Paul Lewis piano Schubert Piano Sonata in C minor D958 Piano Sonata in A major D959 INTERVAL Piano Sonata in B flat major D960 Sun 5 May, 3.00pm Glyndebourne Opera House Brighton Festival programmes are supported by WSL (Brighton) Ltd Please ensure that all mobile phones are switched off The Steinway concert piano chosen and hired by Brighton Festival for this performance is supplied and maintained by Steinway & Sons, London BF02_2013LewisAW:BF1 / LSO artwork 30/04/2013 12:19 Page 1
Transcript
Paul Lewispiano
SchubertPiano Sonata in C minor D958Piano Sonata in A major D959
INTERVAL
Piano Sonata in B flat major D960
Sun 5 May, 3.00pmGlyndebourne Opera House
Brighton Festival programmes are supported by WSL (Brighton) LtdPlease ensure that all mobile phones are switched off
The Steinway concert piano chosen and hired byBrighton Festival for this performance is supplied andmaintained by Steinway & Sons, London
Early in September 1828 Schubert’s friend Johann Baptist Jenger wrote totheir mutual acquaintance Marie Pachler, promising her that the two of themwould pay a return visit to her family in Graz, where they had enjoyedthree weeks of hospitality and music-making the previous year. ‘Friend LittleMushroom’, Jenger told Frau Pachler, referring to Schubert by theaffectionate nickname ‘Schwammerl’ used by members of his intimate circle,‘is shortly expecting an improvement in his finances, and taking that intoconsideration, and as soon as it has happened, he will immediately acceptyour kind invitation.’
Schubert’s anticipation of a more secure income may well have been basedon the fact that he had just completed what even by his standards was anastonishingly large number of new works and that one them had at lastbeen accepted for publication: Heinrich Albert Probst of Leipzig was aboutto issue the Piano Trio in E flat major (D929). However, the planned trip toGraz never materialized, because, as Schubert explained to Jenger, the‘money and weather conditions’ were unfavourable. Schubert had receivedrather poor terms for the trio and had failed to arouse interest in any of hisother recent compositions.
On 2 October 1828 Schubert wrote to Probst, offering him a group ofHeine settings (they were to appear shortly after his death as part of his so-called Schwanengesang series), his C major String Quintet D956 and a setof three piano sonatas which he wanted to dedicate to Johann NepomukHummel, the most successful pianist–composer of the day. What thatfashionable figure would have made of Schubert’s pieces, in whichvirtuosity so notably takes a back seat to profundity of musical thought, ishard to imagine, but events took a different turn. Probst was willing to lookonly at the songs and any ‘easily understood’ piano duets Schubert mighthave. A letter written on the same day, to Schott & Co., offering the Quintettogether with the second book of Impromptus (D935) met with no greatersuccess. Schott also invited Schubert to submit instead ‘less difficult butbrilliant’ pieces in a lighter style. As for the sonatas, they were acquiredsoon after Schubert’s death by Tobias Haslinger, the publisher ofSchwanengesang, but he failed to issue them, and they appeared only in1839, under the imprint of Anton Diabelli. By this time Hummel was alsodead, and the title-page bore an inscription to Schumann.
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)The last three piano sonatas
Schubert and Hummel had both been among those who accompaniedBeethoven’s coffin to its final resting-place, on 19 March 1827. To Schubert,the death of the composer he was too awe-struck ever to approach must havecome as a bitter blow, but also something of a liberation. All his life he hadlived under Beethoven’s shadow; now at last he could feel free to challengehim on his own ground. All three of the sonatas Schubert wrote in the yearafter Beethoven’s death pay direct tribute to him, and the first of them goes sofar as to be cast in C minor — the key Beethoven had made so much hisown in such works as the Fifth Symphony and the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata. It usedto be thought that Schubert had composed his final group of sonatas at whiteheat, in the space of just a few weeks, but the discovery of detailed sketchesfor all three works suggests that he is likely to have worked on them, at leastintermittently, for several months. They nevertheless form an artisticachievement every bit as miraculous in scope and variety as the triptych ofworks with which Mozart rounded off his career as a symphonist, in just sixweeks in the summer of 1788.
