Élisabeth Pion, piano

Program Notes

Liszt arrangements of Schubert songs

Der Müller und der Bach, D.795
Gretchen am Spinnrade, D.118
Auf dem Wasser zu Singen, D.774
Erlkönig, D.328
Franz Schubert
Born January 31, 1797, Vienna, Austria
Died November 19, 1828, Vienna, Austria

Arranged for piano by
Franz Liszt
Born October 22, 1811, Raiding, Austria
Died July 31, 1886, Bayreuth, Germany

Though Liszt never met Schubert (he was only 17 when Schubert died), he knew and loved Schubert’s music at a time when it was virtually unknown to most audiences. He was drawn in particular to Schubert’s songs, but he was attracted to them for their music rather than for Schubert’s skill in setting a text; Liszt’s mistress Marie d’Agoult prepared French translations of Schubert’s songs so that Liszt could more fully understand music that he had already come to love. Between 1833 and 1846 Liszt transcribed about 60 of Schubert’s songs for solo piano (including many of the songs from Winterreise) and included them on his recitals. These were apparently quite successful, as a review of an 1840 London performance makes clear: “In Schubert’s songs it is no exaggeration to say that he made the instrument sing… the showers of light notes which he scattered through some of the variations realized every idea that can be formed of fairy music. In fine, we have no hesitation in saying that Liszt leaves every other performer, whether on the pianoforte or any other instrument, at an immeasurable distance behind him.”

This recital opens with four of Franz Liszt’s piano arrangements of Schubert’s songs. Der Müller und der Bach (“The Miller and The Brook”), is the next-to-last song from Schubert’s cycle Die schöne Müllerin (“The Fair Maid of the Mill”), composed in 1823. In this dialogue song the downcast young miller, contemplating suicide by drowning, speaks with the brook, which unknowingly celebrates love. Liszt repeats and expands the final section of Schubert’s song.

The title Gretchen am Spinnrade translates “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,” and this song, composed on October 19, 1814, sets the words of the young Gretchen from Book I of Goethe’s Faust (1808). As she spins, she thinks of Faust, who is coming to seduce her. She is restless, troubled, anxious, and out of control, and she knows it—Meine Ruh is hin, the song begins: “My peace is gone.” The piano’s steady oscillation is the sound of the spinning wheel, and it is the piano that tells the tale here, capturing the meaning in a way that the words sometimes do not. At the climax of the song when Gretchen thinks of Faust’s kiss, the piano stops completely: she’s overcome, and the wheel resumes its spinning falteringly as she collects herself. In its dramatic sense, insight into emotion, compression, and intensity, Gretchen am Spinnrade is a masterpiece. Schubert was all of 17 years old when he wrote it.

Auf dem Wasser zu singen (“To Sing on the Water”), composed by Schubert in 1823 on a text by Friedrich Stolberg, uses a boat ride and afternoon sunlight as a metaphor for life. Schubert’s song is remarkable for its imaginative piano accompaniment, which echoes the rocking of the boat and the sound of water in many ways.

Most famous of these songs is, of course, Erlkönig (1815), on a poem by Goethe. Schubert’s depiction of a desperate father riding through the dark woods with his terrified son in his arms has become one of his best-known compositions—it is for many the embodiment of the art song. Schubert’s accomplishment in this song is impressive: the use of three different speaking characters, each of whom is assigned his own music; the furious pounding triplets in the accompaniment to echo the sound of the horse’s hooves; the quick transitions between sections, perfectly gauged to shift the mood; the discordant minor ninths as the terrified child shrieks “Mein Vater!”; the stunning lapse into speech at the song’s climax.

Johannes Brahms – Three Intermezzi, op. 117

Three Intermezzi, Op. 117
Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Austria
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria

Brahms’s piano music figures curiously in his career. He burst to prominence as a young pianist-composer hailed by Robert Schumann as a “young eagle,” and most of his early music was for piano, including huge-scaled sonatas and complex sets of variations. But at age 30 he seemed to forget about the piano, turning instead to chamber and vocal works and later to symphonic music. He waited 15 years and wrote eight short piano pieces, then waited another 13 years before he returned to the piano one final time, composing late in life four collections of piano pieces: Op. 116, 117, 118, and 119.

