The year 1854 marks a time of emotional complication in the life of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), given the suicide attempt by mentor and musical idol Robert Schumann, and the growing affection Brahms felt for Clara Schumann, even as each of them, from a creative standpoint, fashioned variations on a theme of Robert Schumann for solo keyboard. Brahms dedicated his Four Ballades, Op. 10 to Julius Otto Grimm, noting both their debt to Chopin and to vocal settings of narrative poetry, specifically, Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Stimmen der Völker (Voices of the people). The Scottish ballads in Herder’s translation, notably “Edward,” in bardic or Ossianic style, had been introduced to Brahms by his new friend Julius Allgeyer, who was studying copperplate engraving in Düsseldorf.

Brahms arranges his ballades in two pairs in parallel keys: D Minor/Major and B Minor/Major to effect a sense of narrative symmetry. The pieces are further interconnected by tonal center, with the first three including the key signature of the piece succeeding it. The last returns to D Major/B Minor to suggest a kind of cyclic pattern. No. 1 (Andante) in D Minor, a dialogue in ternary form, utilizes open fifths, octaves, and triadic harmony to invoke a dark, mythological past, since the subject of the poem is patricide, the crime induced by the son’s mother. The recurring, fateful, triplet figure increases the intensity of the Gothic mood.

No. 2 (Andante) in D Major projects a serene, calm atmosphere in its outer sections, while the central section – itself in two parts – moves first turbulently and then more lightly but no less intensely. The No. 3 in B Minor (Intermezzo: Allegro) constitutes a demonic, scherzo section. Its middle part ranges into the upper reaches of the keyboard, a kind of dream-escape.

The last Ballade in B Major (Andante con moto) reflects the Schumann influence, especially for its “inwardness,” given the marking to be played “with most intimate feeling, but without overly marking the melody” (col intimissimo sentimento, ma senza troppo marcare la melodia). The opening melody, stretched out in descending broken chords has a Schumann sound; the slow middle section, in which the melody shifts to the inner voice, surrounded by chordal figures, again, projects much of Schumann’s inwardness, no less apparent in the slow movement of the Brahms F Minor Sonata, Op. 5.

Inspired by the model of Beethoven’s two sonatas quasi fantasia, Op. 27, Felix Mendelssohn composed his Sonata écossaise (Scottish sonata) in 1833, dedicating it to Ignaz Moscheles. The three-movement work employs simple, elegant themes easily transformed in harmony and rhythm from the music’s initial appearance, Con moto agitato, 2/4. Each succeeding movement increases the tempo, and these movements essentially proceed attacca, with no or little break. Mendelssohn begins with a low, pedal F that supports sweeping arpeggios embracing the full range of the keyboard. An Andante ensues, sad in tone, that sets the course for the movement. As the mood becomes more disturbed, we hear the opening arpeggios move in varied tonalities, in the manner of an impromptu, now quite chromatic. The middle restlessness returns, and then the main melody, in simple harmony, ends the movement.

A single note ties us to the second movement, Allegro con moto, a gambit that appears in the famous oboe note in the Violin Concerto in E Minor. This music is lively, 2/4, in the relative key of A major, with the tone of a scherzo. The long middle section modulates into D major, whose constant flutter of 8th notes produces a moto perpetuo moving from bass into the treble. At the last chord of this scherzo, the Presto opens up, passionately furious, molded into sonata form. If the first theme feels askew, the A-major melody, cantabile, attempts a reconciliation, which the development disrupts with relentless force. Mendelssohn recaps both themes, and the coda usurps the motif from the development in a move, quite like one from Beethoven, involving a plummeting, descending scale and deep trill in the piano’s bass that mark the conclusion of a potent testament to Mendelssohn’s individual sense of the Romantic spirit.

Given the penchant that composer Franz Liszt possessed for reflecting scenes from Nature and the Swiss and Italian country sides, it seems inevitable that St. Francis of Assisi, the early 13th-century patron saint of animals, should command his creative imagination. Probably, Liszt knew the Giotto fresco that occupies the basilica in Assisi. Legend has it that Francis and companions happened upon a place in the road whose trees on either side contained flocks of birds. Francis admonished his companions, “Wait for me while I go to preach to my sisters, the birds.” The avian sisters remained intrigued, not one flying away. Set in Liszt’s “religious” key of A major, St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds resounds with trills and bird calls, with the high tessitura of the piece set mostly above middle C. Francis appears in the piano’s tenor voice. For Liszt, his first name, and that of Francis, Ferenc in Hungarian, were kindred spirits, and Liszt ultimately felt compelled to take holy orders as an Abbe of the Church, almost as a dualistic motivation to counter his equally potent impulse to the demonic in music.

St. Francis Walking on the Waves, S.175/2 is based on a legend of St. Francis of Paola, according to which he was refused passage by a boatman while trying to cross the Strait of Messina to Sicily. He reportedly laid his cloak on the water, tied one end to his staff as a sail, and sailed across the strait with his companions following in the boat. The piece was inspired by a picture owned by Liszt of St. Francis of Paola (who was Liszt’s name saint), drawn by Eduard von Steinle. Liszt described it in a letter of 31 May 1860 to Richard Wagner: “On his outspread cloak he strides firmly, steadfastly, over the tumultuous waves – his left hand holding burning coals, his right hand giving the sign of blessing, His gaze is directed upwards, where the word ‘Charitas’, surrounded by an aureole, lights his way!”

Liszt’s concept is a magnificent, universal depiction of struggle and triumph. The piece is in A major, Liszt’s preferred key for naive spirituality. The principal theme is announced immediately at the outset in unadorned octaves, and its emphasis upon the key of the mediant minor foreshadows the impending struggles. Stated again in the tonic key of E major above rippling tremolandi in the bass, the theme is the theme is presented nobly, in full glory. However, as the music progresses, the harmonic support becomes more violent, clashing against the main theme. Throughout the middle portion of the piece, the theme is nearly overwhelmed by the torrent of chords and surging chromatic lines. Following the harshest part of the struggle, where unrelenting octaves build to their dramatic outcome, the theme returns in majestic and triumphal splendor. Finally, a brief coda turns the mood solemn, like a prayer of thanksgiving. The principal melody then returns for a final statement in the bass, and the piece concludes with heroic ascensions through the tonic triad.

If any Romantic composer could be said to have subsumed William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” into his own creative persona, it was Franz Liszt. As part of his second Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), 1856, Liszt composed a one-movement sonata inspired by a reading of Dante Alighieri’s epic, Christian journey, The Divine Comedy. The work might be termed “programmatic,” much as is Tchaikovsky’s Op. 32 Francesca da Rimini, given that Liszt, evolving his one grund-gestalt (foundation theme), invents nine motifs to correspond to the nine circles (bolgias) of Inferno.

Liszt invokes D minor as the key of God’s wrath and eternal suffering, the tonality of Mozart’s damned Don Giovanni, and the sustained key of Liszt’s Totentanz. Liszt employs the tritone, or augmented 4th, often referred to as the “diabolus in musica,” the Devil’s chord. The second theme, however, in F# major, invokes a beatitude, perhaps Dante’s vision of Beatrice or of Heaven itself, a tonality no less called forth by Mahler. Recall that Liszt’s Les Jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este and Benediction of God in His Solitude are likewise in F# major.

The music of the Dante Sonata becomes convulsive and chromatic, a fusion of pleasure and pain, despair and redemption. Liszt’s use of stretti or layered polyphony often invokes Blake’s notion of “fearful symmetry,” either a triangulation or “trinity” of themes for Satan’s three heads – busy consuming three arch traitors, Judas, Cassius, and Brutus – or the incarnations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The effect adheres to the Romantic love of Manichean Dualism, the good and evil in the human soul, that for the Faithful, must claim victory for virtue.

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Alban Berg’s 1909 Piano Sonata anticipates the qualities of his later style, which eventually adapted to Arnold Schoenberg 12-tone aesthetic, albeit without sacrificing Berg’s innate romanticism. Berg’s point of departure lies in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and in the Liszt B Minor Sonata, given that Berg’s work, ostensibly, fits into the same key. Like Liszt—and Schubert before him—Berg compresses an expressive, four-movement structure into one, continuous movement that divides into distinct periods, if not separate movements. Again, like Liszt, Berg employs a technique of “developing variation” from the dark, melodic kernel in dotted rhythm he states early. Janus-like, Berg’s harmony looks back into the 19th century but also forward to a free syntax built on whole tones, tritones, perfect fourths, descending thirds (from Brahms), and various, harmonic progressions that defy strict convention. The classical divisions of exposition, development, and recapitulation still operate, as the music seems to advance and retreat, swell and diminish, in idiosyncratic counterpoint. Berg has moved from the old ecstasy of expression to the new ecstasy of structure and geometry in music. To see this daring work “merely” as a bridge between late Romanticism and atonality misses its unique character, which absorbs in a relatively small space a cosmos of creative energies.

