The coupling of works by Alkan and Henselt is not as arbitrary as might
appear. Born six months apart, both enjoyed long lives and died within
eighteen months of each other; both have been entirely overshadowed by
their more illustrious contemporaries Liszt and Chopin (to the extent
that they have been assigned to the footnotes of musical history),
though both had an individual approach to the piano with a style as
clearly defined and as idiosyncratic as their two peers; both were
recluses, rarely playing their works in public; both were transcendent
technicians, exploring the potential of their instrument in ways which
were to influence other pianists and composers of piano music; both were
eccentrics in their personal habits and lifestyles; both have been
almost universally ignored by the majority of concert pianists; and
neither of their names is known to the general music-loving public.
(Although there has been a marked revival of interest in Alkan’s work
over the past three decades, there is still only grudging
acknowledgement of his importance from the musical ‘establishment’.)
The
four works presented here were all written at around the same time –
that is to say the twelve or so years between 1832 and 1844. Only one of
them has ever featured in the regular repertoire of any pianist;
Alkan’s Concerto No 1 probably has not been realized in this its
original form since its initial performances; Henselt’s Meyerbeer
variations have certainly not been performed by anyone this century (its
publishers Breitkopf and Härtel confirmed this when checking their
archives); Alkan’s Concerto No 2 has been recorded before, notably by
Michael Ponti, who was also responsible for one of only two previous
recordings of the Henselt concerto.
Of the myriad contributions
to the genre written during the first part of the nineteenth century,
Henselt’s Piano Concerto in F minor, Op 16, is the one whose neglect is
the hardest to explain. It has the composer’s individual stamp on every
bar, it is original in its writing (if not its structure), its
orchestration is more than adequate and at times masterly, its themes
are varied and memorable, the musical and technical challenges for the
soloist are equalled only by their effect on the listener, and the whole
work has the feel of white-hot inspiration. Henselt never reached the
same height again. Is it a good piece of music? Yes. The piece may not
offer revolutionary concepts (indeed, much of it is firmly rooted in the
past), but that does not alter its intrinsic merit. It should be part
of the core repertoire.
Where did it come from? What was the
genesis of this most demanding of Romantic concertos? Its composer was
born on 9 May 1814 at Schwabach, a small town in Bavaria, close to
Nuremberg. His father Philipp Eduard Henselt is described variously as a
cotton manufacturer or cotton weaver, whose marriage to Caroline
Geigenmüller produced six children. When Adolf was three the family
moved to Munich. It was not a musical family but he had his first piano
lessons at the age of five, gave his first public recital when he was
fifteen and, in 1831, under the auspices of King Ludwig I of Bavaria,
was granted a stipend to study piano in Weimar with Hummel and
composition in Vienna with the master theorist and pedagogue Simon
Sechter.
The early part of his career progressed conventionally
enough, though his elopement with (and eventual marriage to) the wife of
one of Goethe’s friends must have raised a few eyebrows at the time.
Aristocratic in looks and bearing, he would in later years resemble the
Emperor Franz Josef. His early success touring Germany and Russia was
underlined by the reception of his sets of studies (Opp 2 & 5)
published in 1837 and 1838. The Douze études caractéristiques de concert
(Op 2) were dedicated to his royal patron and include the best (only?)
known work of Henselt today – ‘Si oiseau j’étais, à toi je volerais’
(‘Were I a bird, I’d fly to you’), a tricky feather-light study in
sixths once given the distinction of a recording by Rachmaninov. These
were followed by the Douze études de salon (dedicated to HRH Marie the
Queen of Saxony) which, with the previous set of twelve, alternate
through all the major and minor keys.
These studies attracted a
lot of attention for the young virtuoso, many of them presenting
technical problems different from those in Chopin’s two sets (published a
few years previously) but still maintaining the new concept of
exercises wrapped in poetry. They were Henselt’s ‘calling card’ and to
the present day remain beyond the capabilities of many pianists. Even
the legendary Anton Rubinstein had to admit defeat; after working on the
études and F minor Concerto for a few days, he realized ‘it was a waste
of time, for they were based on an abnormal formation of the hand. In
this respect, Henselt, like Paganini, was a freak.’ Many passages in the
études presage the harmonic progressions and technical difficulties of
the F minor Concerto. There is a liberal use of chords of the tenth
(sometimes twelfth) and arpeggios with a larger stretch than an octave.
It wasn’t that Henselt had large hands – au contraire, he is known to
have had small hands with short fleshy fingers. But by means of
diligent, self-consuming practice he managed to achieve an amazing
degree of elasticity with an extension that could reach C–E–G–C–F in his
left hand and B–E–A–C–E in the right (try it!).
