Karol Szymanowski is one of Poland’s national treasures, a worthy successor to Chopin and a beacon to the generation of modernist composers who came of age after World War II. In his best-known works—including the opera King Roger, the Third Symphony (“The Song of the Night”), two violin concertos, Mythes for violin and piano, and dozens of songs—Szymanowski coupled a strong lyrical sensibility with an impressive stylistic range. The pronounced strain of German Romanticism in his early music gave way to a colorfully impressionistic idiom nourished by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin, and later to a knottier, more “nationalistic” style influenced by Bartók, Stravinsky, and Janáček.

The Op. 36 Sonata dates from Szymanowski’s period of “splendid isolation” during World War I. Exempted from military service as a result of a leg injury, he sequestered himself on his aristocratic family’s ancestral estate at Tymoszówka in Ukraine. “It is best to tear oneself forcefully from all the horrors of war,” he observed philosophically, “because there is nothing man can do about it anyway.” Free to devote himself single-mindedly to his music, Szymanowski produced a cornucopia of works that enriched the language of French impressionism with an innovative vocabulary of avant-garde harmonies and sonorities. His piano music from these fertile years ranges from Metopes, a triptych of Debussyesque piano miniatures inspired by the mythology and landscape of ancient Greece, to the massive, single-movement Sonata No. 3 of 1917, a formidably virtuosic work poised on the cusp between tonality and atonality that testifies both to the composer’s stylistic adventurousness and to his prowess as a concert pianist.

Like Prokofiev’s Third Piano Sonata, another one-movement work dating from the same year, Szymanowski’s last major piano piece is a volatile blend of serenity and tempestuousness. (The two composers met in Russia during the war through their mutual friend, the Polish violinist Paul Kochanski, and discovered a commonality of musical interests.) Although Szymanowski dispensed with the conventional four-movement structure of the generic Romantic-era sonata, his Third Sonata is divided into four roughly analogous sections. The opening Presto juxtaposes two themes of contrasting characters: one delicate and flighty, a sharply etched mosaic of darting arabesques and arpeggios, the other weightier, more sedate, and predominantly chordal. The tightly packed chromatic harmonies of the ensuing Adagio, marked “mesto” (sad), anticipate the twelve-tone music that Schoenberg would introduce a few years later. A short, scherzo-like transitional section leads to the “finale,” a vigorous four-voice fugue that incorporates the second theme from the Sonata’s opening section—a nod to the rounded, “cyclical” forms that Bartók and other composers were experimenting with around this time. Szymanowski dedicated the Sonata No. 3 to the great Russian pianist and conductor Alexander Siloti, whose plans to lead premieres of the Polish composer’s First Violin Concerto and Third Symphony in St. Petersburg were thwarted by the Russian Revolution.

© 2021 Harry Haskell

At once radical and traditionalist, Debussy rebelled against the French Wagner cult and the ponderous academic style of establishment composers like Saint-Saëns and d’Indy. Instead, he urged his fellow composers to cultivate the “pure French tradition” epitomized by Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose operas Debussy was instrumental in reviving in the early 1900s. “For a long time, and for no apparent reason, Rameau remained almost completely forgotten,” he wrote in an appreciation that revealed just how closely he identified with the Baroque master. “His charm, his finely wrought forms—all these were replaced by a way of writing music concerned only with dramatic effect. . . . Rameau’s major contribution to music was that he knew how to find ‘sensibility’ within the harmony itself; and that he succeeded in capturing effects of color and certain nuances that, before his time, musicians had not clearly understood.”

