Nikolai
Karlovich Medtner (1879-1951)
Nikolai
Karlovich Medtner was born in Moscow on 5th January 1880 (24th December 1879
according to the old style or Julian calendar). His parents were of German
descent, though their families had lived in Russia for several generations.
There were a number of musicians on the maternal side, and Medtner received his
first piano lessons at the age of six from his mother. At ten he began studies
with his uncle, Fyodor Karlovich Goedicke, who was a professor of piano at Moscow
Conservatory. The young pupil would have nothing of "children's
music" but demanded Bach, Mozart and Scarlatti, no doubt to his uncle's
delight.
From
a very early age Medtner showed a keen desire to compose, and at the age of
twelve he entered Moscow Conservatory , where he studied piano, theory and
general science. Alexander Taneyev, his counterpoint teacher, declared,
"Medtner was born with sonata form", and he continued to encourage a
career in composition even while others urged him to become a concert pianist.
During his last three years at the conservatory, Medtner studied piano with the
brilliant Vasily Il'ich Safonov, who also taught Scriabin and Rachmaninov. When
he left the conservatory in 1900, he received a gold medal in piano, and Safonov,
in presenting the award, announced that Medtner deserved a diamond medal if
such existed.
Thereafter
Medtner quicky won recognition as one of the finest pianists of his generation.
The years saw a continuing conflict. however, between public performance,
teaching and composition. In 1921 along with his friend Rachmaninov and other
compatriots. Medtner left Russia and went into voluntary exile abroad. He
returned there only once on a concert tour in 1927. Going first to Germany,
then around Europe and to America on concert tours, he settled in France in
1925. There a fellow expatriate, Alexander Glazunov, upheld him as "the
firm defender of the sacred laws of eternal art" - hardly a ringing
endorsement in 1920s Paris. Finding his music out of step in France and feeling
no sympathy with Parisian musical fashion, he moved in 1935 to England, where
he had already been made an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music seven
years earlier and where he enjoyed a particularly enthusiastic following.
In
1946 the financial support of the Maharajah of Mysore and the cooperation of
the Gramophone Company led to the establishment of a Medtner Society . Though
heart disease had forced his retirement in 1944, Medtner recorded his three
piano cancertos, many solo pieces and some songs under the society's auspices.
Composition and recording occupied his last years as health permitted, and he
worked with dedication until his final heart attack five days before his death
on 13 November 1951.
Medtner
was a man of deep religious conviction, and he approached music with similar
reverence. He spake of inspiration as mysterious, its gifts as unexpected, and
of the necessity of unrestrained dedication to work: without inspiration work
is pointless, yet without work inspiration is nothing. Born to an age dominated
by upheaval in the arts, he asserted his independence by actively opposing the
artistic climate. He summed up his credo by quoting I Corinthians 14:8-9:
"For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to
the battle? So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be
understood, how shall it be known w hat is spoken? For ye shall speak into the
air."
The
quotation explains Medtner's lifelong aloofness from cantemporary trends. His utter
sincerity revealed itself from the very beginning in a musical language fully
formed and grounded firmly in tradition. From then on Medtner's idiom underwent
a process not of stylistic evolution but of ever deepening maturation. Ernest
Newman called him "one of those composers who are classics in their
lifetime."
Bach,
Beethoven and Brahms are Medtner's true ancestors. In the early works
Schumann's influence is felt, even in matters of titles and notation. Before
the period of his mystical excesses. Scriabin too exerted an influence, and the
harmonic language of The Divine Poem and the Fourth Sonata seeped into
Medtner's consciousness. From 1906 a gradual stylistic refinement and
simplification can be discerned, even though the late works lack nothing in
full-blooded, romantic virtuosity.
Occasionally
the melodic and harmonic intonations of Russian folk music bear witness to
Medtner's dual cultural heritage and certainly contribute to his musical
identity , but his Russianness exists fundamentally on the psychological plane.
Medtner seldom availed himself of what he termed "ethnographic
trimmings", and those very characteristics which are linked in the popular
perception to "Russian music" - folk-like melody, brilliant harmonic
and orchestral colour, exotidsm and rhythmic excitement - are notably absent
from his work.
