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This chapter discusses the cultural preoccupation with memory and suffering in Russia during glasnost and focuses upon pain as an element of truth, morality, and spirituality. Galina Ustvolskaya’s Piano Sonata No. 6 resonates with a concern for physical pain that appears in the social discourse during glasnost. For those who were concerned with telling the history of WWII and subsequent human rights violations during the Soviet era, a focus upon the physicality of pain could assert the reality of suffering in response to a master narrative that frequently ignored or falsified such pain. Foregrounding bodily suffering could also function to counter a political narrative that interpreted such experiences in patriotic and triumphalist terms. This chapter considers Ustvolskaya’s foregrounding of bodily pain in the late 1980s as an antidote to an official culture that continued to debate the historical veracity of many people’s suffering under the Soviet regime.

This chapter explores how Robert Schumann imbued the style hongrois with his own poetic colorings. In three related finales—those concluding the F‐sharp Minor Piano Sonata, Op. 11; A‐Major String Quartet, Op. 41, no. 3; and E‐flat Major Piano Quintet, Op. 44—Schumann combines this Hungarian Gypsy folk reference with a highly unusual format: a refrain‐based “parallel” form featuring sustained tonal ambiguity and multiplicity, with tonic definition treated only as an end‐oriented goal. By resisting conventional forms and by wandering through multiple harmonic landscapes that defy any sense of a true tonal home, these finales evoke Gypsy stereotypes common in Schumann's day: a people seen as distant from sociocultural norms, exploring the unknown through their peripatetic lifestyle. The chapter also argues that Schubert partly inspired Schumann's poeticized use of the style hongrois. Schumann's 1831 reaction to Schubert's Divertissement à l'Hongroise is multivalent, suggesting that the idiom could reference an outward peasant culture while also invoking the infinite and ineffable. Nevertheless a comparison of themes from Schumann's Op. 11 and Schubert's Grand Duo Sonata illustrates the different musical means through which Schumann achieved similar and other expressive effects. Ultimately Schumann saw within the style hongrois a pathway for experimentation, a means for revitalizing inherited genres and older models of form.

Having transcribed and analyzed the fascinating compositional sketches for Sonata and Serenade at the Stravinsky archive, I observed how Stravinsky’s compositional process for these two works is shown through his reliance on the classical piano repertoire. For example, a very prominent quotation from a Mozart Sonata is found in the sketches for Stravinsky’s Sonata in different places within the sketches. Yet, in Stravinsky’s final rendition of the Sonata, his quotation from the Mozart excerpt is rather insignificant. In the sketches for the Serenade, Stravinsky repeats a different quotation in several places. As with the Mozart fragment in the Sonata, this example does not seem to be significant in the published edition. In both cases, Stravinsky seems to be using these sources as “musical conduits.”

This chapter discusses Béla Bartók's concerts and other musical activities during the years 1925–1928. In October 1925 Bartók embarked on a brief concert tour of Holland in collaboration with Zoltán Székely. As well as playing sonatas by Bach, Brahms and Mozart, and a selection of Bartók's piano pieces, they performed Székely's own arrangement of the Romanian Folk Dances. The duo's recitals at Arnhem and Utrecht passed off successfully and Bartók also performed his Rhapsody op. 1 with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. This chapter analyses some of Bartók's compositions during this period, including the Sonata for Piano, Out of Doors, Nine Little Piano Pieces, and the First Piano Concerto. It also considers Bartók's performances in various U.S. cities.

The perception of Schubert as an undisciplined, spontaneous composer who was disinclined to revise is challenged by the existence of extensive continuity drafts and autograph scores for the Piano Sonatas D 958, D 959 and D 960. These drafts represent the most important documents of their kind and offer a means by which to reappraise Schubert’s methods of composition for the piano sonata, particularly of what are arguably his greatest examples of the genre. This chapter charts the compositional evolution of the sketches and autographs, before examining the disparities between the continuity drafts and the final versions of the last three Sonatas. This examination permits a more detailed study of the Piano Sonata in B ♭, D 960, in which a number of key features of Schubert’s customary revisions are analysed from the perspective of thematic construction, phrase structure, hypermetre and performance practice.

After his discharge from the Army, Barber continued work with the Office of War Information but was able to work at home. He received a commission from John Nicholas Brown for a Cello Concerto for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. Written to include the strengths and predilections of cellist Raya Garbousova, the concerto is considered one of the most challenging contemporary works of the genre and won Barber the Fifth Annual Award of the Music Critics Circle of New York. Reputedly one of the most promising American composers of his time, Barber also composed music for Martha Graham’s ballet about Medea, Cave of the Heart. In 1947, under the shadow of his father’s deteriorating health and Louise Homer’s impending death, Barber composed his most “American work,” Knoxville: Summer of 1915, for voice and orchestra. It is set to a nostalgic prose-poem by James Agee and was premiered by the Boston Symphony with Eleanor Steber as soloist. Following this, Barber composed a piano sonata for Vladimir Horowitz, a work that had the most stunning impact on the American musical world.

Qualities of memory and reminiscence seem to constitute some of the most characteristic attributes of Schubert’s music. Looking principally at the String Quartet in A minor, D. 804 (‘Rosamunde’), this chapter examines how such nostalgic subjectivities are constructed in Schubert, how music may suggest the actions of memory and temporal consciousness. It demonstrates there are multiple ways of understanding how memory and nostalgia may be musically conveyed, and even though appeal to the language of memory is often only metaphorical, the affordance with this music is particularly strong. Memory is one of the bedrocks of the human psyche and of modern subjectivity, and this is arguably one of the main reasons why Schubert’s music still fascinates so many listeners.

