PIANO SONATA IN F-SHARP MINOR

Igor Stravinsky
(b. Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], nr. St. Petersburg, June 5/17, 1882; d. New York, April 6, 1971)

Composed 1903-4; 26 minutes

The piano was Stravinsky’s instrument; he never played another. And, since he composed at the piano throughout his life, the instrument became the springboard for virtually all his compositions. He liked to experiment in a tactile way on its keys, analyzing textures, sonorities, harmonies and so on, before putting pen to paper. He started piano lessons at nine and later took instruction from a pupil of the great Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein. But it was not piano technique in the manner of a Chopin or a Rubinstein that Stravinsky was seeking. He had no intention of using his skills at the piano as a passport to success in the salons of St. Petersburg!

“I was brought up in an atmosphere of musical achievement [his father was a leading bass-baritone at the Mariinsky Theater] and inherited a natural capacity for transmitting my feelings into music,” Stravinsky told Gramophone magazine in 1934. For Stravinsky, the piano stimulated that capacity and became the means to an end: composition, rather than concert performance. French pianist composer Jean Wiener observed Stravinsky at work early in his career: “He worked at his piano as though in a rage,” he noted. Then, to Robert Craft, Stravinsky said: “Each note that I write is tried on [the piano], and every relationship of notes is taken apart and heard on it again and again.” It becomes clear that Stravinsky the composer thought orchestrally at the piano and, conversely, quasi-orchestral sonorities can be heard in his piano music. 

His parents, meanwhile, encouraged studies in law and Stravinsky found himself at the University of St. Petersburg, while also taking private lessons in harmony (the formality of which he rebelled against) and personal exploration into counterpoint, which he relished. Through the help of a fellow law student, Vladimir, the youngest son of Rimsky-Korsakov, the independently minded Stravinsky was able to play some of his early compositions to the famous composer. In return he was counselled to avoid the Conservatoire (where Rimsky-Korsakov actually taught), continue to take private harmony and counterpoint lessons and seek advice for himself when needed, all the while continuing his law studies. By 1903, Stravinsky had begun work on what he termed a full-size sonata for piano. “I was constantly confronted by many difficulties, especially in matter of form,” he wrote in his autobiography. Two weeks of intense study with Rimsky-Korsakov must have convinced the composer to take Stravinsky, whose father had by now died, under his wing and give him three years of weekly tuition (until his own death in 1908). The Sonata in F-sharp minor was one of several compositions created under Rimsky’s guidance. Stravinsky clearly worked hard to produce a substantial work, perhaps one that he intuitively felt he had to complete in order to move on. 

The first of its four movements opens with a forceful, commanding, fortissimo theme, determined to make a big statement. Its assertive character is exploited across the full keyboard until it cools and subsides to a Chopinesque flourish. From there it blossoms into a lyrical second theme that makes you want to sing. It, too, is gradually worked into more robust treatment, with the music ebbing and flowing in intensity, using traditional harmonic relationships to generate tension. Working within the customary first movement sonata form, though on a grand scale, the return of the main theme has a triumphant feeling. A coda determinedly brings the movement to a quiet end. After the first movement rhetoric, the second movement escapes into a fleet-fingered Stravinsky version of a Mendelssohn scherzo. This Vivo is a joy. Its scherzo-like, rhythmically playful outer sections are complemented by a hymn-like central trio section. The last two movements are played without a break. The Andante is more of an agitated intermezzo than slow movement and it flows effortlessly into an Allegro finale. 

Stravinsky believed that his early Sonata had been lost – “fortunately lost” – after he left Russia in 1914. “It was, I suppose, an inept imitation of late Beethoven,” he said half a century after composing it. Unknown to Stravinsky, the work was preserved, along with other early manuscripts, across several public libraries in the USSR (modern-day Russia). The sonata survived in a manuscript belonging to its dedicatee, Nikolai Richter, who gave the première in February 1905. It was only published three years after the composer’s death in 1974.