CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Emanuel Ax

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Emanuel Ax, Piano

BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Op. 2, No. 2
SCHUMANN Humoreske in B-flat Major, Op. 20
SCHUMANN Papillons, Op. 2
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 23 in F Minor "Appassionata"

Encores:
CHOPIN Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 1
CHOPIN Waltz in A-flat Major, Op. 34, No. 1

Program Notes:

by Paul Griffiths

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Op. 2, No. 2
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn; died March 27, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1794–95, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 2 was first performed at Carnegie Hall on March 31, 1916, with Ethel Leginska, piano.

Beethoven worked on the first compositions he intended for publication—three piano trios and three sonatas—while his teacher Haydn was away for a year and a half visiting London. Haydn’s absence may have proved as stimulating as Haydn’s presence had been, so it seems, disappointing. Perhaps, too, the teacher’s impending return gave the pupil a useful deadline. The trios came out just before Haydn got back to Vienna, in the late summer of 1795, so that Beethoven was able to greet his old master with an opus in print and another, the sonatas, almost ready. When the sonatas were published the following year, they bore a dedication to Haydn.

That dedication was not so much to Haydn the sonata writer as to Haydn the symphonist and author of quartets, for Beethoven here raised the sonata to the level of those other genres, giving each piece four big movements. In doing so, he set himself a challenge for the future, a challenge he was to take on again and again during the next decade, and one may feel that future implicit in this superb second sonata of the set.

The first movement is remarkable for the harmonic venturesomeness of its second subject area, and for the grace with which tensions are resolved in the recapitulation, so that there is no need for a coda. Another feature, especially of the powerful development, is the canonic answering of the hands. The slow movement, in D, has the unusual tempo marking for Beethoven of Largo. After this comes a scherzo with a trio in the minor, and a finale whose rondo theme has its arpeggio introduction constantly varied, covering almost the entire five-octave range of the contemporary keyboard.


ROBERT SCHUMANN Humoreske in B-flat Major, Op. 20
Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Saxony; died July 29, 1856, in Endenich (near Bonn).

Composed in 1838–39, Schumann’s Humoreske, Op. 20, received its Carnegie Hall premiere on April 13, 1935, with Vladimir Horowitz, piano.

A composer whose works include novelettes and fairytales, Schumann likewise went to a literary genre in titling this big piece he completed in March 1839. The prose “humoresque”—in German, Humoreske—was a story illustrating one or more of the recurrent humors, or character types, that people liked to find in human nature. Humor, in the more ordinary sense, was a common feature, and Schumann’s example certainly has a dash of it, along with sweetness, ardor, and a great deal of ebullience, all of which he seems to have felt while at work. As he wrote at the time to Clara, back in Leipzig with her father while he was in Vienna: “The whole week I have been sitting at the piano and composing and writing and laughing and crying at the same time, as you will now find all beautifully illustrated in my Op. 20, this large-scale Humoreske.”

The composition does indeed show Schumann a master of mixed feelings, as also of harmonic ambiguities and simultaneous speeds. Like the better-known Fantasy in C Major that came shortly before, the Humoreske is a work of sonata-style weight and variety. Of the four main movements, the third is slow and, like its two predecessors, in clear ternary form, whereas the finale is a more various succession of episodes. The simple tune at the start of the piece returns at the end of the first movement (where much of the comedy is to be found) and appears again, reduced to a sequence of chords, in the middle part of the second. At the opening of this movement, alongside the melody in the bass, Schumann wrote out an “inner voice,” not meant to be played but only imagined by the performer (or listener), a melody quoted from a composition of Clara’s. The slow movement is based on another gorgeous tune, and the finale proceeds with immense power.

By the end, the Humoreske has told a musical narrative of great subtlety and scope. The story may be partly the composer’s, from a time of enforced separation from Clara, but music’s advantage is that it defines no subject and has no narrator. It just is.


ROBERT SCHUMANN Papillons, Op. 2
Composed in 1829–31, Papillons was first performed at Carnegie Hall on January 30, 1892, with Ignacy Jan Paderewski, piano.

At the end of his teens, torn between the muses, Schumann was rushing to embrace music without being quite willing to abandon his first love: literature. Papillons testifies to this moment of exultant equivocation, being a piece of music directly modeled on a work of literature, the penultimate chapter of Jean Paul’s novel Flegeljahre (Years of Indiscretion). The book featured people the composer’s age; it also chimed with feelings he was beginning to have about himself, especially concerning the coexistence within one person of outward and introspective aspects, of exuberant and dreamy. “Jean Paul mirrors himself in all his works, but each time in two characters,” he wrote, giving as example the twin brothers of Flegeljahre, the sensitive Walt and the vigorous Vult, both of whom, inevitably, are in love with the same girl.