It
is difficult to think of melody, harmony and rhythm as discrete entities in
Medtner's music, for they are integrated to a remarkable degree. The composer
saw music as an indissoluble unity proceeding in a logical sequence of events
from the bare simplicity of the tonic itself to the greatest complexities of
sonata form. To him music was basically song, and melody is the basis of his
musical construction. A theme is acquired intuitively - not invented, and the
fulfillment of its potentiality becomes the composer's command. Though hardly
innovative in themselves, Medtner's melodic ideas assume an individuality that
is more than adequate proof of genius, inextricably linked to a consummate
knowledge of form, his melodic instinct, stylistic differences aside, must be
compared to Beethoven's. With both composers form is not a ready-made mould in
which to pour ideas but something created by the ideas themselves.
There
exists also an intimate relationship between form and harmony: a fundamental
harmonic sense is for Medtner a necessary key to the mystery of musical
construction. It follows that the nonfunctional harmony of the impressionists,
the clashes of polytonality and the meaningless sound aggregates of atonality
were alien to his musical thought. Thus Medtner's harmonic language remained
within the boundaries of nineteenth century romanticism, and though harmony is
perhaps his least distinctive feature, that is not to say that he did not
employ the rules with a certain individuality. One characteristic is a darkness
in the lower keyboard that recalls the Russian aspect of his nature.
Any
lack of harmonic originality is more than compensated by Medtner's powerful,
often novel rhythmic instinct. Its boundless variety is for some his most
readily identifiable feature. Just as he consistently sought balance in melodic
construction, so was he averse to asymmetry in barring. He rarely introduced
time changes. Nevertheless he achieved remarkable and wholly individual
complexities through all manner of syncopation, stressed weak beats, subtle
shifting of accents and the cross-play of different rhythmic patterns in the
right and left hands. Never an end in itself, rhythm becomes here a vehicle of
profound meaning, with which Medtner expressed some of his most intimate
thoughts. As an idealist he placed least importance on sonority, which he
considered the material adjunct to an essentially spiritual art. Sound had no
significance of itself but acquired meaning only through service to melody,
harmony and rhythm.
Though
it used to be fashionable to call Medtner "the Russian Brahms", that
epithet is at best only partially appropriate. It is in fact with the spirit of
Beethoven's late music that a truer analogy can be drawn. In technical
perfection one can cite a correspondence between Medtner's and Faure's
fastidious craftsmanship. Each man can rightly be called a "composer's
composer". Finally, the inevitable comparison with Rachmaninov must be
mentioned, even though Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, a fervent admirer of both,
deemed such comparison "pestilential nonsense" to be dismissed with
contempt. Retiring by nature, Medtner never aspired to the sort of popular
appeal his friend enjoyed. His contrapuntal and formal rigour and the deceptive
ease of his most daunting technical feats produce an intellectual rather than a
primarily emotional appeal. Ever true to his innate nobility , Medtner could
not have composed in any other fashion.
While
many of his contemporaries were seeking new and novel means of musical
organization, Medtner affirmed his commitment to the sonata - that venerable
form enriched through the centuries by the likes of Scarlatti, Bach, Haydn,
Mozart and Beethoven. Medtner's contribution to its ongoing development lies in
an increased sense of organic unity. The Medtner sonata, whether in one or more
movements, develops as an organism from a single argument contained in two main
themes or "protagonists", and all that transpires subsequently has
some bearing on the original problem. Accordingly each sonata must be
approached not in the usual manner but strictly on its own terms, for content
determines form.
In
all Medtner published fourteen sonatas, identified by key signature and opus number
and in some instances by a descriptive title. He did not assign sequential
numbers, and a somewhat complicated situation might be clarified by doing so
now.
Sonata
[No. 1] in F Minor, op. 5 (1903)
Sonata-Triad:
Sonata
[No. 2] in A Flat Major, op. 11/1 (1904-06)
Sonata-Elegy
[No. 3] in D Minor, op. 11/2 (1907)
Sonata
[No. 4] in C Major, op. 11/3 (1908)
Sonata
[No. 5] in G Minor, op. 22 (1909-10)
Two
Sonatas:
Sonata-Skazka
[No. 6] in C Minor, op. 25/1 (1910-11)
Sonata
[No. 7] in E Minor, op. 25/2 (1911)
Sonata-Ballada
[No. 8] in F Sharp Major, op. 27 (1912-14)
Sonata
[No. 9] in A Minor, op. 30 (1914-15)
Sonata
reminiscenza [No. 10] in A Minor, op. 38/1 (from the first cycle of Forgotten
Melodies, 1918)
Sonata
tragica [No. 11] in C Minor, op. 39/5 (from the second cycle of Forgotten
Melodies, 1920)
Two
Sonatas:
Sonata
romantica [No. 12] in B Flat Minor, op. 53/1 (1931-32)
Soanta
minacciosa [No. 13] in F Minor, op. 53/2 (1931-32)
Sonata-Idylle
[No. 14] in G Major, op. 56 (1937)
Few
of Medtner's sonatas are cast in clearly designated individual movements, and
whether a given sonata is a single-movement structure embodying the traditional
characteristics of a multi-movement sonata or whether it is a succession of
linked individual movements is a question open to dispute. Given the quest for
unity and the propensity for content to dictate form, the most realistic
approach to a question whose argument can be an exercise in futility is to
regard the sonatas as existing along a continuum, characterized at one extreme
by the unequivocally multimovement sonata and at the other by the indisputably
unitary structure, with every gradation in between.
