12 ÉTUDES FOR PIANO, NO. 1, 3, 5
Claude Debussy (b. Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, August 22, 1862; d. Paris, March 25, 1918)
Composed 1915; 15 minutes
Read the name “Debussy” and your inner ears may pick up the strains of such haunting orchestral works as La Mer or the ballet The Afternoon of a Faun. You may also immediately recall such evocative piano pieces as Clair de Lune, Girl with the Flaxen Hair, or any of the dozens of his other solos that have become staples of the pianist’s repertoire.
Debussy wrote in several musical forms—orchestral works, an opera and chamber music among them—but far and away his instrument of first choice was the piano. Even his 59 vocal mélodies contain some of his most inventive piano writing, without which the vocalist would be left with only half a song. Turning away from the German-influenced structures and harmonies of traditional music theory practices, which he had learned as a young student, Debussy infused his compositions with the harmonies and cadences of early French music, as well as the Eastern-influenced pentatonic scale and gamelan orchestra.
In 1915, Debussy’s search for new sounds led him to create a deeper exploration of his favorite keyboard instrument. A stunning pianist himself, he disdained the playing of most of his contemporaries, finding that they lacked finesse and subtlety. That year he composed a collection of 12 Études, a work of which he was uncommonly proud. “I must confess,” Debussy wrote to his publisher and friend, Jacques Durand, “that I am glad to have successfully completed a work which, I may say without vanity, will occupy a special place of its own. Apart from a question of technique, these Études will be a useful warning to pianists not to take up the music profession unless they have remarkable hands.” He added, “These Études hide a rigorous technique beneath harmonic flowers.”
Less familiar to concert audiences, and known only to the most proficient piano professionals, the Études hint of the familiar language of his earlier Impressionist compositions, while creating challenges that the term “Études” implies. Upon its publication, the 12 Études failed to engage the interest of most pianists, in France and abroad. For some decades, critics and many teachers resisted, failing to bring to Debussy’s garden the rigorous technique that would produce harmonic flowers. Only in the later 20th century did pianists begin to find its wonders.
Debussy infused each of the six works of Book I with the following specific tasks: Étude No. 1, the Study for Five Fingers, begins innocently with a familiar, polite, five-finger figure before bursting into a breathless, playful exposition. Étude No. 2, the Study in Thirds, plays with a flowing étude on that interval. Étude No. 3, based on the interval of a fourth, throws the pianist into awkward positions while relentlessly changing key, tempo and mood. No. 4 adds subtle use of the sustaining pedal to the challenge of playing in sixths. No. 5, a study in octaves, occupies the entire keyboard, with the pianist executing broad, sweeping gestures with flare and abandon. No. 6, an etude for eight digits without thumbs, features rapid scales and changing meters, a true challenge for pianists accustomed to the use of a full set of fingers.
A LITTLE SUITE FOR CHRISTMAS, 1979 A.D.
George Crumb (b. Charleston, West Virginia, October 24, 1929; d. Media, Pennsylvania, February 6, 2022)
Composed 1980; 17 minutes
In Padua, Italy, first-time visitors to the Arena Chapel—the Cappella degli Scrovegni—may have studied their guide books and reviewed the published images of the chapel’s inner decor, but none of that can truly prepare them for what they encounter. Entering the chapel, they find themselves surrounded on all four walls and the entire ceiling by frescoes painted in richly saturated colors that enchant their viewers even today, 800 years after their creation. The Italian artist Giotto, born ca. 1267, led a team of 40 assistants, painstakingly applying the fresco to create nearly 40 panels depicting The Life of the Virgin Mary, The Life of Christ and The Last Judgment. The artist and his assistants spent nearly two years at their labors and completed the work in time for the celebratory dedication of the chapel and its frescoes in 1305. Historians regularly remark that Giotto and his work mark the end of the Medieval period in art and predict the dawning and flourishing of the Renaissance era. Leaving behind the stiff, stylized depictions of the Virgin Mary and her child, for instance, Giotto created human images that breathe and bend, move and regard the world with expressive faces and figures.
Inevitably, Chapel visitors remain longer than they had planned and forgo other pleasures in order to return to this ancient sanctuary and further absorb its beauties. In 2021, UNESCO named the Cappella degli Scrovegni, with its extraordinary interior, a World Heritage Site.
The admired and celebrated American composer and performer George Crumb brought a wide-ranging curiosity and imagination to his work. His so-called “extended techniques” enlivened his compositions—playing with sound, using instruments and the human voice in new ways and unusual combinations, and especially exploring the piano to pull forth sounds from its every component, keyboard, pedals, strings, lid and insides. Mystical, theatrical and spiritual elements empower his music, and it is no wonder that visiting the Cappella degli Scrovegni inspired Crumb to express his reactions to it in musical terms.
