both Debussy and Ravel in their subtle use of the pedals may partly have been inspired by the playing of the Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes, who settled in Paris in 1887 and went on to give the premieres of almost all their significant piano works during the first decade of the twentieth century. Poulenc, who studied with Viñes, declared that his pedalling was sufficiently striking to draw attention to its status as ‘an essential feature of modern piano music’, and Viñes himself recalled discussions with Ravel on the correct pedal techniques to employ in the latter’s Jeux d’eau . 5 Ravel suggested that the sustaining pedal should be used in the upper register to emphasise ‘the hazy impression of vibrations in the air’, thereby drawing attention to a fundamental discovery associated with the pedal’s acoustical function that underlies much twentieth-century piano music. As Dent observed in 1916,
It is in fact the right-hand pedal which gives the pianoforte an advantage possessed by no other instrument to any appreciable extent. A pianoforte without the pedal would be almost as limited in its effects as a violin without a bow. For the principal value of the pedal is not merely to sustain sounds when the finger is for some reason obliged to release the key, but to reinforce sounds by allowing other strings to vibrate in sympathy with them. 6
One reason why Debussy was so strongly attracted to the sonorities of Javanese gamelan music when he heard it at the Paris Exposition in 1889 was undoubtedly the extraordinary ‘vibrations in the air’ generated by tuned percussion instruments, an effect he emulated in ‘Pagodes’ from the 1903 Estampes (see Ex. 11.2 ). The implied pedalling in the second bar demonstrates the mechanism’s dual function, serving both to prolong sonorities and to emphasise the harmonic daring arising from the composer’s systematic use of the anhemitonic pentatonic scale and consequent avoidance of familiar triadic patterns. The elevation of unprepared and unresolved major-second clashes to the status of a new consonance is typical of the close connection between sonority and harmony in Debussy’s keyboard music. (Dent described the ubiquitous use of dyads comprising major or minor seconds as ‘playing on the cracks’.) 7
The structure of gamelan music further inspired Debussy to devote greater attention to effects of ‘layered’ polyphony in his piano music, suggesting the resonance of deep Indonesian gongs by the sustained pedalling of low piano tones above which various ostinato patterns are superimposed. Younger French composers – principally Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen – came to share Debussy’s fascination with gamelan techniques. It was Messiaen who, perhaps more than any other composer, went further than Debussy in developing an approach to the composition of piano music that arose largely from an awareness of the instrument’s sonorous potential. Messiaen’s early Préludes for piano (1929), while recalling Debussy’s two sets of Préludes (1910, 1913) in numerous respects, first experimented with what the composer termed ‘added resonance’. Not content to achieve acoustical effects by the use of the sustaining pedal alone, Messiaen went so far as to include deliberately ‘wrong’ notes (played more softly than the prevailing musical material) which function as an illusory extension of the natural sympathetic vibrations set up by the release of the pedal. Ex. 11.3 , in which liberal pedalling is again implied with Debussian ambiguity rather than explicitly stated, gives an instance of this ‘added resonance’ in the final bars of the first prelude, ‘La colombe’.
Colouristic harmony
Debussy’s major innovation in the sphere of harmony lay in his cultivation of so-called ‘non-functional’ chords, present for the sake of their individual sonorities rather than as part of a traditional harmonic progression involving tension and release from dissonance to consonance. The chains of parallel unresolved dominant ninths with which Debussy habitually improvised are a notorious and simple example, and in more sophisticated applications of the same harmonic concept it seems evident that novel pianistic techniques (including generous use of the sustaining pedal) were inextricably linked with harmonic experimentation. Emile Vuillermoz recalled: ‘Debussy’s playing was one long harmony lesson … no one else had his gift of transforming a dissonant chord into a little bell made of bronze or silver, scattering its harmonics to the four winds’. 8 A comparable, but much more extreme, instance of a composer’s experimentation with innovative harmonies as sonorous elements in their own right is to be found in the early piano works of Schoenberg. Although Schoenberg arrived at his piano idiom without the catalyst of Debussian influence, the non-functional atonal chord patterns explored in the Three Pieces Op. 11 (1909) represent the fruits of a similar artistic impulse. In the last of the Six Little Pieces Op. 19 (1911), Schoenberg composed a miniature tone-poem commemorating Mahler’s funeral which, in its simple but resonant reiteration of a dissonant chord, also suggests a ‘bell … scattering its harmonics to the four winds’.
On a more prosaic level, certain of Debussy’s and Schoenberg’s influential harmonic experiments were especially well suited to the piano. The equal-tempered scale employed on modern keyboard instruments was essential to Schoenberg’s desire to make all chromatic tones of equal importance (in contrast, a string player or vocalist tends to sharpen or flatten notes by various degrees according to their status in the prevailing tonal context). The whole-tone scale frequently used by both Debussy and (in early works) Schoenberg was a natural by-product of equal temperament. Pentatonicism, too, has its simplest manifestation in the black keys of the piano, a property exploited by Debussy (cf. Ex. 11.2 ) while once more following Chopin’s pioneering example in his G major Etude Op. 10 No. 5. In 1946, Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) composed a set of Children’s Dances which put the euphonious properties of black-note pentatonicism to educational use (an interest also developed in Carl Orff’s method of class improvisation): although printed without key signatures, the music is to be performed exclusively on the black notes.
The piano as percussion instrument
According to Margeurite Long, Debussy continually strove to make the piano sound as if it had no hammers (‘sans marteaux’), a challenge partly met by constant use of the sustaining pedal which releases all dampers simultaneously and allows notes to decay naturally into silence. This preoccupation was again probably connected with Debussy’s admiration for gamelan music, in the finest examples of which the players miraculously manage to create mellifluous effects, even in virtuoso passage-work, in spite of the need to strike every single note with a hand-held mallet. The piano is, of course, a percussion instrument; Debussy’s concern for furthering the illusion of a capability for sustained tone (which in reality it does not possess) goes directly against its intrinsic nature. In contrast, Bartók’s most important technical innovation in his compositions for piano was his emphasis on the instrument’s essentially percussive tonequality. In 1927 Bartók declared, ‘The neutral character of the piano tone has long been recognised. Yet it seems to me that its inherent nature becomes really expressive only by means of the present tendency to use the piano as a percussion instrument.’ 9 As Bartók’s mention of ‘the present tendency’ implies, he had not been alone in cultivating a percussive style of piano writing. The early bravura idiom of Sergey Prokofiev (1891–1953), displayed markedly in his first two piano concertos (1912–13), presents a notable comparison. After the first performance of Prokofiev’s second concerto, one commentator observed that the audience had been ‘frozen with fright, hair standing on end’. 10
After producing a number of early works immersed in the influence of Liszt (a model especially prominent in the Rhapsody Op. 1, dating from 1904), Bartók’s highly original keyboard style emerged in the period 1908–11. As with Debussy and Schoenberg, Bartók’s innovations in keyboard technique were inseparable from matters of musical substance. The Fourteen Bagatelles Op. 6 (1908) were widely condemned as being too ‘modern’, an epithet which in this context effectively meant that they were anti-Romantic. In his use of the pentatonic scale and other modes, Bartók here revealed his recent discovery of Debussy’s music (which he also emulated in the Ten Easy Pieces composed at the same time), and his preoccupation with chords built from seconds, fourths and sevenths indicates a comparable interest in non-functional harmonic sonorities. Busoni rightly hailed the Bagatelles as heralding a new era in piano composition; among their many features of interest was the downward arpeggiation of chords, a technique common in eighteenth-century harpsichord music, for which Bartók later devised a new notation. The percussive piano writing which was to become Bartók’s trademark was rationalised in the notorious Allegro barbaro (1911), where prolonged ostinato passages again reveal a close kinship with Debussy in spite of the turning away from all superficial impressionistic effects which the work ostensibly represents.
Many poor performances of Bartók’s piano music emphasise its percussive quality to the detriment of all else. Anyone who has heard recordings of Bartók’s own playing, or indeed who has taken time to study the wide range of subtle articulation markings printed in the composer’s scores, will surely agree with Roy Howat’s verdict that he was ‘a pianist of lyrical Romantic tradition – never a hard hitter – with an exceptional ear for fine nuances of timbre, rhythm and melody’. 11 Bartók’s pupil Júlia Székely (who studied at the Budapest Academy in the 1920s) recalled that he showed meticulous attention to detail in matters of pedalling and articulation, especially when teaching the piano music of Debussy by which his own approach to the instrument was so strongly influenced.
