Liner Notes: Après Fauré and After Bach II
After Bach II Liner Notes
After Bach II is a hybrid, like its predecessor from 2017, After Bach. I was gratified that the first record was well received by listeners, and emboldened to release a second installment. I noticed that After Bach was understandably confusing to some listeners, who did not always know where Bach ended and where I began, and to what extent the music was written or improvised. So, to clarify, as with the previous album, there are three approaches here: music from Bach, a written composition of mine, and improvised pieces as well.
These recordings grew out of a commissioned composition, Three Pieces After Bach. The first two of those pieces, “Rondo” and “Ostinato”, appeared on After Bach, and the final “Toccata”, is included here. All three took the same approach, which was to give an “answer” to one of Bach’s pieces, and follow it directly, “after Bach”. In this way, one could hear directly how I used Bach as a starting point. I hope that even if one is not partial to my compositions, they can still hear how endless Bach’s contribution to music is, and the way it can play out in music today. There is everything in Bach. He remains an active inspiration for a multitude of musicians – performers, composers and improvisers alike.
In the commissioned performances, and more that followed, I added more Bach pieces to extend the program, but now, instead of writing more responses, I improvised them. This was in one regard a personal challenge: to present a program as interpreter, composer and improviser, and to find a seventy-five or so minute story to tell in all that. I’ve endeavored to make such a wordless kind of story in the recordings as well.
This record begins with my own “Prelude to Prelude,” which folds directly into the Bach Prelude in E Major which inspired it. The mood and musical material of “Prelude to Prelude” are revisited twice more, in the middle piece, “Intermezzo”, and at the close of the record, “Postlude.” These three improvised pieces are meant to act as grounding points within the varied material.
Bach’s D Minor Prelude is next, followed by my “Toccata.” I think the listener will hear easily how Bach’s piece, with its relentless motoric rhythm and urgent harmonic movement, inspired my composition. Bach’s winsome, delicate Allemande from his D Major Partita comes next, answered with an extended improvisation of mine, “Cavatina.”
Bach’s Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier Books I and II are typically heard alongside each other in pairs, and for his A Minor Prelude and Fugue from Book I that follows, I opted for “Between Bach,” inserting my improvisation between the two, exploiting the close intervals of Bach’s masterful fugal theme, and also taking inspiration from the rhythmic funkiness that I’ve always felt in the fugue.
With the Variations on Bach’s Goldberg Theme, I adhere to Bach’s own “frame” – the harmonic and formal structure he introduces in the famous opening Aria – in my own improvised variations. Bach’s frame is so strong in its own right, independent of the endless invention he found in his own variations. Perhaps my contribution can celebrate Bach the formalist, who receives comparatively less attention than Bach the harmonist/melodist.
I will tell briefly how this idea came about, as it is one of those happy unexpected gifts we receive sometimes as musicians, in a context that initially appears troublesome. Martin Engstroem, the impresario of the longstanding Verbier Festival in Switzerland, invited me to participate in a gargantuan, unprecedented gala evening, in which the Goldberg Variations would be presented in a rolling program, each one played by a different artist. Mr. Engstroem asked me to play one of the variations. I considered it for a moment, and declined. Frankly, I did not have the balls to do that in front of so many piano giants. The Verbier is host to the premiere classical pianists of our time, and this evening was no exception.
I presented another idea: I would improvise a variation instead. Mr. Engstroem accepted, his only guideline being to keep my contribution to 3 minutes. Sergei Babayan opened, giving a sanctified reading of the Goldberg’s famous aria theme. Sauntering around backstage that night, and performing as well, were Danil Trifonov, Yevgeny Kissin, Yuja Wang, Richard Goode, Michel Pletnev and Yefim Bronfman, just to name a few. Serious company.
I played a variation in 5/8 time, and it seemed to go over well with the audience – no eggs were thrown. When I went into the studio to record the music presented here, I built on that approach, presenting an aria-like opening theme, continuing with 5/8 and 7/8 metered variations, toggling between major and minor modes, and culminating in a high-energy finale.
