Notes on the Program

by Aaron Grad

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born in Salzburg, Austria, 1756
Died in Vienna, Austria, 1791

Piano Sonata in A Minor, K. 310 (1778)

It was a rough adjustment for Mozart to age out of his career as a touring child prodigy and spend his early adulthood stuck in his hometown of Salzburg, where he worked alongside his overbearing father as a court musician for the city’s irksome archbishop. When he was 21, he left with his mother on a job-hunting expedition that first took them to Mannheim, Germany’s hotbed of orchestral innovation. Leaving there empty-handed, Mozart headed next to Paris, where the best offer he got was to be the organist at Versailles, which he declined. And then, amidst all that disappointment, his mother fell ill and died in Paris.

It was in the aftermath of her death that Mozart wrote his first sonata in a minor key, The Piano Sonata in A Minor (K. 310). The opening Allegro maestoso launches its main theme with a striking dissonance, crunching up to the stable tone of E from a half-step below. Even when the secondary theme moves, as expected, to the related major key, it presents a nervous and restless theme in perpetual motion instead of a songlike retort. Mozart does bring out his characteristically tuneful melodies in the central Andante cantabile con espressione, with the phrases of the main theme structured so as to give extra weight to the wistful arrivals in D-minor that delay the consolation of the F-major tonic. The sonata’s ending in A-minor is all the more bleak after a fleeting visit to A-major seems to promise relief.

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, Germany, 1833
Died in Vienna, Austria, 1897

Selections from Eight Klavierstücke (Eight Piano Pieces), Op. 76 (1878)
Intermezzo in E Major, from Fantasies, Op. 116, No. 4 (1892)
Four Klavierstücke (Four Piano Pieces), Op. 119, No. 2 (1892)

As a teenager in Hamburg, Johannes Brahms was experimenting in private with composition, but his growing public profile as a musician stemmed from his budding virtuosity at the piano. His big break came at the age of 20 when he was hired to go on tour as the piano accompanist for a Hungarian violinist; it was through that tour that he met a friend who soon introduced him to Robert Schumann, who became his biggest champion and recommended the young composer to his publisher. Within a year, Brahms had published his first ten opuses, six of which were for solo piano (plus a piano trio and three sets of songs accompanied by piano).

Brahms’ early focus on piano music receded in his 30s, when his growing fame opened up more opportunities to work in larger forms, and by the time he assembled a set of Eight Piano Pieces in 1878, it had been 13 years since he had released his last solo piano score. These pieces marked a new direction for Brahms; instead of the formal sonatas and sets of variations that dominated his early catalog, these were short and colorful character pieces, the faster ones labeled Capriccio (a term historically applied to music that followed the composer’s whims, rather than any formal plan), and the slower ones titled Intermezzo (a term originally applied to music that separates the acts of a play, which Schumann adopted as a label for standalone piano pieces).

One factor that may have inspired Brahms in this direction was the work he was doing that year to help edit a new collection of the complete works of Chopin, the composer who set the standard for brief, poetic piano scores. Brahms drafted the pieces during a refreshing stay near a favorite alpine lake, with one of them, the opening Capriccio in F-sharp Minor, being a rewrite of a piece he had given to Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, as a gift seven years earlier. That piece evokes Robert Schumann’s florid and impulsive style, while others recall Chopin’s supple layering to create an illusion of three intertwined voices, as in the dreamy Intermezzo in B-flat Major. Other examples are quite crisp and dry, notably the Capriccio in B Minor that brings out a “Gypsy” quality found in so many of his works, a lasting legacy of his youthful fascination with the many Hungarians who passed through Hamburg, a main port of call for immigrants to the United States. This new direction proved to be rewarding for Brahms, with further collections of capriccios, intermezzos, and other character pieces accounting for the bulk of the piano music wrote over the next 15 years.

ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born in Zwickau, Germany, 1810
Died in Endenich, Germany, 1856

Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6 (1837)

At the age of 20, Robert Schumann dropped out of a university law program to pursue music. He was “not a musical genius,” as he acknowledged in his diary, but he pursued his goals doggedly, moving to Leipzig to take piano lessons with the distinguished teacher Friedrich Wieck. He hoped to build a life as a virtuoso composer-performer, but in his efforts Schumann damaged his right middle finger permanently with an overzealous practice regimen and the use of an ill-advised mechanism to strengthen his fingers. The silver lining was that his time in the Wieck household brought him into contact with his teacher’s daughter, Clara, a gifted prodigy who would become his wife 12 years after they first met.

During that period in his 20s when Schumann supported himself as a music critic and journal editor, he used his writings to develop a fictional group he dubbed the Davidsbund, or “League of David,” which was charged with protecting music against trivial and shallow practices — just like how the biblical King David vanquished the uncouth Philistines. Besides the diametrically opposed Florestan and Eusebius who represented the two sides of Schumann, the league included Meister Raro (a stand-in for Friedrich Wieck), Chiara (Clara), and others from Schumann’s musical circle and beyond.

Schumann began the suite of piano pieces he titled Davidsbündlertänze (“Dances of the League of David”) in August of 1837, just days after receiving word that Clara had accepted his marriage proposal. His euphoria over the engagement spilled out in a series of dances and vignettes, beginning with a direct quotation from one of Clara’s own piano compositions, a Mazurka from Soirées musicales. In the first edition, Schumann included initials at the end of each movement to ascribe the selection to Florestan or Eusebius — or both, in the case of the whimsical first selection. These 18 character sketches range from outbursts less than a minute long, such as the “Impatient” fourth number that reflects the impassioned perspective of Florestan, to a luxurious four minutes in the 17th, delivered “As from afar” with an intimate sensitivity befitting Eusebius.

© 2026 Aaron Grad