Bartók’s adaptation of musical material borrowed from folk music is well documented, and first surfaces in his piano writing in the collection For Children (1908–9). It seems plausible that his development of a percussive piano style owed something to an interest in the sonority of the cimbalom, a folk zither (played with two hammers) used in much east-European folk music. Stravinsky, who had also arrived at a percussive style of piano writing independently from Bartók and Prokofiev, included the cimbalom in several works written in this period. The highly percussive ballet score Les noces (1914–23) went through several orchestrations, involving at various times the use of two cimbaloms and a mechanical piano (or pianola, an invention dating from 1895) before achieving its definitive scoring for four pianos and percussion. In the Ragtime for eleven instruments (1919), Stravinsky used a cimbalom to represent the clattering sonority of a honky-tonk upright piano. The latter, somewhat surprisingly, was in later years to become a featured instrument in its own right, especially in music-theatre pieces: it appeared in the opera Wozzeck (1925) by Alban Berg (1885–1935), and went on to figure prominently in a series of works by Peter Maxwell Davies (b.1934) written during the 1960s.
Even in his ostinato-based percussive style, Bartók had not strayed too far from historical precedent. He entertained a passionate interest in pre-Classical music, and the ‘strummed’ repetitions of dissonant chords often to be found in his piano music directly recall similar devices in the more adventurous of Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas. Bartók’s early musical development had been largely founded on a solid diet of Austro-German keyboard repertory, including Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Liszt; but even here he would have encountered examples of percussive accompanimental figurations, especially in instances as striking as the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata Op. 53 (1804), a work which he learnt at the age of ten. The culmination of Bartók’s early martellato style is reached in the hammered ostinato patterns of the First Piano Concerto (1926), but soon afterwards his idiom became tempered by the admixture of neo-classical influences. Stravinsky (for whose work in this area, see below) had successfully reinterpreted baroque rhythmic vitality and textural clarity in his Concerto for piano and wind instruments (1924). This work was performed in Budapest in 1926, and subsequently had a profound impact on Bartók’s style; its influence is felt most prominently in his Second Piano Concerto (1931).
Clusters, glissandi and harmonics
Bartók’s other innovations in the growing arsenal of permissible keyboard techniques included the cultivation of black-note and white-note groupings as contrasting harmonic resources (see, for example, the sixth Improvisation of 1920). These sometimes take the form of black- and white-note ‘clusters’, a device he is reputed to have borrowed consciously from the American composer Henry Cowell (1897–1965) whom he encountered in London during 1923. 12 Clusters of black and white notes are often directly opposed to create extreme harmonic tension, as in the second movement of the Second Piano Concerto (Ex. 11.4 ). In bars 91–2 the opposing clusters encompass all twelve degrees of the chromatic scale. The chordal trill encountered here was one of the many devices Bartók borrowed from Debussy, who had concluded his spirited L’isle joyeuse (1904) with an uncharacteristically percussive application of the technique (Ex. 11.5 ) which includes a dissonant sharpened fourth (D ♯ ) foreshadowing Bartók’s folk-inspired use of the Lydian mode. In the slow movement of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), a work in which the percussion instruments reinforce the pianos’ percussive tendencies, Bartók employs simultaneous glissandi on black and white notes. (He was not the first composer to have explored this technique: black- and white-note glissandi had both been used by Berg as early as 1910 in the piano accompaniment to the last of his Four Songs Op. 2.) Many of Bartók’s cluster and glissando effects are concentrated in his famous passages of ‘night music’, in which the impressionistic suggestion of nocturnal sounds reflects the composer’s lasting debt to Debussy and Ravel. His continuation of the quest for novel sonorities inspired by the piano’s acoustical properties is further to be seen in his adoption of a method for producing ‘harmonics’ by sympathetic vibration first used by Schoenberg as early as the first of the Three Pieces Op. 11 (1909, see Ex. 11.6 ). Keys indicated by void diamond note-heads are silently depressed in order to release their dampers, while the conventional playing of lower notes causes the liberated strings to vibrate in sympathy with the overtones thus produced. A simple example of Bartók’s application of this device may be seen in No. 102 of the Mikrokosmos (1926–39), his celebrated collection of 153 educational pieces which comprise a veritable compendium of pianistic and compositional techniques.
Ex. 11.4 Bartók, Second Piano Concerto, slow movement, bars 88–93 (piano part only).
Ex. 11.5 Debussy, L’isle joyeuse , end.
Ex. 11.6 Schoenberg, Three Pieces Op. 11 No. 1, bars 14–16.
Ragtime and jazz in fl uences
Another manifestation of the gradual turning away from both nineteenth-century German models and early twentieth-century impressionism in keyboard music was the influence of ragtime and, later, jazz styles of piano playing (see also chapter 12 ). Ragtime (of which the first published example for solo piano was Mississippi Rag by William H. Krell (1873–1933), printed in Chicago in 1897) became popular in Europe around 1900–5 in instrumental arrangements performed on the international concert tours undertaken by Sousa’s band, and it was probably from this source that Debussy encountered the idiom during the first decade of the century. His witty imitation of both the ‘stride’ (that is, ‘oom-pah’) left hand accompanimental chords and the syncopated melodic style of ragtime in the ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ from Children’s Corner (1908) was an early example of the influence of popular music on keyboard styles, and Charles Ives (1875–1954) followed suit with a more ambitious and eccentric reworking of the ragtime idiom in his First Sonata (composed in 1909 but not performed publicly until 1949). Stravinsky, perhaps following the example of Erik Satie (1866–1925) – whom he went on to praise in his autobiography for ‘opposing to the vagueness of a decrepit impressionism a precise and firm language stripped of all pictorial embellishments’ 13 – experimented with an abstract and characteristically distorted mixture of ragtime elements in his Piano-Rag-Music , commissioned by Artur Rubinstein in 1919. The rag idiom also surfaces in Suite, 1922 by Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) and Trois Rag-Caprices , (1923) by Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), by which time it had already been eclipsed in popularity by the emergence of jazz. The relationship between concert works and popular music did not merely involve a one-way process of influence, however. Debussy’s harmonic language itself came to influence jazz musicians, as shown by the piano solo In a Mist (1927) composed by Bix Beiderbecke (1903–31), which clearly owes its title, non-functional harmonies and use of the whole-tone scale to French impressionism.
Structure versus sonority
From the 1920s onwards, trends in piano composition fell broadly into two major areas. On the one hand, many composers moved away from overtly colouristic effects to cultivate a more abstract keyboard idiom as a vehicle for complex musical structures. Others continued to experiment with the piano’s sonorous potential by introducing further innovative methods of sound production – some of which come dangerously close to mere gimmickry. The distinction between these two categories is not, of course, absolute: in the work of the finest composers of piano music since Debussy and Bartók there is often a high degree of integration between timbre and structure.
The development of an approach to piano composition characterised by a tendency towards abstraction and a deliberate shunning of superficial colouristic devices stemmed from the work of two composers, for both of whom this had represented a partial rejection of their earlier idioms. Stravinsky’s neo-classicism, which finds its purest manifestation in his Piano Sonata (1924) and Serenade in A (1925), incorporated a strong – though characteristically idiosyncratic – element of tonal harmony. Textures were clarified, either using a contrapuntal idiom redolent of baroque models or simple accompanimental patterns recalling early classical keyboard works. Buoyant, repetitive motifs typical of baroque toccatas propelled the music forwards with a rediscovered sense of rhythmic momentum. At around the same time as Stravinsky’s early neo-classical works, Schoenberg published his first dodecaphonic serial music in the guise of the Suite for Piano Op. 25 (1923). This draws equally heavily on contrapuntal methods and structures borrowed from previous epochs and marks a significant textural contrast to the earlier piano works by Schoenberg discussed above. Although fundamentally divergent in terms of tonal language and textural complexity, both Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s keyboard music in this period nevertheless appear to be pursuing similar artistic aims.
The influence of neo-classicism on later keyboard music varied according to the different responses to the two tonal extremes represented by Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Hindemith’s ‘utility music’ promoted a clarity of contrapuntal texture still based on simple rhythmic patterns but couched in his own elusively modal harmonic language. In addition to completing a set of three contrasting piano sonatas in 1936, his crowning contrapuntal achievement was the monumental Ludus Tonalis: studies in counterpoint, tonal organisation and piano playing (1943). This comprises a cycle of twelve fugues linked by transitional interludes, the entire work framed by a prelude and postlude (the latter a retrograde inversion of the former). Shostakovich’s Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 (1951), written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the death of J. S. Bach, are an extended essay in diatonicism. The first fugue is an ingenious attempt to compose a piece entirely on the white notes.
