Berg, Piano Sonata, Op 1

Описание: Alban Berg, Piano Sonata, Op. 1.

Berg’s first and only piano sonata, written as a single movement of 12-13 minutes in duration, is one of the cornerstones of 20th-century piano literature. It has been perhaps my favorite piano piece written after 1900 since I fell in love with it as a teenager during my freshman year of college 37 years ago. I have picked away at it for decades and have always wanted to carve out a good month of spare time in order to learn it completely. It is a dream at long last fulfilled to have had the opportunity to devote the last 39 days to it almost exclusively.

The piano sonata was Berg’s first published composition. He completed it at the age of 23, and it represented the culmination of his student work under fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg. It is nominally in B minor - the key from which it departs in the first few measures and to which it memorably returns in the last few. But the tonality is so “stretched out” that, like many of Schoenberg’s early works, there are dozens of measures that can no longer be entirely justified in terms of the traditional harmonic framework from which Schoenberg and his students were seeking a departure in the first decade of the 20th-century. The dramatic return to the tonal center of the home key on the last couple of pages, and the subdued final confirmation of B minor which follows, is, for me, one of the most beautiful and profound moments in all of modern music.

The sonata presents a moderate degree of technical challenge, and the numerous 3-against-4 passages are tricky to work out metrically at first. Due to the piece’s harmonic complexity and the general density of the musical language, however, it presents a serious challenge to any pianist who hopes to internalize it at a deeper level through memorization. I have never spent so much time at work memorizing a single piece of music, and I can foresee it will be a significant challenge to retain it in memory as I move on to other pieces.

I am grateful to COVID-19 for having afforded me the opportunity to make this gorgeous and revolutionary piece of piano music my life for the last number of weeks. The sonata has also given its life to me, and I have been living under its aspect since late May, sensing the resonance of its turbulence with the turbulence that our country is currently experiencing through COVID-19 and since the murder of George Floyd.