3: Sonata in B Minor
The one-hour program.
An hour for each contestant—no more, no less.
Your options for filling that hour are limitless. Any piece or pieces, in any order. Pre-Bach Baroque to still-alive contemporary: hundreds of years of music.
But, in reality, even professionals—or especially professionals—seem unable to play the music they really want to play.
The Venn diagram of music that professionals want to play and audiences want to hear has an uncomfortably small overlap. Most audiences, for example, eschew contemporary music; stories abound of venues requesting musicians to avoid modern repertoire, or suddenly reneging on contracts after receiving programs with significant portions devoted to modern fare. Musicians consider themselves lucky if they can put one modern piece as an appetizer to Chopin or Beethoven.
Of course, popular musicians can to some degree overcome this bias through force of personality or ticket sales. But popular musicians also must fill larger halls, and so the net effect is often neutral, or even negative.
In that sense, a competition, where one needn’t worry about ticket sales, is often the place for the most experimental programs. And one can often show off one’s musical strengths best as well.[1]
Such were Masaru’s thoughts as he stood emptily backstage.
I want to become a musician who can make the audience love the music he loves.
No matter what the piece, he knew that if there was magic to be found in it, he could find it, and share it.
He hadn’t ever voiced it, but he had a silver dream deep in his heart. It was to create a “new” canon. To bring a legion of modern repertoire into the pantheon to stand alongside Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin.
And another, darker, more lustrous dream: to add his voice to the overflow of music.
Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Prokofiev: all pianist-composers. Few since.
He would be the next.
Not that he thought he could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. Studying their repertoire alone would take a lifetime, and performance should come first.
And not to discount the numerous pianists who have also written. Hamelin, Hough, and others composed; Volodos, Horowitz, Cziffra, and others still wrote cadenzas and transcriptions.
But the era of the virtuoso-composer has passed. Why?
Because virtuosi didn’t write music audiences wanted to listen to.
Because virtuosi couldn’t convince audiences of their music.
Because audiences couldn’t hear what a virtuoso had to say—only what they had to play.
Could I do what so many have only attempted?
Even the eminent Friedrich Gulda had begun composing not in the classical style, but jazz. And on the way, he had been all but ostracized from classical halls—perhaps as much for his uneven playing as for his quirky compositions, but still.
The barriers to overcome are high.
But they don’t reach the sky. And one day, I will overcome them.
Music for pianists, for audiences. For people.
The consequences could be grave. Could end his career.
But it will have been worth it if his music is loved. And if others follow.
He couldn’t stop thinking of it: his name quoted alongside Shostakovich, Busoni, Brahms, Mendelssohn ... all the way back.
The chime of a bell pierced his consciousness.
What the hell am I doing, barely on the cusp of my professional career? Maestro would laugh if he knew.
He had a very important hour ahead of him.
He glanced at Stage Manager Dakubo, who had had a concerned look on his face; maybe he had seen his empty, dreaming stare. But he quickly assumed a gentle expression and said, “It’s time. Best of luck.”
That’s the third time now.
“Thank you.”
Masaru cast a warm smile toward Manager Dakubo and stepped out into the light.
* * *
The first piece in Masaru’s Third Round recital was Bartók’s Piano Sonata.
Uneasy, impassioned noise; repeated chords “as loud as possible”—it’s a piece to suck in the audience into its chaotic, swirling world.
He had always known that he would open his Third Round thus. Modern and progressive, he would upend the classical, aristocratic impression of him that was sure to have built up by that point.
Bartók was among the first to explicitly argue for the piano as simultaneously a percussion and string instrument; others had taken a stance or remained quiet (letting their music speak for them).
People are wont to register the piano more as a stringed instrument; even though its mechanics are obviously closer to percussion, the smoothness of melody as well as the, well, strings, have leaned toward the epitome of pianism being found in its smoothness.
But Bartók argued for, and brought to life, a conception of the piano as instrument not just to be struck, but to be hit.
Indeed, Masaru resolved from the very beginning not to play or even strike the keys, but to hit them.
He would snap his wrists as though he were playing the marimba. Ten mallets, five extending from each hand.
A marimba’s unique timbre and energy. Earthen, discrete, damp somehow.
A percussion instrument must be hit, and hit hard. Hesitation disrupts rhythm, weakens sound, makes for poor playing.
And so Bartók so often sounds not just impassioned but violent. It’s a percussion instrument, after all.
Anyhow—
It’s such a good piece.