The chapter that particularly affected Schumann takes place at a masked ball, where Walt, Vult, and their mutual but undeclared sweetheart, Wina, are all present. Walt, having dressed himself up as a working man, looks forward to the night. Led by the sound of music, he arrives at the party, where he immediately sees someone disguised as a giant boot. Next he spots a dancer masked as the female deity Hope, and wonders if this can be Wina, before recognizing her as a shepherdess. “Hope” turns out to be Vult, who asks Walt to exchange costumes, which the brothers do. Vult dances with Wina, and the next day Walt is left watching and listening as his brother departs, playing the flute.

Music tells the story in different ways, of course—in changes of tempo, key, and texture, in motivic cross-references, in dialogs between the hands and prevarications of mood, in phases of affirmation or dissolve, all within a dance medley suggesting Schumann’s recent study of Schubert waltzes (and of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance). Through this different kind of masquerade, the same themes of longing and uncertainty are at play as in the novel. The immature creatures circling in what Jean Paul called his “Larventanz” (the German word Larve meaning both “larva” and “mask”) take flight as butterflies—Papillons.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata”
Composed in 1804–05, the “Appassionata” Sonata received its Carnegie Hall premiere in the Recital Hall (now Zankel Hall) on April 24, 1891, with Leopold Godowsky, piano.

According to Carl Czerny, who studied with Beethoven, the composer himself regarded this sonata as his greatest before the “Hammerklavier.” Many have agreed. “Here,” the English composer Hubert Parry wrote, “the human soul asked mighty questions of its God and had its reply.” Another distinguished observer, Vladimir Lenin, put it differently: “I would like to listen to it every day. I always think with pride—perhaps it is naïve of me—what marvelous things human beings can do.” The title, applied by a publisher in 1838, makes its own compact response, which generations have been happy to accept.

Much of the work of composition seems to have been done in the summer and fall of 1804, when Beethoven was on vacation, first in Baden, a spa town about 15 miles south of Vienna, then in Döbling, a village just to the north of the city. Another of his pupils, Ferdinand Ries, visited him in the latter place and recalled a walk they took together, when Beethoven had paced along “humming, and more often howling,” then rushed to the piano when they were back, to hammer out the finale of this sonata. But work continued into the next year, and perhaps into 1806. No sonata—until the “Hammerklavier”—seems to have cost the composer so much effort.

Parry—though one might not want to go all the way with his identification of the interlocutors—was surely right to hear the sonata as questioning. The first phrase outlines an F-minor arpeggio, starkly unharmonized, then ends poised on a C-major chord; the answer to this question is the same question again, raised a semitone, whereupon the driving rhythmic motif of the Fifth Symphony reappears, but here dropping through the crucial minor second. From here, all is drama, with Beethoven again using his keyboard’s full range, down to its lowest note, the F that was there in the left hand at the start and will be there again at the end. Meanwhile, the opening gesture is soon transformed into a generous melody, notionally the “second subject.” This is a beguiling answer, but not the right one, for the music goes storming on in search. Second time round, in the recapitulation (there is no exposition repeat), the melody leads toward a long coda, which Beethoven first sketched as affirmative, before changing his mind.

The slow movement is a hymn in D-flat, in the register of a men’s choir, with decoration that becomes increasingly profuse, and increasingly fast, before falling away. In place of the final concord, Beethoven substitutes a diminished seventh chord, adds another, louder, then tears into the finale of his Döbling walks. This is another big, ranging movement in sonata form, and again the exposition is not repeated—though, unusually, the development-plus-recapitulation explicitly is. Never to be resolved, the movement is stopped by a wild dance, with the storms of F minor unabated.

This had been the key, too, of Beethoven’s first published sonata. In under a decade he had reached No. 23 and come back to his point of origin. Now he would set the genre aside a while.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Paul Griffiths is the author of numerous books on music, including
The New Penguin Dictionary of Music and, most recently, A Concise History
of Western Music (Cambridge University Press).

Emanuel Ax, Piano
Emanuel Ax is renowned not only for his poetic temperament and unsurpassed virtuosity but also for the exceptional breadth of his performing activity. Each season, his distinguished career includes appearances with major symphony orchestras worldwide, recitals in the most celebrated concert halls, a variety of chamber music collaborations, the commissioning and performance of new music, and additions to his acclaimed discography on Sony Classical.

