Haydn spent most of his career in the idyllic seclusion of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy’s country estate in Hungary. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, he expended the bulk of his creative energy on satisfying his employer’s passion for opera (the prince’s musical household included a resident opera company, as well as a marionette theater), while continuing to turn out keyboard sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies on the side to meet the burgeoning popular demand for his instrumental music. After that appointment, so conducive to sustained creativity, came to an end in 1790, Haydn embarked on two extended trips to London, from which he returned to close out his days in Vienna. This late period produced some of his finest works, including the Sonata in C major.

Unlike Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven, Haydn was not a professional-caliber pianist, but he habitually composed at the keyboard and often conducted his own works from the fortepiano. His 60-odd keyboard sonatas span some three decades and offer an overview of his stylistic development during a period in which the design and technology of keyboard instruments were changing rapidly. Many of his sonatas were inspired by gifted women pianists, both amateurs and professionals, whose friendship Haydn cultivated in part to compensate for his own unfulfilling marriage. The dedicatee of the bravura C-major Sonata, Therese Bartolozzi, was a star pupil of Muzio Clementi and one of the most popular piano teachers in London during Haydn’s sojourns there in the early 1790s.

The mincing, catlike tread of the Sonata’s opening bars gives way to music of robust, almost manic energy. Rolled chords, trills and other ornaments, chains of thirds, rippling passagework, and intricate interplay between the two hands give the Allegro a bracingly virtuosic character. Listen for the mysteriously muted pedal effects in the expansive development section, inspired by the pianos Haydn encountered in London. The Adagio, with its elaborate flourishes and sweet-tempered lyricism, is conceived on a similarly majestic scale. (Haydn first published the Adagio as a freestanding piece and recycled it in this, his penultimate piano sonata.) A spitfire finale brings the work to a rousing conclusion. Built around a bouncy triple-time theme that starts and stops like a wind-up toy, it utilizes high notes that were available only on English pianos of the period.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

One of the greatest pianists and pedagogues of her time, Clara Schumann (née Wieck) didn’t gain wide recognition as a composer until nearly a century after her death in 1896. The product of an artistic household—her mother and father were both professional musicians, though they divorced when Clara was only five—she matured rapidly as an artist and made her debut in the Leipzig Gewandhaus at age 11, playing one of her own compositions. In 1840, she married Robert Schumann, who encouraged her work as a composer with the tacit understanding that his musical career took precedence over hers. As the primary breadwinner for their large family, Clara toured and gave concerts most of her life, commanding an international reputation. She set new performance standards that continue to this day, including performing recitals and concertos from memory. After Robert’s tragic death in a sanatorium in 1856, Clara composed little, leaving just 23 published works.

The brief Nocturne in F major is one of six Chopinesque character pieces that Clara Schumann composed in 1836, in the first flush of her teenage celebrity. Like most pianists of her generation, she was deeply influenced by Frédéric Chopin, whom she had heard play in Paris four years earlier as an impressionable 12-year-old. (His music would be central to her concert repertoire for the rest of her life.) Like Chopin’s nocturnes, Schumann’s is built on undulating left-hand arpeggios that delineate the shifting harmonies and provide supple rhythmic support for the right hand’s free-flowing melodies. In the middle, she varies the pattern by inserting a lively interlude based on a driving triplet rhythm.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

Carl Nielsen’s music has long been prized in his native Denmark, where he is revered as the peer of Finland’s Jean Sibelius and Norway’s Edvard Grieg, but not until the late 20th century did a wider appreciation of his six symphonies, two operas, roughly 300 songs, and other works secure his niche in the pantheon of Nordic composers. Although Nielsen composed all his music at the piano, he wrote comparatively little for the keyboard and seems to have been at best a middling pianist. One of his friends described his playing as “hopeless, generally with a vile sound—worse than his violin playing—except for his marvelous musical and artistic intentions.”