Masaru felt joy.
It was the feeling of beating a very large, very resonant drum. The feeling of the sound’s vibrations in one’s own body. The pleasure of effecting such sound. A primal joy.
A drum is the only instrument found in every culture in the world.
And—
Masaru realized that piano was just a very large, very elaborate drum.
He had a friend who, after experimenting with almost every instrument in his childhood, had chosen percussion. He had argued that percussion’s timbre was just as diverse as the rest of the orchestra combined, and that it was the only natural instrument. He had then played Xenakis’s Psappha for Masaru, and he had almost believed him.
The piano comes alive with Bartók’s music in a way that no other composer can quite mimic. As though your chest is swelling open after hours somewhere crowded or stuffy. Like seeing the view from some wide-open vista, the whole world before you.
Masaru, whenever he played Bartók, smelled some synesthetic woods, or warm petrichor, or some other limned natural scent.
Wind breezing through a forest.
The music goes where the wind goes. And when the wind halts, there’s a sunny hill with a log house.
Bartók also feels like an uncut log. No polishing, no refining. The natural power, and beauty, and vitality of the wood—no more, no less.
He heard an ax. Rhythmic and powerful. It struck and struck, deep in the forest. The vibrations pulse through the ground.
The beating of his heart. The thud of the drum. The hum of daily life.
The ax struck and struck.
He noticed he was in a trance. He heard his music, but didn’t feel he was playing it. He hit and hit and hit.
And then the tree was felled. It thudded, and that was that.
Silence overwhelmed the forest again.
* * *
Masaru stood up, and ecstatic applause overwhelmed him.
A light smile, and a small bow.
He listened to their reaction and analyzed it. It’s not an easy piece to listen to, but they loved his music, and they had had fun.
Relief and an indescribable joy expanded in his chest.
I want to become a musician who can make the audience love the music he loves.
And my next piece?
* * *
The next piece: Sibelius. Five Romantic Pieces.
A total one-eighty from Bartók: five small pieces, as beautiful and Romantic as could be. Limber and simple.
With no particular technical challenges, one could play it sweetly if one wanted to. But placing it second was Masaru’s adventure for himself.
The second piece in a recital is unusually important. With the opening Bartók, he intended to capture his audience’s attention; with the second piece, he wanted to capture their heart. After the sonata, they deserved it. He also wanted them to like him, to give and to receive. And with such a contrast to the Bartók, it was the perfect set to prepare for the upcoming monster—replete both with honey and thunder.
It was a short set, beautiful and easy to like. But it was also easy to zone out for. He did not want to undo the work of the Bartók; he wanted to complement it.
It was a piece that made him ask: what is Romanticism?
Staring at the title for hours at a time, he pondered Sibelius’s Romanticism.
The color of Sibelius, the composer of the Finns, is white. Snow, ice, glacier. Powdery, flaky snow. Hard, sharp ice. Solid, unyielding glacier.
What is the heat of Romanticism doing in the cold of Finland?
And then he realized. Finnish Romanticism is heat, captured. Passion, tempered. Romanticism, refined.
He must play the set as if he were painting a pure white canvas. What do the minimalist painters wish to say in a pure-white canvas?
He thought and thought.
Finland—he’d never been. But he imagined. Beautiful night stars. Dancing ocean waves. Flickering candle flames.
A little shy, a little acerbic, a little sad, and just a little ethereal.
White was expressive, rather than gestural; evocative, rather than impressionistic. It was better than a blank canvas. Blankness intimidates, destabilizes; white centers and comforts.
His Sibelius would be natural. The sounds of nature, of daily life. Music not played, but released.
He practiced and practiced to cultivate that naturalness.
And after many, many hours, he realized that he was missing something.
A weak sound, a quiet sound, would not do. It needed potential. A warm quilt dried in the sun; a well-cooked piece of meat still sizzling from the fire; an apple just picked off the branch. An inner life, just waiting to be enjoyed.
That potential, he realized, had to be expressed as maturity. Like the quiet authority who can silence a room with their mere presence, his music had to state itself simply and still radiate life and power.
It needs to be stronger, Masaru remembered thinking after one particularly taxing evening of practice. A strong body, a strong mind.
With those two, every daily activity could become a joy. Waking meant seeing the life-giving sun. Walking meant enjoying the endless glory of nature. Talking meant learning a little more about the infinitude within one’s fellow human. Eating meant taking in the best the world had to offer, and fueling oneself to experience more. Sleeping meant relaxation after a worthwhile day and readying oneself for the next.
