Poets of the Piano: Heroes & Icons is a program devoted to character pieces: personalities brought to life in musical tones. These heroes and icons are drawn from ancient myth, religious lore, and the theatrical stage. We can hear them in the fullness of their personality, but also in the events they passed through, forging their names through adversity and circumstance into legendary status.
The challenge of personification in tones without words has centuries of precedent in keyboard music. In the late 1600’s, Bach’s predecessor at Thomaskirche, Johann Kuhnau, wrote six Biblical Sonatas, depicting David, Goliath, Saul, Jacob and others. Decades later, François Couperin included many personages, famous and unknown, into his Piéces de clavecin: Louis XIV, Manon, Nanette, Anton, a self-portrait. As keyboard music fused with poetry and narrative in the 19th century, examples abound from composers like Schumann, Liszt, Alkan and even the formalist Brahms.
Nathaniel Dett was a virtuoso pianist and expert choral director with a tremendous record of accomplishment in performance, academia, and writing. Born in 1882 in Drummondsville, Ontario (settled by free Blacks in the 1700’s, it is now part of Niagara Falls) he migrated to the USA at a young age and became the first Black graduate of Oberlin Conservatory. While he was there, he heard for the first time Dvorak’s ‘American’ Quartet, inspired by that composer’s extended stay in America and his exposure to Black and indigenous musics. Dett poignantly wrote,
“Suddenly it seemed I heard again the frail sweet voice of my long departed grandmother, calling across the years; and, in a rush of emotion with stirred my spirit to the very center, the meaning of the songs which had given her soul such peace was revealed to me.”
This was an awakening that opened new creative worlds for Dett; elsewhere he reminisced how society taught Blacks to be ashamed of their folk culture, including the “primitive” spiritual. He went deeper, and visited communities who had kept the old traditions alive:
“I have attended meetings of old ex-slaves in the backwoods. Oft-times when singing their very faces showed a self abnegation wholly different from that one sees upon the countenance of the average singer, evidencing that, borne on the wings of song, they temporarily had entered another world.”
While the majority of his works are vocal, his piano suites are a major part of his output. Eight Bible Vignettes were his last compositions for solo piano, written from 1941-43. The first of the set, Father Abraham, combines a Negro Spiritual with an old Jewish liturgical song, still widely in use today:
In the foreword, Dett compared the essence of Spirituals and Jewish music:
“It is something more than a mere coincidence that Abraham, patriarch of the Old Testament history, should also be apostrophized in the Negro spiritual; for the emotional and mystical keynote of the Negro, even as of the Jewish folksong, is emancipation and great happiness in some future state.”
The sixth piece in the suite, Martha Complained, illustrates a scene from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 10: Jesus visits the home of sisters Mary and Martha. Martha is overwhelmed by housework and tedious things, and complains to Jesus who advises her to value the spiritual. Dett captures the atmosphere with a static ground bass and Martha’s melody, soaring in pithiness and dissonant beauty.
Vocal music was so embedded in his art, that it seems he often had a secret text in mind even for his instrumental music. He imagines Martha singing her complaint, and the voice of Jesus answering:
Through the profundity of ancient song, Abraham is brought to life in all his grandiosity; through vocal recitative over a tried-and-true ground bass, Martha and Jesus are with us in musical spirit.
Nikolai Medtner’s inspiration was not religious, but literary. He gave poetic titles and epigrams to many of his piano pieces, and was also a prolific song composer, setting poetry he loved of Pushkin, Lermontov, Goethe, and others.
Medtner is often linked in history with his friend and compatriot Rachmaninoff. Both virtuoso pianist-composers abandoned Russia after the 1917 Revolution, but the worldy Rachmaninoff found fame and fortune in the performance circuit, while the domestic Medtner lived mostly in his own imagination, struggling financially, and composing many works that only he performed, if at all.
