About the Composer

A contemporary of J. S. Bach and Vivaldi, Rameau was the outstanding figure in early 18th-century French music. In his lifetime, he was equally renowned as a composer and music theorist, but his claim to immortality rests chiefly on the operas he wrote in his last three decades. The first, Hippolyte et Aricie, was composed at age 50, and the last, Les Boréades, when he was nearly 80. In the intervening years, Rameau virtually defined the genres of the tragédie lyrique and opéra-ballet with such masterpieces as Castor et Pollux, Platée and Les Indes galantes.

About the Work

Rameau’s late-life focus on dramatic music set him apart from his senior contemporary François Couperin, who wrote no fewer than 27 suites for solo harpsichord. After Rameau published his first album of harpsichord pieces in 1706, he waited almost two decades to bring out a sequel. By the time his third and final collection – the Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin – appeared at the end of the 1720s, he was preparing to make a career pivot to the opera house. Indeed, he recycled many of his harpsichord pieces in his later operas; the graceful Sarabande from the A-Minor Suite, for instance, makes an encore appearance in Zoroastre (1749), accompanying a “ballet figuré” (a kind of dance-pantomime) of a markedly supernatural character. The supple lyricism and refinement of Rameau’s suite are hallmarks of the French Baroque style, as is the delicate ornamentation that subtly enhances the music’s expressive power.

A Closer Listen

The Suite in A Minor is a mixture of traditional dances and genre (or character) pieces of the sort then coming into vogue. It opens with a ruminative, intricately contrapuntal Allemande and a sprightly Courante, whose somber tonality contrasts with the uncomplicated, major-key radiance of the Sarabande. “Les trois mains” features tricky hand-crossings (hence the “three hands” in the title) and bravura glissandi, or slides, while “Fanfarinette” – apparently alluding to the French word for braggart – wears its swagger more lightly. The celebratory A major of “La triomphante” gives way to a stately Gavotte in A minor, which in turn is followed by six increasingly virtuosic doubles, or variations.

About the Composer 

In the early 1780s, Mozart was the toast of Vienna, having left the employ of Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg – and escaped the jurisdiction of his domineering father – to become a freelance pianist and composer. One of his first appearances was a command performance at the imperial palace with his archrival Muzio Clementi. Although Mozart considered the Italian a mere technician with “not a farthing’s worth of feeling,” tradition has it that Clementi emerged from the competition as Mozart’s peer. At least one eminent judge dissented, however; “Clementi’s way of playing is art alone,” Emperor Joseph II told the composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. “Mozart’s is art and taste.”

About the Work 

The celebrated pianistic “duel” with Clementi burnished Mozart’s reputation as a keyboard virtuoso. Buoyed by his success, he decided to take a break from writing operas and turn his attention to the more lucrative genre of the piano concerto. During the last decade of his life, he composed no fewer than 17, as well as a wide array of solo keyboard music that ranged from multi-movement sonatas to rondos, fantasies, fugues, and other stand-alone pieces. The genial Sonata in F Major dates from 1783, a time when Mozart’s hectic schedule left little time for composing. “The whole morning is taken up with pupils,” he complained to his father, “and almost every evening I have to play. Well, haven’t I enough to do?”

A Closer Listen 

Mozart’s music has the gift of being simple without sacrificing subtlety, sophistication, or the ability to surprise the listener. The first movement of the F-Major Sonata – which may have been written for one of the composer’s Viennese students – epitomizes simplicity itself. Written mainly in transparent two-voice texture, it opens with three four-bar phrases that trace an octave-wide arc beginning and ending on the tonic F. The idyllic mood is interrupted by a dramatic modulation to D minor, and the rest of the Allegro alternates between agitation and repose. In the Adagio, a tenderly affecting melody, embellished by turns, grace notes, trills, and syncopations, floats serenely above a rocking Alberti bass. Only in the triple-time Allegro assai, with its racing torrents of 16th notes and interlocking figurations, does Mozart give his virtuosity free rein.