There are as many viewpoints about interpreting Bach as there are performers and listeners, and some are perhaps misleading. A critical comment that arises with regularity goes something like: “I did not hear Bach in Player X’s performance. I heard Player X.” The idea is that the performer got carried away by their own sentiment, and obscured the greatness of the composer’s music. Yet more often than not in these assessments, the observer is the one carried away by their own sentiment as to just what the greatness of Bach is, or, more accurately, what facet of Bach’s greatness should be expressed. There is the implication that there is some perfect version of Bach out there, one that everyone should strive for.
That is a grand idea, but whether it is true can probably never be proved. The opposite is certainly true, though, and thankfully, we have a multitude of examples to prove it. If I consider a few of my favorite pianists – András Schiff, Murray Perahia, Grigory Sokolov, Richard Goode – I would submit that when they play Bach we hear more of them, wonderfully so, than we do in other instances – more, perhaps, than when they play Beethoven, for example. This has to do with the universality of Bach’s music. Here, we must qualify that term. Beethoven’s music, for all its universality, is very much about Beethoven, this striving human being, this great personality who is always close to you in the music, and you engage with that personality directly. Whether the performance is strong, or even just entry-level, Beethoven’s big personality dominates, and the performer is in his service.
It would seem to follow that with a grand, deified figure like Bach, being in his service would be the obvious, only choice – the choice of humility, of reverence. It is indeed, as a starting point. No musician who approaches Bach with any serious aim can avoid a humbling course. Yet something more happens: With Bach, the more you try to engage with him, the more your own personality becomes visible, unavoidably. You are not playing Bach – Bach is playing you, in the sense that he lays you bare. Musicians love Bach in a different way than other composers, because he feeds them. You learn about yourself: as a striver-towards-beauty, as an intellect, and not in the least, as a problem-solver, because of the demands of the counterpoint. What you choose to emphasize or forgo at any given moment says much about you, even, in a fashion, in a “moral” sense – as to what your own musical values are, and why. You are called to examine yourself. This is of course true to a degree with any composer, but Bach is unique. The written score, in its perfection and completeness, is nevertheless open-ended. It gives you the “what”, but allows you to decide “how”. It is in this sense that Bach is less visible, yet omnipresent, because in order to engage in the music, you must decide.
It is not only that there are many choices to make, with little or no road map, in terms of articulation, tempo, and dynamics. The greatest choice you make at all times is not out of an absence, but from what is there, in its totality. Specifically, it is the constant choice you make in how to negotiate between harmony and melody. This goes to the heart of Bach’s singular achievement. In him, more than any other composer who came before or followed him, those two are one and the same. This works in two ways. On the one hand, the harmonic movement comes about through simultaneous melodies. Equally important, though, is that each of those melodies expresses harmonic implication – the movement between tension and resolution – monophonically, in a single line.
Most famously, we apprehend this in the majesty of Bach’s fugues. They achieve a multi-dimensional entelechy, whereby we can listen to the logic of their discreet voices, or hear the logic of the whole, or some cross section of the whole, and always hear that harmony/melody. The division between the discreet, conspicuous quality of melody and the seismic, underlying quality of harmony is dissolved. It is fascinating and humbling to observe this more broadly as a human feat of creativity, as a fulcrum point in music. Bach superseded everything before him and affected everything after, but what he achieved could only happen once, by him alone. His music champions a humanist outlook and a belief in the divine with equal measure.
We apprehend this fusing of harmony and melody most famously in the fugues, but it plays out in the Preludes as well. Bach is never arrpeggiating just for the sake of arpeggiating; he never makes figuration in the service of a melody, with little story to tell in its own right. In the D Minor Prelude here, undulating arrpeggiation is the story – it is also one long melody from beginning to end, and needs no underpinning. This is why Bach is a model for me as a jazz musician. In my improvised solos, I want to make melodic phrases which carry harmonic implication, and create harmony that moves in a melodic fashion. This is a crucial component in the storytelling.
The final Bach selection here is the E-flat Major Prelude. In its free, elastic texture, in its fusion of melody and harmony, he gives the player that open-ended invitation at all times. For me, the piece can be so sensuous, even luxurious, inviting me to linger here and there along the way in its unfolding, continuous stream. If I linger too long, though, the slower, stately chorale-like theme that hovers around or intersects with that stream will lose its thrust, and the large glacial cadences will diminish in effect. It’s a metaphor of being/becoming – finding the balance between enjoying the ride and keeping one’s eyes on the road, between pleasure and purpose.