Everything he wrote included the piano, but his largest body of work were the Skazki, translated as Tales or Fairy Tales. It is a genre all his own, character pieces large or small based on Russian folklore, classic literature, and the art of the dance.
Two presented here come from Medtner’s life-long love of Shakespeare. Ophelia’s Song, op.14 no.1, composed in 1907, is a short and lyrical piece with a simple, folk-like melody. In Hamlet, after the accidental murder of her father Polonius, Ophelia sang cryptic verses to Queen Gertrude, before drowning herself:
“He is dead and gone, lady
He is dead and gone,
At his head a grass-green turn,
At his heels a stone.”
The second Tale, op.35 no.4, is based on a famous monologue from King Lear:
“Blow, winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!”
Lear is raging at the storm on the heath, seeing in his confused old age a conspiracy between nature and his daughters, and fighting off his own senility and impotence in the face of their newly-bestowed power. Medtner revels in his virtuoso side here, as an explosive theme gives way to destabilizing, rumbling rhythms in the low registers. For all its wildness and passion, this compact piece is actually in strict sonata form.
Medtner believed strongly in the “classic” forms, and for that he was seen as an arch-conservative, out of step with his times. As a result he failed to receive widespread recognition and stability. However, the last years of his life became a real-life Fairy Tale: the Maharajah of Mysore fell in love with his music and founded the first Nikolai Medtner Society, funding a series of recordings of Medtner at the piano, playing his own works. Through his whole life, for better or worse, he kept to his own philosophy:
“An artist is not given his talent to be used for self-assertion, self-expression, and the pleasures of fame; he should receive his gift as an obligation towards God and the Art he serves.”
By contrast, Sergei Prokofiev was always a commercial and popular success; after following Rachmaninoff and Medtner in emigrating from Soviet Russia, he enjoyed a brilliant career as performer and composer in the West. Unlike Medtner, he composed for all instruments and genres, but the most exalted forms for him were opera and ballet. It was through a major ballet commission that Prokofiev was finally lured back to the USSR, in 1936.
The ballet was Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. As Prokofiev wryly noted: “We Russians love long ballets that fill up an entire evening.” Censorship was already a regular part of Soviet life, if not yet a terrifying one, so Prokofiev and the ballet director decided to create a new, optimistic, happy ending: rather than the mutual suicide, Romeo discovers Juliet alive at the crypt and they live happily ever after.
In a fit of inspiration, the music was composed at a breakneck pace, but the effort was frustrated - shortly before the planned premiere, the infamous bombshell “Muddle Instead of Music” dropped in the Pravda. Ostensibly a diatribe against Shostakovich, it put all composers on notice that their music would be judged politically, anonymously, and with deadly consequences.
Romeo and Juliet was shelved, and not performed until 1940. But Prokofiev surely knew he had composed some of the greatest, most memorable melodies of the 20th century, and found another way forward in the meantime. In order to get the music into the world and build support for the ballet, he crafted two orchestral suites of excerpts and the Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, op.75,. for solo piano. His goal was to “select the parts best suited to transcription.”
The piano suite is a mixture of dances and character pieces. Prokofiev supplied in his ballet scenario brief descriptions: The Young Juliet: “Juliet’s entrance with her nursemaid; she dashes in… girlishly jokes and pranks… the nursemaid nevertheless gets her into a gown. Juliet stands before a mirror and sees a young woman. She briefly muses, and then dashes out.” Montagues and Capulets: a ponderous dance [for the knights, perhaps in armor]; Juliet dances with Paris; return of the ponderous dance (in lighter guise, ending heavily).” Friar Lawrence: “Lawrence opens the inner doors and admits Juliet. Dressed in pure white, she embodies virginity.” Mercutio: “Mercutio’s dance, somewhat buffoonish.” Romeo and Juliet Before Parting: “Predawn haziness. Romeo and Juliet behind the bed curtain… Romeo and Juliet’s farewell before their parting… At the end of the number Romeo departs.] Juliet alone with her hourglass: the death theme. [Dance with the poison: “I drink for you, Romeo!”]