Followers of Schoenberg’s atonality, however, felt less constrained to adopt clearly recognisable baroque or classical models in their keyboard music. The innovations of Anton Webern (1883–1945) in matters of texture and structure proved to be highly influential on post-war composers, although these would scarcely have been conceivable without the prior example of Schoenberg’s dissolution of conventional melodyplus-accompaniment textures in his Opp. 11 and 19 piano pieces (a radical step against which Schoenberg himself later reacted by readmitting traditional textures in the 1920s, as we have seen). Taking Schoenberg’s renewed commitment to contrapuntal techniques as a starting point, Webern developed a wholly new approach to textural transparency which owed as much to silence as to sonority. Fragmented intervallic gestures are organised in highly systematic patterns which rarely allow the formation of chords containing more than two or three notes, and each movement or piece (invariably of minuscule dimensions) is unified by a forbidding cogency of serial technique. Webern sometimes assigns a different dynamic marking to almost every note, suggesting a refined sense of sonorous contrast which is only fully revealed in the composer’s ensemble music, with its technique of Klangfarbenmelodie (‘tonecolour-melody’, a term coined by Schoenberg) in which equally fragmented textures are orchestrated with a pointillistic allocation of a different timbre to each note. Webern’s mature piano writing is confined to a single work, the Variations Op. 27 of 1936. Ex. 11.7 shows the opening of the second movement, where each hand is strictly confined to its own thematic strand (one the exact inversion of the other). The posthumous influence of Webern’s radical textures was to prove formidably widespread, and quite out of proportion to the modest quantity of his own piano music. Not all developments of his innovations have been equally successful, however. In his solo piano piece Herma (1961), described by Susan Bradshaw as ‘the most difficult piano piece ever written’, 14 Iannis Xenakis (b.1922) devoted lavish attention to the differentiation of individual semiquavers by extreme contrasts of dynamic and register. Some adjacent semiquavers to be played by the same hand are as much as two octaves apart and marked ppp and fff , but the composer’s efforts are wasted when his frenetic metronome marking (180 crotchets per minute) self-evidently renders the rapidly leaping contrasts impossible to play.
Ex. 11.7 Webern, Variations Op. 27 No. 2.
Messiaen went one stage further than Webern by applying strict organisational principles not only to pitches but also to each note’s duration, register, dynamic and mode of attack (staccato, accented, etc.). This precursor of what soon became labelled ‘total serialism’ was unleashed in the Modes de valeurs et d’intensités , one of a set of four Etudes de rythme (1949), which presents a texture recalling Webern in its sparseness but tending to use long notes and ties to achieve greater continuity of sonority. Messiaen did not follow up the far-reaching implications of this style, however, choosing in the 1950s to devote increasing attention to capturing the melodic idiom of birdsong in highly decorative keyboard figurations. This new departure resulted in music exhibiting a technical virtuosity of which Liszt would surely have been proud, and the readmission into Messiaen’s piano music of a wide variety of more colourful techniques (sometimes literally ‘colourful’ in their symbolic depiction of various shades of plumage). The culmination of his mature piano style is to be seen in the thirteen movements of the Catalogue d’oiseaux (1958). Messiaen commented (of his 150-minute solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus , composed in 1944) that it is possible to make sounds on a piano that are ‘more orchestral than those of an orchestra’, 15 and in returning to a more impressionistic piano idiom in later works he rejoined the strong tradition of highly atmospheric French piano music. Orchestral imitation, a feature of piano writing since at least the work of Beethoven, had ceased to be a meaningful concept when Ravel published a series of works in distinct versions for either piano or orchestra (examples include the Valses nobles et sentimentales and Le tombeau de Couperin ) of which it is impossible to judge on purely musical evidence which version was composed first.
If Messiaen retreated from the radical suggestions of his own experimental music in the early 1950s, it was his pupil Pierre Boulez (b.1925) who was destined to pick up the emerging techniques of total serialism where his teacher had left them. Boulez composed his first volume of Structures (1952) for two pianos in a similar vein to that of Messiaen’s Modes de valeurs et d’intensités . Boulez’s First Sonata for solo piano (1946) had already shown strong traces of Messiaen’s influence alongside a development of Webern’s lean contrapuntal textures. Whereas Boulez’s counterpoint generally falls into two parts in the First Sonata, his Second Sonata (1948) explores denser contrapuntal textures and achieves passages of expressionistic violence (the novel verbal directions include markings such as ‘pulveriser le son’ – ‘pulverise the sound’) and considerable virtuosity. Boulez began a third sonata in 1957 which experimented with a mixture of pre-established serial forms and random structural selection: one movement, entitled ‘Constellation’, requires the pianist to select from material printed in different colours. Boulez’s three sonatas have earned themselves a firm place in the repertory, largely through the medium of best-selling recordings by artists of the stature of Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen.
In 1951 Stockhausen heard a recording of Messiaen’s Modes de valeurs et d’intensités and was inspired to abandon his early style to concentrate on developing the more radical implications of Messiaen’s experiments. Klavierstücke (‘Piano Pieces’) I–IV (1952–3) suggest the continuing influence of Webern, whose music Stockhausen was analysing at this time, while Klavierstücke V–X (1954–5) explore contrasting methods of attack and pedal technique. These works also adopt the method of producing harmonics by sympathetic vibration pioneered by Schoenberg and Bartók. Stockhausen’s experimentation with pure piano sonorities provided a foil to his simultaneous work in the sphere of electronic music. He developed techniques of playing clusters with the palm of the hand or the elbow, and utilised a cluster glissando (performed with special gloves) on white and black notes. Cluster effects and chordal glissandi reach their zenith (or perhaps nadir) in the explosive patterns of Klavierstück X . Klavierstück XI (1956) is an aleatory work to be formed from nineteen segments; the performer is permitted to make fundamental decisions governing structure, tempo, dynamics and mode of attack. After Klavierstück XI , there ensued a lengthy abstention from piano music before the composer began to rework ideas from his operatic projects in a new sequence of Klavierstücke commencing in 1979.
Experimentation with various methods of augmenting the piano’s timbral possibilities has been widespread, but was initially concentrated in the USA. It began with Ives’s remarkably precocious (and, at the time, largely unnoticed) attempts to overcome the limitations created by the pianist’s finite number of fingers by using the entire arm or a strip of wood to play cluster chords, as in the ‘Concord’ Sonata of 1911. Cowell, whose influence on some of Bartók’s more radical techniques has already been noted, was the first systematic pioneer of unconventional timbral effects. Tone-clusters (for which Cowell devised a special notation) are first encountered in his piano music at around the same time as Ives was writing his ‘Concord’ Sonata, and a ferocious ffff opposition of white- and black-note clusters appears in Antimony (1917). In the 1920s Cowell went on to experiment with still more eccentric effects. A series of works requires the pianist to play the strings inside the piano, thus bypassing altogether the mechanical action of the keys and hammers; Cowell coined the term ‘string piano’ to describe the instrument when played in this way. Simple pizzicato is used in The Aeolian harp (1923) and Pièce pour piano avec cordes (1924). In The banshee (1925), where the composer stipulates that the sustaining pedal be depressed throughout, a sweeping motion across the strings produces an effect like a harp glissando; by raising only certain dampers (depressing the relevant keys with the other hand) various combinations of notes are produced. Muting of the strings and stopping them at nodal points to produce genuine harmonics (corresponding to those possible on stringed instruments rather than those caused by sympathetic vibration) were introduced in Sinister resonance (1930).
The prepared piano
To meet the increasing desire for more eccentric sonorities, the phenomenon of the ‘prepared piano’ emerged in the late 1930s. This blanket term describes the use of various gadgets to modify the normal piano timbre, and the concept reaches back at least as far as experiments by Satie and Ravel which involved placing strips of paper between the strings in order to produce a sound approximating to that of a harpsichord (or, in the case of Ravel’s Tzigane (1924), to imitate the clattering sonority of a cimbalom). Some of Cowell’s innovations significantly modified the instrument’s timbre by requiring the strings to be stopped manually or to be struck by using hand-held mallets or plectra, but it is John Cage (1912–92) who deserves the credit for turning the piano into a source of a myriad of sound effects. Cage began by adopting certain of Cowell’s more adventurous techniques, modifying the internal glissando played on the ‘string piano’ by using a gong beater and metal rod to strike the strings in the First construction in metal (1939) – a suitably modernistic title reflecting the influence of the visual arts. He then introduced the ‘prepared piano’ in Bacchanale (1940), a work influenced by the Balinese gamelan, which he had encountered through Cowell’s interest in ethnomusicology. This work requires twelve strings to be prepared, using ‘fibrous weather stripping’ and screws with nuts by way of muting. Cage produced a stream of works for this bizarre instrument over the course of the next fourteen years, creating new timbres by the use of wedges placed between the strings to restrict their vibrations, or by the use of metal nuts and bolts (which may either be fixed or left to vibrate), or rubber erasers. In the accompaniment to the song The wonderful widow of eighteen springs for voice and ‘closed piano’ (1942) the performer is instructed to strike the piano’s frame in different locations. In all these enterprises, Cage’s confessed aim was to construct an instrument of unique timbral characteristics which would not be associated with the conventional piano. His timbral experimentation was not necessarily allied to avant-garde musical material, however, and a work for‘prepared piano’ such as Amores (1943; Fig. 11.1 ) is heavily dependent on simple modality and ostinato figurations reflecting Cage’s post-Debussian interest in the gamelan.
