November / Month of the Sonata – 27
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Category: Brahms
November 19, 2023
November / Month of the Sonata – 19
“Over the Town“ (1918)
Marc Chagall
________
Johannes Brahms is pretty well the last of
the great Romantics, 1833 – 1897, he wrote
his Piano Sonata no 3, in F minor, Opus 5,
when he was not quite twenty, with the
same bravura as Beethoven, let me point
out, his sonata has five movements, a sign,
as I’ve said before, of bristling confidence
as a form grows from its original, pristine,
shape, it can only grow by evolving,
becoming something, eventually, that it
wasn’t, by dint of breaking all the rules,
transgressing
style becomes the manner in which a
work is transformed from its integral
state into something more decorated,
more intricately designed, like adding
lace to a perfectly adequate collar, or
making a soufflé out of an egg
but who wouldn’t, won’t
a point is reached where style overcomes
substance then, and becomes the focus
of the entertainment, one watches the
bravura
to my mind, this, however wondrous,
sonata, hasn’t the emotional appeal
that I’d heard in the earlier Romantics,
that would keep me rapt to the end,
the draw for me is the prestidigitation,
the manual dexterity, which is like
watching someone fly through the
air with the greatest of ease, but be
not otherwise moved, see above
but that’s me, and that’s to my mind
incidentally, since this is Brahms’
last sonata, he only wrote three,
this is probably the last of the
great Romantic sonatas, after
which Impressionism
R ! chard
June 1, 2023
how to listen to music if you don’t know your Beethoven from your Bach, XV – what’s a rhapsody
“Rhapsody of Steel“ (1959)
________
so what’s a rhapsody
if you’ve been following at all my
musical adventure, you’ll have
heard by now several rhapsodies
at first, I suggested that the rhapsody
was an evolution from the fantasia,
a piece of music in one movement
that allowed for any internal
construction, but that, after the
Classical Period, became imbued
with Romanticism, passion became
a condition of music, mere technical
ability was no longer enough
note that the audience was different,
rather than nobles who commissioned
artists to decorate their salons, the
burgeoning Middle Class was hungry
for them to entertain, performers were
becoming the main attraction, not just
the background, see, for instance,
Beethoven
but not only did rhapsodies spread
from just one player to an entire
orchestra – see Brahms, then
see Gershwin – but its essential
structure, one movement, was
challenged, see Ravel here, or
Rachmaninov, whose rhapsodies
are both composed of distinct
movements, Rachmaninov even
further refining his movements
into variations, for years, I
referred to his Rhapsody on a
Theme of Paganini as his
Variations
all this to say that a rhapsody is
turning out to be not identified
by its structure, its technical
parts, but rather by its intention,
a rhapsody is in the eye of its
composer, like a nocturne, or
a ballade
I’d thought that rhapsodies had
been relegated to the Romantic
Era, with the occasional later
tribute
who, I wondered, could be
writing rhapsodies anymore
but here’s something, however
unexpectedly, you’ll be familiar
with, from 1975, Queen’s Bohemian
Rhapsody, in several movements
– intro, ballad, opera, hard rock,
outro – and including in all of them,
note, voice
all of which speaks of tradition
being a lot closer than one would
think, ancestral, residual, but
defining, traces, like genes,
however updated, however
posthumously interpreted,
pervade, infiltrate, pursue,
inexorably
rhapsodies are in our DNA, it
would appear, for better or for
worse, ever
here’s to them
R ! chard
October 20, 2018
the essential Romantic violin concertos
“The Violin“ (1916)
_____
if I was able to bring up a list of
ten top Romantic piano concertos
throughout the 19th Century earlier,
I can number of violin concertos
only three essential ones, with,
however, two other significant
such compositions, which remain,
for one reason or another,
peripheral, secondary
more about which later
but the exalted three are situated
conveniently, the first, at the very
beginning of the Romantic Era,
Beethoven’s magisterial, even
extraordinary, Opus 61 in D major,
1806, and close doubly with the
two others, Tchaikovsky’s
resplendent work, words cannot
do it justice, and Brahms’ no less
transcendental one, at its very end,
1878, none are negligible, it’d be
like missing the Eiffel Tower while
in Paris, skipping the pyramids
along the Nile, they are part of our
cultural consciousness, it would
be an utter shame to pass them
by, they are our glory, our
magnificent heritage
it should be noted that the
concerto, be it for violin, piano,
cello, what have you, a soloist
in concert with an array of
instruments, is the perfect allegory
for the Romantic Era, an individual
in contention with a community,
under the influence of a conductor,
a mayor, a mentor, a polity, the
individuality afforded by the
proclamation of human rights in
the aftermath of the French
Revolution, and its social
consequences, musically
manifested
the match might be fraught,
should be, though with
