Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) reached a painful crossroads in 1814. He was as famous as he had ever been, and a lifetime pension set up by three loyal patrons ensured his financial independence; at the same time, his hearing loss had advanced to the point that he had to reluctantly give up performing. In that pivotal year, he took time away from big public projects and returned to the piano sonata, which provided an outlet for introspection and experimentation throughout his career.
The Piano Sonata No. 27 in E Minor (Op. 90) was a curious creature that in some ways brought his efforts of the last decade — a period of distilling ideas down to their essence — to their logical conclusion, through a sonata of two relatively short movements. At the same time, there were signs of the emotional vulnerability that Beethoven would express so achingly in the piano sonatas from his later years, a quality foreshadowed most clearly in the restless and volatile first movement, to be played “with liveliness and with feeling and expression throughout.” Even the ostensibly cheerful second movement, which comes with the instruction that it should be played “not too swiftly and conveyed in a singing manner,” asks more questions than it answers, until it ends with a noncommittal shrug.
Scott Joplin (1868-1917) picked up music from his father, a formerly enslaved laborer and violinist, and his mother, who hailed from Kentucky and played the banjo. Thanks to piano lessons in Texas from a Jewish immigrant from Germany, Joplin was perfectly positioned to hit the road playing a new style that cranked up the syncopated sizzle of established Black dance styles like the cakewalk. The herky-jerky rhythms got labeled “ragged time,” seeding Joplin’s signature style that came to be called “ragtime.”
Most famous for ragtime staples like The Entertainer and Maple Leaf Rag, Joplin had a wider range as a composer, as heard in Bethana, A Concert Waltz, composed in 1905, not long after the death of his wife, whom he had wed only a few months earlier. In this ragtime approach to the waltz, the three-beat pulse holds steady in the left hand, while the right hand weaves a melody characterized by those signature “ragged” syncopations.
Composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) was the first American musician to develop a global reach. He was born in New Orleans to a German-Jewish father who had emigrated from London and a French-Catholic mother whose family had fled Haiti amid the uprisings of enslaved people in the 1790s. Gottschalk studied piano with the organist of America’s oldest cathedral (and by age seven he was capable of subbing for his teacher during Mass), and he also absorbed the diverse sounds of New Orleans, including songs and dances brought from Haiti by the enslaved woman his grandmother had trafficked to the city.
At 12, Gottschalk’s family sent him to Paris for advanced musical training, and at 16 he played a recital that earned high praise from none other than Chopin. He became famous for salon pieces that brought “exotic” sounds from the African diaspora into the keyboard repertoire, including The Banjo from 1853, subtitled a “grotesque fantasy.” Gottschalk must have had direct contact with a real master of the instrument, which at the time was mostly associated with Black musicians in the American south, playing in a style closely related to stringed instruments found in West Africa. The piano does a worthy impression of the banjo’s downward and upward strumming patterns, and the repeated notes and sustained tones recreate the distinctive articulations that come from playing on the banjo’s adjacent strings. One familiar tune that appears near the end is a quotation of “Camptown Races,” a Stephen Foster song that had become a hit on the minstrel show circuit, where white performers in blackface parodied Black music.
The composer Jule Styne (1905-1994) and lyricist partners Betty Comden (1917-2006) and Adolph Green (1914-2002), each responsible for dozens of entries in the Great American Songbook, teamed up in 1956 for the musical Bells are Ringing. It included the song “Just in Time,” which became a hit for such crooners as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Dean Martin. This version takes inspiration from the memorably free and playful interpretation by the great jazz singer and pianist Nina Simone.
While most aspiring American composers spent the 1960s adopting rigorous and highly academic techniques, William Bolcom (b. 1938) went against the current and embraced jazz, ragtime, and other accessible influences. His charming sense of humor and idiomatic grasp of ragtime comes through in The Poltergeist, from Three Ghost Rags, assembled in 1970. Explaining its quirky dissonances, Bolcom wrote that The Poltergeist “explores nearly every ‘frozen appoggiatura’ and substitution in the harmonic book.”
Profoundly deaf and painfully isolated, Beethoven turned inward in his final years, channeling some of his deepest, most surprising thoughts into two intimate genres: piano sonatas and string quartets. The Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major (Op. 110) was the second of three composed between 1820 and 1822 that turned out to be Beethoven’s final contributions to the genre. It begins with a poetic movement that defies easy categorization, with its “moderate, singing, and very expressive” tempo making it unusually slow for a fast movement (or perhaps unusually fast for a slow movement). A brief and rhythmically jarring central movement makes for a stark contrast with the slow introduction to the finale, where Beethoven quotes from the poignant aria in Bach’s St. John Passion that marks the moment of Christ’s death. From that state of minor-key anguish, the finale launches into a smooth fugue in the home key of A-flat major, paying homage to a forgotten past and asserting Beethoven’s total liberty to reimagine the piano sonata according to his own inner vision.
Charles Ives (1874-1954) received his earliest musical training from his father, who had served in the Civil War as the Union’s youngest bandmaster before returning to Danbury, Connecticut. The sounds of parade bands and church hymns conducted by his father seeped into young Ives’ musical consciousness, as did their shared experiments with bitonality and other ear-stretching games. He became Connecticut’s youngest salaried church organist at 14, and he went on to study music at Yale. In New York, he worked to become one of the most successful dealers of life insurance in the industry. Privately, he composed the first truly American body of serious music, applying pioneering techniques (often years or decades ahead of the musical establishment) and drawing on the songs and hymns he loved.
Between 1916 and 1919, Ives drafted the four movements of the Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-60, and he kept tinkering with the score past its initial publication in 1920 and the public premiere that finally came in 1938. Ives thought deeply about his musical intentions and the quintessential New Englanders who inspired him, and at the same time he developed an unusually loose approach to his musical notation. Much of the work flows freely with no time signature or bar lines to dictate the rhythmic structure, a mode that Ives equated to writing prose. The sonata pays tribute to writers who forged the distinctly New England ethos of self-reliance and transcendental spirituality that Ives revered: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts (philosopher Bronson Alcott and his daughter, Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women) and Henry David Thoreau. The other unnamed forefather to this music is Beethoven, who, like the transcendentalists, probed the mysteries of life and faith by embracing nature and investigating his own inner world. Refracted quotations of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony reinforce the extent to which he served as a model and guide for Ives’ radical realignment of what a piano sonata can be.
© 2024 Aaron Grad