Figure 11.1 Interior of a prepared piano, according to directions given by John Cage in the introduction to his Amores (1943).
At around the same time as Cage was introducing his ‘prepared piano’, his fellow American Lou Harrison (b.1917) – who studied with both Cowell and Schoenberg – created a metallic piano sonority by the simple ploy of sticking drawing pins into the felt covering of the hammers. (In a less artistically pretentious context, the ragtime and stride pianist Winifred Atwell – famous for her spirited version of George Botsford’s Black and White Rag – did something similar to intensify the honky-tonk sound of upright instruments.) In more recent years, there has continued to be an astonishing diversity of novel piano sonorities produced by unorthodox means. Innovators include Lukas Foss, Mauricio Kagel, Roberto Gerhard, Robert Sherlaw Johnson, David Bedford and Peter Maxwell Davies: their techniques range from the extreme of removing the interior of the piano altogether so that it can only be played like a cimbalom, to the simple but effective device of requiring the pianist in chamber music to keep the sustaining pedal depressed when not playing so as to promote sympathetic vibrations from notes sounded by other instruments (for example, in works by Xenakis). In his Sequenza IV (1967), Luciano Berio (b.1925) made explicit use of the modern grand piano’s sostenuto pedal (which releases only selected dampers rather than the whole range – a useful mechanism which is often neglected even by professional pianists) to sustain a background chord progression. In the early 1960s some composers grew dissatisfied with the restrictions of equal temperament, and constructed new keyboard instruments capable of microtonal tuning or of a return to just intonation.
One composer who has managed to adapt some of Cowell’s innovations and has shown them to be capable of considerable atmospheric suggestion without gimmickry is George Crumb (b.1929), whose Vox balaenae (‘The voice of the whale’, 1971) for piano, flute and cello is an especially fine example of the sensitive application of unconventional pianistic techniques not requiring special accessories apart from electronic amplification. The quest for timbral novelty has since the 1950s been increasingly diverted into the field of electronic music, with some early examples of works for tape taking piano sonorities as their basis. Composers have gradually returned to more conventional methods of playing the piano. This must have come as a welcome reaction for those in the piano trade concerned with the upkeep and renovation of instruments. As one author has laconically noted, ‘almost any physical action will produce novel, interesting sounds from the piano, though some damage may result’. 16
12
BRIAN PRIESTLEY
Ragtime, blues, jazz and popular music
Throughout the multifarious developments in the field of composition during the twentieth century, the piano has clearly retained its high profile, and its central role in European-style music making. The divide between broadly ‘popular’ and so-called ‘serious’ music, however, has widened irrevocably and, even though the boundaries may fluctuate from time to time, this has come about through changes in Western society.
It is undeniable that the distinct personality of twentieth-century popular music reflects the stylistic contribution of African–American idioms. While such idioms originally developed unhindered, the last one hundred years have seen a gradual but remarkable takeover of the popular field. The arrival of a powerful sheet-music publishing industry was followed (in chronological order of their greatest impact) by radio, sound films, commercial recording and television. Although in each medium the powers that be initially resisted black composers and performers, they eventually capitulated and thereafter played a crucial role in spreading previous minority preferences among the mainstream.
Further consideration of this fascinating process lies outside the scope of the present volume, but two other factors must be borne in mind. Firstly, those responsible for each musical innovation were not merely the elite who form the breeding ground for innovation in any artistic sphere, but a performing minority within a racial minority. Thus, despite the accelerated rate of change brought about by technological developments, the dissemination of musical innovation was a three-stage process. There had to be some acceptance among black American listeners, and then by white musicians; if these stages occurred, the rest of the world got to hear the results. This staggered popularity is distinct from the generation gap it causes – the way in which white teenage fans of swing music in the 1930s still liked it as adults in the 1950s, the period when their own teenage children were absorbed in rock-and-roll (both sets of teenagers being a decade in arrears compared with the relevant innovations of black musicians).
Secondly, some of the music discussed here represents stylistic features that, though not widely popular in themselves, nevertheless became part of the vocabulary on which later developments were based. To use the European terminology (for the last time in this chapter), popular music contains its own significant areas of ‘serious’ music, lacking widespread acclaim but eminently worthy of attention by piano aficionados.
The growth of ragtime
An instance of the first phenomenon is ragtime. Although now seen to have reached its artistic peak during the first decade of the twentieth century, it developed out of a variety of nineteenth-century popular music ranging from brass bands to minstrel-show banjo tunes. The vitality of ‘classic’ ragtime between 1899 and 1909 produced most of the instrumental compositions that are still remembered. But this regional style engendered widespread activity by New York songwriters in the following decade (when ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ was published) and, continuing the process of international popularisation, the often bland music of the 1920s ‘jazz age’ still echoed the style of ragtime. The same transition took place in Europe, with British composers such as David Comer (‘Hors d’oeuvre’, 1914) and Billy Mayerl (‘Marigold’, 1929) mirroring the gradual softening of the original style.
Whatever its historical antecedents – and they are the subject of some debate – classic ragtime was essentially a music for solo piano. Some of those who first popularised the style were also songwriters still working in the minstrel-show tradition, such as Ben Harney, a light-skinned African American who ‘passed for white’. The most fondly remembered writer of piano rags, however, was the uncompromising Scott Joplin (1868–1917), whose ultimate ambitions lay in the diametrically opposed direction of operatic composition (his Threemonisha was finally staged fifty-five years after his death). For many decades, the most widely known of his prolific output of piano pieces was ‘Maple Leaf rag’ (1899), overtaken in popularity since the 1970s by ‘The entertainer’ (1902) which was used in the film The sting .
The style brought to fruition by Joplin and his pianist–composer colleagues, initially in the mid-Western town of St Louis, has several features crucial for understanding all of the music discussed here. Much jazz and popular music has an ambivalent relationship to European harmony, but the influence of the latter was still extremely strong one hundred years ago. Further, the inheritance of European compositional structures was never more visible than in ragtime, which adopted from martial and folkdance music the practice of employing several melodic strains (usually sixteen bars long) and one or at most two key-changes to make a piece hold together. The architecture of ‘Maple Leaf rag’ may be described as AABBACCDD, with a change of key up a fourth (subtly engineered by starting on the V chord of the new tonality) for the third strain, and a return for the last strain (disguised by starting on the IV chord of the ‘new’ key).
The harmonic, and especially rhythmic, subtlety is seen most clearly in the first strain, with the surprising use of the VI chord in parts of bars 5 and 6 followed by the suspenseful broken-chord of bars 7–8 (Ex. 12.1 ). The latter coincides with a ‘break’, whereby the steady rhythm of the left hand is halted for two bars, only to return with correspondingly greater momentum. In the opening melodic phrase (similarly, in the opening phrase of ‘The entertainer’), it is important to hear the repetition of melodic cells moving ‘across the beat’, which leads to the accentuation of every third note. 1 Known at the period in question as ‘secondary ragtime’, and roughly equivalent to the Greek term ‘hemiola’, such rhythmic counterpoint is absolutely central to the kind of syncopations heard in popular music to this day.
Ex. 12.1 Joplin,‘Maple Leaf rag’, bars 1–16.
Whatever the pre-1890s growing pains of ragtime, it burst upon the conventional music world through the medium of sheet-music publication, and ‘Maple Leaf rag’ for instance went on to sell a million copies. In the period before the arrival of the mass media described above, music making was done in the home far more than in the concert hall and, for ragtime to achieve such great popularity, it had to be available in printed form and also to be re-edited in simplified editions (some of which are still around – see under ‘Repertory’ p. 224). The first passive ‘home entertainment’ medium was the player-piano or pianola, whereby a roll punched with holes passed through a mechanism akin to that of a barrelorgan, and the instrument's proliferation in the early decades of the century meant that many rolls were engraved by merely reproducing the sheet music. A process was soon developed whereby performers could play on a piano in order to cut rolls directly, which gave us recordings of several European classical composers as well as important American writers.
Joplin died too soon, after making only a handful of rolls, although the majority of his sixty compositions were made available in this format. But in the period from 1915–25, before the radio networks began to hold sway, many recordings were made directly by composer–performers of the post-Joplin generation such as Eubie Blake (1883–1983), James P. Johnson (1894–1955), his pupil Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller (1904–43) and Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton (1890–1941). All of them also went on to make numerous disc recordings, but their piano-rolls profoundly influenced younger musicians.
