Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Schoenberg/Ives, Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie Berlin, September 2024
Marking the joint 150th anniversaries of Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives, Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s recital at the Kammermusiksaal presented Schoenberg’s complete solo works for piano (at least, of the completed or acknowledged), its second half offering Ives’ monumental Concord Sonata: a programme ambitious in scope and full of food for thought.
The five sets of Schoenberg pieces, around forty-five minutes in length, move from the early, tentative break into atonality at the turn of the 1910s, into the organisation of the twelve-tone method in the work of the early through late ’20s: visions of worlds falling apart and reconstituting themselves in alien forms; a beautiful collapse followed by a meticulous and often equally beautiful reconstruction, all the more beautiful for the historical precarity behind its grand, visionary announcement of the new, dodecaphonic world, holding together like a kind of Jenga Tower made of the twelve-tone rows.
The earliest of those breakthroughs here are the Drei Klavierstück, Opus 11. One of Schoenberg’s first atonal works, it’s now over a century old: music existing in a state of concentrated tension, moving from introspective stasis to sudden flurries of impassioned gestures in a kind of febrile, streaming invention. Aimard, who perhaps has a cold, can be heard murmuring along with the music, his body moving expressively round the keyboard’s centre-point in a series of feints, lunges and flourishes, seemingly somewhere between the performative and the unconscious reflexes by which he translates score to sound. In the transition from the second to third piece, he turns the page himself, his free foot tapping on floor, then visually describes the next surge of sound with a flamboyant sweep of the arm before playing it.
While Opus.11 surges out at length, lasting around fifteen minutes, the Sechs kleine Klavierstück, Op.19, offer more truncated flows, outbursts, and, often, extreme concision: the final last movement, reportedly written at the shock of Mahler’s death, is a mere nine bars long. Aimard’s hands leap from the keyboard, his shoulders twitching as if startled at its touch: the body, like the sound, in a state of condensed concentrated tension, each pause ready to become a leap, each leap a pause. In the minimal second movement, with its halting repeated chords, Aimard makes ringing use of the pedal, emphasizing the music’s sparsity and spaciousness, while at times in the spikier passages, he seems to be dancing while sitting down. What he gives us here is a Schoenberg with edge, as befits the rhythmic impetus he brings to Messiaen and Ligeti, but he’s also willing to hold back, to sink into the pauses, those depths of expressive silence or near-silence into which the music keeps falling.
The two small pieces of the Opus 33A and B, written two years apart at the end of the ‘20s, are rarely heard or discussed: in Aimard’s hands, they’re turbulently pensive and pensively turbulent. We end the first half with the Suite für Klavier, Opus 25, often cited as Schoenberg’s first piece to be fully written using twelve-tone rows as its basis. Adopting the form of a Baroque dance suite, and incorporating the B-A-C-H motif into one of its rows, it consciously harks back to Bach: in his pre-concert talk, Wolfgang Rathert describes the piece as a “furthering of tradition, a furthering of tonality”, rather than its negation, with Schoenberg emerging as a paradoxical “conservative revolutionary”. It was, indeed, this that, for Pierre Boulez, constituted the work’s classicizing weakness, as if Schoenberg had put what had emerged in the rejection of tonality into a straitjacket, or a costume. Likewise, for Adorno, the suite offered “a kind of Bauhaus-music, metallic constructivism which derives its force from precisely the absence of primary expression”; “an ascetism [...] the negation of all façades”: one whose rejection of the facile or sentimental paid the price of a drive toward the negation of music itself, in the very guise of purifying it. But it’s precisely this kind of tension that gives the piece its power, whether we hear it—as Schoenberg seems to have intended—as a gesture of rapprochement, a work that has summarized, exemplified and furthered the tradition it’s often taken to destroy, or as a work whose virtue lies in its very lack of reconciliation, its very awkwardness, a far cry from the glacial worlds of neo-classicism to which it forms a twelve-tone equivalent (and on which Schoenberg himself—perhaps protesting too much—heaped virulent scorn).
In Aimard’s performance, those gestures of measured turbulence heard in the Opus 33 in the Opus 25 take on a twittering, even capering quality, hectically measured, as tone rows are made to dance the Gavotte, the Minuet and the Gigue. Aimard here matched the precision and austerity that some performers emphasize with a wilder edge, as the dance skitters along helter-skelter or slows almost to a crawl, a trill hovering there as if about to trip over itself. After a particularly lively musette, Aimard pulled his hand away from the keyboard in a gesture that for a moment looks like a tennis player’s fist pump, while with the final flourish of the gigue he looked about ready to jump off his stool: a fitting end to the first half, met with warm applause.
As Rathert pointed out in his pre-concert talk, Schoenberg’s piano works are all titled simple “Stücke”, pieces. Deliberately sparse, they lack a programme, establishing themselves in the tradition of ‘Absolute Music’, the “stücke” an intimate form, a music existing for itself, aphoristic and contained. Revolution, if it happens, happens here within the soundworld—even as that soundworld, in its very insulation or isolation, becomes porous, absorbing the currents of the times with an intensity all the greater than a conventionally programmatic reflection. Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, by contrast, adopts a grand programme. The piece’s full title is Piano Sonata No.2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860, and its movements contain dedications to key Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, father and daughter, and Thoreau. Before the piece was even fully premiered, Ives had published a 125-page book of essays explaining its philosophical background in New England Transcendentalism, alongside his theories of music, assertive, forthright, cantankerous, and convinced of its visionary heritage. Musically, too, everything about the piece spills over, from the lack of barlines to the addition of extra staves when the piano part becomes too dense for the normal two, to the chords that become clusters, played with a piece of wood. In contrast to the self-contained world of Schoenbergian Absolute Music, it’s full of quotation, sometimes obvious, sometimes submerged, from church hymns to popular songs, circus band music, and a prominent transformation of the ‘fate’ motif from Beethoven’s fifth which functions, for Ives, as a kind of leitmotif for humanity’s searching after spiritual knowledge, as well, we might suggest, of the revolutionary hopes encoded in the European Romanticism of which Beethoven stands as epitome and herald. (The composer Lou Harrison, indeed, termed the Concord a piece “in the grand manner [...] probably the last [...] romantic sonata”.)