The Fantasy is one of Chopin’s greatest works for solo piano. It was composed in 1841, when Chopin was 31. In his letters, Chopin noted that he used the term fantasy to indicate some freedom from rules and to give the work a Romantic Period cast. The Fantasy begins with a solemn marching theme that eventually plunges into a passionate and virtuosic section expressing a more triumphant and positive mood. A slow, somber chorale-like section occurs about halfway through the piece before the previous passionate material returns. After a short, quiet, and sweet interlude, the piece leaves behind sadness and ends on an uplifting chord in F major, the parallel major key.

Chopin composed his initial set of three Nocturnes between 1830-1832, dedicating them to Madame Camille Pleyel. Already, in his first attempts to imitate and then surpass Irishman John Field (1782-1837) in this relatively new genre, the “night-piece,” Chopin employed many characteristics of the bel canto operatic style of Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) to render the piano a singing, lyrical status. This, the third of the Op. 9 triptych, is set in ternary form, opening Allegretto, 6/8, with the theme chromatic but rife with the sense of tęsknota, or nostalgic bitter-sweetness. Chopin has not sacrificed virtuosity for arioso (melodious) lyricism: the second, contrasting section, Agitato, moves into the tonic minor, dramatically combining impulses in both hands, the right hand’s melody against perpetual, 8th-note arpeggios in the left. The keyboard texture at various points becomes quite rich, marked stretto e crescendo and dramatic, con forza. Besides the florid presence of Chopin’s ornaments, the piece calls for a degree of freedom in execution by the performer, with ritenutos (sudden reductions of speed) and without tempo, and with lightness in touch (measures 150-155) before the Adagio coda, which ends in a wide chord in the left hand underlying right-hand triplets, marked legatissimo smorzando, a smoothly veiled effect of dying away.

The beginning of the generally sunny Scherzo No. 4 in E Major alternates two contrasting textures and harmonies—first in subdued chords and then in faster, arched figures that rise and fall with the dynamics. The Trio section offers an operatic, cantilena (lyrical) melody easily attributable to Chopin’s admiration of Bellini and the bel canto style. Chopin expands the basic A-B-A format in an attitude of freedom and spontaneity, the triple meter perhaps nodding to Beethoven, but the motives express themselves in rich, non-threatening figures. Chopin’s work was composed at George Sand’s villa at Nohant, and their mutual happiness invests this Scherzo with a rare moment of acceptance. The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns took the Scherzo in E Major as his model for the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 22.

One would easily be confused by seeing five movements listed for a sonata, a composition form usually limited to four at most, and indeed it is anomalous because Brahms included this sonata’s Intermezzo as a bonus. This big piece certainly does not waste time—the entrance is drenched in fortissimo chords, which makes sense given Brahms’ great respect for Beethoven. The “fate” motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can be heard throughout three of the five movements, with the bonus Intermezzo “Rückblick” (“Looking Back” or “Retrospection”) featuring it heavily. At this time, Brahms was only twenty years old and more famous as a pianist than a composer, but his unique ability to contrast soft and bold themes within a single movement was apparent even to mature composers in his circle, such as Robert Schumann. That talent and tendency culminates in a finale that intertwines marches, lyrical melodies, sprightly steps, and brilliant showiness.

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Prokofiev established a body of work early in his career noted for his mocking tone and his open disdain of tradition. His chosen musical syntax indulges in angular melodies, abrasive, pungent harmonies, and what some labeled a “primitive” and aggressive sense of rhythm that stretched the idea of dance to its emotional limit. The advent of the 1917 Russian Revolution at first appeared to free Prokofiev even more from Classical constraints, and he journeyed to Paris to refine his cosmopolitan style and his technical skills in piano and conducting. Essentially, Prokofiev rejects the Chopin and Thalberg tradition of making the piano a singing instrument and prefers the instrument’s percussive authority.

The Four Pieces – Dance, Minuet, Gavotte, and Waltz – appear to assemble as a dance suite loosely obliged to Baroque impulses. But Prokofiev rather caricatures their content and desire for symmetry, investing the old forms of the clavecinistes and even Mozart with comical or ominous intimations that hint of the malice dominant in the 20th-century sensibility. The debt to Debussy becomes no less apparent, especially in that composer’s dance-hall pieces, like the prelude “General Lavine – Eccentric.” The opening “Dance” bears a militantly staccato mien, and the ternary form feels less ingratiating than compelled to contain Prokofiev’s irreverence. The more delicate moments suggest an ironic music box. The brief “Minuet” insists on a repetitive bass line, and the switches in register add a Parisian devil-may-care attitude. Prokofiev seems fond of “Gavottes,” and uses them in his ballets often. Once more, an insistent ostinato pattern accompanies a sinewy melody that exploits the crossing of the hands. The concluding “Waltz” rather defies its ¾ time signature, avoiding a clear beat and relinquishing its intent as a danceable medium. The right-hand work sparkles, while the left hand carries subtle, subversive harmonies. The piece ends quizzically.

This piano sonata exists in two versions: the first, from 1817, consists of three movements. Schubert conceived this original in D-flat Major as D. 567. He revised, or rather, transposed, the work in 1826, adding the Allegro moderato, but the later score appeared 1829 as Op. 122, after his death.

The opening movement, an expansive Allegro moderato, enjoys an immediate, gracious character, much in the style of Austrian Ländler or folk music. In a rather improvisational manner, the music evolves lyrically, the voices of the melody answering each other in antiphons. Traces of the Mozart and Haydn influences permeate the warm, even intimate, dancing gestures. The delight in singing lines often becomes so self-absorbed that the piece loses a sense of direction and becomes an impromptu. The method by which Schubert achieves transitions, establishing pedal points and syncopations, may owe debts to Hummel.

The second movement, Andante molto, is in the key of G minor, and projects the kind of staid melancholy for which Schubert remains famous. The music could be a troubadour’s song, intimate and ardent, by turns. Ostinato figures in both hands add a degree of tension to the proceedings. The central section assumes a darker tenor, reminiscent of the nervous anxiety in the lied, “Die Forelle.” The music dies away placidly. A gentle, slow, tripping gait marks the ternary Menuetto in E-flat major. The Trio enjoys aspects of a more courtly dance. A dancing, music-box sensibility opens the last movement, Allegro moderato, 6/8, in E-flat major. But the secondary tune has deeper emotional power, and the music proceeds as a kind of rivalry between two contrasting impulses, Ländler and sonata-form. What most impresses us in Schubert’s piano style is its vocal quality, the sense that a song of praise, often disarming in its simplicity, infiltrates each gesture or expressive figuration. This sonata, even in its originally unfinished form, manages to convey an instinctive beauty in the face of life’s trials.

Prokofiev entered into an experimental phase in the late 1920s in Paris, perhaps envious of the status Stravinsky had achieved in that city. In a spirit of what he termed “introspection,” Prokofiev read the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his search for constancy in the noumena behind appearances. The groping quality of the two, tripartite works Prokofiev fashioned reflect a cold, stark, analytical sensibility, eschewing melody as such for rhythmic impulses that do not appeal to “beauty” as commonly defined.

The ambition of the first piece is large, sprawling with meandering ideas that convey no sense of purposeful direction, although Prokofiev rarely gravitates from his favorite key of C major. The first piece seems overwritten, long-winded, repetitious, and sparing of compelling ideas. Chromatic and diatonic lines alternate, blend, clash, and deviate, according to some novel idea of a melodic line, close, perhaps, to the aesthetic of the Fifth Sonata, which has never achieved popularity.

Both pieces deny the legacy of 19th-century romanticism, and they do so intentionally, to force the listener and the performer to accept a new dimension or aesthetic—in the spirit of Busoni?—for melodic recognition. The joy seems absent in Prokofiev’s music-making; and the only excitement in the first piece occurs with the gradual acceleration of the coda at più mosso until the final measure. Lighter and less ponderous, the second piece has two elements, chromatic and lyric, and Prokofiev’s 16th notes convey a bit of a smile. The pianist may find this briefer piece easier to shape, although it, too, manipulates cadences and boundaries in a detached, intellectual approach. The Andante sostenuto announces the entry of the coda, for which we may have become impatient.

Written and first performed in 1940, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 6 is the first of his Three War Sonatas, composed during World War II. The first movement, Allegro moderato, is filled with dissonance and unstable tonalities, and even the sonata form cannot keep everything in order. The main theme contains contrasting elements using A-major and A-minor thirds, which is meant to add to the confusion of the piece. The Allegretto jumps around more and features staccato chords that allude to marching. The third movement provides some respite with a slow and romantic waltz before the fourth movement, in which the dissonant opening theme reappears, and chaos remains.