The final piece, Romeo and Juliet Before Parting, is a stunning tone-poem made up of Romeo and Juliet’s most moving love melodies and tragic end. The balletic, acrobatic movement on stage is reflected in the physicality of the piano-writing, and these heroes and icons of the stage come to life through lyrical movement.
No composer in Classical music is more associated with the “heroic” style than Ludwig van Beethoven. His art and career are so pored over by history that they are divided into three periods, relevant to his predecessors, his contemporaries, and those that followed in his shadow. The middle period is called the “heroic,” lasting from about 1802 - 1812 and including such works as the Third and Fifth symphonies, major piano sonatas such as the Appassionata and Waldstein, the Violin Concerto, and many other staples of the repertoire. His works became much larger in scope, and connected to political currents of the day.
The Variations and Fugue in E-flat major, op.35, written in 1802, are usually called “Eroica” Variations, because they share the same theme and bass line with the finale of the “Eroica” Symphony, no.3. However Beethoven himself had become obsessed with that melody/bass combination in 1800, and used it first in a Contredanse for small chamber ensemble. In 1801, he used it again, as the finale for his ballet Creatures of Prometheus. The Third Symphony came in 1803 - and Beethoven himself called the 1802 Variations the Prometheus Variations.
While the symbolic hero of the Third Symphony was originally Napoleon - when he declared himself Emperor, Beethoven scratched his name out so violently it tore the page - the hero of the Variations should be seen as Prometheus. But this Prometheus was re-invented by the times - the secret fire was not flame itself, but “science and art,” which “imparted to people morals.” Beethoven himself wrote:
“Only art and science can raise men to the Godhead.”
In the ballet, Prometheus carves men and women out of stone, and brings them to life. They lack a spirit and ethics, so he teaches them the arts in order to fully humanize them. This plot line might be reflected in the very beginning of the piano Variations: after a grand opening chord, the bass line is heard, naked, with no melody, as if carved into stone:
Then gradually the music comes to life, as over the course of three repetitions Beethoven adds one voice (a due), then another (a tre), and another (a quattro) before we get to the theme proper. Finally, the creatures have come alive, into the dance. There are 15 proper Variations, lyrical, virtuoso and predominantly comic, ending with a grand Largo, one of the florid, tender, Romantic slow movements Beethoven could spin out so beautifully. The Largo disintegrates into a strange moment, a G major chord rippling in the lowest register, swelling in volume and disappearing again, into a complete stop. (A similar effect would be used much later in his op.110 Piano Sonata).
Then out of nowhere, “science:” a large fugue on the bass line. Long considered the domain of “learnéd” musicians, fugues were used in the Classical times to give works a weighty, philosophical tone. Beethoven employs some of the traditional extended techniques of Fugue, including inversion and diminution, and even introduces the Theme as a kind of countersubject.
But that still is not the end - after reaching a huge climax, there is one more trick up his sleeve: a Coda, re-capping the Theme proper, and building in intensity as the Theme is subverted and literally becomes the bass line. (This too happens in the finale to the Third Symphony, when the French horns blast out the theme late in the movement). It is one of Beethoven’s most thrilling, satisfying endings, and that says a lot. The Prometheus Variations were conceived on an entirely new scale, and Beethoven knew it. He wrote to his publisher,
“I have composed two sets of variations... both sets are worked in quite a new manner, and each in a separate and different way... Usually I have to wait for other people to tell me when I have new ideas. but this time - I myself can assure you that in both these works the method is quite new...”
Beethoven lived his entire life with severe chronic health problems, not the least of which was his encroaching deafness that he had to live with for the final twenty years of his life. He composed during revolutionary upheaval, turmoil and constant change in society. He is a symbol of perseverance, dedication and triumph over all odds, and it is fitting that in these days, and the year of his 250th birthday, we can gather together to celebrate his music.