Mr. Ax captured public attention in 1974 when, at age 25, he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists and, four years later, took the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. He has been an exclusive Sony Classical recording artist since 1987, making his debut on that label with a collection of Chopin scherzos and mazurkas. Mr. Ax’s third volume in the recording cycle of Haydn piano sonatas (Nos. 29, 31, 34, 35, and 49) received a Grammy Award in February 2004, following the previous recording in the cycle (Sonata Nos. 47, 53, 32, and 59), also a Grammy winner. Recent releases include Strauss’s Enoch Arden narrated by Patrick Stewart (June 2007), two discs of two-piano programs (with Yefim Bronfman) of works by Brahms and Rachmaninoff, period-instrument performances of Chopin’s complete works for piano and orchestra (on two discs), and a reissue of both Brahms concertos with Bernard Haitink and James Levine. Additional notable recordings are the two Liszt concertos paired with the Schoenberg Concerto, three solo Brahms albums, an album of tangos by Astor Piazzolla, and the premiere recording of John Adams’s Century Rolls with The Cleveland Orchestra for Nonesuch.

In the 2007–08 season, Mr. Ax performs with orchestras in the US with which he has had ongoing relationships for many years, including those of New York, Chicago, Houston, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Minnesota, as well as the National Symphony Orchestra. In Europe, he appears with the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra, the London Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra. A solo recital tour in Europe and North America will take him to such celebrated venues as London’s Wigmore Hall and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw.

For the opening gala of the New York Philharmonic in September 2006, Mr. Ax appeared with Mr. Bronfman in Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos conducted by Lorin Maazel with live national TV coverage. As an On Location artist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 2006–07 season, he contributed to a series of chamber and orchestral programs centered around Mozart and Strauss works. With his wife, pianist Yoko Nozaki, a project with the Mark Morris Dance Group originally conceived for New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival in the summer of 2006 was repeated in Vienna and London. Tours included a series of Mozart concertos with Orpheus on the West coast, Florida with the Atlanta Symphony conducted by Robert Spano, a ten-city recital tour, duos with bassist Edgar Meyer, and concerts in Japan with his long-standing colleague and partner Yo-Yo Ma.

In the 2005–06 season, Mr. Ax served as Pianist-in-Residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker, performing with the orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle in Berlin and New York. Other recent performance highlights have included separate recital tours with two longstanding colleagues, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Yefim Bronfman, a tour of the US with the Dresden Staatskapelle and Myung-Whun Chung (with performances in Carnegie Hall and Boston’s Symphony Hall), and a season-long Perspectives series focused on the music of Debussy. In 2004–05, Mr. Ax also contributed to a BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and which was awarded a 2005 International Emmy.

Always a committed proponent of contemporary composers, Mr. Ax has turned his attention in recent years toward the music of 20th-century composers. He gave the world premiere of John Adams’s Century Rolls with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1997, the European premiere with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1998, and the New York premiere with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 2000. Another concerto dedicated to him, Christopher Rouse’s Seeing, was premiered in 1999 with the New York Philharmonic and received its European debut at the BBC Proms in 2001. In 2000 Mr. Ax joined the Boston Symphony for the first performances of Bright Sheng’s Red Silk Dance, and in March 2003 he joined Yo-Yo Ma, David Zinman, and the New York Philharmonic to premiere Mr. Sheng’s Song and Dance of Tears. Mr. Ax premiered Krzysztof Penderecki’s Resurrection with The Philadelphia Orchestra in May 2002, and in May 2003 he premiered a concerto written for him by Melinda Wagner, Extremity of Sky, with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony.

Devoted to chamber music literature, Mr. Ax has worked regularly with such artists as Young Uck Kim, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, and Jaime Laredo, and he was a frequent collaborator with the late Isaac Stern. He has made a series of acclaimed recordings with Mr. Ma, and as a duo they have won three Grammy Awards for the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. The pair has also teamed with Richard Stoltzman for a Grammy Award–winning album of clarinet trios and with Pamela Frank, Rebecca Young, and Edgar Meyer for Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. The Ax-Stern-Laredo-Ma Quartet recorded the piano quartets of Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Fauré, Mozart, and Schumann for Sony Classical.

Born in Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. His studies at The Juilliard School were greatly supported by the sponsorship of the Epstein Scholarship Program of the Boys Clubs of America, and he subsequently won the Young Concert Artists Award. His piano teacher was Mieczylaw Munz. Additionally, he attended Columbia University, where he majored in French. He holds an honorary doctorate of music from Yale University.

Mr. Ax resides in New York City with his wife, pianist Yoko Nozaki. They have two children together, Joseph and Sarah. For more information, please visit emanuelax.com.