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The Barcarolle was composed between autumn 1845 and summer 1846, when the barcarolle genre was becoming popular in vocal and pianistic lyricism. Though Chopin never visited Venice, he was quite familiar with the barcarolles in Rossini and Auber operas. Chopin’s Barcarolle expresses a deeply romantic and slightly wistful tone. The Barcarolle’s principal melody is mellifluous, songful, and rings with thirds and sixths. The middle-section melody in A major is songful, but restless, becoming powerful and passionate, before a return of the opening theme and a finale in a moment of ecstasy.

Between 1825 and his death, Chopin wrote nearly 60 mazurkas. The mazurka was a traditional Polish dance, usually in triple meter, with one of its characteristics being accents irregularly placed on the second or third beat. The mazurka and the other national dance, the Czech polka, were mainstays of the 19th-century ballroom. Chopin’s mazurkas, however, were not the traditional Polish mazurka, but much more refined, including compositional techniques such as chromatic counterpoint and fugue. Chopin’s love of Bach’s music came to infiltrate his later style, albeit in his idiosyncratic, often sensuous, musical syntax.

Mazurka No. 1 in B Major, ¾, Vivace, sets an aggressive tone, the rhythmic pulse quicky assuming shifts that add a visceral excitement to the occasion. An explosive affirmation ends the piece.

For the 200th anniversary of Frédéric Chopin’s birth, 2009, pianist Emanuel Ax asked Adès to contribute a work for the occasion. The Three Mazurkas for Piano Op. 27, performed here, imitate the ¾ rhythms of Chopin’s mazurkas, though their harmonic language remains Adès’s own. Adès himself is an accomplished pianist and writes pieces that span the keyboard. The composer premiered the set in New York in February 2010. While it is hard to imagine a mazurka’s being conceived outside Chopin’s shadow, Adès’s are manifestly within the stylistic parameters, acknowledging the distinctive accentuation and ornamentation, and the four-bar phrasing, at least to begin with. Yet these givens start to deliquesce and are given modern, spiky harmonies and fractured rhythmic impulses. Adès’s own distinctive metrical complexity infiltrates old formulas and puts the familiar form in front of distorting mirrors. The music becomes charming and alarming at the same time, typical Adès.

Mazurka No. 2 in F Minor, Lento, ¾, has many qualities of a nocturne, given its intimate dynamics and subtle shifts in the basic pulse. The repetitive phrases transition to a sustained cadence, and the poignant opening motif recurs, only to break off into silence.

Mazurka No. 3 in C-sharp Minor, Allegretto, ¾, conveys an air of mystery, moving first in simple parlando (declamatory style) but becoming intricate and polyphonic. The middle section, in D-flat, the enharmonic equivalent of the home key, extends the laxity in the Mazurka’s pulse, rubato, close to a waltz rhythm, in which the expression of tęsknota, pained nostalgia, comes forth. The last measures exploit echo effects.

Dedicated to his devoted pupil, Adolphe Gutmann, Chopin’s Scherzo No. 3 was written in the abandoned monastery of Valldemossa on the Balearic island of Majorca, Spain. Dramatic and concise, the work bears an emotional kinship with both Beethoven and virtuoso Liszt, given its often meteoric runs and potent octaves. The aggressive, chordal work then alternates with a moving, cantabile section in D-flat, sounding much like a hymn answered by flowing waves of sound in cascading arpeggios. The last page rings with herculean authority, a bravura display that demolishes any notion of Chopin as effeminate. Hungarian pianist Lajos (Louis) Kentner once compared the glowing, choral melody to a Valhalla motive from Wagner. Artur Rubinstein, in his memoir, My Young Years, recalls meeting Camille Saint-Saëns, who insisted on playing this work, declaring it “my favorite Chopin.” Rubinstein then notes, “the performance was note-perfect but much too fast.”

Gaspard de la nuit, composed in 1908, was inspired by an 1836 collection of prose poems by Aloysius Bertrand exploring medieval European fantasies that had been represented in works of Rembrandt and Jacques Callot. Ondine tells of a water fairy tempting the observer to come to the bottom of a lake. In response, Ravel creates alluring sounds of flowing water. Le gibet transports listeners to a hot desert where bells are tolling, either for the sunset or for the hanging man in the scene. Scarbo, amongst the most difficult pieces in the solo piano repertoire, is the virtuosic moment the pianist has been waiting for and possibly dreading, much like the poem’s narrator, who dreads the evil dwarf. Staccato bass and frantic rhythms depict Scarbo’s strange idiosyncrasies, and even the calmer middle section is only a slower version of the main theme. The infamous difficulties concern not just precision and technique, but also adaptability and agility. In composing this music, Ravel wrote a legendary piece that is still talked about and analyzed today.

Balakirev was a committed nationalist, the mentor of those composers known as “the mighty handful,” who embraced distinctly Russian and Slavic impulses in music and resisted German influences, as opposed to Tchaikovsky and the brothers Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein. Balakirev composed the Oriental Fantasy in one month, having been inspired to write the piece after a trip to the Caucasus. In a letter written in 1892, Balakirev credited the inspiration for the composition to the acquaintance of “a Circassian prince, who frequently … played folk tunes on his instrument, which was something like a violin. One of them, called Islamey, a dance-tune, pleased me extraordinarily, and with a view to the work I had in mind, I began to arrange it for the piano. The second theme was communicated to me in Moscow by an Armenian actor, who came from the Crimea and is, as he assured me, well known among the Crimean Tatars.”

Balakirev revised the work in 1902. It is divided into three distinct parts: an opening (Allegro agitato), which introduces the main theme, a middle (Tranquillo – Andantino espressivo) that introduces an entirely new theme (both described in the above quotation), and a third part (Allegro vivo – Presto furioso), which returns to the main theme. Critic Harold C. Schonberg noted that Islamey was “at one time … considered the most difficult of all piano pieces and is still one of the knuckle busters.” Maurice Ravel considered the work a personal challenge, and he conceived his suite, Gaspard de la nuit, especially the “Scarbo” section, as a legitimate rival to Balakirev’s bravura showpiece. In Russia, Alexander Borodin included quotations from the piece in his opera Prince Igor, while Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov did the same in Scheherazade. The melodies preserved in Balakirev’s Islamey are still present in folk music in the former USSR. The enormous technical challenges of the work aside, Balakirev had created a lasting musical document to accompany the burgeoning awareness and awakening of his nation’s music.

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Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti followed in his father Alessandro’s footsteps but worked primarily for the Portuguese and Spanish royal families rather than in Italy. Although he composed works in many genres, he is known for his hundreds of keyboard sonatas. Scarlatti’s sonatas usually followed a similar form—the first half, with the main theme, ends on a pause, before the second modulates and adds figures. The melodies and harmonies echo Spanish and Portuguese folk music, reflecting his employers’ nationalities. Because many composers and pianists greatly admired Scarlatti’s works, they highly influenced the Classical style and are still performed today.

Scarlatti, a contemporary of J. S. Bach, showed a remarkable musical talent early in life, and by age 15 he served as an organist at the Royal Chapel in Naples. In 1702, in Florence, he made the acquaintance of Bartolomeo Cristofori, the inventor of the first piano with a reliable action, and Scarlatti learned to play and master this new gravicembalo col piano e forte. The decisive moment for Scarlatti occurred in 1719, when he came to the court in Lisbon, where he taught Princess Maria Madalena Barbara and began to succumb to the cultural influences of the Iberian Peninsula. Scarlatti traveled to Rome in 1727 to be married in 1728. The couple moved to Seville and by 1733 to Madrid, where, in 1729, his former pupil, Maria Barbara, had married Spanish Crown Prince Fernando VI and in 1746 became Queen of Spain.

Spain is the source of most of Scarlatti’s many sonatas, especially since the new queen ordered several pianos from Florence. Scarlatti made a habit of repaying regal kindness with volumes of (30) Essercizi per Gravicembalo, prefaced with an invitation: “Whether you be Dilettante or Professor, in these Compositions do not expect any profound Learning, but rather an ingenious Jesting with Art, to accommodate you to the Mastery of the Harpsichord. Neither Considerations of Interest, nor Visions of Ambition, but only Obedience moved me to publish them.”

Between 1752 and 1757 several hundred sonatas had copyists and formed two collections, known as Parma and Venice, the cities whose libraries own the manuscripts. Earlier volumes from 1742 and 1749, with 192 sonatas, have been uncovered. A number of sonatas were discovered by American harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911–1984), who found them in the attics of Scarlatti’s descendants! In 1906 Alessandro Longo published most of Scarlatti’s sonatas, but with many editorial additions and “corrections” of Scarlatti’s often audacious harmonies that the later Kirkpatrick edition restores.

Sonata in C Major, K. 132. Marked Cantabile, ¾, this expansive sonata proceeds in the manner of a processional, a sarabande in defined periods. The music abounds in passing dissonances, which add to the distinctive color and vitality of the occasion. Scarlatti varies the texture of the stately dance, moving to different registers and then asking for staccato as well as legato phrasing. The persistent, percussive bass line acts as an anchor under the shifting figures of the treble. The performer will find ample opportunity for the application of rubato and for ad libitum ornamentation, which already abounds in trills, turns, and repeated notes. Coincidentally, the work also exists in a version for string ensemble.

