Program Book - Hélène Grimaud

N INET Y-THI R D SEASON Sunday, February 4, 2024, at 3:00

Piano Series HÉLÈNE GRIMAUD BEETHOVEN

Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109

BRAHMS

Three Intermezzos, Op. 117

Vivace, ma non troppo—Adagio espressivo— Prestissimo Tema: Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo— Variazioni I-VI

No. 1 in E-flat Major: Andante moderato No. 2 in B-flat Minor: Andante non troppo e con molto espressione No. 3 in C-sharp Minor: Andante con moto

INTERMISSION

BRAHMS

Seven Fantasies, Op. 116

BACH

Chaconne in D Minor, BWV 1004 (arr. Busoni)

No. 1: Capriccio in D Minor No. 2: Intermezzo in A Minor No. 3: Capriccio in G Minor No. 4: Intermezzo in E Major No. 5: Intermezzo in E Minor No. 6: Intermezzo in E Major No. 7: Capriccio in D Minor

This performance is made possible in part by a generous gift from the estate of Halina J. Presley.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria

Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109 COMPOSED

1820

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 custody 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 Piano Sonata in E major, op. 109.

The A-flat sonata (op. 110) 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 three last sonatas that Beethoven realized the essential technique—the complete fusion of sonata, variation, and fugue— that fueled the 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 Benedictus of the Missa solemnis, an appropriate balance of the personal and public manifestations of the transcendent visions he was seeking

a b o v e : Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865), 1823, commissioned by publisher Gottfried Christoph Härtel (1763–1827). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

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to embody within the creations of his last years. The sonata was published by the Berlin house of Schlesinger in November 1821 with a dedication to Maximiliane Brentano, the daughter of Franz Brentano (a Frankfurt merchant who acted as the composer’s agent with the publisher Simrock) and Antonie Brentano (whom Maynard Solomon in his study of Beethoven convincingly identified as the “Immortal Beloved”).

Beethoven wrote to Maximiliane on December 6, A dedication!!! Well, this is not one of those dedications that are used and abused by thousands of people.

It is the spirit that unites the noble and finer people of this earth and which time can never destroy. It is this spirit that now speaks to you and calls you to mind, and likewise your beloved parents—your most excellent and gifted mother, your father imbued with so many truly good and noble qualities and ever mindful of the welfare of his children. . . . The memory of a noble family can never fade in my heart. May you sometimes think of me with a feeling of kindness. My most heartfelt wishes. May heaven bless your life and the lives of all of you forever.

T

he dominant emotional state of the outer movements of the E major sonata is optimism and joy (perhaps a reflection of Beethoven’s gratitude over the court decision regarding Karl), which is 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 on 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 on 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.

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COMMENTS

JOHANNES BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria

Three Intermezzos, Op. 117 Seven Fantasies, Op. 116 COMPOSED

1892

It was Brahms’s ability as a pianist that brought him his earliest fame.

His father, Jakob, a double bass player of meager success in Hamburg, recognized the boy’s musical talents and started him with piano lessons when he was seven. Just three years later, Johannes was playing well enough to be offered a tour of America as a child prodigy, but he was instead accepted for further training (at no cost)

by Eduard Marxsen, a musician whose excellent taste and thorough discipline helped form his student’s elevated view of the art. Marxsen guided Brahms’s earliest attempts at composition and prepared him for his first public recital in Hamburg in September 1848.

Significantly, the program included a fugue by Bach. A year later, Brahms presented a second concert that featured another selection by Bach as well as Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata.

Such high-minded music-making was, however, only one aspect of Brahms’s

life when he was a budding teenage pianist; while he was studying the great classics with Marxsen, the thirteenyear-old began earning money for the always-pinched household budget by playing in what were euphemistically called “dance halls” in Hamburg’s rough dock district. This exposure to the seediest elements of city life affected the young Brahms deeply and was among the reasons he could not achieve a satisfactory relationship with any respectable woman later in his life. (He once vowed that there were two things he would never attempt: an opera and a marriage.) It is a tribute to the innate strength of his personality that he was able to absorb the amazing range of his experiences as a youth and emerge only a few years later as one of the most significant artistic figures of his time.