The 20 pieces that make up these four final sets are all very brief (they may accurately be described as miniatures) and are in ABA form: a first theme, a countermelody—usually in a contrasting tempo and key, and a return of the opening material, now slightly varied. This is intensely personal music, as if Brahms were distilling a lifetime of experience and technical refinement into these brief pieces as he returned one last time to his own instrument.

He wrote the Three Intermezzi of his Opus 117 during the summer of 1892, spent at his favorite summer retreat, Bad Ischl, in the Alps near Salzburg. Brahms’s titles for his piano pieces were sometimes a little loose, but for him the term “intermezzo” seemed to imply music of a quiet, almost introspective nature. It is a cliché to call Brahms’s late music “autumnal,” but there is something darker still about these three intermezzi: they are spare, haunting, moving, almost bleak. Brahms himself called them “lullabies of my pain.”

The first intermezzo in fact is a lullaby. At the top of the music Brahms wrote two lines of a German translation of the old Scottish ballad Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament:

Balou, my boy, lye still and sleep,

it grieves me sore to hear thee weep.

The calm outer section (Brahms marks it “sweet, simple”) gives way to a more agitated middle episode in E-flat minor before the return of the opening material and the quiet close. The second intermezzo (Brahms stresses that he wants it played con molta espressione) hides its theme inside a quiet cascade of arpeggios—only gradually does the ear make out the long line of melody within this flow. The outer section offers some of the most wistful music Brahms ever wrote, and the mood changes little in the middle section: Brahms’s biographer Karl Geiringer suggests that this music portrays a “Man as he stands with the bleak, gusty autumn wind eddying round him.” The final intermezzo opens with the ominous tread of the quiet main theme in C-sharp minor octaves. This has been compared to a funeral march, and the more animated middle section lightens the mood only briefly before the return of opening theme, now skillfully set as a middle voice within a complex harmony.

Verbal description does these three pieces no justice. This quiet and somber music may well be dark. It is also endlessly beautiful.

Cécile Chaminade – Sonata in C Minor, op. 21

Piano Sonata in C Minor, op. 21
Cécile Chaminade
Born August 8, 1857, Paris, France
Died April 18, 1944, Monte Carlo, France

Although her music is largely forgotten today, Cécile Chaminade was one of the first women to achieve fame as a composer. Chaminade showed her musical talent very early: she was composing at age 8, and she made her first tour as a pianist at 18. Her tours, which took her to the United States and repeatedly to England, and hundreds of compositions made her vastly popular in the years before World War I. In fact, Chaminade was the first woman composer to be awarded the Legion of Honor, in 1913. But music in the 20th century passed Chaminade by, and most of her compositions, which include about 200 short pieces for piano, have suffered the faint praise of being labeled “salon music”: tuneful, agreeable, not very difficult, and intended for domestic performance. By the time of her death at age 86, Chaminade’s music had virtually disappeared from concert life. Her one work to achieve a measure of lasting popularity is her suavely melodic Concertino for Flute and Orchestra, composed in 1902 and currently available in a number of recordings. Those interested in Chaminade should know that early in the 20th century she made a number of recordings, and these make clear how talented a pianist she was.