All this augured
well for an important career as a pianist and composer. Neither came
about. Towards the end of his life Henselt himself recognized (in a
letter to the critic La Mara) that he had not fulfilled his early
promise:
I am persuaded that because I performed so little of
what I promised in my youth, it would be impossible to speak about me
without censure … you think perhaps that I undervalue myself; by no
means, but I live in no illusion about myself. I know, for instance,
quite well, that some of my compositions are among the best which have
been written for the instrument – that I have written better studies
than many a so-called composer. Still, this is far too little: that is
to say, the works that deserve mention are far too few in number; I have
but given a proof that I might have been a composer: the circumstances
of my life were, however, not favourable to it. Above all, the passion
for virtuosity should have never taken possession of me.
As a
composer, he simply had nothing else to say after the age of thirty,
recognized the fact and lived with it. From the completion of the F
minor Concerto (1844) to his death, there is no advance in style or
content in the few remaining works. This lends (albeit by default) a
pleasing one-ness to his entire output, a ‘Henseltian’ style as
recognizable as Chopin’s, or Liszt’s or, more pertinently, Alkan’s.
Given
the paucity of his creativity, the extent of his influence on piano
playing is remarkable for two reasons. First by way of the prodigious
technical invention of the études (and, for that matter, the Concerto).
As Richard Davis put it: ‘The effect of [Henselt’s] extensions – [his]
original, if at times impractical contribution to piano technique –
resulted in fuller tone in the bass and greatly increased coverage in
the upper registers of the keyboard with economy of notes and minimal
movement of the hand and arm, and is to be seen in much of the later
music of Balakirev, as well as that of Lyapunov, Scriabin and
Rachmaninov (who must have greatly benefited from his study of Henselt),
and we may believe that the great reserves of resources engendered as a
result of this extra ability really did give control to all these
composers as pianists.’
The second influence Henselt had on piano
playing was a result of his position in the cultural life of Russia.
His triumph as a visiting concert pianist in St Petersburg in 1838 led
immediately to him being named Court Pianist. From then until his death
Henselt spent all but the summer months each year in the Russian city
where he enjoyed a princely lifestyle and was on intimate terms with
three successive tsars. His arrival coincided with the upsurge of
interest in a Nationalist school of music. In 1863 he was made Inspector
General of all the royally-endowed musical institutions in Russia. As
Bettina Walker engagingly observes in My Musical Experiences (1880):
When one takes into account that in St Petersburg alone there are five
such Imperial endowments, three in Moscow, and one or more in most of
the larger cities throughout this vast empire, and that, furthermore,
some of these institutes count their students by the hundred (that, for
instance, of Nicholas in St Petersburg, numbers six hundred pupils), we
shall then be in a position to realize what an enormous influence over
pianoforte playing throughout all Russia was thus placed in Henselt’s
hands. It is not, indeed, too much to say that never before has a single
musician had so wide a sphere of musical activity opened to him; and
though that influence extended over one single department in music’s
vast domain – that of pianoforte playing – still, if we consider that it
was these institutes which trained all the governesses and female
teachers throughout Russia, that all the musical instruction was (and
still is as I write) given by teachers who had either been actually
pupils of Henselt, or else been thoroughly drilled by his
lady-professors, it is not too much to assume that for more than a
quarter of a century his influence has been felt in more or less every
home in Russia where there was a pianoforte.
And this does not
take into account the influence of Henselt’s own private pupils. Among
them were Rachmaninov’s grandfather and Nicolai Zverev. Zverev taught
Rachmaninov himself, Lhevinne, Siloti and Scriabin. Here we have the
foundations of the present Russian school of piano-playing with its
emphasis on singing melody and freedom of hand movement. Henselt’s
contribution to the piano was at least as significant as that of Liszt
and Leschetizky.
What was he like as a pianist? All writers who
left detailed accounts of Henselt (and there were many) agree on one
thing: his cantabile playing was unequalled. (Even Liszt was envious: ‘I
could have had velvet paws like that if I had wanted to’, he told his
pupils.) They also agree that no one in the history of piano playing was
such a compulsive practiser, with the exception, perhaps, of Leopold
Godowsky (whose own music must have been influenced by Henselt’s
writing; certainly both share a common fault of frequent
over-elaboration at the expense of the musical content). During a
recital, even between items, Henselt would leap to his muffled practise
piano in the wings and keep his fingers working, almost like a child’s
comforter. Von Lenz described him at home practising on a piano muffled
by feather quills, playing Bach fugues while simultaneously reading the
Bible: ‘After he has played Bach and the Bible quite through, he begins
over again.’