Brahms’s pianism was noted less for its flashy virtuosity than for its rich emotional expression, fluency, individuality, nearly orchestral sonority, and remarkable immediacy, especially in performances of his own music. The English pianist Florence May, who studied with him in the 1870s, reported,

a b o v e : Johannes Brahms, cabinet card photograph by Fritz Luckhardt (1843–1894), ca. 1885

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Brahms’s playing . . . was not [that] of a virtuoso, though he had a large amount of virtuosity (to put it mildly) at his command. He never aimed at mere effect but seemed to plunge into the innermost meaning of whatever music he happened to be interpreting, exhibiting all its details, and expressing its very depths.

Richard Specht, an intimate of Brahms during his last decade, recalled in his biography of the pianist-composer, His playing, for all its reticence, was filled with song, there was in it a searching, a gliding of light and flitting of shadows, a flaring and burning out, a restrained masculine feeling and a forgetful, romantic passion. . . . He always played as if he were alone; he forgot his public entirely, sank into himself, gained new knowledge of his own tones in re-creating them, was lost to himself.

Brahms’s compositions for solo piano are marked by the same introspection, seriousness of purpose, and deep musicality that characterized his playing.

His keyboard output, though considerable, falls into three distinct periods: an early burst of large-scale works mostly in classical forms; a flurry of imposing compositions in variations form from 1854 to 1863 on themes by Schumann, Haydn, Handel, and Paganini; and a late blossoming of thirty succinct capriccios,

intermezzos, ballades, and rhapsodies from 1878–79 and 1892–93. To these must be added the dance-inspired compositions of the late 1860s: the waltzes (op. 39) and the Hungarian Dances.

Brahms’s late works, most notably those from 1892 and 1893, share the autumnal quality that marks much of the music of his ripest maturity. “It is wonderful how he combines passion and tenderness in the smallest of spaces,” said Clara Schumann of this music. To which William Murdoch added, Brahms had begun his life as a pianist, and his first writing was only for the pianoforte. It was natural that at the end of his life, he should return to playing this friend of his youth and writing for it. This picture should be kept in mind when thinking of these last sets. They contain some of the loveliest music ever written for the pianoforte.

They are so personal, so introspective, so intimate that one feels Brahms was exposing his very self.

They are the mirror of his soul.

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rahms headed the Intermezzo in E-flat major, op. 117, no. 1, the most gentle of his piano pieces, with a German translation from Johann Gottfried Herder’s late-eighteenth-century folk-song collections of lines from an old Scottish song known as “Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament”: Schlaf sanft mein Kind, schlaf sanft und schön! Mich dauert’s sehr, dich weinen sehn. (Sleep softly, my child, sleep softly and well!

It fills me with regret to see you cry.)

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COMMENTS

The original text is generally thought to tell the sad tale of Lady Anne Bothwell, daughter of a sixteenth-century bishop of Orkney, who was seduced by a young nobleman and abandoned with an infant. The dark coloring of the intermezzo’s central episode may not only suggest the mother’s distress but might also be the sixty-year-old Brahms’s reflection on the life as husband and father he chose never to have. Brahms described the op. 117 intermezzos in a letter to a friend as “three lullabies to my sorrows,” and the somber mood of the first also pervades the two that follow. Several commentators have proposed that the Intermezzo in B-flat minor (op. 117, no. 2) found its inspiration and mood in the Herder poem associated with the preceding number in the set, though Brahms himself never said they were related in that way. The Herder verse has also been connected with the Intermezzo in C-sharp minor (op. 117, no. 3), but so has Longfellow’s 1855 poem “Victor Galbraith,” which recounts the execution by firing squad of a disgraced bugler from Middletown, Ohio, during the Mexican War of 1846–48.

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he Capriccio in D minor (1892, op. 116, no. 1), with its powerful, syncopated rhythms, jagged

contours, and chromatic harmonies, is turbulent and unsettled. The hesitant phrases of the Intermezzo in A minor (1892, op. 116, no. 2) give the music a ruminative quality that is thrown into expressive relief by the movement’s animated central episode. The tempestuous opening and closing paragraphs of the Capriccio in G minor, op. 116, no. 3 are perfectly balanced by the nobility of its middle passage. The Intermezzo in E major (op. 116, no. 4), the longest number of the op. 116 set and the one that most fully develops its thematic materials, evokes a twilight scene along a tranquil lake. The Intermezzo in E minor (op. 116, no. 5) juxtaposes contrasting musical states generated from the same two-note germ cell: one in broken phrases of ambiguous meter, the other flowing above a continuous and rhythmically secure accompaniment. The warmth and lyricism of the Intermezzo in E major (op. 116, no. 6) are reminiscent of the Liebeslieder Waltzes (1869 and 1874) as well as the folk-song arrangements Brahms made throughout his life. The Capriccio in D minor (op. 116, no. 7) is given a dramatic character by the opposition of two musical strains, one impetuous, the other pleading, before coming to a succinct but brilliant close.

