NINETY-FOURTH SEASON
Sunday, June 8, 2025, at 3:00
Piano Series
VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON
J.S. BACH Prelude No. 9 in E Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 854
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 27 in E Minor, Op. 90
With liveliness and with feeling and expression throughout To be performed not too quickly and very songfully
J.S. BACH Partita No. 6 in E Minor, BWV 830
Toccata
Allemande
Courante
Air
Sarabande
Tempo di gavotta
Gigue
SCHUBERT Sonata in E Minor, D. 566
Moderato
Allegretto
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109
Vivace, ma non troppo. Sempre legato—
Adagio espressivo—
Prestissimo
Tema: Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo—
Variazioni 1–6
There will be no intermission.
This performance is generously sponsored by the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Fund for the Canon.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
This performance is generously sponsored by the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Fund for the Canon.
COMMENTS
by Richard E. Rodda
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born March 21, 1685; Eisenach, Germany
Died July 28, 1750; Leipzig, Germany
Prelude No. 9 in E Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 854
COMPOSED around 1720
“For the use and profit of the musical youth desirous for learning, as well as for the pleasure of those already skilled in this study” was the heading on the manuscript of the twenty-four preludes and fugues that Bach composed during his tenure as music director at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen from 1717 to 1723. The pieces were originally intended as study material for his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, and he made a copy of the volume for each of them (Friedemann was thirteen in 1723; Emanuel was nine), but he also used Das Wohltemperierte Klavier The Well-Tempered Clavier—as teaching material for his students when he joined the faculty of the Thomasschule in Leipzig after leaving Cöthen. Between 1739 and 1744, Bach created a second set of twenty-four such pieces for his youngest child, Johann Christian (born in 1735). Each of the two books of The
Well-Tempered Clavier comprises twenty-four paired preludes and fugues, one in each of the major and minor keys, arranged in ascending order (C major, C minor, C-sharp major, C-sharp minor, etc.). The Prelude no. 9 in E major from book 1, BWV 854, is in the easily flowing style of a pastorale.
from top: Johann Sebastian Bach, circa 1720, from the painting by Johann Jakob Ihle in the Bach Museum, Eisenach, Germany | Oil portrait of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen (1694–1728), Bach’s employer during his years at Cöthen. Cöthen Castle Collection, Germany
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
Sonata No. 27 in E Minor, Op. 90
COMPOSED 1814
The E minor sonata was composed in the late summer of 1814, between the revival of Fidelio in May and the convening of the Congress of Vienna in September. The work was dedicated to Count Moritz Lichnowsky, younger brother of Prince Karl Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s first Viennese patron, and seems to have been occasioned by the count’s engagement to one Fräulein Stummer, a singer at the court theater. (The noble Lichnowsky family disapproved of this match with a mere thespian, however, and it took Moritz two more years to bring about the marriage.)
Beethoven cast the sonata in two contrasting and fully satisfying movements, which, he wrote to the count, depict “a struggle between head and heart” and “a conversation with the beloved.” Perhaps so. But, more significantly, the unconventional two-movement form, juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy, harmonic originality, fluency and cogency of thematic development, terseness of expression, lack of overt
virtuosity, poignant lyricism, seamless absorption of contrapuntal textures, and German-language performance rubrics mark this sonata as an entry point into the remarkable period of creative renewal and discovery that Beethoven enjoyed during his last decade.
The main theme group of the sonata’s opening movement (Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck—With liveliness and with feeling and expression throughout) comprises several germ cells: a broken-off, two-measure fragment that hints of a dance; a quietly flowing phrase; a bold unison motif in rising open intervals; and a downward sweeping scale. The second subject (in the darkly expressive key of B minor), more agitated because of its broken-chord accompaniment, shadows the open-interval motif of the main theme but in inversion. The development section superimposes variants of the first two motifs of the main theme upon the broken-chord accompaniment of the second, before a full recapitulation of the exposition’s materials brings formal balance and expressive closure to the movement. The second movement is headed Nicht zu geschwind und sehr
above: Ludwig van Beethoven, copper engraving by Blasius Höfel (1792–1863) after a drawing by LouisRené Letronne (1790–1842), 1814
singbar vorgetragen (To be performed not too quickly and very songfully), and Hans von Bülow, the eminent nineteenth-century pianist, conductor, and editor of Beethoven’s sonatas, thought that this poetic music perfectly
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
balanced the “prose” of the opening movement. The movement is a rondo structured around what British composer and musicologist Sir Hubert Parry described as “the frequent and desirable returns of a melody of great beauty.”
