Stephen Hough - Program and Notes

Program Notes

□   BEETHOVEN
Sonata in C-sharp Minor, op. 27, no. 2 “Moonlight”
     Piano Sonata Number 14, popularly known as the “Moonlight” Sonata (Mondscheinsonate in German), was completed by Beethoven in Hungary in the summer of 1801, during the early stages of his deafness, and was published in 1802. It was dedicated to one of his pupils, 17-year-old Countess Giulietta Guicciardi.  Shortly after their first few lessons, the two fell in love.  After dedicating the “Moonlight” Sonata, it is believed that Beethoven proposed to her. Although she was willing to accept, forbiddance by one of her parents prevented her from marrying him. The Countess later wed Count Gallenberg.  Beethoven was never married.
    The name “Moonlight” Sonata was coined some years after Beethoven's death. In 1832, German poet and music critic Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Rellstab thought that the first movement reminded him of how the moonlight reflected off Lake Lucerne, in Switzerland.  “Moonlight” Sonata has since been the “official unofficial” name.
    Beethoven included the phrase "Quasi una fantasia" (Italian: “Almost a fantasy”) in the title partly because the sonata does not follow the traditional movement arrangement of fast-slow-[fast]-fast. Instead, the “Moonlight” sonata possesses an end-weighted trajectory, with the rapid music held off until the third movement. To be sure, the deviation from traditional sonata form is intentional. In his analysis of the sonata, German critic Paul Bekker states that: “The traditional opening sonata-allegro movement would give a work a definite character from the beginning... which succeeding movements could supplement but not change. Beethoven rebelled against this determinative quality in the first movement. He wanted a prelude, an introduction, not a proposition.”
    The first movement, in C-sharp Minor, is written in an approximate truncated sonata form. The movement opens with an octave in the left hand and a triplet figuration in the right. A melody that Hector Berlioz called a "lamentation," mostly by the right hand, is played against an accompanying ostinato triplet rhythm, simultaneously played by the right hand. The movement is played pianissimo or "very quietly," and the loudest it gets is mezzo forte or "moderately loud."  The movement has made a powerful impression on many listeners.   For instance, Berlioz said of it that it "is one of those poems that human language does not know how to qualify.”  The work was very popular in Beethoven's day, to the point of exasperating the composer, who remarked to Carl Czerny: "Surely I've written better things."
    The second movement is in the form of a scherzo (a comic composition, usually fast-moving and used in the place of a minuet and trio during Beethoven’s time). The key of the second movement is D-flat Major, which is unrelated to the overall key.
    The stormy final movement, in sonata form, is the weightiest of the three, reflecting an experiment of Beethoven's (also carried out in the companion sonata, opus 27, no. 1, and later in opus 101), namely placement of the most important movement of the sonata last. Beethoven's heavy use of sforzando notes, together with just a few strategically located fortissimo passages, creates the sense of a very powerful sound in spite of the predominance of piano markings throughout. Within this turbulent sonata-allegro there are two main themes, using a range of variation techniques.
    This sonata has always enjoyed enormous popularity and, therefore, has also undergone the indignity of various arrangements -- including, in 1835, a concert performance in which the first movement was played by an orchestra, and the following two by Liszt.  Additionally, the “Moonlight” Sonata is often chosen for  suspenseful or emotional scenes in movies and television:
    --In the 1990 movie Misery, based on the Stephen King novel, the first movement is played during the disturbing scene in which Annie Wilkes breaks Paul Sheldon's feet with a sledgehammer.
    --The first movement also figures into the first Resident Evil video game.
    --In the children's cartoon The Smurfs, the third movement is frequently played during dramatic parts of the story.
    --The Beatles' song “Because,” from their 1969 album Abbey Road, is based on the “Moonlight” sonata.  John Lennon got the inspiration when listening to his wife, Yoko Ono, play the first movement on the piano.  He asked her to play the chords backwards, which she did. He then wrote “Because” based on those backward chords.

□   JANÁČEK
Sonata  1. X. 1905 “Von der Strasse”    Janáček was born in Hukvaldy in Moravia (present-day Czech Republic) in 1854. As a boy he became a chorister at the Augustinian “Queen’s” Monastery in Brno. From his education in Brno (including running the choir at the monastery) he went on to study at the Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna conservatories.
    In 1881 he founded a college of organists at Brno, which he directed until 1920, the year he and Zdenka Schulzová were married. In Brno he established a foundation for musical education, with violin and singing classes, an orchestra, and later piano classes.
    When the Provisional Czech Theatre opened in Brno in 1884, Janáček founded Hudební listy, a review-based journal, through which we can now understand and appreciate many of his feelings about the work of his contemporaries. His relationships with others were not easy, and he not only resigned from the Gymnasium (where he also taught), but separated from his wife for a couple of years after the birth of their first child, Olga, in 1882. Throughout his life, domestic fireworks are seen as two themes which influenced him profoundly: a sense of place, and a sense of those whom he loved and who loved him.
    Compositions for piano account for a narrow band in the works of Leoš Janáček, yet they are among the most characteristic pieces he wrote.   As musicologist Knut Franke puts it, Janáček’s piano works give us “a glimpse into the development of a creative mind of one who was born in the countryside, loved nature, had a highly developed understanding of social problems and injustice, and remained to a great extent true to himself and his origins.”
    Sonata 1. X. 1905 “Z ulice” (“From the Street”) is based on a political occurrence of the times. Czech citizens had demonstrated in Bruenn (now Brno) to have the university hold courses in the Czech language. The Germans living there feared a loss of influence in the city. Ensuing clashes with police led to the death of a young carpenter, Frantisek Pavlak.
    This was a severe blow to Janáček’s deeply felt patriotism, and he determined to write a tribute to the man. The sonata originally had three movements. However, Janáček  obliterated the concluding Funeral March. Later he threw the entire work into the Vltava River.  Nonetheless, the two movements survived. Both are in the key of E-flat minor, which has been associated with the idea of death since the time of Bach. The first movement, Presentiment, is in sonata form. In the second, entitled Death, Janáček returns to the lead motif of the first movement and adapts it to the character of a funeral march. The movement wanes to a pianissimo close.