The titles of The Little Suite’s seven movements are largely self-explanatory. Crumb has woven into this piano score, with a light touch, a bit of strumming and plucking of the strings. It remains for the listener only to picture the scenes and relish the sense of awe and reverence that George Crumb created through this musical homage.
PIANO SONATA NO. 29 IN B-FLAT MAJOR, OP. 106 “Hammerklavier”
Ludwig van Beethoven (b. Bonn, baptized December 17, 1770; d. Vienna, March 26, 1827)
Composed 1817-1818; 44 minutes
When Beethoven moved from Bonn to Vienna in 1792, the piano was still a relatively young instrument. During his lifetime, all European musical instruments underwent transformations—none more substantial than the piano. Arriving in Vienna as a renowned pianist and aspiring composer, Beethoven spent the next 35 years in a never-ending search for a piano that lived up to his expectations and to the demands of his compositions.
The pianos that Beethoven owned and played demonstrate the development of the instrument from the 1790s to the 1820s. Among his first was a “Walter,” made in Vienna by the builder Anton Walter, whose pianos were known for their powerful bass tones (rather tame, compared to today’s grand pianos), clear accents and fortissimo capabilities. Walter instruments had a “prellmechanik” action, which allowed the hammers to strike the strings directly and with immediacy. The Walter keyboards spanned fewer than six octaves (compared to a modern piano’s 7 1/2). As much as Beethoven admired the Walter pianos, he regularly enlisted the services of Nanette Stein and her husband Johann Streicher, both of them brilliant piano builders, to modify the instruments for his use.
In 1803, the French builder Sébastien Érard presented Beethoven with one of his company’s fortepianos. Although grateful for the gift, Beethoven was still restricted to a keyboard encompassing fewer than six octaves. By 1816, when Beethoven was beginning to assemble sketches for the sonatas numbers 28 and 29, keyboards had reached a width of six octaves. He still had to cope with the fact that every piano was constructed with a light wooden frame, thin piano wires, narrow keys and tiny-headed, leather-covered hammers. To the end of his life Beethoven remained frustrated with the instrument for which he wrote with such passion and understanding: “The piano is and remains an inadequate instrument,” he said the year before he died.
Historians have proposed that Beethoven and his extraordinary catalog of works can be neatly divided into three periods: Early, Middle and Late. His 16 string quartets and 32 piano sonatas thus occupy a pigeonhole convenient for identification, but into which a few of those works fail to fit comfortably. Such is the case of Beethoven’s 29th piano sonata, the “Hammerklavier.” Routinely named as the first of the composer’s “five late sonatas,” it surely stands alone: more daring, more majestic, more searching, more demanding than any piano work that came before or after. With it Beethoven wrenched open a door through which he strode boldly.
By 1817, Beethoven had begun to think about using German (instead of Italian) musical terms in his work. He instructed his publisher to entitle both sonatas, No. 28 and No. 29, “Sonate für das Hammerklavier,” the German equivalent of the Italian “pianoforte.” For reasons unknown, only the Op. 106 work retained Beethoven’s subtitle. Perhaps it is the very sound of the German word “Hammerklavier” that seems appropriate to the might and majesty of the sonata itself. Even with the frustrating limitations of his Érard piano, Beethoven knew that after nearly two years of labor, he had created an exalted work.
Besides setting the Hammerklavier Sonata apart from the other late sonatas, we might examine the wide-spread notion that this work is an example of Beethoven’s orchestral approach to his compositions for piano. Beethoven intended this work for the piano; no other instrument could do it justice. He wrote to his publisher, Artaria, that “...you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played fifty years hence!” Beethoven had also disclosed to his publisher, in reference to an earlier work, that “...whatever is difficult is also beautiful, great and good.” This sonata clearly fulfills Beethoven’s credo.
Instead of giving in to a certain intimidation in the face of such a superb creation, listeners can fruitfully approach this sonata the way the viewers of Giotto’s frescoes take in his creation, by simply opening their hearts and spirits to absorb the work’s power. Beethoven used two deceptively simple musical elements upon which to build the entire piece. Think of them as his way of creating a universe out of stardust. First, the piece opens with a B-flat Major fanfare. The repetitive rhythmic unit of a dotted quarter and an eighth note appears in every movement of the sonata—at various tempos, and in various keys, the same rhythmic cell. Second, Beethoven used the interval of a third as the basis of the harmonic structure of the entire work—again, magically appearing in many different keys, tempos and moods. These two elements, the rhythmic and the harmonic, can direct and focus our attention during the 45-minute span of this work.
Beethoven worked long and hard on this difficult composition; the performer accepts a difficult challenge in executing Beethoven’s great demands for technical and musical depth. The audience, too, has a difficult assignment: to sit with hearts and spirits open to the majesty of this creation. Remember what Beethoven said: “Whatever is difficult is also beautiful, great and good.”
— Program notes by Sandra Hyslop