Of all the great pianists (and there’s no doubt that
he was one of the great players of the last century) he suffered more
than any from stage fright. The thought of playing in public made him
physically ill and in the last thirty-three years of his life it’s
reckoned that he gave no more than three public recitals. Yet many
report that when in the company of friends or, even better, when alone,
he was unsurpassed, some say not even by Liszt. The oft-quoted story of
the pianist Alexander Dreyschock overhearing Henselt playing is worth
repeating. The American pianist William Mason recalls Dreyschock telling
how, calling on Henselt in St Petersburg one morning and going up the
staircase to his room, ‘he heard the most lovely tones of the
piano-forte imaginable. He was so fascinated that he sat down at the top
of the landing and listened for a long time. Henselt was repeating the
same composition and his playing was specially characterized by a warm,
emotional touch and a delicious legato, causing the tones to melt, as it
were, one into the other, and this, too, without any confusion or lack
of clearness.’ Eventually Dreyschock interrupted and announced himself,
asking what it was that Henselt had been playing. It was one of his own
pieces he was composing and Dreyschock begged him to play it to him
again: ‘Alas! His performance was stiff, inaccurate, even clumsy, and
all of the exquisite poetry and unconsciousness of his style completely
disappeared. It was quite impossible to describe the difference; and
this was simply the result of diffidence and nervousness which, as it
appeared, were entirely out of the player’s power to control.’
Henselt
played his F minor Concerto in public only rarely. Who could blame him,
with a temperament that left him below his best under pressure (a
further similarity with Godowsky)? Liszt, it is said, sight-read the
whole work from the manuscript. Other pianists who included it in their
repertoire were Liszt’s pupils Hans von Bülow, Arthur Friedheim and Emil
Sauer, the latter playing it at his New York debut in 1899. Busoni
played it, and so did his pupil Egon Petri (who said it was one of the
hardest pieces he had ever played). Louis Moreau Gottschalk is said to
have performed it, and also Vladimir de Pachmann, who knew Henselt and
edited his works. So it comes as something of a surprise after this list
of barnstormers to learn that it was Clara Schumann who gave its first
performance. This was in 1844 (though the work was not published until
two years later).
The first two bars of the F minor Concerto
contain not only the three ascending notes which provide a motif for
each of the three first-movement subjects but, in its three descending
bass notes, a figure which when transposed to the key of C sharp minor
reveals one of music’s most famous openings. Raymond Lewenthal (who
provided the first recording of the work) was not the first to wonder
whether it is a coincidence or a conscious salute to Henselt that
Rachmaninov’s Op 2 No 3 Prelude commences with that same doom-laden
phrase. There is no doubt that Rachmaninov knew Henselt’s work
intimately and played the concerto when a young man.
The
formidable piano entry gives notice of the scale of the writing to come.
The soloist is given few breathers throughout, though in the midst of
the hectic first movement come sixteen bars of muted strings in a
Religioso variation on the three-note subject (a marvellous touch this)
before the soloist launches into a barrage of ferocious arpeggios
embroidering the Religioso theme. The movement continues with constant
words of encouragement from Henselt (‘agitato’, ‘crescendo assai’,
‘sempre fortissimo’) before a tutti concludes the movement in a
triumphant blaze of F major. If the relentless, constant rhythmic pulse
of this Allegro patetico is rooted in the late Classicism of Weber and
Mendelssohn, the second movement (Larghetto) looks to the future with
echoes of Chopin. A similar three-note motif hints at the Rachmaninov
Prelude again and it features piano scoring on four staves (a device,
incidentally, used very little by any other composer until the C sharp
minor Prelude, make of it what you will). This is firmly in the Romantic
mould, ‘tempo rubato’ et al, and, for its melodious charm, its variety
of emotion and altogether original conception, ranks among the most
felicitous slow movements of the genre.
How does Henselt top
this? With an Allegro agitato in 6/8, commencing with an onslaught of
octaves prefacing a catchy and deceptively simple rondo. The left-hand
triplets alone would knock the stuffing out of the average conservatory
professor and the writing throughout is extraordinarily energetic,
requiring enormous stamina and athleticism. No wonder Henselt was a
fitness freak – one of music’s earliest recorded joggers who exercised
regularly with the royal family.
The finale has been likened by
Raymond Lewenthal to ‘a prophecy of the doom of the Tzarist regime as it
frantically, furiously, frivolously dances its way to perdition’. Not
such a fanciful picture, for there is a strong Russian flavour to this
movement; its second subject could be a waltz by someone like Arensky,
and can we not hear Tchaikovsky somewhere just round the corner?