Post-ragtime developments
Preserving their work without prior notation was of course crucial, for it was only in the classic ragtime style that the player was intended to adhere exactly to the written composition. The generation just mentioned considered an element of improvisation essential in establishing the styles of individual performers, and this became increasingly true as time went by. The existence of recordings of the composer–improvisers themselves was invaluable not only for preserving nuances of performance which would have escaped the printed page, but for disseminating these among other professional performers whose learning was less and less involved with studying notation. 2
What links the work of Blake, Johnson and Waller is the post-ragtime style known as ‘Harlem stride piano’, taking its name from the locality of its development and from the manner of playing. In other words, where the left hand in classic ragtime had displayed a fairly genteel motion between the single bass notes and the intervening middle-register chords, the Harlem performers went in for a much larger ‘striding’ motion and were more apt to thicken the bass notes with octaves or tenths. They were also partial to breaking off the stride pattern to play moving bass lines, or to conflate the two by having the left hand play across the beat (in the manner previously described for the right hand in ‘Maple Leaf rag’). More immediately noticeable to the casual observer was the increase in virtuosity of the right-hand figuration, and the variations introduced during repeats.
These are readily heard in comparing different versions of Johnson’s ‘Carolina shout’, recorded several times by the composer as well as by Fats Waller. Alone among these artists, Waller achieved considerable popularity in the years before his premature death. Although this was largely on the strength of his entertaining singing style, many of his listeners appreciated the fact that he was a commanding pianist whose work was a summary of several decades of development. (The style, of course, did not die away but survived in debased form through such players as Winifred Atwell in the 1950s and Russ Conway in the 1960s.) Of his own piano showpieces, ‘Alligator crawl’, ‘Viper’s drag’ and ‘Clothes line ballet’ live on (the last two incorporating tempo changes, which is relatively unusual in this field) but Waller’s song compositions entered the general repertoire more readily, because they are more open to improvised variation. His non-vocal recordings of ‘Honeysuckle Rose (a la Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Waller)’, is inaccurately sub-titled but shows excellent musicianship.
The above-mentioned ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton was one of many performers who enjoyed success in the 1920s but whose career was decimated by the Depression of the 1930s. His composing style has its ragtime inheritance in common with the Harlem pianists but, in a series of recordings with his ‘Red Hot Peppers’ groups, he proved more expert at adapting it to the organisation of larger groups (in a way which stands outside the main concerns of the present book). More importantly for our purposes, his playing represents the importation into ragtime of two other influences which were essential for the development of both jazz piano and popular music in general.
Because of his stylistic interest, it is often forgotten that Morton was a virtuoso player fond of using percussive octaves in the right hand, influencing Waller and many others. But he was perhaps more virtuosic in the rhythmic arena and, rather than merely breaking his left-hand pattern as described above, he often engendered much greater fluidity and interplay between the left and the right, approaching the complexity of some Caribbean and Latin-American styles. Morton originated from New Orleans, which unlike Harlem had direct contact with the Caribbean, and two generations later – when his ‘Spanish tinge’ had solidified – a new school of New Orleans piano gave us the work of Roy ‘Professor Longhair’ Byrd (1918–80), Antoine ‘Fats’ Domino (b .1928) and their disciple Mac ‘Dr. John’ Rebennack (b .1941). Secondly, the importance of Morton’s Southern heritage may be seen in his unaffected incorporation of the blues influence.
Blues and boogie-woogie
Like ragtime, the blues is a genre which has permeated twentieth-century popular music and, indeed, its continued influence on contemporary forms such as soul and hip-hop is much more readily audible than that of ragtime. The blues also coalesced around the end of the nineteenth century from a variety of prior sources. Unlike ragtime, it was and remains a predominantly vocal form, and it has always been closer to folk music and considerably less susceptible to notation. By the time that standard material such as W. C. Handy’s (1873–1958) ‘Beale Street blues’ and ‘St. Louis blues’ was being published in the 1910s, it was as far removed from the folk roots as ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ was from its sources. If there was a blues equivalent of turn-of-the-century classic rags, it would be a raw vocal music, either unaccompanied or with a skeletal backing from banjo or guitar.
The playing of blues has always been more associated with stringed instruments, as well as harmonicas and latterly saxophones, but was often transferred to the piano. The music was thought of as rural, but that was one of its main attractions – even as the black population was gradually urbanised. When social gatherings were held in Chicago tenements or small Harlem clubs, the music would often be rural in tone and the pianist would be called upon to evoke the playing of folk artists. Whether the performance was solely instrumental or constituted the accompaniment to a vocal (often by the same person who was playing), its approach was deliberately unsophisticated musically. As such, repetition was one of its main resources, especially if intended also as dance music.
This is no doubt the reason for the longevity of the blues form. Ragtime displayed the comparative complexity of different melodic strains (with possible key-changes) alternating within a single piece, in the manner of the folk dances of various European immigrant groupings in the USA. But the blues restricted itself to a single twelve-bar strain with, in its basic form, only three chords (I, IV and V) used in a circular harmonic stasis, and it remained in the same key throughout lengthy per formances recreating the trance states of African traditional music. 3 Often the left hand’s repeated patterns would be a hypnotic ostinato much more rudimentary than anything in ragtime, and even the variations in the right hand would be minimal, and more rhythmic than melodic. In the work of a pianist–singer such as Jimmy Yancey (1898–1951), however, the extreme simplicity was both charming and moving, like that of folk artists anywhere.
Inevitably perhaps, the possibilities of the instrument seduced many of the more energetic performers to expand their role within this strictly limited framework. Like the Harlem stride outgrowth of ragtime, the development of boogie-woogie cannot be easily separated from the parent style of blues piano, and many later players alternated between the two. The introduction of more varied, and often more virtuoso, left-hand patterns did not detract or distract from the relentless twelve-bar blues chord-sequence. Nor did the increase of invention in right-hand parts alter the fact that emotional release was the aim, rather than empty display. Despite the fact that pieces such as ‘Honky tonk train blues’ by Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis (1905–64) or ‘Chicago breakdown’ by ‘Big’ Maceo Merriweather (1905–53) make excellent concert items today, the piano was still being treated (to repeat an oft-used phrase) as ‘eighty-eight tuned drums’.
Jazz and composition
During the 1920s the distinctive areas of ragtime and blues began to merge, in what would be only the first of many cross-influences between the different branches of African–American music. 4 The ‘jazz age’ begat much popular music which was to be forgotten, alongside many classic recordings which are cherished to this day. There was also much repertory composed during the decade which has survived and been endlessly reinterpreted, but the impending maturity of the music is evidenced more by the records than the printed scores. Doubtless it was because of this, and because of the evanescent nature of the countless performances not preserved on record, that there was considerable interest on the part of European composers.
There were, of course, other less welcome reasons for the attention turned on American popular music, which were bound up with the disintegration of the tonal system and the resulting stylistic confusion. Just as Picasso’s interest in African masks mirrored Debussy’s enthusiasm for Balinese gamelan, so curiosity about jazz may often have been mixed with a desire to end the impasse in European music. If so, it must be said that the beneficial results were few and far between. 5 Whether one looks at orchestral work such as Milhaud’s La creation du monde or keyboard compositions such as Stravinsky’s Piano ragtime , the importation of jazz effects failed to solve the writer’s structural problems (as might indeed have been foreseen). It also managed to reduce what was becoming a lively and self-sufficient art to the status of local colour in a travelogue. If one looks for examples which actually breathe the air of jazz and blues, while yet remaining successful works within the European compositional tradition, the list might well begin and end with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G.
Again, it might have been foreseen that the best use of ragtime and blues material in larger-scale composition would be made by musicians more intimately associated with the relevant traditions, such as George Gershwin (1898–1937). Now that Porgy and Bess has been acknowledged as a classic twentieth-century opera and his Rhapsody in Blue has been accepted into the European concert repertory, his success has finally become self-evident. As with miniatures such as the Three Preludes, the reason is clearly that his varied uses of ‘third-note accentuation’ and of blue notes came naturally, not as a stick-on effect. During his early days as a songwriter and demonstrator of others’ songs, Gershwin had developed an excellent ragtime playing style and, though not an originator in this field, his surviving recordings and piano rolls show an idiomatic performer at work.