compromise, considerate
accommodation, fruitful,
hopefully even transcendental,
if not at least entertaining,
cooperation, music seems to
infer eventual concord,
congress, harmony, a way out
of, even dire, distress, or at
least point the way toward it
concertos die out, incidentally, in
the 20th Century, you don’t hear
of very many, if any at all, after
Rachmaninoff, they are gone,
much like later, in the 1950s, the
waltz, forever, with the wind
may they rest in peace
R ! chard
October 7, 2018
Piano Concertos 2, 3, 4 – Beethoven
“Liberty Leading the People“ (1830)
_________
for everyone, with great gratitude,
who reads me, I mean only to
bring poetry, which is to say,
light
though I’d considered leaving the
Romantic Piano Concertos behind
to explore other areas of the period
in this survey, it seemed unfair,
indeed remiss of me, not to include
the three among my top ten that I
haven’t yet highlighted, Beethoven’s
2nd, 3rd, and 4th Piano Concertos,
Opuses 19, 37, and 58 respectively,
after all, these are where the spirit
of the age, the Zeitgeist, was
constructed, like a building, with
walls, windows, a hearth, all of
which would become a church,
then a Church, and by the time of
Brahms, a very Romantic Cathedral
the foundation had already been laid
by Mozart with his 27, but music had
not yet become anything other than
an entertainment by then, or
alternatively, an accessory to
ceremonial pomp and circumstance,
see Handel and England for this, or
liturgical stuff, see, among many
others here, Bach
but with the turn towards
independence of thought as the
Enlightenment progressed, cultural
power devolved from the prelates,
and their reverent representations,
to the nobles, who wanted their own
art, music, which is to say, something
secular, therefore the Classical
Period, 1750 – 1800, in round figures
then in the middle of all that, 1789,
the French Revolution happened,
and the field was ripe for prophets,
anyone with a message of hope,
and a metaphysical direction, midst
all the existential disarray – the Age
of Reason had set the way,
theoretically, for the possibility of a
world without God, something, or
Something, was needed to replace
the The Trinity, the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost, Who had been
seeing Their supremacy contested
since already the Reformation
Beethoven turned out to be just
our man, don’t take my, but history‘s
authentification of it, see the very
Romantic Period for corroboration
in a word, Beethoven established a
Faith, a Vision, not to mention the
appropriate tools to instal this new
perspective, a sound, however
inherited, musical structure – his
Piano Concertos Two, Three, and
Four, for instance, are paramount
amongst a host of others of his
transcendental revelations
briefly, the initial voice, I am here, in
the first movement, is declamatory,
even imperious, but ever
compositionally solid, and proven,
tempo, tonality, recapitulation, the
materials haven’t changed from the
earlier Classical epoch, just the
design, the interior, the
metaphysical conception
his construction is masterfully
direct, the line of music is
throughout ever clear and concise,
despite flights of, often, ethereal,
even magical, speculation, you
don’t feel the music in your body
as you would in a dance, as in the
earlier era, of minuets, but follow
it, rather, with your intellect, you,
nearly irresistibly, read it
but the adagio, the slow movement,
the middle one Classically, is always,
for me, the clincher, the movement
that delivers the incontrovertible
humanity that gave power to the
Romantic poet, who touched you
where you live
Beethoven says life is difficult, and
eventually, at the end of his Early,
Middle and Late Periods, life may
even have no meaning
but should there be someone, he
says, who is listening, Someone –
though implicit is that one may be
speaking to merely the wind – this
is what I can do, this is who I am
and while I am here, however
briefly, I am not insignificant, I
can be worthy, even glorious,
even beautiful, I am no less
consequential, thus, nor
precious, than a flower
for better, of course, or for worse
R ! chard
October 2, 2018
Piano Concerto no 2, opus 83 – Brahms
_____________
if Brahms’ 2nd Piano Concerto is, to my
mind, the last one of the Romantic Period,
Beethoven’s First is, accordingly, the first
I thought it, therefore, instructive to pair
them
Beethoven, impelled by ideological
speculations, built not only a variation
on what had come before, music as
entertainment, a reason to dance, but
gave it a greater, which is to say,
philosophical, dimension
by extending the reach of the cadence
beyond the usual metered rhythm,
sending the melodic statement
beyond an otherwise constricting bar
line, Beethoven turned a lilt into a
sentence, a ditty into a paragraph
Shakespeare does the same thing to
poetry, for instance, with iambic
pentameter devoid of rhyme
“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she”
and with this newfound oratory,
peremptory, insistent, imbued,
however, with utterly convincing
honesty, unfettered emotion,
which is to say, humanity,
Beethoven establishes the
sensibility of a very era, listen
that era, up to, eventually, Brahms,