I thank you for engaging in the music here. Importantly, it should not be overlooked that the listener as well has that open invitation from Bach to hear his music on their own terms. You, in turn, may hone in on any given aspect, regardless of what the player emphasizes. Will you focus on the distinct melodies that poke out of the texture, or bask in the bigger picture of the harmony? Will you marvel in the frame itself – the formal rigour, the economy of material? Or, you can simply turn off your thinking cap and feel the music, sensually and emotionally. You have the choice.
Brad Mehldau
Après Fauré Liner Notes
Fauré, the Quiet Revolutionary
A composer’s late output can be a testament to their unceasing creativity in the face of physical decline and impending demise. If not an outright victory over mortality, it offers consolation, in a kinship that passes through the boundary of time and death. The listener and the great ghost silently communicate: “You are there; I am here, yet we are linked.” There is a quiet poetic justice.
The link, of course, is the enduring transcendence of the music itself. On the one hand, it may breathe life-affirming beauty; or, it may transmit the Sublime: a counterweight to beauty which affirms our transience. In such music and art, we sense a large and fathomless eternal presence, one which may terrify us in its in annihilatory capability, or at least shake us from easy beliefs. If, upon this apprehension, we search back for the consolation of beauty, it is still there, but tempered by awe. Beauty affirms life, but beauty is temporary, because we are temporary. Death lies within it already. Depending on our metaphysical leanings, we may or may not call that “just”, but one thing is sure: this admix of beauty and death is strongly poetic.
In the negotiation between beauty and sublimity, certain late works may tilt to the latter, in what seems like a renunciation. If we know the composer’s earlier output already, and love it with our hearts, we may feel perplexed, or even betrayed – where is that great sunny ghost who consoled me? What we have instead is music that breathes austerity and weirdness all at once. The most familiar model for that uneasy phenomenon is Beethoven, in music like his last String Quartets. Fauré’s late music shares this quality.
I opted to present the four Nocturnes here in a counterintuitive fashion, confronting the listener with the radical tonal language Fauré arrived at near the end of his life in his final essay in the form, No. 13 in B Minor. In this way, one may hear his earlier music in a different light. The Nocturne No. 4 which follows, the earliest of the four, is a case in point. For all its welcoming solace, its middle minor-keyed section foreshadows the sparse, at times desolate atmosphere of the later work.
Gabriel Fauré, who was born in 1845 and died in 1924, composed 13 Nocturnes over a span of 36 years, the first in 1875 and the last in 1921. One can hear that he already displays his own voice in No. 4, but we feel Chopin’s presence, perhaps recalling the famous Nocturne Opus 9, No. 2 in the same key of E-flat. Fauré moved away from the great predecessor, but in a different manner than some of his contemporaries who also wrote piano music that extended from Chopin’s language. Namely, we never hear a system with Fauré. The writer Italo Calvino posited “a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatsoever.” Fauré attained that in his final two Nocturnes included here. They are one-offs, completely unique and unrepeatable.
In considering his music on the centennial year of his death, this invites the question: What is Fauré’s legacy? It’s a subject I’ve taken up more than once with other musicians who are passionate about his music, and we have remarked with some puzzlement that Fauré sometimes seems to be a “musician’s composer.” He is not as familiar a name as his younger peers, Debussy and Ravel. There are indeed a handful of well-known classics, like the beloved Requiem, the Pavane, and songs like “Après un rêve” and “Clair de lune”. Yet in my observation attending concerts for a few decades, his piano music does not appear on programs with regularity. Part of the reason may be that his piano output is not overtly virtuosic, and is free of novel pianistic effects.
Another reason may be that Fauré has been what is sometimes called “historically unlucky.” Although they both rejected the designation in reference to their music, Debussy and Ravel are regarded as exemplars of French Impressionism in their field, which presents itself now as a singular entity – a moment in which music and visual art aligned in a particular cultural locus. Posterity favors the umbrella of such a clear historical narrative, one which presents us with a clean break from the past – a rupture, followed by a revolutionary new language which changed everything thereafter. We know that the actual unfolding of creative history never operates like this, that it’s more like series of perpetually overlapping streams.
