Sonata in E Minor for Piano and Violin, K.304
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg
Died December 5, 1791, Vienna

Mozart wrote about thirty-five sonatas for violin and keyboard, including some that were left unfinished. He wrote the first when he was 6 and the last in 1788, three years before his death. Only this one is in a minor key. Composed when Mozart was only 22, it is universally regarded as one of his finest chamber works.

Accompanied by his mother, Mozart had set out from Salzburg in September 1777 in search of the position his father was sure would bring him fame. Mozart did not return until January 1779, and the journey can hardly be regarded as a success: Mozart spent too much money and found no position at all. The true cataclysm, though, was that his mother became ill and died in Paris in July 1778. It was left to the young composer to send his father the news and then to make his way back to Salzburg with nothing to show for his sixteen-month absence.

He had, however, written seven violin sonatas during this trip, and he published six of these in Paris. The Sonata in E Minor is wistful music, full of a depth of feeling absent from the other five sonatas, and few commentators have been able to resist associating it with the death of Mozart's mother, though there is no way to know whether it was written before or after her final illness.

The Allegro takes its character from the somber opening theme, played in unison by violin and piano. The jaunty second subject, first announced by the piano, does little to change the mood, and the opening theme dominates the movement. Mozart marks the second movement Tempo di Menuetto, but this music is far more serious than most minuets. Solo piano plays the gravely graceful opening melody, and soon the two instruments take turns with it-this melody returns continually. At the center of the movement, though, Mozart shifts to E major, and this measured, calm section (Mozart marks it dolce) is the true glory of a glorious sonata. Two hundred years after this music was written, it is difficult to disagree with Alfred Einstein's claim that the Sonata in E Minor is "one of the miracles among Mozart's works."

Piano Quintet
ALFRED SCHNITTKE
Born November 24, 1934, Engels
Died August 3, 1998, Hamburg

Alfred Schnittke attended the Moscow Conservatory in the 1950s, taught at the Conservatory from 1961 until 1972, and began his career as a rather conventional composer. But Schnittke became interested in such "Western" techniques as serialism, electronic music, and quoting from earlier composers, and he left the Conservatory to work at the Moscow Experimental Studio of Electronic Music. Soon he was labeled an "avant-garde" composer in the conservative circles of Soviet music, but that description is unfortunate because it refers only to technique. What distinguishes Schnittke's music is its fusion of a refined technique with emotional depth, and many of his scores are leavened with a sharp wit.

Schnittke's Piano Quintet grew out of a devastating moment in the composer's life-the death of his mother-and it had a difficult genesis, taking four years to complete. In a note for a recording, the composer has described its composition: "In the night of 16th-17th September 1972 my mother Maria Vogel died of a heart attack. My aim to compose a piece of simple yet at the same time earnest character in her memory set an almost insoluble problem before me. The first movement of a Piano Quintet had come into being almost without complication. After that it went no further-for I had to transplant everything I wrote from imaginary sonic locations (in which everything was already indescribable, even dissonance) into a psychologically real environment, where tormenting pain has an almost light-hearted effect . . ." Schnittke's Piano Quintet is not a celebration of his mother's life and memory, but a direct reaction to living through the pain of her loss. The opening Moderato is extremely quiet music, but it frequently feels full of menace; the music begins with a long piano solo, and the strings' response, played without vibrato, has an almost icy quality; themes are brief, fragmentary, repetitive.

Unable to continue, Schnittke set the work aside for four years and then resumed work, completing the second movement, which he calls "an unearthly waltz" based on the name B-A-C-H (the note sequence Bb-A-C-B). The third and fourth movements are craggy and dissonant; Schnittke noted that these two movements "are based upon situations of genuine grief, about which I wish to say nothing because they are of a highly personal nature and can only be devalued by words." Briefest of the movements, the finale has the intriguing marking Moderato pastorale. Schnittke described it as "a mirror-image passacaglia, the theme of which is repeated fourteen times, whilst all the other sonic events are mere shadows of an already disappeared tragic perception." The passacaglia theme, a disarmingly simple little tune, goes its own way in the piano, and around these repetitions the strings weave reminiscences of the earlier movements before the stunning close, where the music fades into silence on the passacaglia theme.

