March 10, 2009: From the drawing-room to the concert hall

I have now accumulated enough listening experience, through both concerts and recordings, that it is no surprise when I realize that I am familiar with all the compositions on a concert program.  However, while attending the Faculty Artist Series concert last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I encountered for the first time a program all of whose works I had played (in my own modest efforts).  Pianist Paul Hersh had assembled an evening consisting entirely of four-hand piano music by Franz Schubert.  Not only had I taken at least a crack at each of the works he had prepared;  but Hersh began the program with the very first piece of four-hand Schubert I had ever attempted, thanks to the encouragement of a graduate student in the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania while I was teaching computer science there.

Schubert's four-hand repertoire was probably never intended for a concert setting.  As the entry for "Germany" (by Denis Arnold and Alan Jefferson) in The Oxford Companion to Music explains, it was directed more towards the increasing role of music in middle-class life in the early nineteenth century:

After the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 much of northern Italy came under Austrian rule, but instead of the former 300 German states there were now only about 30, with Prussia in the ascendancy. Many of the nobles were subjects of others and a new middle class came into being, reinforced by wealthy industrialists and merchants. The tastes of this middle-class society are sometimes called Biedermeier, denoting a worthy, even cosy art rather than the revolutionary extravagances of the Romantics. The comfortably-off bourgeoisie bought pianos for their drawing-rooms and required music which lay within their technical means, such as the short genre pieces called Moments musicaux, bagatelles, or Albumblätter, examples of which can be found among the late music of Beethoven and, especially, of Schubert. The song with piano accompaniment was equally popular, the verse often reflecting middle-class life, as in Schumann's Frauenliebe und -Leben and Dichterliebe cycles. The concept of the Schubertiad, an informal meeting of friends to sing, play, and listen, is the essence of this bourgeois art.

These days middle-class society is more inclined to buy concert tickets than to participate in one of these meetings;  so the Schubertiad has migrated from the drawing-room to the concert stage.  Nevertheless, in the Schubertiad tradition, Hersh used the occasion to summon three of his own friends (Yoshikazu Nagai from the Piano Faculty, Teresa Yu, a Conservatory alumna who now runs her own music school, and current student Hye Yeong Min) to share with him the "domestic intimacy" of the four works on his program:

1. The two "Marches Caractéristiques," D. 968
2. The F minor fantasia, D. 940
3. The "Lebensstürme" allegro in A minor, D. 947
4. The C major ("Grand Duo") sonata, D. 812

All of these works are products from the end of Schubert's short life, and the middle two were composed in his final year.

I have played the fantasia on more occasions than any other four-hand work and with more people than I can probably enumerate.  It will always involve biting off more than I can chew, but I keep coming back to it.  With all that experience, I never fail to discover new things in it whenever I hear it properly performed;  and last night was no exception.  This work comes from a time when, having already demonstrated how much intensity he could pack into the brevity of a song or short piano composition, Schubert was experimenting with far more extensive time scales, wrestling with the problem of laying out a "temporal journey" suitable to the duration of the performance.  The fantasia is relatively short (on the scale of fifteen minutes);  but its "journey" alludes to the Baroque tradition of the French overture (rather in the same spirit as the opening of Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 13 "Pathétique" sonata, as András Schiff demonstrated in his recent performance), the Classical tradition of the ternary form dance, an aria reminiscent of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Nozze di Figaro, and finally a fugue that takes the ground that Beethoven broke with this ostensibly archaic genre and breaks it even further.  This is an extensive journey rendered, as Hersh put it, with "heavenly length."  His performance with Yu coaxed the attention of the ear with the first plaintive gestures of the aria and held that attention rapt until the journey ended with the final sigh of that same aria.  Schubert may not have intended this for a concert setting, but Hersh and Yu made it clear that it deserves its place there.

By contrast the "Grand Duo" is on an extended temporal scale and was the only work after the intermission.  Over the course of its four movements, the ear is less coaxed and more commanded by the ongoing uncertainty of what to expect.  Music theorists, who try to interpret the "journey" as a path through tonal centers, are driven crazy by Schubert's turn-on-a-dime leaps into distant harmonies;  and the abruptness of his tonal migrations is matched only by his radical shifts in dynamics.  Only the overall structural frameworks of the movements seem to conform to expectations, and for Schubert everything else was up for grabs.  Hersh and Min negotiated this roller-coaster ride of sharp differences with an agility that would have made Schubert proud (and, on the basis of the historical record, was probably beyond his own capabilities at the keyboard).  Once again, the case was made that this was music for the concert hall, where it was far more likely to receive the attention it deserved than it could have summoned in any drawing-room!