Yet we may be seduced by the bite-sized edification of such an account, and it makes good program notes. In this case, it invokes a quality we call “modernism.” We associate that quality with Debussy and Ravel, and we do not as readily with Fauré. We must be careful to not romanticize our notions of modernism, for in doing so we risk missing what is modern – that is, perpetually modern, modern still to our ears today, if we pay attention. There is much to find, in this regard, in Fauré’s music.
Fauré has been viewed as a bridge figure, with one foot straddled in the German Romanticism of Schumann and Brahms. How much this is true cannot be fixed with certainty. It is a dangerous game in general to assert influence from one great figure to another, to the extent that it is presumptuous. The phenomenon of influence is a mysterious process, one which continues after the initial encounter, not a fixed moment, and often as mysterious to the artist as it is to their public. Often, a listener’s presumption is a misplaced assessment: it is more about the connections they make between composers and musicians that they love, in their own personal canon.
Nevertheless, it is easy to hear a harmonic kinship, if one may call it that, particularly between Brahms and Fauré. As an example, consider Brahms’ second String Sextet (1865) and Fauré’s second Piano Quartet (1886). In both works, the mediant tonal relationship between G, B, and E-flat is fundamental, and constitutes an organizing formal principle of the multi-movement work. Because they are the same three pitches, I like to think that Fauré encountered the Brahms, an earlier work by roughly thirty years, and it had an impact on him, although of course this is my own connection as a listener.
Brahms builds mystery and poignant emotional admixes from these three tonalities in his first movement, but they are still separate entities. Fauré welds them together in an unprecedented way. Here is a pivotal juncture in the first movement (with the piano arpeggiation reduced to chords). The strings play the melody in unison octaves:
This is a bridge moment, if there was one, and it is also what we could point to as a facet of Fauré’s “sound” – the closest he ever gets to a system in the sense of a harmonic device he exploits with mastery in other works as well. The tonal center is neither G, E-flat or B major, yet is all of them. In the circular logic of the common mediant tones, one could start this phrase at any point and the listener will have the same kind of experience, which is a feeling of vertigo and resolution all at once. On the one hand, the music follows feels romantic in the best sense – at turns dreamy and tempestuous, the way Brahms’ three Piano Quartets can be. Yet those three pitches, G, E-flat and B, form one of two augmented triads that make up the whole tone scale: a row of notes that becomes indispensable for French composers who follow Fauré. Debussy will build whole pieces around it; Messiaen will name it the “first mode” in his book on composition and theory.
Fauré’s uniqueness was to arrive at his proto-whole-tone approach in the context of a well-established existing tonal tradition. Those mediant relationships still play out in the tension and resolution of chromatic voice-leading, and are framed within a Sonata-Allegro form movement, with its larger story of tension and resolution, of dissonance resolving in consonance. That is quite different than beginning a piece in the whole tone scale and “hanging out” in that mode, as a jazz musician might put it, which is what Debussy does so evocatively in a piece like the Prelude, “Voiles.”:
In one view, we can understand this as a 20th Century kind of moment – the earlier composer, still straddling the previous one, has reached a breaking point, and the latter one begins from that point. (Again, I will not speculate on influence, but Debussy’s Preludes were composed in 1910.) We must specify that break though. It is not that Fauré reaches a point of chromatic no-return, and Debussy breaks from functional harmony completely, the way we have (reductively) come to view the relationship between Wagner, Mahler and Strauss the elders; and Schoenberg who follows them. Debussy remains a harmonist of the highest order, but his innovation here is to allow himself stasis, precisely at that break point, in such a way that the whole tone scale is no longer jarring and destabilizing. It has become the home tonality.
Yet when you choose one approach, you relinquish another, and what we relinquish in this approach is the grand narrative of tonality that began to fracture at the end of the 19th century – of tension and resolution through harmonic movement, versus stasis. In the 20th Century, the break from that narrative constituted modernism. One might ask rhetorically, which, if either, is more “modern” for our 21st Century ears – the movement, or the stasis?