Gershwin also introduces another significant strand of this story, for subsequent performers have found numerous interpretations of his songs of which the composer himself was not aware. His ‘I got rhythm’ is just one example, but thousands upon thousands of jazzmen have taken the bare bones of the song, often discarding the given melody at the very outset and improvising endlessly upon the underlying chord sequence. Gershwin himself wrote a concert piece for piano and orchestra called ‘Variations on ‘I got rhythm’, which pales before his long-distance contribution to the creativity of several generations of jazz players.
His black counterpart, Edward ‘Duke’ Ellington (1899–1974), went considerably further in working out the development of orchestral jazz from the inside. He too aspired to be first a ragtime player and then a writer of songs, and the original, piano-concerto form of his 1943 ‘New world a-comin’ also deserves consideration alongside Rhapsody in blue . His involvement with the piano is often deemed less crucial than his instrumental writing for the many other musicians who populated his various bands. Nevertheless his chromatic writing for ensemble, and his often astringently experimental piano interjections to band compositions, exercised a great long-term influence on keyboard players.
Stylistic diversification
In the early blues and boogie-woogie period, the piano was usually the sole instrument to fulfil the function of what is now known as the ‘rhythm section’ and, even if played alongside an acoustic guitar, it would predominate. The fussiness of ragtime was found to be excessive when used alongside other instruments, but the pattern of blues and boogie-woogie for accompaniment purposes survived with little modification in the jazz-influenced rhythm-and-blues bands of later generations. The great model in defining the piano’s place within the jazz ensemble was William ‘Count’ Basie (1904–84), whose rare solo spots often employed the same minimal but propulsive gestures that he used when accompanying the rest of his group. Most succeeding players found there to be more of a serious dichotomy between what they were required to do in the rhythm section, that is, when in a backing role, and what they wished to do when allowed the space to play a solo.
From this period on, the solo improvisation was usually not unaccompanied but the work of a single player backed by other group members, and most pianists’ right-hand work began to mirror the sounds of other jazz instruments. By the time that Basie was making his mark in the 1930s, his discretion stood out in stark contrast to most other established jazz players. His informal teacher, Fats Waller, was at the height of his powers, while the more daring Earl Hines (1903–83) was also leading his own band. Hines was able to imply rhythm with the left hand but use it as a percussive adjunct to highly syncopated flights of fancy essayed by his right. This has proved to be the conventional division of labour ever since, and many pianists of later generations have become so addicted to left-hand punctuations as to be unwilling to play any regularly repeated rhythm. It is, however, a by-product of Hines’s original desire to make the melodic improvisation of the right as incisive, and rhythmically self-sufficient, as a trumpet or other wind instrument capable of producing only one note at a time. Since wind players, from Louis Armstrong onwards, have usually been the pacesetters in jazz, there has been an inevitable non-keyboard influence on the pianist’s approach.
One unique performer took these developments for granted, and was also admired by such as Horowitz and Godowsky for his sheer dexterity. Art Tatum (1909–56) had a brilliant musical mind which enabled him, often in the course of a single short piece, to incorporate flashes of smoothed-down stride, the anti-stride discontinuity of Hines, and his own chromatic harmonies (full of ninth and thirteenth chords) which were to influence later players, even wind players. Just occasionally, he would play a genre piece such as his ‘Tatum-pole boogie’ (recorded in 1949) or his virtuoso arrangement of ‘Tiger rag’ (1932–3). Tatum’s speciality, however, was to take a familiar melody, reharmonise it and decorate it with arpeggios and complex runs, sometimes in a rubato manner which was new in a jazz context and which made his in-tempo passages all the more effective. In this way the piece became a completely new experience, and two excellent if untypical examples are his versions of Massenet’s ‘Elegie’ (which manages to incorporate a bizarre quotation from ‘The Stars and Stripes forever’) and of Dvo ř ák’s ‘Humoreske’.
Hines and Tatum belonged to the first generation who chose to base their improvisations on the popular songs of the day. They wrote little original material, simply because their reworkings of others’ material became sufficiently original to be easily distinguished from their fellow performers. They were also of sufficient middle-class upbringing to be given excellent conventional tutoring in the European repertory before branching out into the vernacular, and this is true of the vast majority of players who followed them. There continued to be important exceptions, however, such as Erroll Garner (1921–77). Singled out in early childhood as having an exceptional ear and being able to reproduce both piano rolls and pieces from his elder siblings’ classical lessons after a single hearing, he deliberately distanced himself from conventional learning. He was also an exception stylistically in that, almost alone of his generation, he maintained a steady left-hand rhythm. This was only abandoned at climactic moments or when he simulated the ensemble playing of big-band jazz by phrasing with both hands together, a technique known as ‘block chording’ which is still widely used today.
Post-war developments
The ascendancy of Hines, Tatum and then Garner came during the immediate post-Depression years and the second world war, when the wider field of popular music was more indebted to jazz than ever before or since. But pianists never attained the contemporary fame of the white bandleaders who played wind instruments, such as Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey. Even the pacesetters of the piano were most admired by fellow musicians, and their wider significance has only become obvious with the passage of time. As is often the way in the popular arts, many other performers of less impressive pedigree achieved greater renown, but only for shorter periods. Now totally forgotten, people like Maurice Rocco and others appeared in the three-minute-long sound films produced for use with early jukeboxes (a forerunner of today’s promotional videos). In wartime, even Hollywood looked favourably on black female pianists such as Hazel Scott and the still-active Dorothy Donegan, who produced a palatable blend of jazz elements with embellishments echoing their classical upbringing.
The end of the war, and the ensuing collapse of more favourable attitudes towards black citizens, coincided with the emergence of a new style of jazz which turned its back on the very idea of courting popularity. For a period in the late 1940s ‘bebop’ – a deliberately frivolous name comparable to that of the Dada movement in art – attempted to expand on trends inherent in the work of Tatum and others, in an atmosphere free from the dictates of commerce. Needless to say, commerce soon intruded (as in the art world) but, in the meantime, two players emerged who between them dictated the main directions of development followed by creative pianists ever since.
Earl ‘Bud’ Powell (1924–66) might be likened to a jet-propelled Earl Hines, whose glittering tone and helter-skelter lines rivalled the saxophone of bebop’s icon Charlie Parker, just as Hines emulated Louis Armstrong. Though still undervalued for his far-reaching influence, Powell laid such an emphasis on the right hand’s melodic improvisation that few subsequent developments (of whatever precise stylistic inclination) have questioned the proposition that the main goal of jazz or a jazz-influenced pianist should be linear invention, in the manner of a wind instrumentalist. The main exceptions belong to the school of Powell’s contemporary, Thelonious Monk (whose first name, not a nickname, has now graced three generations of the same family).
Monk (1917–82) apparently began his career as a more conventional jazz player but, by the time he gradually became to make a name for himself, he had pared away all the smoothness and introduced fascinating discords, voicing these in a strangely sparse way often alleged to be caused by a lack of fluency. However, a study of his characteristic vocabulary, and especially of the comparatively large amount of original material he created, reveals a highly coherent method which is all cut from the same cloth. Monk and his few followers were openly inspired by the harmonic pungency of Duke Ellington. Equally enamoured of Monk and Ellington is Cecil Taylor (b .1929), whose hyperactive atonal clusters might be likened to the school of action painting, although this is a simile which he would undoubtedly reject as too flippant. Indeed the 1960s, which saw him become a force to reckon with, was the period when the continuous development from ragtime through to avant-garde jazz began to be described as ‘black classical music’, in order to distinguish it from more popular forms.
Each of three aforementioned artists lived to witness (as indeed did Earl Hines and Erroll Garner) the gradual move of serious jazz performance away from the backing of dancers and the entertainment of nightclub audiences towards concert-hall presentation. This move, which has involved certain losses as well as considerable gains, had already begun immediately after the height of the bebop period. An early innovator in putting on concerts for college audiences, Dave Brubeck (b .1920) is a rather heavy-handed improviser whose success in the 1950s was even an early inspiration for Cecil Taylor and, like Taylor, he came to jazz comparatively late, after a background in the European classics. The player of the same generation whose playing is more idiomatic, yet possesses a fiery fluency that communicates easily to non-specialist listeners, is Oscar Peterson (b .1925). He is also an excellent group player, but the height of his achievement lies perhaps in his unaccompanied performances which often resemble a more intense version of Art Tatum.
Jazz and popular music
It may come as a surprise to learn that the role model for the young Peterson (and for most players of his age) was the singer–pianist Nat ‘King’ Cole (1917–65). Since it was Cole’s singing which was promoted at the expense of his keyboard work, he all but abandoned the latter in order to stand at the microphone and perform face-to-face with the mass audience. The recordings he made in the 1940s, however, when he accompanied himself at the piano, reveal tantalising hints of the jazz pianist he used to be. And they provide one reminder that, as in the field of European composition, much that was intended as purely functional or commercial music – with no other aim than entertaining its consumers – may stand the test of time and reveal hidden gems decades later.