Chaminade composed the Piano Sonata in C Minor, her only piano sonata, in 1895. The world of music was beginning to change around her, but Chaminade remained true to the idiom in which she had been trained, saying “I am essentially of the Romantic school, as all my work shows.” The Sonata in C Minor is a concise work: its three movements span only about 16 minutes. The beginning of the Allegro appassionato is dramatic, built on a rising figure in the left hand that grows more forceful as it proceeds. This drives to a climax marked Con fuoco (“with fire”), and then Chaminade surprises us: this energy falls away, and a long fugal passage marked Tranquillo takes us in an entirely different direction. An extremely active development, repeatedly marked triple forte, leads to the movement’s firm conclusion. The Andante is based on two themes: the chordal opening melody and a long-spanned lyric idea that rises out of the piano’s busy textures. We expect the central movement of a sonata to bring some relief between its active outer movements, but this Andante turns surprisingly dramatic, rising to a climax marked Vivo e capriccio before falling away to conclude quietly. Shortest of the movements, the finale is built on a rush of sixteenth-notes that continues virtually throughout. From out of this flurry of activity, a melody gradually emerges, but there is no time for its development—the music builds to another Con fuoco climax, and the sonata is suddenly over.

Frédéric Chopin – Études, op. 25

Twelve Etudes, Op. 25
Frédéric Chopin
Born February 22, 1810, Żelazowa Wola, Poland
Died October 17, 1849, Paris, France

While still a teenager in Warsaw, Chopin heard a performance of Niccolo Paganini’s Caprices for Solo Violin and was astonished—as were so many other musicians of that era—by what the Italian composer had achieved in this music. Here were extraordinarily complex works for the violin that presented specific technical problems for the performer yet managed to be exciting and engaging music at the same time. Chopin resolved to write something similar for the piano, and over the next few years (a difficult time for the composer) he did just that.

Chopin left Poland in 1830, never to return (it was then being swallowed up by Russia), and settled the following year in Paris. Even before leaving Warsaw, Chopin had begun work on a series of etudes for the piano, and he published this set of 12 in Paris in 1832 as his Opus 10. He continued to write etudes, and over the next few years he completed a further set of 12, which he published in 1839 as his Opus 25. Chopin had dedicated the first set to Liszt; he dedicated his Opus 25 to Liszt’s mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult.

This was a period when Chopin had turned away from the life of the public virtuoso and was devoting his time to giving recitals in private salons and to teaching, and the etudes should be understood first as teaching pieces. Written for Chopin’s students, these brief studies present different kinds of pianistic problems, ranging from the most finger-breaking virtuoso hurdles to the ability to sustain a long melodic line. Along the way, however, they offer breathtaking music that delights general audiences while it challenges pianists.

The 12 etudes of Opus 25 are in general brilliant music. Some create specific technical problems for the pianist (No. 6 in G-sharp Minor is in thirds, No. 8 in D-flat Major is in sixths), while some present unusual hurdles: No. 4 in A Minor demands treacherous leaps from the left hand, and No. 5 in E Minor is in Lombard rhythms (dotted rhythms with the short note coming first). While most of the Etudes are fast, that title does not inevitably mean virtuosic music. Some of the most haunting music in the set comes in the one slow etude, No. 7 in C-sharp Minor, a Lento etude with the melody in the left hand as the right accompanies.

But it is the brilliant etudes that capture the imagination. No. 1 in A-flat Major was actually the last of the set to be composed, in September 1836. Its rippling arpeggios brought it the nickname “aeloian Harp,” after Robert Schumann’s description of this music as “an Aeloian harp having all the scales and an artist’s hand combining them with all kinds of fantastic embellishments…” The floating, dancing rhythms of No. 9 in G-flat Major have earned it the nickname “Butterfly” (a nickname that did not originate with the composer, who wanted this music considered solely as music, not garnished with fanciful titles); this etude exploits the ringing sound of the piano’s high registers.

The last three etudes are all extraordinary in different ways. Chopin gives No. 10 in B Minor the marking Allegro con fuoco and requires legato octaves in the outer sections; the extended center section brings a peaceful interlude before the return of the storm. No. 11 in A Minor opens with a bleak four-bar slow introduction; this figure becomes the main theme at the Allegro con brio, where it is heard in the left hand beneath the right hand’s volcanic accompaniment. No. 12 in C Minor is built on arpeggiated themes that thunder across the range of the keyboard. Its furious energy rushes without relief to the concluding C-major chord.

Program notes by Eric Bromberger