This question may have no answer, yet as we move on to consider Fauré’s later oeuvre, it might help us find another way to understand his particular innovation. If we want another word than “modern”, with all its baggage of historicism, we might call it freedom, understood in that way that Calvino imagined – freedom from strict adherence to the rules of tonality, but, just as much, freedom from an obligation to suspend or renounce a tonality which fashions a wordless narrative through its flux of tension and resolution. Such a renunciation become orthodoxy in the 20th century.
As an example of that freedom, consider Fauré’s 12th Nocturne, included here, written in 1915, almost three decades after the Piano Quartet mentioned above. In one regard, we may also call Fauré historically lucky, in that he lived a long life. He began as Debussy, Ravel and Satie’s predecessor, but at this point is their contemporary. Now, he uses the whole tone scale in a bald, direct way, allowing us to bask in its destabilizing sonority for its own sake:
This passage arrives as a maelstrom of heightened tension in the Nocturne, but Fauré is flirting with Debussy’s kind of stasis – in the right hand, the whole-tone scale starts to feel like home base for a moment. The left hand, meanwhile, is close in shape to the melody of Thelonious Monk’s Epistrophy,” and for this listener, taken alone, has a blues character. Fauré bit me so strongly when I first discovered him because of the maximalist freedom on display here. He extends a Romantic piano tradition from Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms, and at the same time announces an unmistakably French kind of modernism – one that anticipates jazz harmony. There is so much in this one piece.
The 13th Nocturne is a genre in itself. Its opening page presents us with a harmonic landscape that has no corollary, even in his own work. Here is one particularly arresting passage:
With its mix of crunchy chromaticism and not-quite-parallel ascending triads, this music reminds us of nothing else – not even, indeed, Fauré’s own earlier output. More strikingly, though, it has led nowhere else, in an immediately discernible sense. Far from being a pejorative statement, this quality embodies the quiet revolution that Fauré achieved. No composer after him wrote piano music which sounds like this, in the way, for example, that Chopin echoes in Scriabin, Rachmaninov, and Fauré himself. If a composer’s greatness is commonly measured in how apparent their influence is, here the opposite is true: the music is too singular, and remains unassimilable, affirming its genius.
Brahms’s Intermezzo from his last set of four Klavierstücke (in the same key of B Minor, and fittingly, with the same Opus number of 119) shares that closed/eternally open quality. In both cases, the isolation is reinforced by the austerity of the musical texture, which eschews a normative Romantic piano model of songlike melody hovering distinctly over accompanying figuration. Melody and harmony are closely fused, more akin to a Bachian model. There is a new focus in the economy of material, and with that, a certain stateliness, which for the player, must not collapse into rigidity. Fauré’s opening section holds strictly to a four-part texture, and unfolds with a chorale-like solemnity, even as it lands baldly on a C Minor seventh chord on the last bar above, sounding like modal jazz for a wisp of a moment.
Here is that weirdness. In this late work though, weirdness is never trivial, and austerity never confining. If the sublime foreshadows our mortality, this music might communicate the austerity of death – Fauré’s as it approached him, but also the apprehension of our own. We find a kinship with the composer finally, in the form of a question that he tossed off into the future, to us.
I have composed four pieces Après Fauré to accompany Fauré’s music here, to share the way I have engaged with Fauré’s question, with you the listener. This format is similar to my After Bach project. The connections are less overt, but Fauré’s harmonic imprint is on all four. There is also a textural influence, in terms of how he presented his musical material pianistically – he exploited the instrument’s sonority masterfully, as an expressive means. So, for example, in my first “Prelude”, melody is welded to a continuous arppegiation, both part of it and hovering above it; in my “Nocturne”, it is possible to hear the harkening chordal approach in the opening of Fauré’s No. 12.
The record ends with a reduction of an excerpt from the Adagio movement of the aforementioned Piano Quartet in G Minor. This music is quintessential Fauré, in its ability to draw the listener into what feels like a waking dream, a consoling reverie that only gains expressive power in its delicate ephemerality. It is mysterious and bewitching.
Brad Mehldau