In these works by Schoenberg and Ives, then, we hear two different trends in twentieth-century modernism: on the one hand, the avant-garde as a self-contained experimentation arising from the material, further and further isolated from clear social reference (even as that isolation cannot help but bespeak the social); on the other, a music that insistently flows into and out of the social.
In Schoenberg’s works for piano we hear ideas worked out in miniature—experimentation through compression. In Ives’ sonata, by contrast, we hear experimentation through expansion. The work, as Rathert’s programme notes and pre-concert talk suggested, is a kind of endless text, constantly revised with new elements—in the case of Ives’s own recordings, sometimes improvised—and a layer of intellectual associations and quotations.
What both Schoenberg and Ives have in common is a tension between fixity and the monumental and the fleeting, the improvisatory, the eddy of feeling and the edifice of structure.
These elements were certainly brought out in Aimard’s performance, which combined the virtues of virtuosic precision with that same edge of wild energy he’d brought to the Schoenberg. We began with Emerson contemplating eternity with the strains of Beethoven’s ‘fate’ motif wafting or hammering by within dense chords or at the tail end of melodies. Aimard gives the music a sense of flow, of the questioningly affirmative, as the motif dies out into a pedalled silence. The swirling opening of the second movement, dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne—what Ives described as a “phantasmagoria” inspired by Hawthorne’s fantastical tales—visits the circus, arpeggiates into dreamy reverie, capped off with a cluster played with a block of wood. Aimard renders this music of filigree contrasts, of vibrant energies and flitting light and shadow, with a jubilant exuberance laced with contemplation and something at times approaching swing.
The simple soberness of the relatively short third movement, ‘The Alcotts’, offers lyrical contrast, the fate motif now a pensive parlour song, now a church hymn. (At one point, we even hear a snatch of ‘Here Comes the Bride’.) It’s as if the work is saving up its energies for the finale: not, however, in the traditional grand manner, but instead, in near-silence. Ives conceived a loose programme for the piece imagining Thoreau taking three walks in late summer, contemplating Walden Pond. In the magically quiet opening, Aimard treads a careful line between leaning into the piece’s contemplative nature with over-indulging its luxuriousness. He has the hall rapt as he surges up from a pause and into the beautifully harmonised melody that forms the emotional centre of the movement.
The melody in question is based on the opening to a phrase from Stephen Foster’s ‘Down in the Cornfield’ (the title by which the song is mostly known today, in replacement of its offensive original). For Ives, this quotation had personal significance: it was, as Kyle Gann notes in his book on the sonata, Ives’s father’s favourite song, and is quoted and transformed in various forms across numerous of his pieces. The echo may seem troubling, given the controversy and ambiguity surrounding Foster’s minstrel songs: its lyrics impersonate slaves mourning the death of their master, though Donald Berman, another recent interpreter of the sonata, has recently suggested that the text represents slaves ironically celebrating that death, Ives’s quotation of the song thus highlighting Thoreau’s abolitionism. Whether it’s a political signal or an apolitical echo, it’s hard not to hear the troubling echo of a pitifully condescending caricature, a contradiction it would surely be foolish to ignore, for it was, too, at the heart of the wide range of abolitionist politics and its representational modes. Certainly, a too triumphalist reading of Ives risks overlooking what’s troubling in his visions of liberty, as those visions reflect wider prejudices—the comments made about spirituals in his published writings, for instance—and as the desire for liberty, including that of abolitionism, couches itself in forms that do not fully render or do justice to the humanity of those whose liberation they purport to seek. Which is to say that the question of what liberty might mean, and for whom, which the work puts to question in, say, its citations of Beethoven and its fervent Transcendentalism, not to mention its exceeding of conventional harmonic rule, are also questions that can be put to the work itself: for in the texture of Ives’s music, and this is its enduring power, every affirmation opens onto a question—that ‘Unanswered Question’ most famously asked in 1908, a few years before the completion of the sonata. Whatever the ramifications of the Foster (half-)quotation, it’s at the heart of the movement, accompanied by a gently tolling, repeated three-note figure that, Gann writes, Ives meant to suggest the tempo of nature: a melody and an accompaniment always seemingly on the verge of resolution that, nonetheless, never quite resolve. In the spellbinding conclusion, the music surges to one final peal before ebbing away as the ‘nature’ figure fades to nothing, a moment treated by Aimard with an unobtrusive reverence met by suitably warm applause.
He offered an encore from another North American experimentalist who, while in Europe, refused to study with Schoenberg, keen to stick to her own path, and whose revival, unlike that of Ives, has come in fits and starts. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s fast and furious Piano Study in Mixed Accents of 1930 was a piece, Aimard announces from the stage, that, in the '80s, György Ligeti used to give the piece to friends with the suggestion that they play this music. From the forty-five minutes of Ives to the mere minute of Seeger, different worlds come in different forms, the condensed and the expanded, the exercise and the programme. Perhaps we might speculate that for Seeger, the fervent socialist, in what seems a technical exercise in palindromic form, those “mixed accents” are too the “mixed accents” of history, the teaming and unpredictable rhythms by which its contours are envisaged, planned or challenged: the tempo, in other words, of revolution. Either way, in the worlds of all these pieces, there is still much for interpretation, contestation, debate. Aimard’s readings this early September evening offered us a fine way in.