By
that reckoning the Sonata in G Minor, op. 22, displays a high degree of
integration and best qualifies as a single-movement structure with a
fast-slow-fast design, analogous to the classical three-movement pattern but
unified into an indissoluble wholeness by a lack of discernible junctions and
by the intimmate thematic relationship of the fast outer parts. Probably
composed in 1909-10, the stormy music is notable for its complex harmony,
openly spaced chords and rhythms reminiscent of Scriabin's third and fourth
sonatas. A simplified description of the formal plan clarifies the structure as
follows: after an introduction, "Tenebroso, sempre affrettando",
comes a deftly moving "Allegro assai". An interlude, "Andante
lugubre", occupies the central position and is succeeded by another
"Allegro assai", based on the opening material and serving as a
recapitulation-finale.
Similar
in length, the Sonata Skazka in C Minor, op. 25/1, dates from 1910-11. Also
played without pause, it falls into three readily defined sections and can be
described as in three connected movements with cyclical references. In contrast
to the agitated fifth sonata, the Sonata-Skazka is at the outset relaxed and
lyrical, even reflective, building to an impassioned climax during the course
of the first movement. The central "Andante con moto" has a
distinctive theme that foreshadows by some twenty years Rachmaninov's immortal
eighteenth variation from Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The Russian word
Skazka is usually translated as "fairy tale", though
"legend" might be a closer rendering and one that characterizes this
sonata's dreamy opening and vaguely folkish, march-like finale. The main body
of this last movement alternates 5/2 and 3/2 meters with a 3/4 interlude that
brings back the lyrical theme of the slow movement.
"One
of the major pianistic masterpieces of modern times" is how Kaikhosru
Shapurji Sorabji, a daunting composer in his own right, described Medtner's
Sonata in E Minor, op. 25/2, composed in 1911. Here Medtner created a work of
epic breadth, gigantic and bewildering architecture. and fierce techninal and
interpretative demands. Dedicated to Rachmaninov, it is headed by verses from
Tyutchev that ask the night wind why it wails and laments so frantically and
admonishes it not to awaken the dormant forces of primordial chaos. Its great
length allowed for wider emotional scope than either of the two preceding,
compact sonatas could convey, and its artistic success demanded of Medtner a
heroic discipline, which he met admirably. Indeed, this seventh sonata is
universally regarded as his masterpiece. Here we have a well unified
three-movement structure. The first part, beginning with a Slavic theme
pregnant with all manner of developmental possibilities, follows sonata form
and is unified by a 15/8 time signature. Moments of Fauré-like calm appear
occasionally but scarcely allow the music's furious momentum to slacken.
Another sonata structure emerges in the final section, a fantasy-reprise of the
opening themes that brings coherence to this mammoth work. The sonata has been
called one of the most enigmatic works in the piano literature, but bearing in
mind Medtner's dictum that every theme has a destiny, one will find the efforts
at comprehending this mighty score well rewarded.
Ádám
Fellegi
The
Hungarian pianist Ádám Fellegi was born in Budapest in 1941. Graduating from
the Budapest Academy in 1963, three years later he went on to win first prize
at the International Cultural Centre in Vienna, where he took part in master
classes given by Paul Badura-Skoda, Alfred Brendel and Jörg Demus. In the same
year he won a special prize at the Budapest Liszt-Bartók Competition for his
interpretation of contemporary Hungarian music. In 1974 he won the Artur
Rubinstein prize in Rio de Janeiro. Fellegi has appeared on the concert
platform throughout Europe, in Russia and in the United States of America, and
has recorded for many of the major broadcasting stations. For Hungaroton he has
recorded works by major twentieth century composers, including new Hungarian
music that he has commissioned. He was awarded the Liszt Prize by the Hungarian
government in 1981.
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