The two composers on this disc were born over sixty years apart – both children in German cities, and adult citizens of Vienna. Beethoven composed over thirty piano sonatas across the course of his life. Brahms published just three, all in the earliest years of his career.
The early 1820s were a difficult and frustrating time for Beethoven, both musically and personally. After a protracted legal struggle of some four and a half years, he succeeded in securing sole guardianship of his nephew Carl in the summer of 1820. What Beethoven evidently hoped would be a rewarding, quasi-paternal relationship quickly deteriorated; and he also suffered from several bouts of serious ill health in 1821. It is a testament to his creative energy (and presumably to the detriment of his relationship with Carl) that despite these hardships, he completed the Missa Solemnis, three piano sonatas, the Bagatelles op.119 and the ‘Diabelli’ Variations between 1820 and 1823.
The three final piano sonatas were written at the request of the Berlin publisher, Adolph Martin Schlesinger. One sonata appeared in print each year between 1821 and 1823 – but the editions were so hopelessly littered with mistakes that Beethoven secretly helped their rivals, the Viennese publishers Cappi & Diabelli, produce corrected editions of opp.110 and 111.
When Beethoven sent the A flat Sonata to his former student Ferdinand Ries, he remarked that it was ‘really not very difficult’. Whether that’s true in practical terms is certainly debatable. More than this, the late sonatas demonstrate serious conceptual complexity. Numbers of movements, tempo changes, keyboard textures, themes and changes of key – all these elements are unpredictable and often surprising. This is why it took so long for them to be included in public concerts. Until around the 1850s, when Brahms was writing his piano sonatas, Beethoven’s late works were usually played only in private for small groups of musical connoisseurs who were prepared to grapple with their difficulties.
Although it is nominally a four-movement work, the A flat major sonata is in many more sections than this, with each component subtly related to others, and each separate idea receiving increasingly nuanced and detailed performance instructions from Beethoven. Vocal writing is a major influence here, from the stunning ‘Klagender Gesang’ (‘Plaintive song’) of the third movement, to the bel canto melody which opens the work. The finale betrays Beethoven’s considerable interest in the music of J.S. Bach: it is a fugue, in which the subject (the opening musical idea) is presented straightforwardly, in inversion (upside down) and in diminution (with all the note lengths shortened). Singing melodies become sweeping pianistic gestures which explore the entire scope of the keyboard (the piece was written for a new Broadwood grand with a six-and-a-half octave range, and he makes use of the entire compass); the fugue is halted by the return of the ‘Klagender Gesang’ before it is allowed to conclude; and recitatives and rhythmic displacements, along with a host of ingenious harmonic shifts, provide an extraordinary variety and sense of journey over the course of the piece.
Beethoven was 52 when the A flat Sonata appeared in print. Brahms, by contrast, was just twenty when the Sonata in F minor – his third and final piano sonata – was completed in early 1854. It was a time of tremendous change and possibility for the young composer, who had been introduced to Clara and Robert Schumann in the autumn of 1853 and lived ever since in a whirlwind of new friends, new music and new professional opportunities. A Piano Sonata in C major formed his Op. 1, beginning with a clear smashing together of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata and Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantasie. A second sonata had followed soon after. And his work-in-progress at the time of his introduction to the Schumanns was a Piano Sonata in F minor, which he played in its entirety to Robert and Clara ‘aus dem Kopf’ (i.e. from memory, without the aid of a written score) on 2 November 1853. After tinkering with it for another few months, it was ready for the world by February 1854.
The Sonata is littered with literary and musical allusions. It still bears the marked influences of Beethoven and Schubert, along with the Schumanns and Felix Mendelssohn; but the muscular virtuosity of its opening movement, in particular, seems most reminiscent of Franz Liszt. Everywhere there is contrast: subtle shifts of mood, tempo, tonal areas and rhythmic devices carry the texture from dense fistfuls of chords into quasi-chorales, lyrical melodies, closely imitative counterpoint and, in the Scherzo, a witty reworking of the finale of Mendelssohn’s C minor Piano Trio. The Finale’s second section, after the initial statement of the rondo theme, begins with the note sequence ‘F-A-E’ – a reference to the motto of Brahms’s close friend Joseph Joachim, the talented violinist who had engineered his meeting with the Schumanns (‘Frei aber einsam’ – ‘Free but lonely’). And the second movement bears a rather more direct literary reference in the form of a poetic epigram by C.O. Sternau (the pseudonym of Otto Julius Inkermann, a contemporary of the composer):
Perhaps the most intriguing movement in the Sonata is the fourth – a ‘Rückblick’ (roughly translatable as ‘Looking back’, or ‘Remembrance’). Over the course of just two pages, Brahms seems to recall shapes and fragments of previous movements without ever referring to them directly. It’s a striking device, and this movement’s sparse texture, occasionally angular harmonies and unusual title seem particularly reminiscent of Robert Schumann’s character pieces. It also turns this big-boned Romantic sonata into a five-movement work, bursting beyond the confines of the traditional four in an imaginative bringing together of ‘abstract’ and ‘poetic’ musical types. Beethoven, still a crucial model to the young Brahms, would surely have approved: and we have already heard him, in fact, knocking out the famous rhythm of his Fifth Symphony, in the Sonata’s first movement. It would be some years before Brahms found a way of fully absorbing the older composer’s influence and developing his own highly distinctive musical idiom. And by that time, he had ceased altogether to write piano sonatas.
© Katy Hamilton