Piano Sonata in C minor D958AllegroAdagioMenuetto. AllegroAllegro
The first of Schubert’s last three sonatas begins with a subject that recalls thetheme of Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor, though the differencesbetween the two are more significant than their superficial similarities.Schubert’s theme, being part of a much larger, less sectional design, evolvescontinually before it eventually prepares the ground for a serene secondsubject in the major which almost immediately undergoes a transformation intoa more agitated minor. Perhaps more obviously Beethovenian in itsatmosphere of subdued tension is the approach to the recapitulation, atroughly the movement’s mid-point, where shadowy sweeping chromatic scalesare underpinned by the main theme’s rhythm tapped out, drum-like, deep inthe bass.
Beethoven’s shadow falls across the slow movement, too — the only genuineAdagio to be found among Schubert’s mature sonatas. Here we may detectechoes of the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata’s middle movement — particularly in thereprise of the main theme, which unfolds, as in the Beethoven, over a‘rocking’ accompaniment in semiquaver triplets. (In Schubert’s piece theaccompaniment continues the rhythm of the more agitated precedingepisode.) The final return of Schubert’s theme offers another texture favouredby Beethoven: a smooth melodic line above a staccato accompaniment. Themusic’s atmosphere, however, is thoroughly Schubertian, as are the luminousharmonic shifts of its coda.
Schubert’s original draft of the minuet third movement shows its openingmelody as a series of chords, without the definitive version’s more pianisticaccompaniment; and the sudden silences that interrupt the melody in theminuet’s second half, as though the music were gasping for breath, appear tohave been another later inspiration. The trio, in the major, has the characterof a Ländler (a rustic dance in waltz time).
The finale is a ‘galloping’ tarantella of almost manic energy, whose model islikely to have been the rhythmically similar final rondo of Beethoven’s‘Kreutzer’ Sonata or of his Piano Sonata op. 31 no. 3. Again, Schubert’stonal palette, and particularly his use of chromatically adjacent keys, is whollyindividual: the sudden plunge into C sharp minor, a semitone above the home
key, shortly after the start; and, in the movement’s central section, the broadmelody that unfolds in a luminous B major, a semitone below. For all thepiece’s expansiveness, its ending is curiously abrupt, with the musicthreatening to die away at the bottom of the keyboard before two forcefulchords bring it to a full stop.
Piano Sonata in A major D959AllegroAndantinoScherzo. Allegro vivaceRondo. Allegretto
Schubert’s preliminary draft of the opening movement of the A major SonataD959 is a fascinating document. It presents the assertive initial theme in thestyle of a chorale, without the octave leaps in the left hand that give thefamiliar version its rhythmic impetus. There is less rhythmic tension, too, in theapproach to the calm opening melody of the second group; and the melodyitself lacks the expansiveness of its final version. Not that the exposition’ssecond half in its definitive form is an entirely relaxed affair: the newcontrasting subject soon gives way to a chromatic passage whose tripletmotion recalls the rhythm of the movement’s first stage. So dramatic does themusic become here that Schubert deems it wise to dissipate its tension duringthe exposition’s closing bars by fusing the second subject with a quiet echo ofthe urgent triplets. The coda involves another, more surprising, form of echo:the main theme is subdued to a distant pianissimo, with the pianist’s left handin imitation of pizzicato strings, before the music vanishes into thin air with aseries of arpeggios sweeping gently over the keyboard. Not until theconcluding bars of the finale is the main theme to return in full-blooded guise.
The slow movement is a barcarolle of infinite melancholy. As in many ofSchubert’s late slow movements, there is a more dramatic middle section; butnever did he conceive a more astonishing outburst than occurs at the heart ofthis piece. It is a moment that offers a vision of wild despair, if not actualmadness, and its impassioned style anticipates the keyboard writing of amuch later generation of composers.
Following the scherzo, with its playful skipping chords, the gentle rondobrings the sonata to a close in relaxed style. Schubert took his rondo themefrom the middle movement of the first of his three sonatas in A minor, D537,composed more than a decade earlier. But if the melody itself was animproved self-borrowing, the new finale’s course of events shows Schubert
turning for his model once again to Beethoven’s sonata triptych op. 31 — thistime, to the concluding rondo from the G major first work in the set. Theinfluence of Beethoven’s piece even extends to the texture and keyboardlayout of Schubert’s, as well as the halting approach to its coda. In both thebeauty of his material, and the magical effects of elliptical key-change, it hasto be said that Schubert surpassed his model.
