"›Malédiction‹ (Curse) is the first of four entries that the young Franz Liszt noted in 1833 in the score of his later so-titled single-movement composition for piano and string orchestra. ›Pleurs-angoisses-rêves‹ (Tears, Fears, Dreams), ›orgeuil‹ (Pride) and ›raillerie‹ (Mockery) define further programmatic thematic fields. Their dramatic development in rhapsodically free form and the virtuosically elaborated solo part unite for the first time the gesture of a piano concerto with the characteristics of the symphonic poem.
About 20 years later, Franz Liszt sends some new compositions to Clara Schumann. A sonata is among them, dedicated to Robert Schumann in return for his C major Fantasy. Brahms is asked to play it. ›Horrible‹ and ›only blind noise‹ it is, Clara writes in her diary in 1854. Today the Sonata in B minor is considered one of the most significant, technically demanding piano works of Romanticism and as a highlight in the composer's œuvre.
As ›very delicate‹, however, Franz Joseph Haydn himself describes his Symphony No. 95 in C minor. Written in early 1791, it emerges from the shadows of the premonition of the approaching death of his friend into the radiant light of glowing admiration for the beloved Mozart, who once emulated him. Striking in the variation sequence is the use of a solo cello. Could Adam Liszt, Franz's father, who still played for a long time under Haydn's direction in the Esterházy orchestra, have inspired him to do this?
Dmitri Shostakovich calls his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C minor ›a mocking challenge to the conservative-serious character of the classical concert gesture‹. Written exactly 100 years after ›Malédiction‹, it is also his first concertante work, whereby it remains noteworthy that it was initially conceived as a trumpet concerto, then as a double concerto, and finally completed as a piano concerto with concertizing trumpet. Where Liszt focuses on serious and deep feelings, here everything revolves around parody and persiflage as stylistic means of satire. Thus we encounter alienated quotes from Beethoven's ›Appassionata‹, Haydn's Piano Sonata in D major and Beethoven's Rondo ›The Rage over the Lost Penny‹. But the quote of the Austrian folk song ›O Du lieber Augustin‹ is of particular topicality. Augustin, heavily intoxicated and believed dead, is thrown into a mass grave of those who died of the black plague, awakes bright and cheerful without having been infected by the highly infectious corpses, and begins to play on his bagpipes as a modern Orpheus. Like Haydn's symphony, this musical journey also ends in lapidary C major."
Roland Böer
Tickets for the concert "Liszt, Haydn, Shostakovich" on Friday, April 8, 2022 can be found HERE.
The complete program of the Piano Days 2022 from April 8-10, 2022 can be found HERE.