Notes on the Program

by Aaron Grad

FRANZ SCHUBERT
Born in Vienna, 1797
Died in Vienna, 1828

Four Impromptus, Op. 90, D. 899 (1827)

The gatekeepers of Vienna’s musical establishment wrote off their native son Robert Schubert as being too “peculiar,” as one publisher put it, and so he spent his whole career relying on a small circle of friends and patrons who believed in his idiosyncratic music. He never managed to complete an opera, let alone stage one (his greatest ambition), and not a single one of his symphonies was ever performed in his lifetime. At least he earned a modest reputation for his abundance of songs and other small-scale works that flourished in living rooms rather than concert halls.

Things were just starting to open up for Schubert about a year before his fatal syphilis infection silenced him, through opportunities like the one offered by the publisher Tobias Haslinger, who asked for this set of short piano pieces. It was his idea to call them Impromptus, imitating a title introduced by the Bohemian composer Jan Voříšek a decade earlier. Only the first two made it into print during Schubert’s lifetime, and the others were shelved for 30 years.

The Impromptu in C Minor is more substantial and profound than one might expect in a genre that usually implies a relaxed, off-the-cuff musical statement. The dotted rhythms and chorale-like phrases impart a nostalgic, ceremonial air, while the central trio section responds with a songlike melody and flowing accompaniment that would be right at home in Schubert’s Lieder.

In the second Impromptu, in E-flat Major, a stream of perpetual motion glides over a left-hand accompaniment, its three-beat pattern recalling the lilt of a waltz. A contrasting passage and matching coda strike a more severe tone.

The key signature of G-flat major for the third Improptu—which includes of all the piano’s black keys—dictates the tone and shape of the warm piano figurations. The publisher penciled into Schubert’s manuscript that the whole thing should be transposed up to the key of G, and that the rhythms should be re-notated in a more conventional 4/4 meter, instead of Schubert’s atypical scheme of eight quarter-notes per measure; perhaps it was these impracticalities that led this one to be set aside.

In the fourth Impromptu, cascading arpeggios and capricious shifts between minor and major keys echo Schubert’s extraordinarily expressive Lieder. At certain points the left hand adds a tenor-range melody, and in the trio section chords pulse under a yearning melody in the right hand’s soprano range.

IGOR STRAVINSKY
Born in Oranienbaum, Russia, 1882
Died in New York City, 1971

Three Movements from Petrushka (1921)

Igor Stravinsky was an obscure and untested 27-year-old protégé of Rimsky-Korsakov when the impresario Serge Diaghilev tapped him as the last-minute replacement to compose a dance score for the Paris season of the Ballets Russes. The Firebird was an astounding success when it reached the stage in 1910, and Stravinsky immediately launched into a new ballet idea based on prehistoric pagan sacrifice — the work that would become The Rite of Spring. But first, as he noted in his autobiography, “I wanted to refresh myself by composing an orchestral piece in which the piano would play the most important part.” The music he conceived brought to mind “a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggi.” Upon hearing the first sketches, Diaghilev urged Stravinsky to expand his idea into a ballet, which reached the stage as Petrushka in 1911.

Stravinsky returned to the score a decade later to create another showpiece for his friend and fellow expatriate Arthur Rubinstein, following up on the Piano-Rag-Music that Rubinstein had kindly commissioned in 1919. (Money was perpetually tight for Stravinsky, and little cash infusions from projects like these were lifesavers.) The first excerpt, Russian Dance, comes from the end of the ballet’s first tableau, a scene at the fair in which Petrushka and his fellow puppets come to life and dance for the crowd. The second movement, Petrushka’s Room, goes inside the puppet theater to reveal the love triangle between Petrushka, the rival Moor, and the Ballerina they both desire. The discordant, rising triad figures near the beginning spell out the distinctive “Petrushka” chord that rings throughout the ballet. The third movement transcribes the merriment from the ballet’s final scene at the Shrovetide Fair, complete with gypsies, a dancing bear and a group of masqueraders.

HAROLD ARLEN
Born in Buffalo, New York, 1905
Died in New York City, 1986

“Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Like many of the core contributors to the Great American Songbook, Harold Arlen (born Hyman Arluck) was raised amid the devotional singing and festive dance music of Jewish immigrants. He worked as a house songwriter for The Cotton Club in Harlem in the early 1930s, where he wrote the hit “Stormy Weather” that was first sung by Ethel Waters, and from there he leapt to California to write songs for movie musicals. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hired Arlen and his lyricist partner “Yip” Harburg to write songs for The Wizard of Oz, and Arlen struggled mightily to find the right tone for the ballad to be sung by the 16-year-old Judy Garland, until that immortal melody, starting with its hopeful leap up the octave, came to him while out for a drive with his wife. “Over the Rainbow” ended up winning the Oscar for Best Original Song, and it has been fodder for infinite re-interpretations, including this wistful rendition transcribed from a 1984 appearance in Tokyo by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett.

© 2025 Aaron Grad