Simplicity, Masaru found, was harder than anything he had ever tried to evoke.
But he got it. It was the most challenging piece he had ever learned in his life.
And his audience saw, through his Sibelius, how he lived. Simply, energetically, happily. Against a canvas of white.
He stood up, happier than he had ever been. He looked out. The applause was slightly quieter, but he saw here and there openly sobbing audience members.
His mood lifted. His recital was going as planned.
We’re ready.
Masaru calmed his mind. The next piece of the recital, and the plat du jour.
Franz Liszt. Sonata in B Minor.
* * *
Arguably Liszt’s magnum opus. The greatest piano sonata after Beethoven, maybe ever.
Written 1852-3; premiered 1857.
Liszt had already retired from the stage; his pupil, Hans von Bülow, gave the premiere.
Universally hailed as perfect in almost every way, the piece is unusual as far as sonatas go. With the name that Liszt gave it, it immediately sparked controversy as to whether it even was a sonata. With such a tangled structure—double-function form; five or four or seven or nine themes depending on your choice of academic; a full half-hour without pause, a first in pianism—pulling off a convincing performance is next to impossible.
A typical sonata would have a multi-movement structure of allegros and adagios, waltzes and rondos, but the Liszt sonata was a single-movement work. Also a first.
And not to mention that the requisite technique alone deters most pianists.
That very complexity had originally drawn Masaru in; as a kid, he had pored over the score for hours, reading it over and over like a delicious novel.
Indeed, it is an epic in musical form, requiring stamina from the poet and the audience. One must digest the entire work and be able to present it whole. This tale of glory and tragedy and eventual transcendence.
Masaru, when he finally sat down to learn the piece, decided to approach it as a director might a play: understanding the entire structure, filling in the technical details as he went. The skeleton was most important, he believed; without a perfect understanding of the function of each scene and character, his epic would be half-baked, pathetic. He recalled his childhood days, reading the score and taking in every detail.
And with each page, he was in awe.
Was there ever so perfect a piece.
A classic makes itself known from its very score. Just looking at it, one gets the sense that it possesses greatness. It overflows with passion and is so tightly constructed it positively vibrates from the energy in its structure.
The miracle that this piece arose from a human being’s brain still occasionally made him lose his breath.
* * *
The piece opens tensely, darkly.
A young man walks quietly. Brushing past tall grasses, dark eyes burning, alone on a forlorn winter path. His posture and clothing bespeak an individual of some rank; a concealed badge, an official mission.
His surroundings are quiet.
Desolate surroundings; a sky choked with thick, dark clouds. Frigid air; a silent forest.
Dry branches cracking underfoot.
The man steps, looks down, sees a stone tablet. Etchings, illegible from years or decades of weathering. Numbers, years maybe, but their fadedness conveys only humankind’s transience and pointlessness.
The man continues, expression flat.
He fords a hill. At its base on the other side, a small village. Its tall church spire and old perimeter wall suggest wealth and history.
The man is silent. But his eyes focus, glaring, at a single point. He remembers what he has heard of the town.
The place is one of knotted tragedy. Over generations, strangers’ fates have come intertwined in this unassuming village.
Following the uneasy entry are the themes. A quick spray of the dramatis personae.
The violent chieftain father, and his sons and younger siblings, salivating over his throne and power. Their family lore: messy and heartless and also dazzling. Conspiracies are always afoot, and the seeds of discord have long been sown.
Each scene is sketched quickly before the next scene emerges. The music swells and fades and swells and fades.
And then a second lead character: a youthful heroine.
A member of the ruling tribe, but orphaned as a child and lacking a patron; no one pays her any mind. She grows up with her grandmother, strict but kind, in a corner of the village not frequented.
The beautiful, bright heroine. Seeing her eyes, anyone can tell that a deep, felt courage is ready within her for its moment.
Her theme, like her, is warm, loving, generous. It’s powerful and grand; it reveals her as one with many blessings.
One day, returning from her work at the chapel, she sees a stranger looking in her direction.
A man, standing at the edge of the village, staring at something. Another figure, some sort of squire-lad, chattering.
The heroine spies the man.
He’s a foreigner, un étranger, but her heart thrums. She feels as though she’s known him from long ago …
Over the next few days and weeks, coincidence pulls the man and woman together. While helping a boy injured in the stable, they begin to chat.