Sonata in A Minor, K. 175. Marked Allegro, 2/4, this vigorous piece serves as a toccata, a study in diverse touches and registrations. Playful and witty, the music delights in passing dissonances, often at cadences, jabbing accents, flamboyant ornaments, and sudden starts and stops. As in the Sonata in C Major, we feel the influence of guitar tablature on the approach to the keyboard. The music strums, sings, and skitters away in bouncing, antiphonal figures.

While Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in Vienna, Schubert paid his musical idol a visit, only a few days prior to Beethoven’s passing on March 26. The Allegretto in C Minor, likely a memento mori of its kind, was composed in late April. The chosen key, C minor, often served Beethoven as a source for dramatic, passionately driven works, such as his Concerto No. 3, the Fifth Symphony, the “Pathétique” Sonata, and his final Sonata No. 32, Op. 111. Schubert’s work, however, remains lyrical in content, set in 6/8 in an idiosyncratic, three-part manner that, at first, recollects the C-Minor Symphony’s Scherzo—darkly ominous in arpeggiated figures, but interrupted by flashes of light. The middle section, pianissimo, evolves in a highly vocal fashion, almost an introspective chorale in A-flat major. Schubert once more reveals a quick debt to Bach, with a canonic episode between the hands that culminates fortissimo. The music returns to its original motif, only touched by passing dissonances, and then the opening recurs, verbatim.

Schubert had been gravely ill in 1822, and this sonata, written in February 1823 and published after his death, in 1839, as Op. 143, conveys a bleakness that anticipates his song cycle Winterreise. Though marked Allegro giusto, the first movement reveals a texture dominated by bare octaves; and the resultant effect becomes tragic, even haunted, in nature. The initial rhythm soon assumes the character of a funeral march, its parallel chords ceremonial, almost Baroque in feeling. Utilizing a descending third motif, B-flat to G, Schubert modulates to an unexpected E major for his second subject. The development evolves from repetition and variation on the downbeat pattern and the occasional burst of renewed energy, which some scholars assert as an expression of the declaration from the Te Deum: “I shall not perish in eternity.” The juxtapositions of agitation and calm create a highly anxious atmosphere, rife with a nervous tension capable of emotional eruption at any moment. Whatever resolution the coda offers seems like cold comfort after the brittle consolations in this journey, so far.

The F-major Andante hardly feels more secure emotionally, with its sudden onrush of emotion then consoled by pp voices interspersed between statements of the main theme. The movement casts a rhapsodic mood, seeming to meander in its progress, with the tenor voice doubling its thematic statement and then trailing off. Much of the texture is marked sordini (muted) to intensify the music’s inwardness and meditative quality.

The third movement, Allegro vivace, in A minor, extends the bipolar character of this deeply troubled music: triplets abound over a skittish accompaniment. The music moves at first in the manner of an etude, then to a more declamatory mode. In an exalted melody in the major mode, Schubert sings confidently, though still nervous about his emotional security. The etude section returns as a kind of punishing rondo, then once more to the wonderful, conciliatory melody. But the mood cannot sustain itself, and the opening material becomes canonic in various registers, rising to a ff climax, if only momentarily to let the grand melody try its balm once more. The last pages yield to the aggressive power of either fate or its resistance, ending with the four chords that no less signal Beethoven’s call, “fate knocking at the door.”

While the term scherzo originally signified a jest, a playful and vigorous burst of energy in light fashion, there is little of the jocular in Chopin’s four exercises in his one-movement, expansive solo pieces designated Scherzo. True, Beethoven employed the scherzo in his symphonies, often in an A-B-A structure in triple time with sforzandos off the beat—the “joke.” Chopin goes well beyond Beethoven in adapting the form to his own, dramatic requirements. They are indicated tempo presto or presto con fuoco, and they explore an expressive range akin to the Romantic William Blake’s notion of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. While the four Scherzos preserve Chopin’s pianistic brilliance and bold, even operatic, fioriture, they reveal an emotional range that holds fast to Chopin’s national love and nostalgia for his beloved Poland, which was too often suffering under the tyranny of foreign oppression.

The B-Minor Scherzo begins with a terrifying cry of anguish. This jolting, tension-filled opening chord comes out of nowhere, unleashing a fiery torrent of virtuosic sparks that fly up and down the keyboard. Just as suddenly, this section dissolves into a quietly brooding dialogue between treble and bass. The middle section (Molto più lento) quotes the old Polish Christmas song, or noel, Lulajże Jezuniu. As Chopin composed this music in Vienna in 1831, the November Uprising against the Russian Empire was raging in his native Poland. The dreamy nostalgia of this middle section is rudely interrupted by a return of the ominous opening chord. Curiously, the quiet music lingers, as if unaffected as the two worlds clash.

The Second Scherzo opens in sotto voce rumblings, answered with fierce, dramatic force, all of which is repeated. Harmonically, the piece opens in B-flat minor but its resolution rests in D-flat major. Schumann thought the entire Scherzo played like a ballade, perhaps based on a Byron poem. Chopin marks his central melody con anima, heard over lush harmonies in the left hand. The trio section shifts to A major. Chopin repeats the trio section to introduce a bridge from the prior tune in F-sharp minor. The outer scherzo returns, reprises, and its eight-bar shift into A major announces the arrival of the coda. Chopin superimposes several of the themes in close proximity, and the sheer energy of the conclusion fulfills his sense of dramatic closure.

The C-sharp Minor Scherzo, the most dramatic of Chopin’s four compositions of this form, is built from the alternation of two sharply contrasting musical elements. The first, passionate and stormy, is marked by strong accents and thundering scales in stark, open octaves. The other element is graceful and luminous, combining a richly harmonized chorale phrase with an incandescent ripple of falling notes. The background to Chopin’s writing of this passionate work involves his declining health, and his and George Sand’s voyage to the isle of Majorca to find rest. Instead, they encountered storms and a diagnosis of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill the composer.

The music’s opening reveals rhythmic and harmonic ambiguity. The sudden burst of chromatic runs feels demonic in its urgency, finally finding its key center and then making a transition to the noble D-flat major chorale that consoles Chopin’s tormented spirit. The cascading arpeggios, meno mosso, anticipate Wagner in some passages of Tannhäuser. Silences as well as passionate chords create the drama in this piece: Arthur Rubinstein reports that in his meeting with the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, the latter sat at the keyboard, declaring the work “my favorite Chopin,” and played the piece note-perfectly, but too fast.

The beginning of the generally sunny Scherzo No. 4 alternates two contrasting textures and harmonies—first in subdued chords and then in faster, arched figures that rise and fall with the dynamics. The trio section offers an operatic, cantilena (lyrical) melody easily attributable to Chopin’s admiration of Bellini and the bel canto style. Chopin expands the basic A-B-A format in an attitude of freedom and spontaneity, the triple meter perhaps nodding to Beethoven, but the motives express themselves in rich, nonthreatening figures. Chopin’s work was composed at George Sand’s villa at Nohant, and their mutual happiness invests this Scherzo with a rare moment of acceptance. Camille Saint-Saëns took the Scherzo in E Major as his model for the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 22.

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The Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Minor is the 22nd of the preludes and fugues from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach’s contrapuntal studies in two sets of 24 pieces for the major and minor keys. The affect in this prelude is restrained, slow and meditative, the motion restricted, even Romantic by some standards. Bach quickly moves within the 24 measures of the piece to a cadence in the dominant key of F minor. The music proceeds on the opening figure’s appearance in the treble part as it moves in contrary motion. There are descending figures at measure 7 (treble) and measure 13 (bass). At measure 13, the music modulates through E-flat minor, A-flat major, and D-flat major before landing at the tonic at measure 17.

The fugue evolves in three voices, answered in F minor. Here, too, the mood proceeds in a dignified, stately procession. To some, the atmosphere might suggest the presence of a polyphonic chorale. Bach inserts a brief codetta between bars 5–10 and 34–36 just prior to a transition, respectively, to the subject in B-flat minor (alto) and an alto answer in D-flat major. After measure 50, Bach increasingly relies on stretto (layered) effects to create harmonic and dramatic tension. The coda (measures 72–75) splices part of an answer in alto to the subject in alto, finishing in B-flat major on a Picardy third (a chord made major by raising the third of the minor triad by a semitone).

