In
many respects, the Grande Sonate, Op 33, is one of the pinnacles not
only of Alkan’s output but of the entire Romantic piano repertoire. In
writing a piano sonata, Alkan was reviving and preserving a form which
was not merely undervalued by the French but was even described by
Schumann as being ‘worn out’. In the hands of this extremely discreet
composer, it could almost claim to be a manifesto: composed in the wake
of the 1848 Revolution, and dedicated to his father, it is prefaced by
what constitutes one of the rare official examples of the composer’s
taking an aesthetic stand on an extremely controversial matter:
programme music. His text is not to be overlooked:
Much has
been said and written about the limitations of expression through music.
Without adopting this rule or that, without trying to resolve any of
the vast questions raised by this or that system, I will simply say why I
have given these four pieces such titles and why I have sometimes used
terms which are simply never used by others.
It is not a
question, here, of imitative music; even less so of music seeking its
own justification, seeking to explain its particular effect or its
validity, in a realm beyond the music itself. The first piece is a
scherzo, the second an allegro, the third and fourth an andante and a
largo; but each one corresponds, to my mind, to a given moment in time,
to a specific frame of mind, a particular state of the imagination. Why
should I not portray it? We will always have music in some form and it
can but enhance our ability to express ourselves; the performer, without
relinquishing anything of his individual sentiment, is inspired by the
composer’s own ideas: a name and an object which in the realm of the
intellect form a perfect combination, seem, when taken in a material
sense, to clash with one another. So, however ambitious this information
may seem at first glance, I believe that I might be better understood
and better interpreted by including it here than I would be without it.
Let me also call upon Beethoven in his authority. We know that, towards
the end of his career, this great man was working on a systematic
catalogue of his major works. In it, he aimed to record the plan, memory
or inspiration which gave rise to each one.
The composition and
publication of the Grande Sonate occurred at a crucial moment in the
composer’s life. During the summer of 1848, when the Revolution was not
yet over, Zimmerman, Alkan’s teacher, resigned from his position as
Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire. It would seem natural
enough that Charles-Valentin, his most brilliant and promising student,
should succeed him; but in the troubled climate of the time, and as a
result of some predictable intrigue, it was in fact a second-rate
musician, Antoine Marmontel, who was to gain the post. This was a
particularly bitter pill for Alkan to swallow; he was to fade gradually
further into obscurity and renounce all public and official posts. The
Revolution was also to harm any publicity which might have surrounded
the publication of the Grande Sonate: although it was well heralded in
the music magazines, it would appear that there was not one single
review of the piece, nor one public performance thereafter. The British
pianist Ronald Smith is fully justified in thinking that he brought the
piece to life when he gave it its first public performance in America in
1973!
Alkan was to try his hand at the piano sonata form on four
occasions: the Grande Sonate, Op 33, the Symphony and Concerto for solo
piano, Op 39, and the Sonatine, Op 61, all illustrate the discrepancies
between an inherited Classical form and the trends of Romanticism. The
astonishing complexity of the Grande Sonate was certainly disconcerting
for his contemporaries and sufficiently justified his decision to give
the programme a preface. Let us not forget three of its most markedly
original features: as in the Symphony and Concerto, Op 39, and well
before Mahler or Nielsen, the tonality evolves during the course of the
work without returning to a ‘root tonality’; confining ourselves to the
start of each movement, the keys are respectively D major, D sharp
minor, G major, G sharp minor; if we focus purely on the endings, we
find B major, F sharp major, G major and G sharp minor. The sequence of
tempi was equally likely to be disconcerting for the listener: in place
of the usual quick–slow–quick, Alkan puts four successively slower
movements one after another. Finally, he invokes two of the great
Romantic myths – Faust and Prometheus; the first, immortalized by
Goethe, enjoyed a popularity kept alive by Berlioz, Gounod, Liszt and
Schumann etc, while Prometheus takes us back to antiquity, to an era
which Alkan, being passionate about the Classics, knew well and which he
often referred to in his compositions.
The sonata opens with ‘20
ans’, a frenzied scherzo which frequently reminds one of Chopin’s
Scherzo No 3. Straightaway, the 3/4 time is juxtaposed with accents on
every other beat. The trio portrays the awakening of love, working its
way gradually through various sections, from ‘timidly’ to ‘lovingly’ and
on to ‘with joy’. The coda brings the movement to a whirling
conclusion.
‘30 ans, Quasi-Faust’ is the heart of the sonata. It
opens with the Faust theme which, in four bars, covers the whole
keyboard and states the rhythmic formulae which will permeate the entire
movement. There follows the Devil’s theme, in B major, which is the
inversion of Faust’s theme. Marguerite’s theme, in G sharp minor and
then major, presented at first in a mood of sweet sadness, passes
through numerous climatic changes. The development and the return of the
exposition lead on to four huge arpeggios which spread across every
octave of the keyboard. Now comes a fugue, a horribly complicated
eight-part fugue, which the eye alone can follow in the score; in order
to make it legible, the composer himself establishes the use of
different manuscript styles! The fugue continues until the entrance of
‘Le Seigneur’, and the movement concludes with a clear victory of Good
over Evil, thus inspired by Goethe’s Faust Part 2, unlike the ending of
Berlioz’s opera-oratorio where the composer boldly damns his hero.