o p p o s i t e pa g e : Johann Sebastian Bach, circa 1720, from the painting by Johann Jakob Ihle in the Bach Museum, Eisenach, Germany

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JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Born March 21, 1685; Eisenach, Germany Died July 28, 1750; Leipzig, Germany

Chaconne in D Minor, BWV 1004 (Arranged by Ferruccio Busoni) COMPOSED

around 1720

Though it is known that Sebastian Bach composed his three sonatas and three partitas for unaccompanied violin before 1720, the date on the manuscript, there is not a letter, preface, contemporary account, or shred of any other documentary evidence extant to shed light on the genesis and purpose of these pieces. They were written when Bach was director of music at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, north of Leipzig, and represent the pinnacle of achievement in the unaccompanied string repertoire. The greatest single movement among these works, and one of the most sublime pieces Bach ever created, is the majestic chaconne that closes the Partita no. 2 in D minor. The chaconne is an ancient variations form in which a short, repeated chord pattern is decorated with changing figurations and elaborations. Bach subjected his eight-measure theme to sixty-four continuous variations, beginning and ending in D minor but modulating in the center section to the luminous key of D major. The grandeur of vision of the chaconne has inspired several

composers to arrange it for various other musical forces. Among the most familiar of these alternate renderings is the arrangement for solo piano by the Italian German pianist-composerphilosopher Ferruccio Busoni, who not only included many works by Bach on his recitals but also edited two complete editions of that master’s keyboard music for publication.

Of the chaconne, German Bach scholar Philipp Spitta wrote, From the grave majesty of the beginning to the thirty-second notes which rush up and down like the very demons; from the tremulous arpeggios that hang almost motionless, like veiling clouds above a dark ravine . . . to the devotional beauty of the D major section, where the evening sun sets in a peaceful valley: the spirit of the master urges the instrument to incredible utterances. This chaconne is a triumph of spirit over matter such as even Bach never repeated in a more brilliant manner.

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.

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PROFILES Hélène Grimaud Piano Renaissance woman Hélène Grimaud is a deeply passionate and committed musical artist whose pianistic accomplishments play a central role in her life. Her multiple talents extend far beyond the instrument she plays with such poetic expression and technical control: Grimaud has established herself as a wildlife conservationist, human rights activist, and writer.

Highlights this season include tours in North America and Canada with a solo recital program. She performs with the London Philharmonic Orchestra across Europe and with the Luxembourg Philharmonic as part of her season-long residency with the orchestra. Grimaud also appears with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Camerata Salzburg, with which she embarks on a new artistic partnership.

Grimaud has been an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist since 2002. Her recordings have been critically acclaimed and received numerous awards, including the Cannes Classical Recording of the Year, Choc du Monde de la Musique, Diapason d’Or, Grand Prix du Disque, Record Academy Prize (Tokyo), Midem Classic Award, and the ECHO Klassik Award.

Hélène Grimaud was born in 1969 in Aix-en-Provence, southern France.

She was accepted into the Paris

P H OTO BY M AT H E N N E K

Conservatory at thirteen, winning first prize in piano performance three years later. Grimaud continued her studies with György Sándor and Leon Fleisher until 1987, when she gave her well-received debut recital in Tokyo.

That year, renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim invited Grimaud to perform with the Orchestre de Paris, launching her musical career.

In 1999 Grimaud made a wholly different kind of debut: she established the Wolf Conservation Center in upstate New York. Her love for the endangered species was sparked by a chance encounter with a wolf in northern Florida, which led to her determination to open an environmental education center. “To be involved in direct conservation and be able to put animals back where they belong,” she says, “there’s just nothing more fulfilling.” Grimaud is also a member of Musicians for Human Rights, a worldwide network of musicians aiming to promote a culture of human rights and social change.

For many years, she found time to pursue a writing career, publishing three books that have appeared in various languages. Her first, Variations sauvages, came out in 2003, followed by two semi-autobiographical novels, Leçons particulière, and Retour à Salem.

Her prodigious contribution and impact on the world of classical music were recognized by the French government when she was admitted into the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur (France’s highest decoration) at the rank of Chevalier (Knight).