Little matching that description survives from the 1950s, with the notable exception of another singer–pianist who was initially one of the many performers enamoured of Cole. However, Ray Charles (b .1930) had a much closer affinity with the vocal and instrumental blues, and effected a dramatic transformation of both blues and pop by marrying them with the influence of gospel music. The vocal results, which led to the development of 1960s ‘soul’, lie outside the field of the present book but the piano work was highly influential. By taking the left-hand octaves and the ringing right-hand triads previously only heard in black churches (and typified by Mildred Falls, the long-time accompanist of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson), Charles brought a new sound to popular piano music. One has to look for small nuggets within his predominantly commercial recordings but, having been blind since childhood, unlike Cole he has continued to perform from the piano bench.
If Cole and Charles underline the frequent background role of the keyboard in the popular field, two sometime jazzmen emerged in the 1960s to sudden success with avowedly ‘light music’ approaches. Peter Nero played in a glib and glossy manner which was distantly reminiscent of players such as Tatum and Peterson, and which gave him access to frequent prime-time television appearances. German pianist Horst Jankowski (b .1936), who led a fine radio orchestra and had accompanied many leading jazz players, will be forever associated with a trifle entitled ‘A walk in the Black Forest’.Yet, though these efforts easily went in one ear and out of the other, their professional backgrounds assured technically excellent performances which inspired many younger performers to raise the standards for popular music.
Another example of the piano being relegated to the background, yet nevertheless making a distinctive contribution, is within the field of Hispanic–American music. Already a cliché by the 1950s, the percussive running octaves of pianists in Latin bands made them stand out from the general rhythm-section sound without giving them solo space as such. This gradually changed as the ‘salsa’ style coalesced in the 1960s, largely thanks to the work of Charlie Palmieri and later his brother Eddie (both of Puerto Rican descent), both of whom led bands dominated by their flamboyant keyboard work. Their serious approach was perhaps a Latin equivalent of jazz, but more widely popular throughout the world were two Brazilian players. The frothy vocal and instrumental combination of Sergio Mendes’s Brazil’66 group (subsequently Brasil’77) was heightened by his piano work, while the celebrated songwriter and musical director Antonio Carlos Jobim made highly effective use of his minimal single-note piano in many of the original ‘bossa nova’ recordings.
European and exotic influences
A similar sensibility to that of Jobim has been at the heart of much jazz piano of the last thirty years and more, and the reason for this lies in the enormous influence exerted by Bill Evans (1929–80). As Earl Hines’s development is linked to that of Louis Armstrong, Evans will be eternally associated with one aspect of the work of trumpeter Miles Davis – as typified by the classic recording Kind of blue , which Evans stamped with his ensemble style. The particular combination of delicacy and strength produced by his chord voicings, taken together with soaring but oblique right-hand lines, was a leap forward to the same extent as Cecil Taylor’s, but much more readily accepted. At his most reflective, he often plays what one might expect from Erik Satie, if Satie were a contemporary jazz performer, especially when occasionally abandoning the chord sequences of his favourite popular songs to improvise on a modal base. This was a widespread shift during the 1960s (and in soul music from the following decade onwards), and examples of Evans’s work in this vein are ‘NYC’s no lark’ (1963) and ‘Peace piece’ (1958).
Evans, like Powell before him, was less known for his original material, whereas McCoy Tyner (b .1938), the chief collaborator of saxophonist John Coltrane, followed Monk in largely preferring his own compositions. Because of the association with Coltrane, Tyner’s work was far more tempestuous than that of Evans and, whereas Evans’s extended harmonies sometimes echoed Debussy, Tyner’s adaptation to the modal approach resulted in heavily accented chords built up in fourths, not thirds. Not only did these two between them affect the future course of jazz, but the frequently less demanding fusion known as ‘jazz-rock’, which took root from the 1970s, was populated with pianists whose chief requisite was a stock of Evans and Tyner phrases. Of course, the nature of the context meant that they were usually importing this vocabulary to one of the many electronic keyboards, which lie beyond the scope of our discussion.
Several of the most individual players who had success in the fusion field, however, were originally jazzmen whose first love was the conventional piano, now frequently and solecistically known as the ‘acoustic piano’ (or, by those who strongly prefer it, by the ironic name of ‘steam piano’). Two of the musicians concerned are Herbie Hancock (b .1940) and Armando ‘Chick’ Corea (b .1941), who as well as frequently leading rock-influenced electric bands have repeatedly returned to their original outlet, sometimes even touring as a duo. Both, of course, were trained in the European repertory, and both have written works for piano that reflect classical influences. In their ‘acoustic’ jazz work, both represent amalgams of Evans and Tyner, with Hancock emphasising more of an awareness of blues phraseology while Corea more often exploits his Puerto Rican roots.
Perhaps the performer who has come to represent the epitome of jazz piano for many people – enjoying a widespread acceptance comparable only to that of Brubeck thirty years ago – is Keith Jarrett (b .1945). His scope and his output have been enormous and, in addition to his early work as a stimulating ensemble player leading his own quartets, he made his reputation with a decade of solo concerts in which he drew on a huge range of influences. Post-Evans jazz, blues, gospel, ethnic music and seemingly the whole of European composition from baroque to atonal – all are grist to the millstone around his neck, that of creating a whole evening’s performance with no preconceived material. The 1975 Köln concert remains a classic, but many of his attempts to repeat its success plough remarkably similar furrows, thereby negating some of the benefits of free improvisation. It is worth noting, too, that he has inspired a new genre of less demanding solo piano work by players such as George Winston, who helped to found the kind of uplifting meditative music known as ‘new age’.
The piano central to all styles
In working his way out of an artistic impasse in the 1980s, Jarrett adopted several ploys. He not only reverted to trio versions of the popular-song repertory favoured by Bill Evans but became one of the few jazz performers (apart from Benny Goodman and Wynton Marsalis) to record repertory from the European canon, such as the Goldberg Variations. Whatever the genuine insights into this material discerned by his reviewers, it is perhaps of more interest that he has drawn admiration from some classical players for his jazz work. What is an even more remarkable and very recent development is the serious interest on the part of classical players in becoming involved in jazz performance.
Back in the 1950s, there were inroads made by Friedrich Gulda (b .1930) (who has recorded with Chick Corea) and André Previn (b .1929), both of whom have maintained an association with the jazz field while continuing their careers in ‘straight’ music. But there were few high-profile colleagues who cared to join them in this very difficult and rather risky activity. During the last ten years, however, many factors including the double-barrelled approach of Jarrett and the acknowledged respectability of Joplin and Gershwin have led to a more wide-ranging involvement by classical performers. One of the results is the performance of transcriptions of Garner and Monk by the British pianist Joanna MacGregor. The French player Katia Labèque (who partners her sister Marielle in a piano duo) has played works by Evans and Hancock and has commissioned works from other jazz writers.
It would be a mistake, though, to think that popular music is somehow justified by the endorsement of figures from the classical world, when it is the technique and traditions of the music which are their own justification. Popular piano today can mean all sorts of things, from simplistic playing-down to the audience by someone such as Richard Clayderman to the real down-market thumping of an Elton John. But it can also mean lightweight jazz from the likes of a Dave Grusin, or the genuinely widespread appeal of someone with high artistic ideals such as Keith Jarrett. Much of this broad spectrum of activity will live on into the next century and, although for reasons already explained sheet-music is of limited use to the explorer of this territory, recordings continue to provide more and more listeners with a challenge to the ear and to the hands.
Repertory
Because popular music at its most creative is essentially a performer’s art and not a composer’s art, its representation in printed form is slender. Most of what has been made available must be regarded as unreliable, because it usually takes the form of simplified arrangements aimed at other would-be performers. The only publications recommended here are those intended as accurate transcriptions of the way the music was actually played by its creators. Although even here small errors are often found, the volumes below do offer an insight into the performance of popular music at a high artistic level.