Although its spine may be in the well-worked European tradition, its
character is distinctly un-French and -German. This last movement also
reveals one important reason behind the concerto’s disappearance from
the repertoire. The demands of the solo part are immense – though not by
any means unpianistic, unplayable, inelegant or unconquerable – but
they are the kind of difficulties that an audience cannot readily
appreciate without a score (another trait shared with Godowsky’s music).
The soloist has to work very hard indeed for effects that are not
always apparent.
It’s good to welcome the concerto back to the
catalogue in this distinguished performance by a soloist who is an
authentic advocate of this music.
The Variations de concert, Op
11, on ‘Quand je quittai la Normandie’ from Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable
are dedicated to ‘Her Majesty L’Impératrice de toutes les Russies’.
Henselt produced this diverting confection in 1840 after his move to
Russia, simultaneously shifting the subject of his dedications from a
Bavarian to a Russian monarch. He was not the first to use Meyerbeer’s
popular success for the basis of variations: Chopin’s Grand Duo in E for
cello and piano was written in 1832, a year after the opera’s Paris
premiere; Liszt in his Reminiscences, and Sigismund Thalberg in his
Fantasy, used themes from the opera too. Henselt’s are out of the school
of Chopin’s ‘Là ci darem la mano’ variations of some thirteen years
earlier. Though there is less evidence of his études than in the
concerto, it’s a work which partly justifies Schumann’s assessment of
Henselt as ‘the Northern Chopin’. That said, it could never have been
written by Chopin (nor indeed Mendelssohn; quite apart from stylistic
comparisons it falls some way below their inspirational best). Its
brilliant and demanding writing are more Lisztian than anything. After
an opening deluge of octaves, note-spinning and a Larghetto
introduction, Meyerbeer’s perky theme is followed by seven variations
(with a fearsome cadenza before the last), each linked by an orchestral
breathing space.
If Henselt had nothing more to say after the age
of thirty, the same could not be said of Charles-Valentin Morhange (the
name with which Alkan was first registered: Alkan was his father’s
first name and he adopted this as his surname early on). The ideas came
pouring forth in bewildering variety, his earliest in the
Kalkbrenner-Mendelssohn-Weber mould but taking flight during his life
into strange, prophetic visions.
Alkan is one of the most
puzzling cases of ‘composer neglect’. He wrote at a level consistent
with the greatest contemporary writers for the piano – Chopin, Schumann,
Liszt, Brahms –, introduced new forms, and produced music every bit as
inventive as that of his peers, and yet he was all but forgotten until
three decades ago. Since then the advocacy of Ronald Smith and Raymond
Lewenthal (names to which can now be added Laurent Martin, Bernard
Ringeissen and Marc-André Hamelin) has persuaded many people that Alkan,
like Chopin and Liszt, was a genius.
One can see why he dropped
out of sight: his music was advanced for its day. Like Henselt, he did
little to promote it in the way that Liszt, Wagner, Berlioz and the
other moderns did. The piano-writing is for the most part ferociously
hard to play; he had few contemporaries to champion it. Musical tastes
change; the world had tasted Debussy, Bartók and Schoenberg before
anyone bothered to investigate this nineteenth-century dinosaur. Since
Alkan’s death, the likes of d’Albert, Bauer, Ganz, Busoni and Arrau have
included odd bits of his music in their repertoire at some point, but
it was not until the arrival on the scene of Egon Petri in the first
decades of this century that his major works (in particular the Symphony
and Concerto for solo piano) were heard at all.
And what a
strange, bitter man he was, a misanthrope who had two homes in Paris
(one of them in the Square d’Orléans where he was a neighbour of Chopin
and George Sand) so that he could avoid visitors, a great pianist (Liszt
declared that Alkan had the greatest technique he had ever known) but
who, like Henselt, seldom played in public. He had an illegitimate son
with the wondrous name of Elie Miriam Delaborde who shared his dwelling
with two apes and 121 cockatoos. Having been passed over for a major
position at the Conservatoire, ignored and humiliated (as he saw it) he
withdrew from the public, still yearning for official recognition. One
anecdote illustrates his character. Towards the end of his life a
delegation of officials finally called upon him one afternoon, just
after he had finished lunch, to invest him with some award or other. He
met them at the door saying, ‘Messieurs, à cette heure, moi, je digère’
(‘Gentlemen, at this hour I digest’). The delegation departed and that
was the end of Alkan’s chances for a decoration. Today it’s the nature
of his ultimate demise that evokes a reaction at the mention of his
name, rather than any of his music, for he suffered one of musical
history’s most unusual deaths. He was crushed by a bookcase (although
the legend of him having reached up for the Talmud – which miraculously
remained clutched in his hand – may be a romanticized version of the
event).