For Johannes Brahms, the idea of writing intermezzi seems to have been inspired by Schumann, given the latter composer’s set of Six Intermezzi, Op. 4 of 1832. Some 60 years later, Brahms found the genre congenial for his Op. 118, miniatures that compress a world of feeling and pathos into a small space, rife with rhythmic and harmonic audacities. Of these six pieces, four are designated Intermezzo, one a Ballade, and one a Romanze. The first Intermezzo in A Minor sweeps us forward in passionate eruptions in counterpoints built on rising and falling seconds, moving to its resolution in A major that sets up the most famous item in the group, No. 2 in A Major, Andante teneramente. This piece should evolve not too slowly, as is the wont of overly sentimental interpreters. It relies on contrapuntal symmetries, especially in its second half. The middle section, in F-sharp minor, moves with more introspection, haunted as it is with nostalgia. The Ballade in G Minor, marked Allegro energico, projects an athletic vigor and declamation. Its central section is in B major, whose pianissimo in dotted rhythms indulges us in something like a caress.

Highly contrapuntal, the Intermezzo No. 4 in F Minor moves in hazy pulsations, its bass a canon at the octave, its anxious temperament an adumbration of much 20th-century sensibility. The music and its passions end on a plagal cadence, something of a prayer. The Romanze in F Major bears a noble melancholy, the trills and filigree wistful and atmospheric, the dense harmonies not too distant from the modalities to come in Debussy. The last of the group, the Intermezzo in E-flat Minor, Andante, largo e mesto, seems a compressed Greek tragedy. The opening line contains notes from the same Dies Irae that haunts Rachmaninoff. The central section appears in G-flat major, a dramatic confrontation with sinister forces. Beyond Brahms, who but Béla Bartók often invokes mesto (sad and pensive) as his affective identity? We might assume the sadness and resignation express the love Brahms harbored for his “eternal feminine,” Clara Schumann (1819–1896). With her death, Brahms had few in his life to whom he could turn for comfort and sympathy.

The Sonata in C Minor, K. 457 presents a work specifically intended for Theresia von Trattner, one of Mozart’s pupils in Vienna and possibly an inamorata. While anticipating much of Beethoven’s emotionalism in the same key of C minor, this music, opening Allegro, in percussive octaves, bears a chromatic violence rare even for Mozart. We sense a kinship in this dramatic music close to the school of Empfindsamkeit (Sensitive Style) of the Bach sons, especially Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788). The second subject evolves in E-flat major, and we experience moments of galant or rococo sensibility in the ornaments, which resonate with aristocratic poise. There appear operatic flourishes and sighing motifs that suddenly break off into expressions of poignant rage, the development traversing dark tones in F minor, G minor, and the original C minor. The recapitulation indulges in musical puns on the tonic key, now in modes of D-flat, concluding with a coda based on the opening subject.

The second movement, an Adagio in E-flat major, possesses a lyrical élan. Its form is that of a songful rondo, with episodes in B-flat, A-flat, and G-flat major. The principal subject, seven measures in length, reappears in variation, often floridly ornamented in the Italianate manner of Galuppi. The operatic character of the music becomes eminent, at times evincing a music-box sensibility. A darker episode enters, with brief interjections and a throbbing bass, the upper voices in response with especially brisk runs in chains. The coda combines the opening subject and the first episode, now transposed into the tonic key over repeated notes.

The last movement, Allegro assai, exerts the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) sensibility of a burgeoning Romanticism. In rondo-sonata form, this music proceeds in a formula established by Mozart’s contemporary, Haydn. The music’s second subject in E-flat major seems a mirror of the exact point of reference in movement one. The bass tones prove particularly crisp and resonant in Mozart’s studied application of colors to this energetic motion, marked by dark periods in F minor, G minor, and the tonic C minor. There are aspects of operatic writing, like recitative, mixed with a strong sense of Mozart’s capacities as an improviser, given his tendency to lengthen and augment the original materials.

Isaac Albeniz remains among the most powerful exponents of Spanish music and impressionism, often rendering in brilliant piano and orchestral colors the life and spirit of his native land. His masterpiece, Iberia, presents a suite of 12 piano impressions, of which tonight’s recital offers two: Evocación and El puerto. Olivier Messiaen, a composer also represented in this evening’s concert, spoke of the set as “the wonder for the piano; it is perhaps on the highest place among the more brilliant pieces for the king of instruments.”

Evocación hovers sentimentally between A-flat minor and its tonic major. The music sings nostalgically in folk idioms, the fandango in ¾ of southern Spain and the more earthy, rustic jota of the northern regions. These dances, often meant for partners, proceed in exotic colors, some Moorish in hue, others Castilian or Galician, with hints of drums, bagpipes, and castanets. A sense of variation flows throughout, as the folk idiom itself resists emotional stasis and quietude.

El puerto is set in D-flat major, an Andalusian zapateado in lively, flamenco 6/8, inspired by El Puerto de Santa María, in Cádiz, on the banks of the Guadalete River. The sensibility emphasizes footwork in rapid, percussive, tapping steps, especially on the second beat.

Olivier Messiaen wrote his 20 Contemplations of the Infant Jesus in a few months of 1944, when France was besieged by the forces of Fascism and betrayal. Huge in scope and Wagnerian in design, the daunting work proceeds in four distinct leitmotifs: a Theme of God; a Theme of Mystical Love; a Theme of the Star and of the Cross; and a Theme of Chords. Messiaen, a trained ornithologist, found inspiration in St. Francis of Assisi’s naïve piety and communion with nature, seen as a living, anthropomorphized intention.

Messiaen discards traditional harmony and bar lines for what he terms “additive rhythms” of flexible chains of selected notes, arranged with a transcendent purpose, most often announced in F-sharp major, no less Liszt’s preferred key of ecstasy. Given the textural and harmonic densities, the piano becomes symphonic in its means, highly ornamental and vigorously athletic. No. 15, “The Kiss of the Infant Jesus,” is part of an extended, grand rondo pattern, one of the four, three-movement episodes that inhabit and illuminate the rondo. This exotic music boasts bird calls, dances, and tone clusters, all within the spirit of a berceuse, a mystical lullaby. Innocence and grand passion collide and coalesce in this music, much as these contradictory forces invest Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Here, the passion of Jesus extends from his infancy, already inflamed with a cosmic charity.

Alberto Ginastera, born of a Spanish mother and Italian father in Buenos Aires, ranks among the most influential composers of South America. His three Danzas argentinas derive from his so-called period of Objective Nationalism, 1934–1948, wherein he exploits traditional folk elements of Argentina and the pampas to create rhythmically aggressive, brutal, evocative, and exotic sound pictures.

No. 1, Danza del viejo boyero (“Dance of the Old Herdsman”), has the two hands independent of each other, one playing only black notes, the other white notes, a gently rendered bitonality in C major and D-flat major. Rhythm and texture are carefully modulated to avoid raucous cacophony. This dance ends on a guitar chord, typically when it is being tuned.

No. 2, Danza de la moza donosa (“Dance of the Graceful Maiden”), is a gentle dance in 6/8 time. A piquant melody meanders its way through the first section, constantly creating and releasing tension through the use of chromatic inflections.

No. 3, Danza del gaucho matrero (“Dance of the Outlaw Cowboy”), opens with a serial, 12-tone ostinato and proceeds in terms unequivocal in their aggression: furiosamente (“furiously”), violente (“violent”), mordento (“biting”), and salvaggio (“wild”). In the form of a meandering rondo, the music indulges in dissonance and chromatic outbursts, ironically, even avoiding accidentals in its late pages. A sense of unfettered nature abounds, easily comparable to the effects in Villa-Lobos, here ending with a spectacular ffff crash and glissando to announce some frightful liberation.

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Ferruccio Busoni, an Italian pianist, composer, conductor, and teacher, spent 30 years transcribing works by Bach for piano, publishing them as the Bach-Busoni Editions. The Chaconne is the fifth and final movement of Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2, which dates from 1720, and has been treated or transcribed by many composers—not only for solo piano (among them Busoni, Raff, Brahms, and Siloti), but also for cello (J. S. Paetsch), organ (John Cook and Henri Messerer), guitar (Segovia), and full orchestra (Stokowski). Busoni composed his masterful transcription of the Chaconne in 1893.

In 1835, the 25-year-old Robert Schumann learned of plans to create a Beethoven monument in Bonn and, fired with enthusiasm for the project, resolved to compose a “Grande Sonate” for the piano and donate all receipts from it to support the monument. He suggested an elaborate publication in which the score would be bound in black and trimmed with gold, and proposed a monumental inscription for the cover, in part: Ruins, Trophies, Palms: Grand Sonata for the Pianoforte for Beethoven’s Monument. Yet when Schumann began composing this music the following year, his plans had changed considerably: he had fallen in love with the young piano virtuosa Clara Wieck, and her father had exploded in anger. Friedrich Wieck did everything in his power to keep the lovers apart, forbidding them to see each other and forcing them to return each other’s letters. The dejected Schumann composed a three-movement sonatalike piece that was clearly fired by his thwarted love. He later told Clara that the first movement was “the most passionate thing I have ever composed—a deep lament for you.” Yet the score, published in 1839 under the neutral title Fantasie, contains enough references to Beethoven (quotations from the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte at the end of the first movement, and from the Seventh Symphony in the last) to suggest that some of Schumann’s original plans remained in the music. Yet Schumann dedicated the score not to Clara but to Franz Liszt, who would become one of its great champions.