‘40
ans, un ménage heureux’ presents a picture of unspoken Romance,
interrupted on two occasions by a charming three-voice digression
entitled ‘les enfants’; this latter section exhibits a use of thirds,
sixths, fifths which is very untypical of Alkan who, unlike Chopin,
usually shows little interest in anything other than octaves and chords.
With the return of the opening section, the theme, treated in canon,
becomes even more animated. The clock striking ten is the signal for
prayer.
‘50 ans, Prométhée enchaîné’ draws us to the abyss. As an epigraph, Alkan cites several verses of the Aesychlus tragedy:
No, you could never bear my suffering! If only destiny would let me
die! To die … would release me from my torments! Would that Jupiter had
not lost his power. I will live whatever he might do … See if I deserve
to suffer such torments! [lines 750–754, 1051, 1091 (the end of the
play)]
After the victory in ‘Quasi-Faust’ and the joy of the
happy household – something which the composer would always be denied –
‘50 ans’ ends with an acknowledgement of failure, in a visionary piece
written without hint of pomposity or excess. Thinking about the
composer’s destiny, the piece is also a premonition.
The
Sonatine, Op 61, was written fourteen years after the Grande Sonate and
forms a striking contrast to it. Concise and concentrated in the
extreme, refined in its style of writing, and of exceptional technical
difficulty, it is a gem of equilibrium and perhaps presents Alkan at his
most accessible. Its first movement, although swept along and
interrupted by violent angry outbursts, maintains a profound coherence,
reinforced by the taut conjoining of its two themes. The Allegramente
which follows, in F major, belongs within the best tradition of Alkan’s
falsely naive works. It is immediately reminiscent of the slow movement
from Maurice Ravel’s Sonatine; Ravel was, moreover, familiar with the
music of this, the composer of Le festin d’Esope. The Scherzo-Minuet, in
D minor, is one of those perpetual motion pieces of which the composer
was so fond; he interrupts its driving rhythm with a trio which eases
the pace of the movement but is unsettled by various rhythmic and
harmonic devices. The finale, Tempo giusto, opens with startling fifths
which conjure up the empty chords of a cello or the toll of bells, in
the style of Mussorgsky in his Pictures at an Exhibition; the sections
which follow vary greatly without ever altering the movement’s deep
cohesion. A dry fortissimo chord brings the four movements to a close.
Le
festin d’Esope completes the cycle of 12 Études dans tous les tons
mineurs, Op 39, to which the Symphony and the huge Concerto for solo
piano belong. The term ‘study’ should be taken to mean the same as it
does to Chopin and a fortiori Clementi or Cramer. Alkan, more so even
than Liszt, expands the scope of this form to the dimension of a
symphonic poem, a rhapsody. Le festin d’Esope consists of a series of
variations on a theme which one might liken to traditional Jewish
melodies. The argument is to be found again in Jean de la Fontaine’s La
vie d’Esope le Phrygien:
One market day, Xantus, who had
decided to treat some of his friends, ordered him to buy the best and
nothing but the best. The Phrygian said to himself, ‘I’m going to teach
you to specify what you want, without leaving it all to the discretion
of a slave’. And so he bought nothing but tongue, which he adapted to
each different sauce; the starter, the main course, the dessert,
everything was tongue. At first the guests praised his choice of dish;
but by the end they were filled with disgust. ‘Did I not order you’,
said Xantus, ‘to buy the best?’ ‘And what could be better than tongue?’
answered Aesop. ‘It is our connection to civil life, the key to the
sciences, the organ of truth and reason. Through it, we build and police
our towns; we learn; we persuade; we rule over assemblies; we fulfil
the greatest of all our duties, namely to praise God.’
The theme
of the tongue, the most important organ and function, is frequently
mentioned in the Bible, Alkan’s favourite book. The variations, apart
from dealing with various technical problems, illustrate without doubt
every possible transformation that a theme could go through; in
addition, one is presented with a succession of little tableaux of the
animal kingdom, Alkan giving us several hints of this such as the
marking abajante.
The Barcarolle which completes this recital is
taken from the third of Alkan’s five Recueils de Chants for piano. These
five books are distinctive in that they are modelled on Mendelssohn’s
first collection of Lieder ohne Worte; they follow the same tone
sequence and conclude with a barcarolle. The Barcarolle from the third
collection is undoubtedly one of Alkan’s most seductive and meaningful
pieces: its melody imprints itself immediately on one’s memory, and the
whole work radiates a melancholic sweetness. (François Luguenot - Hyperion)
Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888)
1-4. Grande Sonate "Les Quatre Âges" Op 33 (38:25)
5-8. Sonatine Op 61 (17:56)
9. Barcarolle Op 65 No 6 3:53
10. Le Festin D'Esope Op 39 No 12 8:45
Credits :
Piano – Marc-André Hamelin
Painting [Cover Painting] – Tiziano Vecellio
https://it.d-ld.net/f0f4f84686/Charles-Valentin Alkan — Grande Sonate –Marc-André Hamelin (1995, Hyperion – CDA66794) APE.rar
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