Garrick Ohlsson: Program Notes

GARRICK OHLSSON October 27, 2018 Notes on the Program

By Harry Haskell

“Sitting at the piano, he proceeded to reveal to us wondrous regions. We were drawn into circles of ever deeper enchantment.” Thus did Robert Schumann introduce Johannes Brahms to the musical world in a famous article published in 1853 in Europe’s foremost music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Over the next four decades, Brahms would enrich the solo piano literature with sonatas, variations, fantasies, waltzes and miscellaneous other pieces, which Garrick Ohlsson will survey comprehensively in his two-year cycle beginning tonight. Brahms’s sneak previews of his early sonatas mesmerized Schumann, who referred to them as “veiled symphonies” and hailed their 20-year-old creator as a genius capable of transforming the piano “into an orchestra of wailing and jubilant voices.”

JOHANNES BRAHMS Born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833 Died in Vienna, April 3, 1897 EIGHT PIECES FOR PIANO, OP. 76 Composed in 1871 and 1878; 30 minutes Throughout his life, Brahms was attracted to the characteristically Romantic genre of the instrumental character piece, a time-honored vehicle for distilling a particular mood or musical idea to its essence. In the summer of 1878, he took a break from the arduous task of composing his Violin Concerto to pull together a set of eight such pieces—four capriccios and four intermezzos—that he had written at various times since the beginning of the decade. Although they were published together, Brahms conceived the Op. 76 Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces) as two four-part sets, each containing a balanced mixture of genres (capriccios and intermezzos), keys (major and minor), and moods (ranging from turbulence to tranquility). So expeditiously did his publisher move to bring them out that the habitually self-critical composer complained that his creations were to be “thrust out into the world, unwashed and unbrushed.”

Brahms took evident care in arranging the two sets, each one of which begins with a vigorous, emotionally charged capriccio marked “agitato.” (Brahms composed the F-sharp-Minor Capriccio, the earliest of the Klavierstücke, as a birthday present for his beloved Clara Schumann in 1871.) The Capriccio in B Minor, with its gaily mincing sixteenth notes and chains of euphonious thirds, resembles an off-kilter polka; its genial bonhomie is transmuted into graceful melodic arabesques in the A-Major Intermezzo. The Intermezzos in A-flat Major and A Minor are a study in contrasts, the one characterized by rippling arpeggios, the other by insistent melodic half-steps. The last pieces in each set, marked “grazioso,” conjure a mood of relaxed, Schumannesque reverie.

VARIATIONS ON AN ORIGINAL THEME, OP. 21, NO. 1 Composed in 1857; 20 minutes The Variations on an Original Theme was an early fruit of Brahms’s lifelong cultivation of variation form. An avid student of music history, he relished the challenge of erecting new structures on old foundations. It mattered little whether the base he built upon was one of his own melodies, a popular folksong, or a theme by Schumann, Handel, or Paganini. The important thing, he maintained, was that variation form “must be kept stricter, purer,” in part by emulating the old masters’ rigorous use of ground bass as the harmonic framework for a composition. “In a theme for variations,” he wrote, “it is almost only the bass that actually has any meaning for me. But this is sacred to me, it is the firm foundation on which I then build my stories. What I do with melody is only playing around.”

Brahms bases each of these eleven variations on the harmonies and phrase structure of his winsome D-major theme. The theme is notable for its simple symmetry: each of its two sections is further subdivided into two four-bar phrases. The first variation aerates the texture by breaking the block chords into wavy arpeggios. The second combines chords and arpeggios, and the third injects rhythmic variety in the form of gently nudging syncopations. Thereafter, things grow increasingly complicated. Variation 5, for instance, is a canon in contrary motion: the two voices track each other while moving in opposite directions, with every two notes in the right hand set against three in the left—a characteristically Brahmsian touch. Further rhythmic displacements highlight the flightiness of variations 6 and 7, in contrast to the brusque, muscular manner of variations 8 and 9. After a lengthy detour into D minor, Brahms returns to the home key in variation 11 and pulls out all the stops, extending and “playing around” with the original melody against a shimmering backdrop of sustained trills.