If the inspiration for this music is in doubt, its greatness is not: the Fantasie is one of Schumann’s finest compositions, wholly original in form, extremely difficult to perform, and haunting in its emotional effect. Schumann was right to call this music a fantasy—it may seem like a piano sonata on first appearance, but it refuses to conform to the rules of sonata form. The first movement, marked “To be performed with fantasy and passion throughout,” begins with an impassioned falling figure that Schumann associated with Clara. In the quiet middle section, which Schumann marks “In the manner of a legend,” the music moves to C minor; yet the conclusion does not recapitulate the opening material in the correct key—the music returns to C major only after the reference to An die ferne Geliebte.

The second movement is a vigorous march full of dotted rhythms; Schumann marks it “Energetic throughout.” Clara—though the inspiration for the first movement—liked this movement the best. She wrote to Robert: “The march strikes me as a victory march of warriors returning from battle, and in the A-flat section I think of the young girls from the village, all dressed in white, each with a garland in her hand crowning the warriors kneeling before them.” Schumann concludes with a surprise: the last movement is in a slow tempo—it unfolds expressively, and not until the final bars does he allow this music to arrive—gently and magically—in the home key of C major.

The Fantasie in C Major is a masterpiece, yet within years of its composition, Schumann himself was hard on it, calling it “immature and unfinished … mostly reflections of my turbulent earlier life.” By this time, he was happily married to Clara and may have identified the work with a painful period in his life, yet it is precisely for its turbulence, its pain, and its longing that we value this music today.

Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, written between 1914 and 1917, was intended as a memorial for the composer’s friends who had died fighting in World War I. (Tombeau, meaning “tomb,” was a popular musical genre in France in the 18th century, and indicated a piece written as a memorial.) The work’s structure, with its succession of independent pieces, evokes a Baroque dance suite. The sixth and final movement, “Toccata,” a fiercely difficult show piece—light-fingered, fast, and virtuosic—is dedicated to Captain Joseph de Marliave, the musicologist husband of Marguerite Long, the pianist who premiered many of Ravel’s works, including, in 1919, this suite. Ravel purposely intended the light-hearted feeling, believing that a somber, grim tone was not appropriate for the dead, who had already entered their “eternal silence.”

Prokofiev liked to plan works far in advance, and in 1939, when he was 48, he projected a series of three piano sonatas, which would become his Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth—the so-called “War Sonatas.” He completed the first of these in 1940, but then came catastrophe: Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, and Prokofiev’s plans were altered. Along with many other artists, he was evacuated, first to the Caucasus, and then in the fall of 1941 to Tbilisi, near the border with Turkey. Here Prokofiev plunged into his project to compose an opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the heroic Russian resistance to Napoleon becoming a parallel for the struggle against Nazi Germany. At the same time as he worked on the opera, Prokofiev found time to compose this sonata, completing the score in 1942. Young Sviatoslav Richter gave the first performance, in Moscow, in 1943, having learned and memorized the work in only four days.

The Seventh Sonata is recognized as one of Prokofiev’s finest works. Almost inevitably, observers have claimed to hear the sound of war and national catastrophe in this music, but the composer himself made no direct connection, leaving such issues to his listeners. The first movement has the unusual marking Allegro inquieto, and unquiet this music certainly is. The opening section is quite percussive, and something of the music’s character can be understood from Prokofiev’s performance markings: secco, tumultuoso, veloce, con brio, and marcato; at one point, he even requests that the performer make the piano sound quasi timpani. Vladimir Ashkenazy has compared this section to the sound of “drums beating and iron screeching,” which makes the second section, a singing and flowing Andantino marked espressivo e dolente (“expressive and grieving”), all the more impressive. These two quite different kinds of music alternate before the movement comes to a quiet close.

The second movement also has an unusual marking, Andante caloroso (“warm”); and some have found the opening almost sentimental in its relaxed songfulness. The cantabile opening is soon disrupted by an agitated middle section; the violence fades away, but the gentle opening makes only the briefest and most tentative of returns before the close. The famous last movement is a blistering toccata, marked simply Precipitato. The movement is extremely fast, set in the unusual meter 7/8, and unremittingly chordal in its textures. It is also extraordinarily difficult music (Vladimir Horowitz sometimes used this movement as an encore piece) and forms an exciting conclusion to the sonata. Along the way, material from the opening movement makes a brief reappearance, but the movement’s chordal violence overpowers it and drives the sonata to its hammering close.

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Franz Liszt was an inveterate traveler in both space and time, seeking ecstasies in art and life. In the 1830s, dubbed by Liszt his “Years of Pilgrimage,” he and his mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult, traveled extensively through Switzerland and Italy. Their travels inspired piano compositions that responded to pictorial art, sculpture, song, and literature, especially poetry. If Dante’s Divine Comedy provided a major poetic impulse, the paintings and sculpture of Raphael and Michelangelo, respectively, impressed Liszt no less with their exalted visions. “Sposalizio,” composed in 1838 and the first piece in his cycle Deuxième année: Italie, finds Liszt contemplating Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin, a depiction from the apocryphal gospels of the wedding ceremony of Mary and Joseph, completed in 1504 for the Franciscan church in Città di Castello, Perugia.

Marked Andante, and in 6/4 time, the piece opens in E major with a five-note theme that soon evolves into a more complex architecture, the descending bass line assuming both melodic and accompanying roles as the piece develops. Tender sighs in the treble, marked dolce, answer the descending motif, and a series of repetitions passes through modulations toward G major. Liszt introduces a new, chorale-shaped melody and returns to E major, the music growing in passion—a wedding march that triumphs in octaves of simplicity and joy. The main melody returns in diminished figures, a cascade of descending tones, until the work closes peacefully in blissful solemnity.

Liszt created his epic Sonata after the manner of Schubert, who had employed the device of transforming a motif into the four movements of a traditional sonata, but played continuously, as for example in his Wanderer Fantasy of 1822. Liszt labels his technique “transformation of theme,” and the fundamental design permeates the music’s development, even to the point of incorporating a fugue, as Schubert had done three decades before.

The lack of separation between movements gave rise to much controversy and criticism in 1854, when the Sonata was published. Liszt dedicated it to Robert Schumann, who, having already been committed to an asylum, never heard the work. Clara Schumann received a copy shortly after its publication, but she loathed both Liszt and the work: “merely a blind noise—no healthy ideas anymore, everything confused, one cannot find a single, clear harmonic progression—and yet I must thank him for it [the dedication to Robert]. It really is too awful.” The finale provided controversy for Liszt himself—he had originally written a loud ending but crossed it out in favor of a quiet descent into silence of the same scale with which the work began.

Though in one continuous movement, the work follows sonata form, prompting noted Liszt biographer Alan Walker to call it a “sonata within a sonata.” Three of the five main themes are presented early in the first section, providing a variety of material for the pianist, from descending scales to staccato octaves to cantabile melodies. Throughout this composition, demanding passages continually test the pianist’s abilities.

Today, the Sonata is the source of analysis and debate not just for its harmonies and techniques, but also for its possible symbols and meaning, with theories ranging from descriptions of the divine and diabolical to portraits of Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles.

Few musicians would dispute that Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor is one of the 19th century’s greatest masterpieces. Alan Walker believes that “if Liszt had written nothing else, he would have to be ranked as a master on the strength of this work alone.”

Robert Schumann often exploited the psychological dualism of his own character—its wild optimism and its more poetic and tragic sensibility—naming the two musical personae Florestan and Eusebius, respectively. Added to his Romantic inclination towards internal conflict seeking resolution was Schumann’s love of the fantastic and mischievously grotesque as found in the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), for example his Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier of 1814–15. These factors resulted in several sets entitled Fantasiestücke (fantasy pieces) that Schumann created at various points in his career: eight pieces for piano, Op. 12 (1837); four pieces for piano trio, Op. 88 (1842); and the present three pieces for piano written in 1851 after Schumann’s appointment as Director of Music in Düsseldorf. Clara Schumann acknowledged the set’s “grave and passionate character,” conceived, as Schumann himself stated, in tribute to his admiration for Beethoven’s final essay in the sonata medium, the towering Sonata No. 32 for Piano in C Minor, Op. 111.

No. 1 in C Minor, marked Sehr rasch, mit leidenschaftlichem Vortrag (very fast, with passionate expression), startles with its aggressive and stormy energy, much like the toccata opening of his Kreisleriana, Op. 16. No. 2 in A-flat Major, Ziemlich langsam (rather slow), opens in a reflective chorale-like 3/4, and is alternately lyrical and passionate. No. 3 in C Minor, Kräftig und sehr markiert (powerful and very marked), proves martial in character, but conveys nonetheless the fairy-tale and ballad sensibility so common in Schumann’s piano works. The middle-section arabesques pick up impulses established in the first of the three fantasy pieces, a unifying device often found in Schumann’s compositions.

Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes began life in 1834 as a set of 16 variations on a theme by Baron von Fricken, plus an additional variation on the anthem-like refrain Du stolzes England, freue dich (Proud England, Rejoice) from Heinrich Marschner’s Der Templer und die Jüdin, a grand Romantic opera based on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Baron von Fricken was himself an amateur musician who held the guardianship for Ernestine von Fricken, an inamorata to whom Schumann was briefly engaged in 1834-35 until he fell in love with Clara Wieck.

In 1852, 15 years after the first edition was published, a revised edition that excised Variations 3 and 9, and emended the piano writing, appeared. The variation form proceeds rather loosely, taking its cue from the germinal progressions in Beethoven’s monumental Diabelli Variations, Op. 120. Chopin proved another powerful influence, given the richness of Schumann’s textures and his penchant for layered polyphony. Yet another edition appeared in 1861, bearing both former titles XII Études symphoniques and Études en forme de variations, published by Schumann’s father-in-law, Friedrich Wieck. In 1890, Johannes Brahms, long a devotee of Schumann and himself a composer of variations on a motif from Schumann’s Bunte Blätter (Colorful Leaves), Op. 99, published five so-called posthumous variations that Schumann had deleted but could now be inserted by performers ad libitum. Martín García García does insert the first of these directly after the initial theme.

Typical of Schumann’s persistent dividing of his persona into Florestan, the bold extrovert, and Eusebius, the retiring, poetic self, the etudes alternate with variations in mood and temper, recalling the two personalities’ function in his piano suite Carnaval: to lead a triumphal march of the Davidsbündler (the League of David) over the reactionary Philistines—those who belittle the goals of cultural progress. The Symphonic Etudes stands as a potent reminder of Schumann’s prowess as a composer of colors and virtuoso keyboard timbres, raising the keyboard to orchestral heights and rhapsodizing with chamber music intimacy at will, even, as in the Etude No. 3 in E major, imitating the virtuoso violin techniques that Paganini had so memorably established.

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Edvard Grieg tends to be classified as a Romantic miniaturist, but the deaths of his daughter in 1869, and those of his parents only five weeks apart in 1875, led him to reexamine early musical texts, folk ballads, and Norwegian mountain melodies for a plaintive theme to serve for a large set of variations, the Ballade in G Minor in the Form of Variations on a Norwegian Folk Song. The theme, notated Andante espressivo, 3/4, will, at Variation VIII, announce itself in the form of a funeral march. The chromatic bass line serves as a unifying factor that is often dominant in the absence of the initial melody. Grieg remarked that he wrote his melancholy composition “with my life’s blood in drops of sorrow and despair.”

Grieg’s music is marked by simplicity, grace, and sincerity. Perhaps Bach’s model in the Goldberg Variations influenced Grieg in his use of a chromatic bass; he often inserts that line into the inner voices. Variation I does drop the melody for the bass line, and Variation II, 9/8, intensifies the effect. Variation III, Adagio, makes several allusions to Grieg’s admired Robert Schumann, specifically the Romance in F-sharp Major, Op. 28, No. 2. For Variation IV, Allegro capriccioso, the right hand has the chromatic line in a spirited, Norwegian dance. Variation V, Più lento, employs a left-hand recitative that bears the sad, chromatic germ. Variation VI, Allegro scherzando, 3/4, demands tricky, jumping chords that suggest a halling, a lively Norwegian dance. Grieg inserts canons as a form of progression, as did Bach. Variation VII extends the canon effect, staccato throughout. A funereal severity marks Variation VIII, Lento, with an added A-flat to increase the chromatic anguish. Variation IX, Un poco andante, presents a fantasy segment, freely employing the contour of the chromatic theme. Variation X, Un poco allegro e alla burla, opens a multipart coda, a light scherzando section in 12/8. Variation XI, marked Più animato, propels the coda forward. Variation XII, marked Meno allegro e maestoso, injects the heroic impulse into the coda in G major, 6/8, the chords massively assertive. Variation XIII reverts to the original G minor, 3/4, Allegro furioso, and impels the music forward to what will become a barbaric dance in the manner of Liszt. Variation XIV, Prestissimo, moves in pounding, primitive, octave chords, landing on an E-flat octave, lunga (long), with a fermata. The coda proper reminisces, epilogue-fashion; and the work closes in G minor, as it began, with the sad song of the Norwegian mountains.

Ravel’s masterpiece was inspired by three prose-poems from Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, a collection of ballades en prose by the sensitive, sickly, and impoverished young Romantic poet Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841), who was doomed to die at 34, a failure. His collection was published only posthumously in 1842, and sold a mere 20 copies.

“Ondine” tells of a water spirit who tempts a mortal man to join her, as her bridegroom, in her palace at the bottom of a lake. Ravel creates alluring sounds of flowing and splashing water; when the man rejects her in favor of a mortal woman, Ondine explodes in peals of laughter that Ravel depicts with a burst of musical showers. “Le gibet” (The Gallows) transports the listener to a desert where bells are tolling in the sunset; repeated B-flats depict a hanged man swinging slowly on the gallows in the reddening sun. In “Scarbo,” among the most difficult pieces in the entire solo piano repertoire, staccato bass and frantic rhythms depict the evil dwarf Scarbo’s strange antics, and even the calmer middle section provides only a momentary respite from the piece’s terrifying difficulties.

On Christmas Eve, 1830 in Vienna, Chopin wrote a despondent letter to his friend, the Polish physician Jan Matuszyński, about his despair at the news of the Russian suppression of the Polish uprisings against foreign tyranny. Another dear friend of his youth, Tytus Woyciechowski, had left Vienna to fight in the cause of Polish liberation. Chopin’s national fervor took a literary turn to the work of his friend, poet Adam Mickiewicz, the “Slavic bard” whose gifts for the romance, the epic poem, and the ballad—a popular narrative in simple refrains—appealed to Chopin’s musical imagination. In 1831, Chopin moved to Paris, where he published his first Ballade and met, at a dinner party given by Liszt’s mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult, the writer George Sand (née Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil), which would lead to a fateful alliance.

Mickiewicz transposed Lithuanian legends and fairy tales into a political context. In his music, Chopin conforms to the basic outline and emotional tenor of Mickiewicz’s narratives. The Ballades tend to be conceived in 6/8 and 6/4 meters, a trochaic invitation to romance. Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23 (completed 1835) is believed to follow Mickiewicz’s narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod, whose protagonist shocks his audience with a drunken declaration to fellow Poles of his admiration for the Moors’ defiance of their Spanish oppressors. Wallenrod will bring plague and death to Poland’s adversaries; the poem helped inspire the November Uprising of 1830. A struggle between darkness and light, the Ballade alternates the keys of G minor and E-flat major, its harmonic axis borne on a Neapolitan sixth chord that introduces a plaintive, questioning motif that reappears in the Presto con fuoco coda in hammering octaves. This was Robert Schumann’s favorite of the four, and James Huneker called it “the Odyssey of Chopin’s soul.”

The Ballade No. 2 in F Major, Op. 38 (1836; revised 1839) is dedicated to Robert Schumann, who found the work “less artistic than the first, but equally fantastic and intellectual.” The Ballade is believed by some to have been inspired by Mickiewicz’s poem, “The Lady of Lake Świteź,” the narrative depicting the meandering of a beautiful maiden and a young suitor by the lake’s “blue waters, among the moonbeams that shine on its tide.” (However, some believe that it was Ballade No. 3 that was inspired by this poem.) Chopin balances a delicate F major with a somber and tumultuous A minor, moving the work from a loving Andantino to a convulsive Presto. Anton Rubinstein spoke eloquently of the work, comparing it to “a caressing of a flower by the wind … which at last lies broken by martial forces.”

Ballade No. 3 in A-flat Major, Op. 47 (1841) seems essentially decorative in character, its lyricism spread out over three octaves at its initial impulse. The Ballade is dedicated to Mlle. Pauline de Noailles and is also believed to have been inspired by Mickiewicz’s’ “The Lady of Lake Świteź.” The young maiden doubts the fidelity of men and transforms into a water sprite, a temptress. She lures a young man to his destruction; his fate is to pursue her evasive image forever. Huneker calls the piece “aristocratic, gay, graceful, piquant, and … delicately ironical.” Its middle section, in C-sharp minor, projects a cantering motion, hypnotic and eventually explosive.

