Last night in the Sol Joseph Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), the Ross McKee Foundation presented the latest installment in its Piano Talks series. The full title of the program was Musical Journeys: A Performance and Discussion of Two Great Musical Narratives. The speaker was Paul Hersh, a member of the SFCM faculty; and, for the second half of the program, he was joined by his former student, Hye Yeong Min.
The “narratives” that Hersh discussed and performed were the concluding Chaconne movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor and Franz Schubert’s D. 940 fantasia in F minor for four hands on a single keyboard. The piano arrangement for the Bach selection was composed by Johannes Brahms to be played by the left hand alone. Hence, the program was divided between music for one hand and music for four hands. Hersh and Min then concluded the evening with “Abendlied” (evening song), the last in Robert Schumann’s Opus 85 collection, which he called Piano Pieces for Young and Older Children (Klavierstücke für kleine und große Kinder). This is a three-hand composition: one hand for the melody and two for the accompaniment.
The scare quotes in the above paragraph are intended to suggest that I was not entirely convinced that either BWV 1004 or D. 940 can be approach on the basis of narrative qualities. I have always held to the conviction that BWV 1004 was composed for pedagogical purposes; and, like so many of Bach’s compositions, it introduces the student to the richness of invention presented in a setting of significant challenges to the capacity for execution. The chaconne movement, whose length approaches that of all the movements that preceded it, could almost be called a monumental vision of architecture that provides a setting for the student’s mastery of a vast panoply of technical challenges. The architecture of D. 940 is similarly impressive, almost symphonic in scale, even if the performance resources are those of the salon, rather than the concert hall.
Hersh’s introduction to the BWV 1004 Chaconne was as rich in detail as it was engaging. He began with the original composition for violin, laying out the three basic units of the architecture in terms of both structure and function. He also discussed the technical challenges that confront the violinist, before then discussing how closely Brahms followed the notes that Bach himself had composed. Implicit in this presentation was the proposition that Brahms had taken a masterpiece of pedagogical study from Bach and repurposed it for pianists; and, indeed, his arrangement was published as the last in a collection of five Piano Studies, each conceived with the mastery of different technical skills in mind.
When Hersh moved from talk to action, one could appreciate, from his performance, the extent to which Brahms had honored both flesh and spirit of the original Bach composition. In sharp contrast to Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangement of the same Chaconne, Brahms’ setting was clearly all about Bach from beginning to end. Listening to Hersh’s performance, I was reminded, once again, that Brahms was a faithful subscriber to the Bach-Gesellschaft-Ausgabe, even if he died before the final volume in that series was published.
Hersh’s introduction to D. 940 also concentrated on the architecture behind the music. He invoked Robert Schumann’s famous assessment of Schubert’s “heavenly length” (mistakenly attributing that phrase to Donald Tovey). However, the features he most emphasized were the darkness that pervades the rhetoric of the entire composition and the way in which the opening theme returns twice over the course of the composition, an approach to recurrence that is rarely encountered. Equally important is that, as late as the early nineteenth century, individual keys were distinguished by their association with specific affective characteristics. Most likely Schubert was aware of Christian Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (ideas for an aesthetics of the art of sound), which outlined those affective characteristics for all 24 major and minor keys. The description for F minor is “Deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave.” In the performance that followed, Hersh and Min never skimped on those dark qualities; but they also kept the temptation to over-emote under control, resulting in a reading that was decidedly true to Schubart without ever descending into degrading excesses.
In that context the performance of the Schumann selection, which was basically an encore, could be relished for its straightforward simplicity, whose rhetoric can convince without ever being overplayed.
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