Between 1825 and 1829, Felix Mendelssohn's piano music and songs received mixed reviews in Germany. His compositions generated more interest from reviews than the composer's precocity. In general, appreciation of Mendelssohn's music was less strongly characterized by the patronizing tone of earlier notices. However, criticisms were typically sharp. The predominantly Mozartian language of Mendelssohn's First Piano Quartet was increasingly influenced by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Louis Spohr, George Frideric Handel, and Carl Maria von Weber. More conservative critics described Mendelssohn's style as eccentric, academic, or even subversive. Two notices from the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung journal provide evidence of both the positive and less than enthusiastic reviews received by Mendelssohn for his works during the period, including Beethovenian Piano Sonata, op. 6 and the Sieben Characterstücke, op. 7.

In Chapter 2 Berg’s early musical activities are outlined, and his musical studies with Arnold Schoenberg are examined in detail. His first efforts as a composer were songs, some thirty-three of these composed before he had formal training in music. His studies with Schoenberg began in 1904, beginning with exercises in counterpoint and fugue, then progressing to composition per se. In these disciplines Schoenberg emphasized a mastery of traditional musical forms and materials. The emphasis on time-honored forms had a lasting impact on Berg’s later music, and Schoenberg’s philosophy concerning musical evolution reinforced Berg’s own musical instincts. Berg’s early compositions—songs, piano works, and his Opp. 1–3—are discussed and described to show their relation to contemporary musical developments and Berg’s impulse toward originality. Whenever possible Berg’s own descriptions and analyses of his early music are cited, and Berg’s approach to “atonal” harmony is described.

Chapter 9 begins studying Alfred Schnittke’s lengthy retreat from polystylism by looking at several of his key compositions from the 1980s, among them his Piano Sonata no. 2, Violin Concerto no. 4, String Trio, and Viola Concerto. In these works, polystylism began to fade as Schnittke emphasized the grotesque, artificial nature of his quotations. He also began speaking more about what he called “shadow sounds,” which soon took precedence in his aesthetic schema, largely replacing polystylism. Yet by the end of the 1980s, as polystylism dissipated, it remained a central category for critics and listeners. Schnittke himself became more unrooted; he emigrated from the USSR to Germany but continued to express a deep ambivalence about his true home.

This chapter tries to express the Essays Before a Sonata in terms of music. The value of anything, material, moral, intellectual, or spiritual, is usually expressed in terms other than music. Charles Ives was interested in using music as a medium for interpreting or commenting, in his Second Piano Sonata, on the writings of the New England Transcendentalist philosophers. Among the ways he found for doing this was to cite prominently in every movement a musical motif that symbolized the essence of Transcendentalism, not only for him but for any listener he could imagine. That motif was the four-note motto that launches Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on its blazing transcendental course. Beethoven, in conversation with his disciple Schindler, had identified the motto as Fate knocking at the door. In his Essays, Ives refined the image, in the light of Transcendentalism, to become Man knocking on the door of Heaven, confident that it will be opened to him.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's works of 1882–1884 echo those of 1878–1881: op. 51, like op. 40, is a set of notated improvisations; the All-Night Vigil came in the wake of Nikolay Rubinstein's death, just as the Liturgy came after the events of 1877; the Second Suite, op. 53, is an experimental orchestral work like the 1st; the Children's Songs of op. 54 echo the Children's Album, op. 39, as the Third Suite, op. 55 with its elegy, waltz, and variations, echoes the Serenade for Strings; the Concert Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra, op. 56, returns to the dashing pianism of the Piano Sonata. Mazepa, a historical opera, recalls The Maid of Orleans in that respect. Two short pieces are adjuncts to Tchaikovsky's complex compositions of 1884.

This final chapter tackles the issue of temporality. Analyzing a number of Beethoven’s late works, including the Arietta variations, it offers a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the temporality of listening and its logics of representation. The analyses suggest that the is a supplementary time that tends to go unaccounted for when we think of the time of music’s unfolding and the time represented in analysis. The trills that appear across the late works are indices, it is suggested, of this extra time it takes to listen. In this way listening is always already anticipated and music always already exappropriated.

This chapter focuses on how Henry Cowell marketed himself as an unorthodox American composer-performer, to a public committed to the European masters. In June 1919, Henry completed a four-movement Piano Sonata, an a cappella setting of Psalm 121, and wrote short pieces for cello solo and for piano, a sonata movement, and a song to words by John Keats. He also finished the Quartet Euphometric (“Euphonious Meter”), a composition which he began in 1916. After a summer devoted almost exclusively to composing, Henry headed east in October 1919. In Chicago he visited some of Ellen Veblen's old friends, almost certainly including Georgia Kober. In New York he began searching out every opportunity to play. He also enrolled in the Institute of Applied Music in New York to study fugue with R. Huntington Woodman. Certain that he would return to New York in the autumn, Henry left for California and held a full concert on November 6 in Palo Alto's Community House. On March 31, 1922 he was back in New York, appearing as a guest in Carl Ruggles's lecture on modern music at the Whitney Studio Club.