Partita No. 6 in E Minor, BWV 830
COMPOSED around 1730
Much of Bach’s early activity after arriving in Leipzig in 1723 was carried out under the shadow of the memory of his predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, a respected musician and scholar who had published masterly translations of Greek and Hebrew, practiced as a lawyer in the city, and won wide fame for his keyboard music. In 1726, probably the earliest date allowed by the enormous demands of his official position for new sacred vocal music, Bach began a series of keyboard suites that were apparently intended to compete with those of Kuhnau. In addition to helping establish his reputation in Leipzig, these pieces would also provide useful teaching material for the private students he was beginning to draw from among the university’s scholars, who were less
hampered by bureaucratic exigencies than their superiors in recognizing Bach’s genius. (Several of his secular cantatas were written for commissions from the university students.)
The Partita no. 1 in B-flat major, BWV 825, issued in 1726, was the first of his compositions to be published, with the exception of two cantatas written during his short tenure in Mühlhausen many years before (1707–08). Bach funded the venture himself, and he even engraved the plates (to save money) with the help of his teenage son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was then learning that exacting craft. Bach published an additional partita every year or so until 1731, when he gathered together the six works and issued them collectively in a volume titled Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice), a term he borrowed from the name of Kuhnau’s keyboard suites published in 1689 and 1692. The partitas of what became part 1 of the ClavierÜbung were well received, and Bach
above: Johann Sebastian Bach, holding a copy of the six-part canon, BWV 1076. Portrait in oil by Elias Gottlob Haussmann (1695–1774), 1748. Bach-Archiv, Leipzig, Germany
COMMENTS
continued the series with three further volumes of vastly different nature: part 2 (1735) contains the Italian Concerto, the ultimate keyboard realization of that quintessential baroque orchestral form, and an Overture in the French Manner; part 3 (1739), for organ, the Catechism Chorale Preludes, several short canonic pieces and the St. Anne Prelude and Fugue; and part 4 (1742), the incomparable Goldberg Variations.
The Partita no. 6 in E minor is one of Bach’s most introspective keyboard compositions. It opens with an unusual toccata, a form that typically admits only free, quasi-improvisatory figural
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Born January 31, 1797; Vienna, Austria
Died November 19, 1828; Vienna, Austria
Sonata in E Minor, D. 566
In June 1816, when he was nineteen, Schubert received his first fee for one of his compositions (a now-lost cantata for the name day of his teacher, Heinrich Watteroth) and decided that he had sufficient reason to leave his irksome teaching post at his father’s suburban school in order to
work (as is heard in the first and last sections), but here expanded to incorporate a vast fugue as the central argument of the movement. The following allemande is deeply expressive and richly decorated. The courante is built around a precisely controlled chain of nervous rhythmic syncopations, and the brief air is a moto perpetuo piece rooted in largely scalar figurations. Next comes a sarabande whose elaborate melodic filigrees temper its essentially tragic nature. Two fast movements close the E minor partita: a gavotta of vigorous rhythmic energy and a gigue in imitative style.
follow the life of an artist in the city. By the end of the year, he had finished two symphonies, a cantata in honor of the sixty-sixth birthday of his counterpoint teacher Antonio Salieri, a Magnificat, a Stabat mater, and a large number of songs, including “Der Wanderer.” After being inspired by the so-called Rossini Fever, then sweeping Vienna to compose an Italian-style overture at the beginning of 1817 (D. 556), he turned his attention to the piano and completed three sonatas by August and made
this page: Franz Schubert, portrait by Joseph Kupelwieser (1791–1866), 1821 | opposite page: Portrait of the pianist Joseph Pembaur, oil on canvas, by Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), 1890. Tyrolean State Museum
extensive sketches for an equal number that were never finished.