With more of Alkan’s music available now than ever
before, the list of extraordinary works, of revelatory piano
compositions, grows yearly. No sneering musicologist can deny the epic
grandeur (in writing and conception) of the Twelve Études in all the
minor keys, Op 39, of which Nos 4, 5, 6 and 7 comprise the Symphony for
solo piano, and Nos 8, 9 and 10 form the Concerto for solo piano (the
recording of which by Mr Hamelin being, in this writer’s opinion, one of
the single most astonishing exhibitions of virtuoso pianism ever
captured on disc). The études are among the masterpieces of the piano’s
literature and inspired Hans von Bülow’s famous description of Alkan as
‘the Berlioz of the piano’. Then there’s the Grande Sonate, Op 33,
subtitled ‘Les quatre âges’, the futuristic La chanson de la folle au
bord de la mer and Le Tambour bat aux champs, the Trois grandes Études,
Op 76, the Grand duo concertant, Op 21, the impromptu on Luther’s Un
fort rempart est notre Dieu, Op 69 … the contents of his secret treasure
chest are slowly emerging to intrigue and delight.
So what of
the present two discoveries? First the title, ‘Concerto da camera’,
first used for Baroque music. Just as there were two types of sonata
(‘sonata da chiesa’, a church sonata with abstract movements, and
‘sonata da camera’, a chamber sonata with dance-style movements), so
there were two types of concerto. Here, a more apposite description
would be ‘Concertino’, for the two by Alkan contain no dance music and
both take the form of a short concerto.
Scored for piano and
strings, the Concerto da camera in C sharp minor, Op 10 No 2, was
composed in 1833 (when Alkan was only twenty) during a visit to England.
It remained a lifelong favourite. It is dedicated to the minor composer
and pianist Henry Field, Bath-born and -bred (1797–1848), who gave the
first performance there on 11 April 1834 (the Bath and Cheltenham
Gazette reviewed it as ‘especially delightful for the novelty of its
style and technique’). Field must have been no mean player to cope with
some of the novel and challenging keyboard acrobatics, especially the
final section of its simple A–B–A structure which incorporates
lightning-fast arpeggios and jumps that put it way beyond the gentleman
amateur. This is not Alkan at full stretch (as in the Twelve Études)
but, despite the obvious limitations and influences in the work, clearly
he already knows that he has a voice of his own.
The Concerto da
camera in A minor, Op 10 No 1, premiered by Alkan in Paris in 1832, has
never been recorded before, either as a piano solo, or (as here) in its
original form. It is doubtful whether it’s been played more than a
handful of times since its composition; the existence of a full set of
parts was only discovered in the 1980s. This is a more ambitious
‘concertino’ than its successor, again in one movement though in three
distinct sections. It is scored for strings, double woodwind (with two
extra bassoons), four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and timpani.
Throughout, one is reminded of other composers but never convinced. Here
is a Mendelssohnian theme, there a Chopinesque modulation, here some
awkward Weber-like passagework. But no, it is a different, independent
thinker throughout, too masculine for Chopin, too sharp-cornered for
Mendelssohn. Any pianist tackling this must have nimble fingers and (in
all three sections) good octaves and sparkling repeated notes. The work
is dedicated to Alkan’s teacher Joseph Zimmerman (1785–1853), who
himself was a pupil of Cherubini.
The two Alkan concertos, for
all their attractions, are still minor works. So are the Henselt
variations. The F minor Concerto is a major piano composition. But
whatever their various emotional, musical and structural merits and
limitations, in the end one simply has to ask: ‘Are they effective and
well-wrought? Do they stand up to repeated hearing? Are they worth
reviving?’ The answer to all three questions surely is ‘yes’, and one
must add: ‘But why has it taken until now before most of us have had a
chance to hear them?’ Hyperion
Adolph von Henselt (1814-1889)
Piano Concerto in F minor Op 16 [29'44]
Variations de concert Op 11 [17'47]
Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888)
Concerto da camera in C sharp minor Op 10 No 2 [7'30]
Concerto da camera in A minor Op 10 No 1 [14'14]
Credits :
Conductor – Martyn Brabbins
Leader [Orchestra] – Bernard Docherty
Orchestra – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Piano – Marc-André Hamelin
