Debussy, the relentless innovator and perennial warrior against all Germanic influences in music, from Bach to Wagner, sought inspiration in the French baroque, primarily Rameau and Couperin. The Sarabande from Pour le piano is both a nod to an old tradition and a break from it, which is not unusual for Debussy, but this particular piece is also a harbinger of subsequent work by Debussy, soon to follow.
If a hyper-intelligent Martian who never heard music in his life and had no notion of the concept, five minutes after landing on Earth were made to listen to Haydn’s C major sonata Hob. XVI:48, he would reach two conclusions based on the sound patterns he heard: (a) that something very simple is going on here, and (b) that there’s a great deal of sophistication in this simplicity. A year later, that same Martian, after having listened to all of the piano output of Mozart and Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, as well as of Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Ravel, and Bartok, etc., would still insist that Haydn’s C major sonata is one breathtaking piece of music, in its subtle simplicity.
Composers are experienced practical dialecticians, routinely engaged in reconciling opposites. A prime example, with a twist or two, appears in Beethoven’s Tempest sonata. After a disorienting and relentless first movement, and a dignified, spiritual second one, Beethoven combines organization and chaos in the final movement, before it winds down dynamically and suddenly fades away.
The last three pieces of Schubert’s Moments Musicaux are fraught with gloom, pessimism, and ambiguity. The brief moments of respite are undercut by menacing tones in the minor key and premonitions of doom. And yet, in the last moment, Schubert chooses to end the piece in an open octave, providing a closure of sorts, but no resolution of the many tensions, letting the listener choose between an optimistic and a pessimistic conclusion.
Schubert seems to have invented a new genre with the Moments Musicaux cycle of seemingly unconnected pieces. Its closest relative may be found in literature, in picaresque novels, like Don Quixote, relating sundry scenes of different moods, held together by a common hero but otherwise unrelated. In the case of the Moments, that hero would be none other than Schubert himself.
How do we play early music on a late piano? I discuss this hot topic not with reference to the much emulated, iconic masterpieces of early music, but to a particular piece, the Fantasia for keyboard by CPE Bach, a free-form fantasy, entirely improvisatory, of the type that has not had much following later.
It is no surprise to find traces of Chopin in Scriabin, who greatly admired the Polish composer. But can there be influences of Schubert in Scriabin? Awareness of Schubert at the turn of the 20th century outside the Germanic space was minimal. Are then the Schubertian elements we identify in Scriabin the product of our corrupted imagination (in other words, coincidences) or are they genuine, however unlikely, influences?
Once you put on Wagner’s magic helmet (Tarnhelm), there’s no telling what you’ll be transformed into. Maybe a toad… Fittingly, its associated leitmotif is harmonically ambiguous, and while you wear the helmet you’re in tonal no man’s land. But Wagner didn’t invent the idea of transformation through ambiguity. As I show here, Diabelli variation 20 serves precisely as such a magic helmet that mediates the transition between the second and the last part of the work.
Bells… What can be more straightforward in music than representing bells? If music can represent anything, it is bells. So what makes Grieg’s bells sound so queer and so… unGrieglike? This is the question I’m trying to answer while wondering whether the imitative notes are meant to represent some extra-musical reality, or merely an impression of it, swirling in the composer’s head.
How is this Mozart different from all the other Mozarts? Specifically, why is the Adagio in B minor, K 540, so different from hundreds of others Mozart has written? It was written in 1788, a tough year for Mozart, when he was beset by financial problems and struggling to get commissions. But we don’t need to know any of this to be struck by the un-operatic character of this sombre, ambiguous piece, built around diminished chords, in an almost Beethovian manner, and broken octaves.