Brubeck, Dave, Time Out and Time Further Out (Derry Music, 1962)
Corea, Chick, Piano Improvisations (Advance Music, 1990)
Evans, Bill, Bill Evans plays (Tro Ludlow Music, undated)
Evans, Bill, Bill Evans 3 (Tro Ludlow Music, undated)
Garner, Erroll, Erroll Garner songbook (Cherry Lane Music, 1977)
Hancock, Herbie, Classic jazz compositions and piano solos (Advance M, 1992)
Jarrett, Keith, The Köln concert (Schott, 1991)
Joplin, Scott, Collected piano works (4th edn, New York Public Library, 1981)
Kriss, Eric (ed.), Six blues-roots pianists (Oak Publications, 1973) (includes pieces by Jimmy Yancey and five others)
Monk, Thelonious, Jazz masters (Amsco, 1978)
Morton, Jelly Roll, Collected piano music (Smithsonian Institution, 1982)
Priestley, Brian (ed.), Jazz piano , vols. 1–6 (IMP, 1982–90) (each volume contains pieces by ten or more pianists, covering 53 different performers in all)
Richards, Tim, Improvising blues piano (Schott, 1997) (includes ‘Honky tonk train blues’ by Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis)
Tatum, Art, Jazz masters (Amsco, 1986)
Tyner, McCoy, Artists transcription series (Hal Leonard, 1992)
Glossary
action : the mechanism by which a hammer is made to strike the strings when a key is depressed. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most grand actions were of two fundamentally different types. In the ‘Viennese’ action (Figs. 2.2a and 2.2b ) the hammer mechanism is mounted on the key itself, whereas in the English and similar actions (Figs. 2.3a and 2.3b ) the hammer is mounted on a separate frame. The modern grand action (Fig. 6.3 ) is derived from the English grand action. Upright piano actions comprise the same component parts as grands, but arranged differently to suit the vertical orientation of the strings.
agra ff e : a metal stud pierced with as many holes as there are unison strings to a note, invented by Sebastien Erard in 1808, whose function is to prevent the hammer pushing the strings upwards when they are struck (Fig. 6.2 ).
base board : the wooden underside of an early piano.
bassoon : a tone-modifying device operated by handstop , knee lever or pedal by means of which a strip of parchment, silk or other material is pressed against the bass strings of the piano, causing them to make a buzzing sound (see Fig. 2.7 ).
belly rail : the substantial wooden frame member which runs the width of the piano and supports the end of the soundboard nearest to the performer.
bentside : the long, curved side of the grand piano to the right of the performer. In some early pianos the wood curves into the body of the piano and is joined to the (straight) tail of the instrument (see Figs. 1.2 and 1.5 ). In other pianos, there is a continuous ‘S’ shape, referred to as a ‘double bentside’ (see Fig. 2.1 ), which incorporates the tail of the piano. bichord : stringing of the piano in which there are two strings per note. bracing : a system of wooden or metal supports which strengthen the piano.
bridge : the strip or strips of wood which are fixed to the soundboard , and over which the strings pass, whose function is to transmit the vibration of the strings to the soundboard.
cabinet pianos : see upright pianos .
capo d’astro bar : a metal bar which presses down on the strings and performs the same function as the agra ff es .
case : the outer shell of the piano.
check : the part of the action which ‘catches’ the hammer immediately after it has struck the strings. Some early piano actions have no check, some have individual checks for each note (Figs. 2.3a , 2.3b and 6.3 ) while in other actions there is a single check rail for all of the hammers (Figs. 2.2a and 2.2b ).
combination piano/harpsichords : instruments which contain harpsichord and piano mechanisms by means of which the strings can either be plucked (harpsichord) or struck (piano), as the performer chooses. Combination piano/harpsichords were made by several makers up to c. 1780.
combination piano/organs : instruments which contained piano and organ mechanisms. They were made until c. 1800.
cottage pianos : see upright pianos .
cross-stringing (overstringing) : on modern upright and grand pianos the bass strings do not lie parallel to the treble strings, but pass over them, allowing for greater string length in uprights, and a more central position of the bridge on grands. Cross-stringing was developed in the nineteenth century (see Fig. 6.1 ).
damper : most commonly a piece of felt, but generally leather or cloth on early pianos, whose function is to damp the vibration of the strings of an individual note.
damper rail : the strip of wood which guides the dampers in place on some pianos (see Fig. 2.6 ).
double escapement action : an action patented by Erard in 1821, and sometimes referred to as his ‘repetition’ action, which allows the performer to repeat a note before the key has been completely released. The modern grand action is a modification of Erard’s action.
English grand pianos : grand pianos with distinctive actions and case constructions that were made in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and whose original design had much in common with Cristofori’s pianos. The fundamental design elements were used in many parts of continental Europe, especially in France, and formed the basis of modern grand piano design.
escapement : the part of the action which allows the hammer to ‘escape’ as the string is struck, allowing it to fall back to a low resting position. Some early pianos (especially squares) have no escapement (see Figs. 1.1 , 2.2a , 2.2b , 2.3a , 2.3b , 6.3 ).
giraffe pianos : see upright pianos .
hammer : the part of the action which strikes the string (see Figs. 1.1 , 2.2a , 2.2b , 2.3a , 2.3b and 6.3 ). On most eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century pianos, the hammer heads were covered with leather (see Figs. 2.2a and 2.3a ), although some early hammers were made of bare wood. In the course of the nineteenth century, the practice of covering hammer heads with felt was introduced.
handstop : the means of operating tonemodifying devices on some early pianos (see pedal).Handstops are either situated inside the case of the piano (on squares – see Fig. 1.4b ), or they project through the nameboard.
hitchpin plate : the metal plate into which are set the hitchpins (on pianos after c.1830).
hitchpins : the small metal pins around which the strings are looped at the end of the strings opposite the tuning pins.
intermediate lever : part of the action of some pianos which lies between the key and the hammer, whose function is to increase the rate of acceleration of the hammer towards the string (see Fig. 1.1 , component ‘E’ and Fig. 6.3 ).
kapsel : wooden or metal component in which the hammer rests (Figs. 2.2a and 2.2b )
knee levers : levers which are operated by the knee to perform the same function as pedals. Knee levers were used on many types of continental piano instead of pedals until the early nineteenth century.
lute : a tone-modifying device operated by a handstop , knee lever or pedal which causes a strip of leather or other material to be pressed against the strings, inhibiting their vibration.
moderator : a tone-modifying device operated by a handstop , knee lever or pedal in which tongues of leather or cloth are interposed between the hammers and strings, muffling the sound, but leaving the strings free to vibrate (see Fig. 2.6 ).
nameboard : the piece of wood immediately behind the keys on which is usually found the piano maker’s name.
overstringing : see cross-stringing .
pedal : foot-operated lever operating the tonemodifying devices of the piano. See bassoon , lute , moderator , sostenuto , sustaining , Turkish music and una corda .
reproducing piano : a piano with a mechanism for recording a performance (see Fig. 5.1 ).
ribs : pieces of wood glued to the underside of the soundboard .
sostenuto : the sostenuto pedal is found on some grand pianos from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Its purpose is selective sustaining and its mechanism causes to be sustained only the notes that are depressed by the performer at the time the pedal is pressed: all other notes are damped in the usual way while the pedal remains depressed.
soundboard : a large panel of softwood supported on the underside by ribs glued across the board.
square piano (Tafelklavier) : the rectangular form of the piano that was most commonly used for domestic purposes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Figs. 1.4a and 3.4 ).
sticker : a component of the action used in upright pianos in which the hammers are placed some distance above the level of the keyboard. Lengthy strips of wood transmit the motion of the key to the hammer mechanism (Fig. 3.7 ).
sustaining : the sustaining handstop (s), knee lever (s) or pedal (s) which raise all of the dampers from the strings.
Tafelklavier : see square piano .
tail : the end of a grand piano opposite the performer.
trichord : stringing of the piano in which there are three strings to each note.
tuning pins (wrest pins) : the metal pins around which the strings are wound at the end of the strings nearest the performer on a grand piano. The tuning pins are set into the wrestplank and are rotated in order to slacken or tighten the strings in tuning.
Turkish music : a device, or collection of devices, operated by a knee lever or pedal that was fashionable in the early nineteenth century. It comprises a combination of various drum, cymbal and triangle effects.
una corda : a tone-modifying device operated by a handstop , knee lever or pedal which causes the keyboard to move laterally, allowing the hammer to strike one or two, rather than all of the strings. On many early grands a small wooden block to the side of the keyboard controls the extent of the keyboard shift – to one or two strings – whereas on more recent grands the shift is limited to two strings.
upright piano : in almost all forms of upright piano the strings lie perpendicular to the floor. The form in general use today was often referred to as the ‘cottage piano’ in the nineteenth century (see Fig. 3.8 ) and had shorter strings than the grand piano. In the ‘giraffe’ and ‘cabinet’ (Fig. 3.6 ) forms of the upright piano the strings are similar in length to those of a grand and rise from floor level upwards. In upright grands, the strings rise upwards from the level of the keyboard (Fig. 3.5 ). Some early experiments were made with upright square pianos by William Southwell, but not many instruments of this design were made.
‘Viennese’ piano : grand pianos with distinctive actions and case construction. ‘Viennese’ pianos were made in Austria and southern Germany in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
wrest pins : see tuning pins.
wrestplank : the block of wood into which the tuning pins are set.