VARIATIONS ON A HUNGARIAN SONG, OP. 21, NO. 2 Composed by 1854; 10 minutes In the second set of his Op. 21 variations, Brahms uses the melody rather than the bass as the foundation for his musical “story.” (He referred to such melodically based works as “fantasyvariations,” as distinct from the “stricter, purer” kind that he associated with Bach and Beethoven.) In this case, the theme is a short, punchy folk tune that Brahms is said to have gleaned from his ensemble partner, the exiled Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi. Whereas his original theme is smooth and symmetrical, the “Hungarian song” lurches back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4 meter, producing a slightly lumpy, asymmetrical effect that Brahms cannily exploits in several of his thirteen variations. The brevity of the individual variations made it all the more important that they be sharply differentiated in terms of both character and pianistic technique. At the tail end of the work, Brahms tacks on a rollicking coda that is almost a set of variations in itself; he likened its boisterous high spirits to those of a “disobedient youth” on a tear.

FOUR BALLADES, OP. 10 Composed in 1854; 30 minutes After Schumann’s attempted suicide in early 1854, when the doctors forbade his wife from visiting him, Brahms rushed to Clara’s side and consoled her with music. It was during his fivemonth stay in Düsseldorf that spring and summer that he composed the four Ballades, as well as the Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, a tribute to his tragically afflicted mentor.

That January Brahms called on Robert at the sanatorium in Endenich and played the two works for him. Clara reported that her husband “gave vent to his excitement with constant interjections” and “did everything he could” to delay his friend’s departure. Despite her unwavering devotion to Robert, Clara confessed that she was “filled more and more with admiration” for Brahms and “for the great spirit which inhabits so small a body.” For his part, Brahms felt a special fondness for the Ballades, which “remind me so much of the twilight hours I spent at Clara’s side.”

Op. 10, No. 1 is often called the “Edward” Ballade, after a traditional Scottish ballad that Brahms knew in a translation by Johann Gottfried Herder. Like the poem, the piano piece takes the form of a dialogue between a mother and her son: under her persistent interrogation, Edward finally confesses to the gruesome murder of his father. The work’s somber D-minor tonality, reinforced by hollow-sounding octaves and fifths, conveys an atmosphere of grim and inexorable fatality. In the companion D-Major Ballade, horror and foreboding are transmuted into wistful tenderness, as if to expiate the unspeakable crime of patricide. The third and fourth Ballades form another minor–major pair, this time centering on B, and present a similar study in contrasts. No. 3 is by turns demonic and angelic, the delicate, bell-like peals of its middle section echoed in the beatific closing chords. No. 4 is the longest and most enigmatic of the Ballades, a work of hauntingly fragile lyricism and profound emotional ambivalence. As Schumann observed, “the strange opening melody note sways, to the end, between minor and major, and stays wistfully in the major.”

VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF PAGANINI (BOOK 1), OP. 35 Composed in 1862-63; 25 minutes Like the Handel Variations, the two books of Paganini Variations—or “studies,” as Brahms preferred to call them—date from the early 1860s. The ambitious young man had recently moved to Vienna from his native Hamburg and was determined to prove his mettle as both pianist and composer. Whether he wrote the Variations on a Theme of Paganini for himself or for the eminent Polish virtuoso Carl Tausig, with whom he had struck up a close friendship, is uncertain. In any event, Tausig reveled in their finger-twisting pyrotechnical display. “Everybody considers them unplayable,” he wrote to Brahms, “yet secretly they nibble at them, and are furious that the fruits hang so high.” Clara Schumann considered the Op. 35 Variations so fiendishly difficult that she dubbed them “witches’ variations.”

With its catchy tune and regular phrase structure, the bouncy A-minor theme from one of Paganini’s famous caprices for solo violin gave Brahms (and later Serge Rachmaninoff) ample opportunity to “rummage around,” as he put it, without straying too far from his original source. In several of the 14 variations from Book I the melody is barely recognizable, either buried beneath an avalanche of arpeggios and trills (as in variation 4) or completely transformed in shape, meter, and character (as in variation 12). Although virtuosity is very much the point of the exercise, Brahms doesn’t stint on poetry: the gently oscillating patterns of variation 11 make for one of his loveliest lyrical creations. Overall, the Paganini Variations present the pianist with a formidable set of technical challenges, from the chains of parallel sixths and octaves in variations 1 and 2 to the crisp staccato acrobatics of variation 8 and the torrid passagework of variation 14.