The bravura Chaconne for solo piano reflects the 50-year-old composer’s admiration for Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as his own idiosyncratic brand of modernism. In mid-December 1916, Nielsen wrote to his daughter: “I think this piece will grow strong and big over Christmas; just for now it greatly amuses me to give my fantasy free rein within these fixed periods (8 bars in a moderate ¾ meter). You must know Bach’s beautiful Chaconne for solo violin. If I could reach up to his shoulders with mine for piano!!” The initial statement of the lugubrious ground bass theme in the left hand is soon paired with a sprightlier countersubject in the right hand. Over its 10-minute span, the Chaconne traces a capricious trajectory to a thunderous, harshly dissonant climax, whereupon it slowly unwinds before dissolving in a tranquil coda amid a haze of delicately swirling passagework.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

The undisputed doyenne of Russian composers, Sofia Gubaidulina came of age during the Khrushchev “thaw” after Stalin’s death in 1953, when Soviet musicians became relatively free to explore avant-garde techniques long banned as symptoms of decadent Western “formalism.” After emigrating to Germany in 1992, she won an international following for her quasi-mystical and eclectically expressionist body of work, drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as ancient Egyptian poetry, traditional Japanese instruments and instrumental techniques, and the folk music of her native Tatar Republic. Gubaidulina’s longstanding affinity for Bach is manifest in such works as the violin concerto Offertorium, which first brought her to the attention of Western audiences in the 1980s, and the formidably virtuosic Chaconne for piano.

Written in 1962 for a fellow student at the Moscow Conservatory, the Chaconne juxtaposes thick chordal textures and densely layered blocks of sound with passages of crystalline clarity. Like its Baroque prototype, the work is structured as a set of seven continuous variations on a chord progression presented in the opening eight bars. The wide-open spacing of the initial B-minor chord illustrates Gubaidulina’s fondness for extremes of register and massive, organ-like sonorities. Although her freely dissonant harmonic language is anchored in tonality, the 23-note tone row that provides a subliminal scaffolding for the Chaconne bespeaks her openness to serial procedures. Unlike much of Gubaidulina’s music, the Chaconne has no apparent religious subtext, but some commentators have discerned a Bach-like preoccupation with Christian number symbolism in, for example, the sevenfold repetitions of the thematic B-minor chord at the end.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

Few composers are as closely identified with a single instrument as Chopin is with the piano. The 21-year-old pianist and composer took Paris by storm when he arrived from his native Poland in 1831. He threw himself into the city’s musical and social life, turning out waltzes, mazurkas, nocturnes, and other solo piano pieces by the dozen. Contemporary accounts of Chopin’s playing attest to his phenomenal powers at the keyboard. One witness marveled at his effortless arpeggios, “which swelled and diminished like waves in an ocean of sound.” Another recalled how his apparently delicate hands “would suddenly expand and cover a third of the keyboard. It was like the opening of the mouth of a serpent about to swallow a rabbit whole.”

Composed in the latter half of 1844, Chopin’s third and last piano sonata reflects his late-life interest in contrapuntal textures and extended formal designs. Although Chopin’s art was firmly grounded in tradition—Bach and Mozart were his favorite composers—his radically unconventional conception of the piano, and his unique blend of classical discipline and romantic freedom, helped pave new pathways for the instrument’s repertoire. It’s astonishing to reflect that he achieved artistic maturity less than a decade after the deaths of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert; the gulf that separates his music from theirs runs so deep that it almost marks the boundary of a separate world.

The B-minor Sonata’s opening movement is an expansive sonata-form structure built around two sharply differentiated themes, the first boldly dramatic in character, the second sweetly lyrical. Tonally, the Allegro maestoso plies a circuitous path from B minor to B major, whereupon Chopin abruptly detours to the distant key of E-flat major for the short, lighthearted Scherzo. A portentous peal of thundering octaves heralds the beginning of the Largo. In its wake arises a tranquil cantabile tune in B major that will come back in ornamented form to round the slow movement off; its gently rocking motion contrasts with the insistent patter of the cascading eighth notes in the Largo’s midsection. Chopin returns home to B minor in the Finale, embedding still more beguiling melodies in its bravura passagework.

© Harry Haskell, 2024