WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born in Salzburg, Austria, 1756
Died in Vienna, 1791
Fantasia in C Minor, K. 475
Piano Sonata in C Minor, K. 457
At the age of 25, after years of suffering the indignity of living at home in Salzburg and working a dead-end church job alongside his overbearing father, the former child prodigy Mozart took a leap and moved to Vienna to try his luck as a freelancer. It didn’t take long for him to prove that his keyboard skills were unmatched, and he was able to make ends meet by keeping up a dizzying schedule of gigging, teaching, and composing. One ally who helped Mozart get established was Therese von Trattner, a wealthy piano student who at one point invited the growing Mozart family to move into her lavish house (which included a private concert hall), and who became godmother to some of Mozart’s children.
Published sheet music didn’t play a central role in Mozart’s career like it did for later composers, but he did make some inroads into the rapidly growing market for compositions that amateurs would purchase to play at home. His Opus 11, published in 1785, brought together two recent keyboard works unified by their key: the Fantasia in C Minor and the Piano Sonata in C Minor. He dedicated the set to Madame von Trattner.
The solo piano music that Mozart wrote after moving to Vienna was also shaped by his first encounters with the keyboards works of Bach and Handel, thanks to the guidance of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a patron and man of letters who was determined to keep the learned Baroque style from fading into obscurity. The Fantasia (Italian for “fantasy”) was a staple of Baroque keyboard music, rooted in the improvisations that were an essential part of a musician’s toolkit in that era.
Mozart’s Fantasia in C Minor has that same improvisatory quality as it ranges freely through sections and keys. The stern minor key and declamatory octaves have the ring of Bach to them, but true to Mozart’s form, it can’t help but transform into an opera without words as voices in different registers trade singing phrases. The brief transitions that bridge the gaps between sections are especially ingenious, starting with the bare octaves that rev up the fast second section.
Mozart decided to include the Piano Sonata in C Minor that he had composed in late 1784 in the same two-part publication with the Fantasia. They were conceived separately, but their shared key center and Baroque leanings make them natural companions on a concert program. The sonata also starts with a unison declamation, this one rocketing up the C-minor arpeggio in a manner Mozart picked up from the court composers in Mannheim. Even with the emotional intensity endemic to the minor key, the first movement’s sonata form stays true to Mozart’s impeccable style of balanced phrases that converse in reasoned arguments and rebuttals. The central Adagio, in the relative major key of E-flat, offers a blissful island of repose before the return of C-minor ensnares the finale in the kind of drama we’ve come to expect in that same fateful key from Beethoven, soon to become Mozart’s heir as Vienna’s ranking keyboard wizard.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born in Eisenach, Germany, 1685
Died in Leipzig, Germany, 1750
Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 903
When Bach took up a new position as court organist for the Duke of Weimar in 1708, at the age of 23, his main duty was to play the organ in church, where he cemented his already formidable keyboard skills to become an improvisor and innovator of the highest order. In 1717, he parlayed that experience into a job as the kapellmeister tasked with entertaining a music-loving prince in Cöthen, where he spent the next six years enjoying more freedom than at any other point to experiment with instrumental forms for the sheer pleasure of it, including his first set of 24 keyboard preludes and fugues in every major and minor key. After he graduated to a prestigious church job in Leipzig in 1723, a post he held for the rest of his life, Bach still made space for pushing the envelope with keyboard forms, pushing the art of fugue to unfathomable heights even as his contemporaries and offspring drifted away from that arcane style.
Bach’s manuscript for the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor is lost, so historians have made their best guess to place it in the Cöthen period, but the fact that several variants exist suggests that Bach himself probably tinkered with it at different points, and in any case it leans on skills he acquired throughout his career. In the free-flowing Fantasia, the two hands stitch together a dizzying thread of music filled with chromatic tones (i.e., notes that don’t belong to the D-minor scale) as the wandering harmonies pursue an elusive state of resolution. The matched fugue builds off a subject that creeps up the chromatic scale, a gesture that stands out every time it appears in its many rising and falling permutations.
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL
Born in Halle, Germany, 1685
Died in London, 1759
Chaconne in G Major, HWV 435
Handel was born just a month before Bach, and less than 100 miles away. Had Handel stayed in Germany, he might have ended up on a similar path to the pinnacle of Lutheran church music, but Handel’s real love was opera, and he leveraged a period of study in Italy and his relationship with the German royals who soon inherited the British throne to become England’s reigning opera impresario.
Handel, like Bach, was a legendary keyboard virtuoso, and the music he wrote down early in his career started making the rounds through bootleg copies as his international fame grew. Ever the shrewd businessman, Handel went into his archives and found old scores that he could publish for his own profit, including this Chaconne in G Major that was first printed in 1733.
In a Chaconne, a recurring motive serves as the basis for a string of short, continuous variations. This G-major example outlines its main theme in the initial bass line that supports a tuneful aria. The eight-measure pattern spurs 21 florid variations, including a haunting passage in the minor key.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, Germany, 1833
Died in Vienna, 1897
Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, Op. 24
The 20-year-old Johannes Brahms was on his first big tour as a piano accompanist when he met a new friend who made the introduction of a lifetime, setting him up to go visit Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf. Robert Schumann became a powerful mentor and champion, nurturing Brahms’ natural tendencies to root his music in the storied lineage of German-speaking composers that encompassed Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Haydn and Mozart, and all the way back to Bach and Handel. When Schumann’s mental health collapsed soon after, leaving him institutionalized for the last two years of his life, Brahms moved into the Schumann household to help manage their affairs while Clara, one of the great pianists of her generation, kept the family afloat with concert tours. She and Brahms navigated a smoldering (and by all accounts unconsummated) affection for each other, and after he moved out, they remained dear friends and musical confidantes for the next 40 years, until she died one year before he did.
Brahms channeled his high regard for Clara and their shared devotion to music’s past into the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, which he offered in 1861 as a present for her 42nd birthday. She performed it later that year, but he had trouble getting it published, even after pleading his case in a letter to his publisher, calling it his “favorite work” and “much better than my earlier ones.”
It is no wonder that a publisher looking for a quick profit would be puzzled by Brahms’ impractical score. It begins with a direct transcription of an aria from a keyboard suite by Handel, whose music was mostly brushed off at that time as hopelessly old-fashioned, when it was even remembered at all. As themes go, the one Brahms chose is simple bordering on banal, ranging up and down one octave of the B-flat major scale in two repeated, four-measure phrases. Whereas most composers of variations sets were content to decorate around the margins of the melody, Brahms took his cue from Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and “Diabelli” Variations in crafting a massive structure that extracts every drop of potential from the limited thematic material.
Handel’s melody is the least important element in Brahms’ treatment, which instead focuses on the underlying harmonic structure. After 25 diverse variations in major and minor keys and all manner of textures and moods, the work closes with a tour de force of a fugue that distills the contours of Handel’s theme down to its essential gestures.
© 2024 Aaron Grad