The last Ballade, Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52 (1842), the epitome of Romantic piano music and the acknowledged masterpiece of the set, projects a Slavic sensibility in its broad and dramatic lyricism. Dedicated to the Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild, it is believed to follow “The Three Brothers Budrys” of Mickiewicz, a tale of brothers sent by their father to fight the enemy; when the sons return “from the barren, stripped land,” they bring Polish brides, and the poem ends in three weddings feasts. The work proceeds in periods and dramatic episodes, evincing waltz-like lilts, cadenzas, towering ornaments, and prophetic, sudden silences; it ends, as Alan Rawsthorne wrote, with “a sense of inevitability as conclusive as the crack of doom.” “Music hot from the soul,” wrote Huneker of its emotional range. “Its witchery is irresistible.”

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Often characterized as the “Berlin Bach” to distinguish him from his brother Johann Christian, C. P. E. Bach was an influential composer working at a time of transition between his father’s Baroque style and the Classical style that followed. His personal approach, an expressive and often turbulent one known as empfindsamer Stil (sensitive style), applied the principles of rhetoric and drama to musical structures. The underlying ethos was an appeal to enthusiasm as the desired impetus. The sensitive style stands in deliberate contrast to the more mannered galant style, and in several respects anticipates the emotional fury in Beethoven. C. P. E.’s lengthy Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments became a much-studied text for Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Bach declares his emotional aesthetic in the maxim: “A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved. He must of necessity feel all of the affects that he hopes to arouse in his audience.”

The Sonata in F-sharp Minor is one of the six Württemberg Sonatas composed “for connoisseurs and amateurs” in the years 1742–1744. The six expressive and experimental keyboard works serve as an excellent summation of C. P. E.’s aesthetic and style. Dedicated to his pupil Carl Eugen, the Duke of Württemberg, the sonatas are challenging works that present the performer with a multitude of technical and interpretative difficulties. C. P. E. established the first movement of a Classical sonata to have two themes; in each sonata, he gives full rein to his creative abilities and seems to relish such difficulties as complicated rhythms, overlapping voices, extreme technical challenges, and unusual key signatures.

The opening Allegro bears all the qualities of an aggressively improvised toccata in brilliant runs and leaping intervals, offset by sudden shifts in mood and texture to a quieter affect, marked by ornamented imitation. The music lunges back into its aggressive stance and then its calm foil with increasing frequency, leaving us with a vivid sense of his chromatic sense of space. The second movement, Poco andante, bears a gently martial air, a delicate ceremonial with a soft, ostinato bass. Again, an improvisational character leads this arioso, which delights in the upper register. Moments of imitation occur, moving rather chromatically. A shift to a darker hue allows some more transparent texture, almost a recitative, until a cadenza passage and trill carry us to a calm resolution. The final movement, an often contrapuntal Allegro assai, bears Italianate characteristics; but its sudden stops and starts and antiphonal voicing proclaim it pure C. P. E. Bach. C. P. E. seems to have augmented his father’s notion of an invention and adapted it to his own virtuosic means. The last page requires both a light touch and a sense of irony.

Johann Christian Bach, the 11th son of the illustrious J. S. Bach, travelled to Italy at the age of 20 in 1755 to study with Padre Martini of Bologna. There he imbibed what he would cultivate as the gallant or rococo style, at first investing his compositional skills into liturgical music. The combination of expressivity, virtuosity, and ornamental elegance would prove attractive to the English Royal Family once J. C. made his home in London, in 1762, installing himself as “the London Bach.” He was the first to champion the fortepiano in concert, and by the time he came to write his Six Sonatas Op. 17, the instrument was well on its way to dominance. One of J. C. Bach’s many admirers was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; C. P. E. Bach’s earlier sonatas of Op. 5 were among these works played to the young prodigy when he visited London in the 1760s, where the German composer was then living. Mozart was known to have admired both the Op. 5 and 17 sets. Given J. C. Bach’s influence on Mozart, it should come as little surprise that the sonatas of Op. 17 are almost stylistically interchangeable with those of the Salzburg genius—anyone who delights in the latter’s keyboard sonatas is sure to be won over by these charming works.

The Six Sonatas of Op. 17 are perfect examples of the style galant: they exhibit wit, charm, brilliance, good humor, and high musical caliber, as befitted a son of the great Johann Sebastian and teacher of the queen of England. The expansive opening Allegro of No. 5 easily suggests the influence of the Italian school of Scarlatti and Galuppi, with its plethora of reprised initial motifs, arpeggios, trills, short staccato runs, and crossed-hand effects. The second movement, Presto, sets a kind of moto perpetuo in brisk, percussive scales that suddenly stop and resume. The music pauses and then begins another round of contests between striking chords and legato work, ending in trills. The shifts in dynamics suggest the range of Bach’s instrument and his attempt to capitalize on its expressive possibilities.

Composed in the years 1830–1831, the Grande polonaise was initially written for piano and orchestra before Chopin decided to write the Andante spianato for solo piano, in 1834, to precede it. However, Chopin’s emphasis on the piano allows a complete solo piano performance of the two works, which are joined by a short fanfare-like passage. The Andante is smooth and melodic, drawing its listeners into a dreamlike state before the Polonaise interjects. The Polonaise almost demands that the pianist deploy every virtuosic talent he or she possesses. It is a show-stopping piece, and the ending coda brings the work to a dazzling close.

Besides his gifts in Romantic composition, Sergei Rachmaninoff enjoyed a towering reputation as a piano virtuoso, his keyboard works often designed to suit his own extraordinary hands. In the manner of Chopin, Rachmaninoff composed two sets of etudes, so-called études-tableaux—short visual and narrative pieces that pose potent technical challenges. This second series of nine such pieces takes its cue from contemporaries Scriabin and Prokofiev, enjoying a lusty, propulsive character whose textures appear more intricate than those of the Op. 33 set. Rachmaninoff shared the pieces with contemporary arranger Ottorino Respighi, who orchestrated selections from them in 1930.

Rachmaninoff opens the Op. 39 set passionately, with a piece in C minor, Allegro agitato, which demands right-hand stamina and left-hand syncopations. The fateful key of C minor corresponds to much in Beethoven and to the composer’s own Second Piano Concerto. The influence of Chopin’s Prelude in E-flat Minor bears notice.

Rachmaninoff published his Ten Preludes, Op. 23 in 1904, having written them between 1901 and 1903 during the first flowering of his compositional maturity. Despite the successful premiere of his first opera Aleko, for which he had won the Great Gold Medal at the Moscow Conservatory when he was 19, Rachmaninoff fell into a prolonged depression and creative slump following the disastrous 1897 premiere of his First Symphony. Only after undergoing psychotherapy could he compose again in earnest, completing his Second Piano Concerto, one of his most enduring and beloved works, in 1901. His compositions from this period display a newfound distinctiveness of style, harmonic complexity, and mastery of form. While most of Rachmaninoff’s works of these years are in large-scale symphonic and operatic forms, the preludes of Op. 23 revisit the smaller Romantic character pieces of his youth, but with greater assuredness and originality. Like Bach, Chopin, Alkan, and Scriabin before him, Rachmaninoff ultimately composed 24 preludes, one in each of the major and minor keys (Bach in fact had done so twice). At mid-20th century, Dmitri Shostakovich—just as haunted as his distinguished predecessors—also wrote a set of 24 preludes and fugues in all the keys. (Though Debussy wrote exactly 24 piano preludes, he made no attempt to employ all the keys.) Rachmaninoff’s preludes are most clearly indebted to Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28, but are generally longer and more complex, and exhibit an unmistakably Russian ethos, pride, and nostalgia.

Rachmaninoff first performed the 10 preludes of Op. 23 at a concert put on by the Ladies’ Charity Prison Committee in Moscow on February 10, 1903. He did not feel that these preludes had to be performed as a set and performed (and recorded) individual preludes from the opus.

The Op. 23 preludes alternate between minor and major keys. Prelude No. 4 in D Major, marked Andante cantabile, is Chopinesque and sings, with the grand right-hand melody flowing along above triplet accompaniment. The melody betrays the influence of Tchaikovsky and of Russian folk song. The music grows more complex, and soon Rachmaninoff is developing three separate strands: accompanying lines frame a melody in the piano’s middle register. The prelude drives to a great climax on a shower of massive chords, then falls away to a quiet close. The revolutionary and martial Prelude No. 5 in G Minor is one of Rachmaninoff’s most famous, a favorite of pianists and audiences alike. Marked Alla marcia, it opens with an ominous vamp that is in fact the first subject. The dark and dreamy central section features a gorgeously lyrical melody, and its gradual acceleration leads back to the opening tempo. The ending is particularly effective: the energy of the march dissipates, and the music vanishes in a wisp of sound. Following this perhaps most well-known work of the set is the lyrical Prelude No. 6 in E-flat, an Andante whose joyful and rising operatic melody is accompanied by flowing 16ths. Prelude No. 7 in C Minor, with its sweeping arpeggios and turbulent passagework, recalls the composer’s Second Piano Concerto in both key and pianistic figurations.

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