The man is a lawyer for an unnamed entity who has moved here temporarily for research purposes. Though the two enjoy each other’s company, the woman feels something chilly in his gaze; it makes her uneasy.
The man’s presence is slowly known throughout the village, and rumors take wing.
—Someone has surely retained him to take down the chieftain and his family.
The rumor spreads, as rumors will, to the chieftain himself.
The sections with the ruling family’s themes are always tense, dramatic. A dark churning muck.
The man from nowhere begins tightening a rope about the ruling family, at first so slowly that they don’t even notice. Those who once aided the family in its murderous rise to power, through seeming misfortune or accident or petty dispute, are found dead, one by one.
The scene shifts to the family in its gauntlet: panic dominates. What is happening? Is this revenge? What does the foreigner have to do with it? Is he engineering it?
They suspect one another; the family splits into warring factions.
Masaru conjures the epic in his mind; the scenes flit by his vision.
He can almost hear the dialogue. He can see the candleflames flickering far away, the sparkle of illicit silver exchanging hands, the moonlight glinting off rainwater welled in cartwheel ruts.
The epic has a diverse, brilliant cast. The brash diva, the wise shopkeeper, the village fool who sees all.
The landscapes and psychology overpower. The drama unfurls, scene by scene, and hurtles toward its tragic climax.
Fate is unchangeable. The gears of fate click-click-click toward their inevitable conclusion.
And the heroine is caught within the tangles of the drama. Ignored by her clan in her childhood and adolescence, now, as she becomes a beautiful young woman, she receives successive overtures of marriage—from rival clans who wish to take a member of the ruling family, and from that very ruling family, her family, who would rather keep power and blood undiluted.
But she yearns for her mysterious lawyer, uneasy gaze aside. She feels paralyzed.
And he opens to her just enough to keep rebuffing suitors’ offers; however, one day, after she tells him her ancestry in the hopes that he would share his, he stares, shocked and speechless.
He eventually confesses that his case is nothing less than the total destruction of the ruling family, her family.
The story’s climax.
The ruling family, after digging and questioning and interrogating and shall we say encouraging people to give answers, learns that the lawyer is the son of the chieftain’s youngest son—killed by his own father personally for trying to blow the whistle against his family. The youngest son’s wife likewise was killed—she had made it to the outskirts of the village with her newborn son. That son in question, however, had never been found; the murderers, with the baby mere weeks old and the season being midwinter, left him to succumb to the elements.
—Who was sympathetic with that bastard no-son of mine?
Thus is the question of the chieftain; his subordinates and family all try to prove their relatives’ guilt and their own innocence. Blood soaks the earth; bodies pile up for the feasting of dogs and crows.
And then someone has the bright idea—“Why don’t we just murder the lawyer?”—forgetting that a dozen had already died trying to conduct such a mission.
The man himself looks worse for wear every day; he seems to be getting little sleep.
And one snowy night, he slips to the house of the heroine. Unsheathes a blade, enters their home. Sees her asleep.
He stands over her and closes eyes. Raises his blade.
And then he hears his name. From behind.
It is her grandmother.
Sleepless and arthritic, she had seen his entire approach. When she realized his intent, she felt she could keep her secret no longer—why his campaign had finally reached its denouement. She roused the heroine, whose initial irritation turned to surprise at seeing the lawyer, turned to shock at her grandmother’s tale.
The grandmother had once had a son with the chieftain, an illegitimate and dirty affair resulting in a lifetime of shunning and silence in return for a minimal subsistence; her son had grown up being close with the chieftain’s youngest son. That youngest son and his wife, of course, had been murdered; though she had no blood relation with the lad, she had always liked him, and grieved his death.
And so, when the old woman had learned that the youngest son and his wife had left twins, a boy and a girl, she had decided on a plan for them: the boy would be sent away, and the girl she would take in. Around that time, a disease had been going around; her blood son, his wife, and their newborn daughter were all sick, and soon died. She decided to pretend that the newborn daughter had survived—much easier than explaining where she had found an infant girl.
Which means, the lawyer murmurs, looking at the heroine.
That we, the heroine stammers.
Are twins, the old woman finishes grimly.
Their initial spark—the seeming familiarity—was their unknowingly seeing their own faces literally imprinted in the other.
Had I told either of you, the old woman sighs, perhaps word could have gotten out; the chieftain would easily kill his granddaughter, especially one seemingly so close to the angel of death erasing his empire and family.
The man cries out; in despair, he runs out into the woods. His love, shattered; his soul, tainted beyond repair. A fraternal Oedipus.
