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

Known for his steely-fingered precision and refinement at the keyboard, Prokofiev wrote some of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and percussive keyboard music. As both pianist and composer, he cultivated a sharply etched, ironic, and occasionally acerbic style that propelled him to the forefront of the modernist movement in the years before World War I. During the conflict he tapped a more poetic vein in smaller-scale works like the delicately impressionistic Visions fugitives for solo piano. At the same time, he anticipated the clear-textured neoclassicism of 1920s in his effervescent Classical Symphony. The combination of traditional and avant-garde elements helps explain the enduring popularity of Prokofiev’s music.

Encouraged by his mother, an amateur pianist, Prokofiev started composing and playing the piano at an early age. The composer Reinhold Glière, who was engaged to tutor young Sergei at home, testified that he “played the piano with great ease and confidence,” although “his playing was careless and inaccurate, his phrasing was poor, and he paid little attention to detail.” That criticism would be echoed by his teacher at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, who judged the teenage tyro “very talented, but rather crude.” Sarcasms is a student work, written when he was gaining a reputation as an enfant terrible at the conservatory. Prokofiev polished his technique sufficiently to pass his final piano examination in 1914 with flying colors, brashly choosing to play not a standard test piece but his own First Concerto—the same work with which he made his Carnegie Hall debut four years later.

The five aptly titled Sarcasms explore a panoply of moods and musical textures, which Prokofiev juxtaposes in ways that are always unexpected and often shocking. In the Tempestoso, for instance, a barrage of pounding fifths instantly dissolves into music of a more playfully lyrical character. Each of the other four pieces follows a similarly unpredictable trajectory. The coy, start-and-stop opening of the Allegro rubato proves as deceptive as the Allegro precipitato’s driving ostinato rhythms and the ponderous, syncopated chords that open the fourth Sarcasm, marked “smanioso” (frenzied). And nothing quite prepares the listener for the stygian gloom that engulfs the final bars of the Precipitosissimo.

© 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