Piano Sonata in B flat major D960Molto moderatoAndante sostenutoScherzo. Allegro vivace e con delicatezzaAllegro, ma non troppo
The last of Schubert’s 1828 sonatas not only marks his farewell to the pianobut it is also his last instrumental composition, and in its breadth and serenityit stands apart from its two companions. Its opening movement, an unusuallyexpansive ‘Molto moderato’, mostly unfolds in pianissimo, as though it werebeing heard from afar. Indeed, the pianissimo established at the outset ismaintained for more than 30 bars, and such few forceful moments as occurlater in the movement are short-lived.
The calm main theme itself is so broad as to be almost hymn-like, and itstranquil surface is ruffled only by the distantly menacing sound of a trill deepin the bass. The trill occurs on the note G flat, and it presages a new versionof the main theme in G flat major over a rippling accompaniment that evokesthe sound of a cello bowing across its strings. Only once, and then only oncondition that the pianist observes the repeat of the movement’s first stage andplays the ‘first-time’ bars, does the trill erupt into a dramatic gesture. Thepassage in question is one that looks at once forwards, to the comparativeintensity of the central development section, and back, to the calm of theexposition’s closing bars, allowing the two moods to overlap.
The unusually relaxed style of Schubert’s piece perhaps owes something to theexample of one of Beethoven’s great B flat major works — the ‘Archduke’ Trioop. 97. In the ‘Archduke’ the development section is seamlessly joined to thestart of the recapitulation by means of a long trill on the notes F and G flat,and Schubert approaches his recapitulation in similar fashion, though hediffers from Beethoven in allowing the music to fade away into silence beforethe recapitulation sets in. And in the same way that Schubert had created asense of overlap during the exposition’s closing bars, he anticipates the onsetof the recapitulation during the development, where, in a remarkable moment,
the main theme is heard from the extreme distance (the marking is ppp) at itsoriginal pitch, but in the middle of a passage set in an entirely different key.
The slow movement is built out of an infinitely expressive, long-spun melodythat we might imagine being played by two violins. Its sonority is enriched bythe resonance of an accompaniment that ranges over four octaves, constantlycrossing over the theme. For his middle section Schubert moves into the majorand transfers the melodic line to the more sonorous cellos. With the return ofthe opening theme comes a new rhythmic figure in the accompaniment; andthe piece draws to a close with a coda of wonderfully heightenedpoignancy, in which the theme undergoes a sea-change into the major.
The scherzo is a piece of utmost delicacy: the pianissimo marking of its mainsubject coupled with its melodic shape suggests that it can be heard as anaccelerated offshoot of the sonata’s opening theme. The trio, though darker inmood and sonority, has all the hallmarks of a Ländler.
The finale begins with a dramatic gesture: a held octave G which heralds arondo theme that appears to begin in C minor, before it eventually alights onthe home key. The harmonic side-step may have been intended as a homageto the similar opening of Beethoven’s last completed composition — the finalehe provided for the String Quartet in B flat op. 130, as a less demandingsubstitute for the original ‘Grosse Fuge’ conclusion. Schubert’s amiable, almostchamber-like rondo theme meets its obverse side at the end of the piece,where a headlong ‘presto’ coda brings the sonata to a forceful close.
Paul Lewis Paul Lewis studied with Ryszard Bakst at Chetham’s School of Music and with Joan Havill at theGuildhall School of Music and Drama, then privately with Alfred Brendel. His many awards haveincluded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist of the Year Award; the 25th and finalPremio Internazionale Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena; two successive Edison Awards inHolland; and three Gramophone Awards, including Record of the Year in 2008. He performsregularly at leading international festivals and recital venues and has appeared over 70 times atthe Wigmore Hall in London. He has performed with the major UK orchestras, and with the LosAngeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw, Leipzig Gewandhaus,Bamberg Symphony, Mahler Chamber and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, among many others,with such conductors as Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink, Christoph von Dohnányi, Mark Elder,Wolfgang Sawallisch, Andrew Davis and Andris Nelsons.
Between 2005 and 2007 Paul Lewis performed the complete Beethoven piano sonatas andconcertos throughout Europe and North America (which he recorded); in 2010 he was the firstpianist to play all five Beethoven piano concertos in a single BBC Proms season. This afternoon’srecital is the concluding programme of the two-year ‘Schubert and the Piano’ project, duringwhich Paul Lewis has performed all the major piano works Schubert composed during the last sixyears of his life. This eight-programme series has also included Schubert’s three song cycles withthe tenor Mark Padmore, which have also been recorded.
With his wife, the Norwegian cellist Bjørg Lewis, Paul Lewis is the co-artistic director ofMidsummer Music, an annual chamber music festival held in Latimer, Buckinghamshire.
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