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“Ms. Rich is a magnificent Haydn player. Such vital, affectionate
and knowing readings of this music are rare. A treasurable release.”
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Program Notes by Elizabeth Rich
“Whoever knows me well must have found out that I owe a great deal to Emanuel Bach, that I have understood and diligently studied him.” (Haydn, 1750s or ’60s)
The great—and currently underestimated—musical influence of C.P.E. Bach came through two related folds: his music itself and his famous “Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments” (1732). Haydn called this essay, “the school of schools,” beginning to study it in the 1750s. A generation later, Mozart said, “He [Bach] is the father, we are the children. Those of us who do anything right learned it from him.” In another generation, Beethoven, accepting the young Carl Czerny as piano student, said to Czerny’s father, “Be sure to procure C.P.E. Bach’s… Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments so that he may bring it to his lesson.”
Here is Haydn’s response to C.P.E. Bach’s first six keyboard sonatas: “I did not leave the clavier,” he said, “until I had mastered them all.” “Innumerable times I played them for my own delight, especially when I felt oppressed and discouraged by worries and always I left the instrument gay and in high spirits.”
C.P.E. Bach—the great composer son of Johann Sebastian—was the exponent of “Empfindsamkeit”: most literally, “sensibility-perception,” “affect-ness,”—an emphasis on the feelings, the affections. “A musician,” writes Bach, “cannot move others unless he too is moved… in languishing, sad passages, the performer must languish and grow sad”… And elsewhere, “This requires a freedom of performance. Play from the soul!” And “Certain purposeful violations of the beat are often exceptionally beautiful.” (i.e., rubato.) And “Dissonances are played loudly and consonances softly, since the former move our emotions and the latter quiet them.” The first clause here is musical grammar; the second clause shows Bach’s sense of the direct connection between grammar and expressive meaning. “What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition. Any passage can be so radically changed by modifying its performance that it can scarcely be recognizable.” (Underlining is mine. E.R.)
In what musical structures is this approach found in Bach’s music? Forms are both distilled (full of content) and free. By the 1760s we find a fully realized, original sonata-form. Mood changes suddenly; harmonies surprise. There are irregular phase lengths, large skips, syncopations and sudden surprising contrasts: a passionate and personal character pervades. Fantasia-like passages abound: passages that take on the style of improvisation or speak like recitative. We may remember Keats’s comment on Haydn’s piano sonatas. “Haydn always surprises.”
That a stylistic relation between the two composers was obvious to their contemporaries is curiously witnessed by a 1784 English review, which accused Haydn of wittily parodying C.P.E. Bach’s sonatas in certain early sonatas of his own. (This in revenge for criticism.) In response, the Hamburg master wrote to the newspaper stating that he and Haydn were the best of friends, and that the article’s assertion was a lie.
The 1770s were the years of Sturm and Drang in Europe. Rousseau’s “back to nature,” Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther—which moved people to extremities, even to suicide—both expressed and led to an ideal of subjectivity and romanticism. Thus Haydn’s sonatas of this period (C Minor and G Minor on this album) speak with an affect—as well as in musical forms—very close to Bach’s Empfindsamkeit, which had shown the way beyond either galant or learned style more than 20 years earlier. How large-scale a work this inspired C-Minor Haydn Sonata is; all 3 movements are in sonata form! But in Bach’s smaller-scale Allegro assai, written 8 years earlier, we already hear: fully realized sonata form; dramatic opening-theme and character; dynamic contrasts; interrupting diminished harmonies, both forceful and mysterious; a cadenza-like run—and the improvisatory quality of the development section. The E-flat-D so prominent in both movements of the G-Minor Sonata can be heard in the amazing Bach Cantabile which follows them. The opening turn-motive appears in canon, in diminution, in enlargement. The E-Minor Haydn Sonata, despite its later date, retains the romantic affect as well as the minor key. Its kind of rondo movement, with altered returns of the theme, was pioneered by Philipp Emanuel. In Bach’s C-Major Fantasy, surprises—of form, of harmony, of character—are indeed taken to a place beyond what Haydn would integrate and Keats hear in him. In the great C-Major Haydn Sonata of 1789, the affect is no longer that of Sturm und Drang. But the musical structures are still using and reinventing the thoughts, discoveries and inspirations of Haydn’s first great teacher.
Haydn and C.P.E. Bach was recorded in 1997 and originally published by Connoisseur Society in 1998.