At the suggestion of Russian conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who recognized the dramatic character of this music, Schnittke in 1978 orchestrated the Piano Quintet, and this version-titled In Memoriam-was first performed in Moscow on December 29, 1979.

Pictures at an Exhibition
MODEST MUSSORGSKY
Born March 21, 1839, Karevo
Died March 28, 1881, St. Petersburg

In the summer of 1873, Modest Mussorgsky was stunned by the sudden death of his friend Victor Hartmann, an architect and artist who was then only 39. The following year, their mutual friend Vladimir Stassov arranged a showing of over 400 of Hartmann's watercolors, sketches, drawings, and designs. Inspired by the exhibition and the memory of his friend, Mussorgsky set to work on a suite of piano pieces based on the pictures and wrote enthusiastically to Stassov: "Hartmann is bubbling over, just as Boris did. Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord, like the roast pigeons in the story-I gorge and gorge and overeat myself. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough." He worked fast indeed: beginning on June 2, 1874, Mussorgsky had the score complete three weeks later, on June 22, just a few months after the première of Boris Godunov.

The finished work, which he called Pictures at an Exhibition, consists of ten musical portraits bound together by a promenade theme that recurs periodically-Mussorgsky said that this theme, meant to depict the gallery-goer strolling between paintings, was a portrait of himself. Curiously, Pictures spent its first half-century in obscurity. It was not performed publicly during Mussorgsky's lifetime, it was not published until 1886 (five years after its composer's death), and did not really enter the standard piano repertory until several decades after that: the earliest recording of the piano version did not take place until 1942.

Even early listeners were struck by the "orchestral" sonorities of this piano score, and in 1922 conductor Serge Koussevitsky asked Maurice Ravel to orchestrate it. Koussevitsky gave the first performance of Ravel's version at the Paris Opera on October 19, 1922, and it quickly became one of the most popular works in the orchestral repertory. This recital offers the rare opportunity to hear this familiar music performed in its original version.

The opening Promenade alternates 5/4 and 6/4 meters; Mussorgsky marks it "in the Russian manner." The Gnome is a portrait of a gnome staggering on twisted legs; the following Promenade is marked "with delicacy." In Hartmann's watercolor The Old Castle, a minstrel sings before a ruined castle, and his mournful song rocks along over an incessant G-sharp minor pedal. Tuileries is a watercolor of children playing and quarreling in the Paris park, while Bydlo returns to Eastern Europe, where a heavy ox-cart grinds through the mud. The wheels pound ominously along as the driver sings; the music rises to a strident climax as the cart draws near and passes, then diminishes as the cart moves on. Mussorgsky wanted the following Promenade to sound tranquillo, but gradually this Promenade takes on unexpected power. The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks depicts Hartmann's costume design for the ballet Trilby, in which these characters wore egg-shaped armor-Mussorgsky echoes the sound of the chicks with chirping gracenotes.

"I meant to get Hartmann's Jews," said Mussorgsky of Two Polish Jews, One Rich, One Poor, often called by Mussorgsky's later title Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle. This portrait of two Polish Jews in animated conversation has the rich voice of Goldenberg alternating with Schmuyle's rapid, high speech. Listeners who know Pictures only in the Ravel orchestration will be surprised to find this movement followed by another Promenade; Ravel cut this from his orchestral version, which is a pity, because this appearance of the Promenade brings a particularly noble incarnation of that theme. The Marketplace at Limoges shows Frenchwomen quarreling furiously in a market, while Catacombs is Hartmann's portrait of himself surveying the Roman catacombs by lantern light.

This section leads into Cum mortuis in lingua mortua: "With the dead in a dead language." Mussorgsky noted of this section: "The spirit of the departed Hartmann leads me to the skulls and invokes them: the skulls begin to glow faintly"; embedded in this spooky passage is a minor-key variation of the Promenade theme. The Hut on Fowl's Legs shows the hut (perched on hen's legs) of the vicious witch Baba Yaga, who would fly through the skies in a red-hot mortar-Mussorgsky has her fly scorchingly right into the final movement, The Great Gate of Kiev. Hartmann had designed a gate (never built) for the city of Kiev, and Mussorgsky's brilliant finale transforms the genial Promenade theme into a heaven-storming conclusion.