elaborates on that ethos, adding
texture and enhanced authority
to the original concept, setting
the moral agenda for that, and
other generations, to follow
Brahms is more ponderous, mighty,
a cathedral instead of a church, a
commandment instead of an
aspirational, merely, thrust, he
adds even a fourth movement to
an already magnificent structure,
an extra steeple to a towering
edifice, a subliminally received
reference to Beethoven‘s already
inspired, but tripartite only,
architecture
see Chartres for a comparable
ecclesiastical counterpart
R ! chard
September 26, 2018
Piano Concerto no 1 in D minor, opus 15 – Brahms
“The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog“ (1818)
_____________
if Beethoven built the Church, along
with Goethe maybe, of Romanticism,
and be assured Romanticism is an
ideology, a moral outlook, a
motivational perspective, much like
the economy is nowadays,
supplanting any more humanistic
imperatives, Brahms put up one of its
Cathedrals, just listen, the First Piano
Concerto is a monument, as mighty
as the Cologne Cathedral musically,
right next to Bonn, incidentally,
Brahms‘ birthplace
with the disintegration of the
supremacy of the Catholic deity
at the onset of the Protestant
Reformation, Luther, Calvin,
Henry Vlll and all that, bolstered
by new discoveries in scientific
speculation, that the earth wasn’t
flat, for instance, that it revolved
around the sun rather than the
other way around, contradictory,
though convincing, voices began
to abound, excite question
in the 18th Century, the Age of
Reason, the Christian Deity fell,
never effectively to be put back
together again, see for Its final
sundering, Nietzsche
in France, after the Revolution,
the Church was officially removed
from political consideration,
countermanding its centuries of
morally heinous depredations,
the United States had already at
its own Revolution separated it
from State
Romanticism was an answer to
a world wherein there might not
be a God, a world with, however,
a spiritual dimension, to respond
to the clockwork universe
envisioned by the earlier epoch,
the Enlightenment, a world where
everything could be categorized,
analyzed, predicted
Romanticism called for the
inclusion of inspiration in the mix,
there are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio, than are
dreamt of in your philosophy,
as Shakespeare would, for
instance, have it – “Hamlet”,
1.5.167-8
poets became prophets thereby,
if they could manage it, very
oracles, the world was blessed
with, at that very moment,
Beethoven, far outstripping the
likes of, later, for example, Billy
Graham, or other such, however
galvanizing, proselytizers,
whose messages would’ve been
too, to my mind, literal
for music cannot lie, obfuscate,
prevaricate, music cannot be
fake
and then there was Schubert,
and Chopin, Tolstoy, Dickens,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Robert, her husband,
Tchaikovsky, Caspar David
Friedrich, the Johann Strausses,
Byron, Shelley, Keats, whose
artworks, all, are as profoundly
in our blood, our cultural system,
as, if not more so than, our
present information about the
details of our Christian myths,
despite a superfluity of them
even, throughout the long
indeed Middle Ages, and right
up to, and including, the still
fervent then Renaissance, for
better or for worse still, for us
what Romanticism did, and
specifically through the work
of these seminal artists, was
give each of us a chance,
show us how to come
through trial and tribulation,
what a faith does, any faith
it said, here, this is my dilemma,
and this is how I deal with it
for me, Beethoven’s 32nd
Piano Sonata is, soundly, the
epitome of that, but listen to
Brahms put a stamp on it
with undaunted authority
we might be ultimately of no
consequence in an indifferent
universe, they say, but, hey,
this is what we can do, and
do gloriously, while we are
at it
Woody Allen picks up the
purpose in our own recent
20th Century, following in
the earnest footsteps of his
Existential mentor, the much
too dour, I think, Ingmar
Bergman
but that’s another story
entirely
meanwhile, listen
also watch, the conductor here,
a complete delight, is right out
of “Alice in Wonderland“, I
promise you’ll love it
R ! chard
September 22, 2018
Piano Concerto no 3 in E-flat major, opus 75 – Tchaikovsky
______________
if I’m including Tchaikovsky’s Third,
and last, Piano Concerto in my survey,
it’s not because of its excellence, it is,
indeed, severely flawed, but because
I am a completist – if I’m visiting the
Cologne Cathedral, ergo, for instance,
I’ll make my way to the very top,
however treacherous might be the
stairs, the gargoyles being worth it,
not to mention the view
first of all, it’s incomplete, Tchaikovsky
died before finishing it, you can’t blame
him for that, though he was, curiously,
complicit in his own demise, but I don’t
believe this composition and his death
are that intimately interrelated
it has only one movement, but has
nevertheless been termed a concerto
on the, debatably unsound, strength
of its intention
briefly, and this is my opinion, the
movement has no lyrical moment,
no melting melody to float you out
of the recital hall as you exit,