□  SCRIABIN
    Born in Moscow in 1872, Scriabin studied piano from an early age, taking lessons with Nikolay Zverev who was teaching Sergei Rachmaninoff at the same time. He later studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Anton Arensky, Sergey Taneyev, and Safonov. He became a noted pianist despite his small hands, which had a span of barely over an octave.
    Many of Scriabin's compositions are written for the piano; the earliest pieces resemble those of Frédéric Chopin and include many musical forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the étude, the prelude, and the mazurka. Later works, however, are strikingly original, employing very unusual harmonies and textures.
    Composers of the Romantic period were somewhat apprehensive of composing piano sonatas, thinking there was little left to be said after the monumental achievement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32.  Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, and Schumann were each satisfied with just one or two major statements in this genre before moving on to different forms. In this aspect, Scriabin, who lived from 1872-1915 and composed sonatas throughout his life, stood apart as perhaps the most important composer of piano sonatas after Beethoven.
    Scriabin’s ten sonatas were highly personal works, as they were his only large-scale compositions besides symphonies. He infused his sonatas with extensive symbolism and programmatic elements about his personal philosophy on life and the supernatural. Through his sonatas, one can trace his development as a composer as well as his evolving personal worldview. The shifts in his personal philosophy can be seen from his meditation on religion in the First Sonata, to the influence of Nietzsche in the Third Sonata, and the Messianic visions of the Seventh Sonata (the “White Mass”). The changes in his compositional style are especially noticeable after the Fourth Sonata, as his harmonic language became more atonal, and as his experiments with form and motivic unity in the earlier sonatas came to fruition, with a deliberate shift in the direction of a single-movement mold.
    Sonata no. 4, op. 30 in F-sharp Major was written in 1903 and is the shortest of Scriabin's sonatas. It is written in a post-Romantic style, similar to the composer’s other works of the time, and the mood could be described as erotic. The Fourth Sonata is divided into two closely related movements, both cast in the warm, radiant key of F-sharp Major.
    The opening bars of the first movement contain virtually all the thematic material used in the entire piece, particularly in terms of the melodic shape and the chromatic voice-leading of the ambiguous, swooning harmonies. The mood here is languorous and mysterious, with ravishing textures that encapsulate the beauty of the cosmos and an underlying sense of unfulfilled desire.
    The second movement is volatile and airborne, darting and dancing with breathless excitement. Scriabin himself described it as a “flight at the speed of light, straight towards the sun, into the sun!” The final appearance of the opening theme at the end of the second movement quakes with unbridled ecstasy and jubilation, bringing the sonata to a spectacular close.
    This sonata has an affixed poem, written by Scriabin himself, describing the contemplation of a distant star, the journey towards it, and the eventual free fall into its core. The poem suggests that Scriabin conceived this two-movement sonata as an effectively single-movement work, with the first movement functioning as a prelude to the sonata-form second movement.
    The extra-musical religious ideas, which became an increasing obsession in Scriabin's last years, have tended to overshadow the composer's music and even to alienate more than a few listeners. The Fourth Piano Sonata was written at a time of transition for Scriabin: musically, he was moving ever closer toward real atonality, while his personal life was marked by the deepening complexity of his theophilosophical ponderings.
   Sonata no. 5, op. 53, written in 1907, marks the end of Scriabin’s Romantic period and the beginning of his atonal period. The piece consists of five themes, which intertwine and evolve throughout: the intense, dissonant trill and glissando in the opening; a slow, languishing introductory theme; a dance-like presto based on material from the languishing theme and serving as the first subject group; a transition marked imperioso; and a meno vivo that serves as the second subject group. The music changes rapidly between tender, delicate moments and segments of joyous energy, each section combined and finally ending with an ecstatic, ascending harp-like gesture recapitulating similar material from the opening.
    Scriabin included an epigraph to this sonata, taken from his long poetic work “The Poem of Ecstasy” (not to be confused with his Symphony no. 4, op. 54,"Poem of Ecstasy”).  The epigraph translates as, "I summon you to life, hidden longings! You, drowned in the dark depths of the creative spirit, you fearful embryos of life, I bring you daring!"
    This is Scriabin's most-recorded sonata. The legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter has described it as the most difficult piece in the entire piano repertory (along with Liszt's first Mephisto Waltz).

□   LISZT
Sonata in B Minor
    Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor, S.178, was composed in 1852-3 and  published in 1854. It is arguably his finest composition and one of the greatest piano sonatas ever written. It was dedicated to Robert Schumann in return for Schumann's dedication of his Fantasia in C, op.17 (1836) to Liszt.
     At this point in his life, Liszt’s career as a traveling virtuoso had almost entirely subsided. He had been influenced, almost five years earlier by Carolyne zu Sayn-