About the Composer 

Even by Mendelssohn’s usual standards of hyperactivity, the early 1840s was a phenomenally busy time. Still in his mid-30s, he was one of the most eminent and widely admired musicians in Europe. The demand for his services as composer, pianist, conductor, and administrator was unrelenting. In addition to his regular duties as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus—which involved organizing subscription programs a year during the winter season, as well as a series of chamber concerts—he was commuting to Berlin, where King Friedrich Wilhelm IV had appointed him general music director of the Prussian court, with special responsibility for the performance of sacred music.

About the Work

In 1841, a Viennese publisher invited Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and seven other composers to contribute to an anthology of piano music intended as a fundraiser for a monument to Beethoven in Berlin. Mendelssohn set to work with gusto, telling a friend that he took such “divine pleasure” in composing his Op. 54 that he immediately produced two more pieces in variation form. The Variations sérieuses are indeed “serious” by comparison with the ear-tickling fare commonly heard in European salons of the day. After presenting the somber, somewhat lugubrious theme in D minor, Mendelssohn gets straight down to business, leading us through a series of 17 intricately wrought and richly imaginative variations that range widely in mood, character, and compositional procedure. The final variation lingers on a tension-filled dominant pedal—low, rumbling in the left hand—before reaffirming the home key in a brilliant coda.

About the Composer 

In 1817, Beethoven received a six-octave Broadwood piano as a gift from the English manufacturer. Although he was likely too hard of hearing to fully appreciate the instrument’s expanded tonal and dynamic range, his keyboard music of the period—beginning with the titanic “Hammerklavier” Sonata—reveals a similar expansion of musical boundaries. Like other of Beethoven’s late works, the last four of his 32 piano sonatas juxtapose passages of great tenderness and lucidity with lacerating eruptions of raw energy and emotion. How much the composer’s loss of hearing affected his music and outlook on life is, to some degree, a matter of conjecture, but there is no mistaking the inwardness of these extraordinary works, with their radical discontinuities, far-flung tonal relationships, and bold reconfigurations of musical space and time.

About the Work 

More than a year in the making, the “Hammerklavier” was the most ambitious—and by some degree the longest—piano sonata Beethoven had ever composed. Unlike such works as the “Moonlight” and “Appassionata” sonatas, the conventional subtitle offers no clue as to the music’s distinctive character. In what seems to have been a burst of patriotic feeling, Beethoven insisted that the publisher advertise the B-flat–Major Sonata as written for the Hammerklavier, the German word for “pianoforte.” In all but name, however, the composer’s 29th sonata was radically unconventional. A notice in the Viennese press accurately described it as inaugurating “a new period in Beethoven’s keyboard works.” Uncertain of how his creation would be received in the marketplace, he encouraged his British publisher to issue the score in two separate volumes, with the freestanding finale retitled “Introduction and Fugue.”

A Closer Listen 

Beethoven signals his intention of working on an outsized scale at the outset. No sooner have a pair of mighty chordal thunderclaps fixed the listener’s attention than he switches abruptly to a lighter, more transparently lyrical mode. Sharp dynamic contrasts, sudden shift s of register and texture, and bold juxtapositions of keys are the very essence of the opening Allegro. Listen for the playful mini-fugue in the development section, which reflects Beethoven’s abiding interest in the contrapuntal techniques of Bach. The short Scherzo—with its springy, tautly wound theme and ominously roiling midsection—reinforces the sense of dynamic instability that pervades the sonata. The heart of the work is the richly introspective Adagio sostenuto, whose transcendent spirituality points the way toward Beethoven’s last piano sonatas and string quartets. After a strange, improvisatory-sounding interlude, the finale proper begins with a series of sustained trills that launch an energetic three-voice fugue. Midway through the movement, Beethoven pauses to introduce a placid second subject in quarter notes, which he proceeds to interweave with the first subject in a dazzling double fugue.

© 2024 Carnegie Hall. Reprinted with permission.