The Two Piano Sonatas and Other Works

Abstract

These three wonderful piano miniatures interpret different traditional dance styles from a modern aural perspective. These early pieces have the rhythmic liveliness and demonstrate the kind of modified tonality that would characterize much of the composer's later compositions.

The first dance is in Allegretto tempo and has a skipping, dotted rhythm much like that of Mendelssohn's Spring Dance. The melody is in the rarely used Locrian mode and the harmonies are also built on this mode and often take the form of whole-tone scale chords. The flighty style has an elfin, jolly, but phantasmagoric, quality that is balanced by single measures of steady quarter notes with chromatic voice leading, like a strange march or chorale. In the coda, these steady quarters are played in a diminishing staccato toward a faux cadence.

The next piece is an odd waltz with a gentle, plaintive mood. The Andantino melody is built of arpeggios and very wide (fourths and fifths) ascending intervals in octaves which reach to the very top registers of the instrument. The theme is firstly played at a delicate (grazioso) piano dynamic with a light accompaniment of the usual waltz afterbeats (on beats 2 and 3). Interspersed with the melody are contrapuntal, chromatic passages in a contrasting legato style. The tempo picks up briefly to Allegretto, and changes to a bright Mixolydian mode with a slight Brahmsian influence to the gestures. After a long pause, the initial theme returns and ends with a deliberately ordinary cadence.

The third piece has the feeling of a lightly tripping ballet number combined with ragtime accents. The various substitute chords in the otherwise standard tonality are in the Russian joking style of "mistaken" notes. This is extended to the coda which features a non-cadence sequence of chords (E flat seventh to C major). Shostakovich's Piano Sonata No. 1 followed on the heels of his tremendously successful First Symphony (premiered on May 12, 1926). Begun while vacationing on the Black Sea with his girlfriend Tatyana Glivenko in August of that year and finished in Leningrad on October 20, the sonata is one of the most brutal and modernist works Shostakovich ever composed. The day he completed it, he played it for some of his friends at the Leningrad Conservatory who reported seeing blood on the keys after he was done; the young composer's teacher, Maximilian Steinberg, disapproved strongly, and claimed to be astounded that Shostakovich could make sense of the work himself.

The power of Shostakovich's performance of the work (Shostakovich was a formidable pianist whose repertoire included Liszt's B Minor Sonata and Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata), however, convinced most non-believers. As one of his contemporaries remarked, "The composer was unusually severe, very concentrated, and played with faultless clarity...He was not simply playing, he seemed to be casting spells and imposing his will on us" (Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. Elizabeth Wilson. p. 72).

Although structurally nothing like the sonatas of any previous composer, Shostakovich's sonata is still clearly formed and cogently argued. Built around the tonal opposition of C and F sharp and using texture rather than themes as a means to articulate form, the sonata acutely resembles Shostakovich's Second Symphony ("To October") of six months later. In fact, some of Shostakovich's contemporaries gave the work the similar subtitle, "October Symphony," thereby linking it with the symphony forever. Shostakovich, however, denied ever approving the use of the subtitle.