Among the unfinished piano works of 1817 was the Sonata in E minor, D. 566, for which Schubert completed three movements in June. There is then no record of the piece until the manuscripts were included in the remarkable treasure of works that passed to Schubert’s brother Ferdinand following the composer’s death in 1828. Ferdinand sold the scores in 1842 to the Leipzig publisher K.F. Whistling, who never published them. By the time the first collected edition of Schubert’s works appeared in the 1880s, the editors (Johannes Brahms did the symphonies) had located only the opening movement of the E minor sonata, and included it in volume 10 (1888). In 1903 German musicologist and manuscript collector
Erich Prieger acquired the manuscripts of all three movements; Breitkopf and Härtel published the Allegretto in 1907, and the German periodical Die Musik issued the scherzo in 1928, the centenary of Schubert’s death. The first known public performance of the E minor sonata was given in Munich in October 1928 by Austrian pianist, composer, and teacher Joseph Pembaur (1875–1950). Some performers have added the Rondo in E major (D. 506), also composed in June 1817, to round out the sonata’s four-movement structure, while others perform only the first two movements, making it something of a counterpart of Beethoven’s two-movement op. 90 sonata.
The sonata-form opening movement contrasts the dark emotions and halting phrases of the main theme with a bright, lyrical second subject with a rippling accompaniment; the compact development section borrows mostly from a phrase of the second theme. The Allegretto in E major, also in sonata form, reverses the expressive narrative of the previous movement, with a fine example of Schubert’s melodic genius as the first theme and a more dramatic passage as its second. The song theme returns to close the exposition. The development section takes the dramatic gestures of the second for its material, after which the recapitulation reprises both earlier themes.
No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109
COMPOSED
Beethoven’s painful five-year court battle to secure custody of his nephew Karl from his brother Caspar’s dissolute widow (whom the composer disparaged as the “Queen of the Night”) finally came to an end early in 1820. He won but lost the boy’s affection (Karl, half crazed from his uncle’s overbearing attention, tried, unsuccessfully, to kill himself); the case also publicly exploded the composer’s pretension that he was of noble blood. Beethoven was further troubled by deteriorating health and a certain financial distress (he needed a loan from his brother Johann, a prosperous apothecary in Vienna, to tide him over that difficult time), so it is not surprising that he composed little during the period. With the resolution of his custody suit, however, he returned to creative work with a set of three piano sonatas and began anew the titanic struggle to embody his transcendent thoughts in musical tones. In no apparent hurry to dispel the rumors in gossipy Vienna that he was “written out,” he produced just one work in 1820, the
Sonata in E major, op. 109. The Sonata in A-flat was dated on Christmas Day, 1821, and his last piano sonata, the op. 111 in C minor, appeared just three weeks later. It was in his last three sonatas that Beethoven realized the essential technique—the complete fusion of sonata, variation, and fugue—that fueled the soaring masterpieces of his final period.
Beethoven composed the op. 109 sonata between May and September 1820 in the Austrian village of Mödling, south of Vienna, where he had rusticated for the two previous summers (though he had to find new lodgings that year since his landlord of 1819 refused to rent to the stone-deaf composer again because of his “noisy disturbances”). Those country residencies were times of spiritual and creative retreat for Beethoven, when, according to his amanuensis and biographer, Anton Schindler, he was “rapt away from the world.” Sketches for the sonata appear among those for the Credo and the Benedictus of the Missa solemnis, an appropriate balance of the personal and public manifestations of the transcendent visions he was seeking to embody within the creations of his last years.
The dominant emotional state of the outer movements of the E major sonata
this page: Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait in oil by Joseph Willibrord Mähler (1778–1860), 1815. Vienna Museum | opposite page: View of the countryside near Mödling, Austria, nineteenth century. Photo by De Agostini/Getty Images
is optimism and joy thrown into relief by the stormy central Prestissimo. The opening movement is the epitome of Beethoven’s distillation of the sonata principle in his late works: the two themes (the first—fast, flowing, diatonic, arpeggiated; the second—slow, ruminative, chromatic, chordal) are given in bare, economical juxtaposition, without introduction or transition. The development section is a seamless, superbly directed elaboration of the main theme that reaches its peak at the moment the recapitulation begins. The
second subject returns before the movement ends with a luminous coda built upon the principal theme. The fiery Prestissimo, which serves as the sonata’s scherzo and its emotional foil, is also in sonata form, though, unlike the opening movement, its themes are little contrasted with each other. The finale, twice the length of the first two movements combined, is an expansive set of six variations founded upon the hymnlike two-part theme presented at the outset. An ethereal restatement of the theme, virtually a benediction to the entire work, brings the sonata to a sublime close.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
