The one unsung piano sonata everyone should hear!

[chill319]

Wilhelm Berger wrote a piano sonata that distills what I find best in late 19th-century German romanticism: heroic high spirits (mvmt 1), profoundly inward spirituality (mvmt 2), and richly varied playfulness of the kind one finds in the finale of Brahms's PC 2 (mvmt 3).

[Alan Howe]

Fascinating. Have you actually heard it or did you read the score?

[ahinton]

Pourquoi?

Pourquoi pas?!

[Alan Howe]

Expliquez, s'il vous plaît!

[ahinton]

Expliquez, s'il vous plaît!

I would have thought - or at the very least hoped - that the work would "explain" itself in terms of its "must hear" qualities; it dates from around the time of the composer's fine and also rather underperformed second symphony and shares some characteristics with it.

[Alan Howe]

Well, I'm sure it does explain itself when one hears it - but for those who don't possess the piece, further explanation is usually very helpful. Thanks, then, for setting the piece in context.

[eschiss1]

Ahinton:
"it dates from around the time of the composer's fine and also rather underperformed second symphony"

Actually... erm... not really. It comes from around the time of the original version of that symphony. I'm not sure if anyone knows to what extent that symphony was revised decades later, and revision can be minor, or it can be thoroughgoing. The only published version, the only version we ever hear, is the revised version. I agree that the second sonata is rather similar, formally especially, with its fine, unstable chromatic, sort-of-Regerish and exciting first movement and the contrasting (and, I think, also exciting) finale - but the symphony has, as I recall (will listen again soon) some significant differences too that might result from that revision.

[ahinton]

Well, that's more or less what I meant, actually. The symphony was composed at around the same time as the sonata but most of the revisions were made with the help of his friend Gregorz Fitelberg (who had conducted its première) some two decades later. I do not have the precise details of the differences to hand but, according to Jim Samson (The Music of Szymanowski; Kahn & Averill, London, 1980, p.58), "most of the revisions concerned orchestration, but there were some structural changes, notably the removal of an entire variation from the second movement", to which statement he appends the footnote "Szymanowski approved Fitelberg's mnor revisions to the orchestration of the first movement but died before the other movements were completed".

[ahinton]

Well, I'm sure it does explain itself when one hears it - but for those who don't possess the piece, further explanation is usually very helpful. Thanks, then, for setting the piece in context.

Szymanowski's three piano sonatas are very different from one another in character, coming as they do from distinctly contrasting periods of his sadly all too short creative life, although the one thing that they all have in common is that they each conclude with a fugue; those of the second and third sonats have quite quirky but highly effective subjects. The first sonata is a product of the composer's early days and displays its immature clumsiness rather too obviously. The second represents a great advance on it, with its turbulent, passionate and finely wrought first movement followed by a delightfully imaginative set of variations (as in the second symphony) that then lead without a break to the fugue that ends with a massively triumphant coda; the principal influences on it are Richard Strauss, Max Reger and Joseph Marx, but his own distinct character and persona are already making their marks in ths work. The third would appear to be outside the scope of discussion here so I will refrain from further reference to it, great as it is.

[Alan Howe]

Wonderful. Thanks so much for taking the time to post that helpful description.

[ahinton]

Wonderful. Thanks so much for taking the time to post that helpful description.

You're very welcome - and I'm pleased if indeed it is found to be helpful; it's such a wonderful piece that if only I were a pianist I'd be playing it whenever and wherever I could!

[eschiss1]

Alan: Re the Berger- I asked if anyone's heard the sonata in another thread; I got no response there, either!

[Sydney Grew]

Cyril Scott's Pianoforte Sonata number one, composed in 1908; because of the utterly original irregularity of its rhythms throughout, the richness of its pan-tonal harmonies, and the extraordinarily non-Bachian fugue with which it concludes.

Of the third movement, a kind of scherzo, Eaglefield Hull wrote that "It seems to me that there is here achieved in music an adumbration of that phenomenon which Carpenter calls Cosmic Consciousness. It may be traced psychologically I think from the exhilarating effect which Beethoven and Mahler occasionally secured in their codas. But Scott carries it to a higher power. This scherzo is a wild, mad happy dance, but it is a terpsichorean expression on some higher plane than the physical. It has the same molecular atmospheric festive feeling which we feel in Debussy's Fêtes."

I am not entirely certain what Hull meant there by "molecular," but according to the O.E.D. the word can refer to "an elementary unit of behaviour such as a physiological response." And it would have been interesting had Hull indicated which codas. The last movement of Beethoven's seventh is I would say "exhilarating" throughout, so the quality specific in Hull's view to the codas appears to be something rather different.

[Dave]

I agree with you on Scott's Sonata no. I. What Leslie De'Ath did under Dutton Labs in reviving the composer's piano music is nothing short of astonishing (with consistently high level of imagination and artistry). I find myself going back to this set quite regularly.

[kvizy]

Rufinatscha's op 18 sonata in d minor. I wish I could have a look at the score ...

~K~