And then, from the woods, a glint of metal; the man halts in his tracks, falls to his knees. An arrow protrudes from his heart. A jealous suitor, seeing only the man’s approach to the heroine’s home, had imagined his object of desire had forsaken him.
The heroine, who had chased after the man, sees his fall, his blood soak the snow-covered earth black. Her scream echoes, primordial and earth-shattering.
The scene fades to the opening.
The heroine stands, bundled and forlorn. On this patch of earth, her brother had stood when she had first laid eyes on him.
Her eye catches a flat stone upon the ground. She takes a sheet of paper from her bag and rubs dirt over it. The stone’s rubbing makes her lose her breath.
The name is that of her mother. It is where she had been killed; after finding her body, the old woman, her grandmother-not-grandmother, had laid a small gravestone in her memory.
Her soul filling with grief, she looks at the gray sky. She walks on; the scene fades to black.
Liszt had written “FIN” at the end of the score. Why, when two lines would do just fine?
Because he too knew, perhaps, that it was a tale, an epic.
Masaru gazed at the last note—the lowest B on the piano—with the feeling of closing a book.
He indeed had “heard” the entire epic in this sonata.
* * *
He knew what the piece was.
Now he just had to play it as such.
Learning and tidying a piece was much like tidying a house, Masaru had often thought while practicing.
Looking upon a clean room and feeling satisfaction is one thing, but living in it is another: keeping it clean is a Sisyphean task. And keeping one’s music clear and direct and trim is likewise near-impossible. He looked upon the Liszt sonata as a huge mansion, very old and storied, with whose upkeep he alone was tasked in advance of an auction in a few months.
A large house, like a large piece, is harder to refurbish and clean than a small apartment.
The Liszt sonata was just so large that making every corner perfect, and keeping it that way, felt almost impossible. He’d gloss over a passage, or forget the precise mood of a trill, or even omit a whole repeat. And while he rectified it, another section would become just slightly dull.
One day, Masaru threw down all his cleaning tools, as it were, and stepped outside and thought.
Just cleaning and cleaning was pointless. He needed a better strategy.
But no strategy, no trick, no hack worked. It was the first time he had almost given up on a piece. He learned what it meant for a piece to be hard. He just grit his teeth and wiped and mopped and vacuumed and dusted until one day, he walked through all the rooms and realized: it’s clean.
And knowing that it’s possible, the continued cleaning feels much less daunting. When he had prospective buyers over, they sometimes commented, Oh, even the crown moldings are dust-free, and he feels his heart swell as his effort is recognized.
One day, he even has time for a break. He wanders around: how could it be better?
It’s just clean, at the moment. So he begins to decorate. New curtains, carpets, art.
And one day, the auction comes. Everyone marvels—they love the house. The auction is a huge success; the house is sold for a gazillion dollars.
Only you could have done this, he imagined Nathaniel saying.
* * *
He played that last, low B. The hall was sepulchral. The entire audience drank in Masaru’s epic Sonata in B Minor.
He dropped his hands from the keyboard. With his smile, the audience collectively rises, roars its gratitude and ecstasy. Fury had no louder cry.
Masaru bowed and bowed, Thank you.
Why thank you?
Thank you for letting me share my music. For listening. For hearing my story, and visiting my house.
He sat down, but the applause wouldn’t stop. He stood and bowed again to even greater cheers. This repeated itself twice more until he placed his hands on the keyboard; only then did the audience finally quiet.
The energy of the sonata was still in the air.
He kept his hands on the keyboard for a long time. He let the energy settle into a lower equilibrium, and then began his last piece.
A short waltz by Chopin; his encore-not-encore. Chopin’s final composition.
Romantic, a little bitter, yearning.
Comforting. A farewell. Such was his intent; like the Bartók, he had known it would be closing his program from the very start.
He finished it simply, elegantly, and rose again.
The audience came to its feet once more. Even more sobbing faces.
It’s over.
Masaru, head bowed, let himself feel the relief.
I’m done with the Third Round.
The applause would not halt, long after he retreated backstage.
1. Translator’s note: the Cliburn Competition of 2022, for example, saw the eventual winner Yunchan Lim play all twelve of Liszt’s Transcendental etudes (one of which was played so marvelously by Aya Eiden). Other programs included Beethoven, Verdi-Liszt, and Prokofiev; Brahms, Scriabin, Debussy, and Ginastera; and Brahms and Prokofiev.