Debussy might have been referring to himself. He first made his mark in the early 1890s with a series of boldly unconventional and quintessentially gallic masterpieces, such as the emotionally turbulent String Quartet; La damoiselle élue (The Blessed Damozel), a Wagnerian “lyric poem” for women’s voices and orchestra; and his revolutionary masterpiece Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”). By the time Debussy published his first book of Images for solo piano in 1905, the composer and his aesthetic principles—loosely subsumed under the rubric “Debussyism”—had garnered praise and censure in equal measure. Together with his symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s pathbreaking piano and orchestral pieces came to define musical impressionism in the popular mind. Although critics persistently associated him with painters like Manet and Whistler, he maintained that his music depicted not superficial impressions but essential “realities.” Musicians alone, he declared, enjoyed “the privilege of being able to convey all the poetry of the night and the day,” whereas painters could “recapture only one of her aspects at a time.”

Published in 1901, Pour le piano (For the Piano) inaugurated a decade that saw the creation of Debussy’s most iconic keyboard works, including two sets of Images, Estampes, and the first book of Préludes. At once ultramodern and historically evocative, the three pieces that comprise Debussy’s mini-suite pay homage to his Baroque predecessors. The opening Prélude, true to its eighteenth-century models, is a bravura essay in rippling scales, arpeggios, tremolos, and glissandos, punctuated by deep, gonglike sounds in the bass. The melody moves from the left hand to the right, and the Prélude culminates in a swirling, freely measured cadenza. Although the title of the ensuing Sarabande alludes to a Baroque dance, Debussy’s point of departure seems to have been visual: he likened his music to “an old painting in the Louvre” and instructed that it be played “avec une élégance grave et lente” (with a slow, solemn elegance). Pour le piano ends with a characteristically propulsive Toccata, a nonstop torrent of sixteenth notes in supple, ever-changing patterns that highlight the novel sonorities and resonances Debussy coaxed from the piano.

© 2021 Harry Haskell

“Sitting at the piano, he proceeded to reveal to us wondrous regions. We were drawn into circles of ever deeper enchantment. His playing, too, was full of genius, and transformed the piano into an orchestra of wailing and jubilant voices. There were sonatas, rather veiled symphonies—songs, whose poetry one would understand without knowing the words . . . single pianoforte pieces, partly demoniacal, of the most graceful form—then sonatas for violin and piano—quartets for strings—and every one so different from the rest that each seemed to flow from a separate source.” Thus did Robert Schumann introduce the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms to the world in a famous article published in Europe’s leading music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, on October 28, 1853. Brahms had been the Schumanns’ house guest ever since he arrived in Düsseldorf four weeks earlier, and Schumann’s initial estimate of his visitor had been amply confirmed. “You and I understand each other,” the older man had remarked after listening to Brahms play his early piano music, including the first two sonatas, in C major and F-sharp minor.

Brahms may also have taken that opportunity to audition the second and fourth movements of his sonata in progress, No. 3. In any event, the other three movements of the F-minor Sonata were speedily drafted during the month Brahms spent under Robert and Clara Schumann’s roof, and on November 2 he performed the entire work for his captivated hosts. After leaving Düsseldorf, he continued to tinker with the sonata virtually up to the time the printed score appeared in early 1854. Schumann was instrumental in bringing his protegé to the attention of publishers in Germany and Austria. Shortly thereafter, the elder composer began his tragic descent into madness and death. With characteristic magnanimity, he declared that he had seen the future of music and his name was Brahms.

From the thunderous opening of the Allegro maestoso, with its massive symphonic textures, to the rolled major-key chords that bring the sonata to a majestic close, Brahms’s Op. 5 is a work of breathtaking confidence and maturity. As Schumann observed, it was as if the young and still unknown composer had sprung forth “like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove.” The Sonata in F minor is conceived on a grand scale, and although much of the writing is tailored for Brahms’s exceptionally large hands, equally many passages call for great delicacy and tenderness. The two slow movements, in particular, show Brahms at his most poetic. (The Andante bears an epigraph from the German Romantic poet Christian Sternau that begins, “Dusk is falling and the moonlight shines . . . .”) In the Finale, Brahms further endeared himself to his host by incorporating the motto f-a-e, standing for “Frei aber einsam” (Free but lonely), the cri de coeur embraced by Schumann and his circle of musical progressives.

© 2021 Harry Haskell