nothing to hum, nor to whistle as
you wistfully wend your way back
home, nothing to remember but
flash, braggadocio, bombast,
expert fingers strutting their
dazzling, even, stuff, style over
substance, I venture, won’t be
enough to whisk you into the
following centuries
Chopin, the other towering Romantic
figure standing between the spiritual
bookends of Beethoven and Brahms,
wrote two piano concertos, of which
his Second suffers from, essentially,
not being his First, however mighty
his Second here, for instance,
proves to be in this utterly convincing
performance, watch, wow
Beethoven, in other words, wrote the
book, two works, Tchaikovsky’s First
and Chopin’s First, tower above his
in the public imagination during the
ensuing High Romantic Period, after
which Brahms closes the door on the
era with his two powerful masterpieces
for piano and orchestra
of which more later
there are other piano concertos
along the way, but Beethoven’s
five, Tchaikovsky’s and Chopin’s
one each, and Brahms two are
the basics – but let me add, upon
further consideration, and for a
a perfect ten options, Liszt, his
own, of two, First Piano Concerto –
what you need to consider yourself
comfortably aware of the essentials
of music in the 19th Century, the
culture’s predominant voice then,
until art, painting, took over as the
Zeitgeist‘s most expressive medium
with Impressionism
of which more later
R ! chard
August 28, 2018
First Symphony, “Winter Dreams”, opus 13 – Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1866)
______
for Elizabeth, who said she’d
“be all ears once it happens“,
this first of my Tchaikovskys
the example of Beethoven was
a hard act to follow, no one
nearby, which is to say, in the
vicinity of Vienna, which had
ruled the musical world for
more than half a century, from
Mozart to late Beethoven,
would be able to match his
eminence, not even the,
however mighty, Brahms
but in the East a star was born, in
1840, of extraordinary dimensions,
to tower above the High Romantic
period, which shone with, were it
not for its distance from the
European central galaxy,
comparable brightness
Beethoven had written for every
instrument, every combination
of instruments, every voice,
every combination of voices,
no other composer had, nor
has since, done that but the
incandescent Tchaikovsky,
who’d ever ‘a’ thunk it
symphonies, concertos, string
quartets, sonatas, variations,
ballets, operas, liturgical
pieces, there wasn’t anything
he didn’t touch, and transform
into magic
here‘s an early work, his Opus 13
only, in order to get chronological
perspective, and, as I pursue this
compelling trajectory, a sense of
his musical evolution, his First
Symphony, “Winter Dreams”*
listen for troikas flying across
the steppes, hear the bells tingle
from their fleeting carriages, be
swept away by the exhilarating
majesty
R ! chard
* Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra,
Joshua dos Santos, conductor
July 27, 2018
“Lament From Epirus” – Christopher King
“Blind Man’s Portion“ (1903)
________
though you’ll have to actively listen
to Christopher King rather than
merely hear him here, as you might
have been doing with many of my
suggested musical pieces, should
you be at all interested in the history
of music, he is fascinating, dates his
investigations back millennia to very
Epirus, Ancient, nearly primordial,
Greece, to mirologia there, ancient
funerary chants
some have survived, and have been
recorded for posterity, one, in 1926,
by a Greek exile fled to New York City,
Alexis Zoumbas, a year later, however
improbably, by an American, a blind
man, his own story inspirational, akin
to that of Epictetus, one of the two
iconic Stoic philosophers, the other,
incidentally, an emperor, though the
blind man here, Willie Johnson, was
never himself a slave, but only, by a
historical whisker, the emancipations
of the American Civil War
Christopher King‘s comparison
of an Epirotic miralogi with an
American one brings up, for me,
the difference between Mozart
and Beethoven, notice how the
Willie Johnson version is more
rhythmic, the cadence is much
more pronounced than in the
Greek one, Johnson would’ve
got that from the musical
traditions Europeans had
brought over from their native
continent, probably also from
Africa, Africans
Beethoven would’ve been
surrounded, meanwhile, by Roma,
perhaps called gypsies then, their
music ever resonant in his culture,
not to mention later Liszt‘s, and
the Johann Strausses’ even, for
that matter, Paganini also seems
to have been imbued with it, it
having come up from Epirus
through, notably, Hungary – not
to mention, later still, that music’s
influence, and I’ll stop there, on
late 19th-Century Brahms
Christopher King, incidentally,
sounds a lot like someone you
already know, I think, from his
eschewing – Gesundheit – cell
phones, for instance, to his
enduring preoccupation with
death, not to mention his
endearing modesty, indeed
his humility, his easy
self-deprecation, despite his,
dare I say, incontestable, and
delightful, erudition
makes one wonder why that
other hasn’t become also
famous yet
what do you think
R ! chard
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