The piano was central to Boulez's composing at the time of his prodigious start: by the age of 23 he had written the first two of these sonatas, other solo pieces, chamber works strongly featuring the instrument (the Sonatina with flute, the initial version of his first big vocal work, Le Visage nuptial) and a concertante piece, later destroyed by accident. Such an output suggests ambitions as a pianist-composer, yet Boulez was not writing for himself. He seems never to have performed his massive Second Sonata in public, and the Third he played only during its first run of performances. The piano was the voice not of his performing persona but of his creative mind. It was a voice coming - to quote a remark he made at the time about Schoenberg's op. 11 pieces - from “a percussive piano which is at the same time remarkably prone to frenzy".For the first movement of the First Sonata (May-June 1946) all the essential material is contained in four opening gestures: a rising minor sixth, an appoggiatura, an isolated note and a brusque, brilliant arpeggio. What follows, in the slow sections, is unpredictable extrapolation, interrupted by or combined with a quicker, stuttering kind of toccata. The second movement also begins slowly with simple cells that spread right across the keyboard, but such music is soon almost lost behind two new and distinct types in alternation: a two-part staccato counterpoint in almost continuous regular notes and a flexible, supple, legato hazing of lines. Here, Charles Rosen has suggested, the piano becomes a vibraphone, whereas elsewhere in the sonata it is more cimbalom or xylophone.
The Second Sonata (1947-48) is on a quite dif-ferent scale, challenging Beethoven's “Hammerklavier" Sonata in its expanse, its rhetoric and its fugal finale. This was deservedly the first of Boulez's works to be published, and it did much to establish his early reputation, thanks to performances in Europe by his classmates Yvette Grimaud and Yvonne Loriod, and in the United States by David Tudor. But its nature as a monument is equivocal, for though it makes a parade of traditional forms (sonata allegro, bipartite slow movement, scherzo with three trios, finale with two fugues), these are evoked only to be annihilated. In the composer's words, “the Second Sonata does have this explosive, disintegrating and dispersive character, and in spite of its own very restricting form the destruction of all these classical moulds was quite deliberate".
Destruction in the opening movement builds on the methods of the First Sonata, especially in that extension from a few intervallic-rhythmic cells alternates with their obliteration in dense counterpoint or charges of chords. But now everything is larger, more powerful - not least the abrupt chordal onslaughts that reinject the music with energy whenever it shows signs of flagging or reaching a dead end. These bursts strive towards even rhythmic motion, then move up a gear before contrapuntal music returns “rapide et violent". Points of strained standstill arrive when notes are fixed in register, but the principal character is one of intemperate force.
Contrastingly fluid and leisurely, the second movement is interrupted by brief segments going faster or slower, often injected between pauses. (This notion of the musical parenthesis was to be developed in the Third Sonata.) Meanwhile, the basic thread is a palindrome, though considerably disguised.
In another contrast, the brief third movement is simple, almost playful: four scherzo sections, recognizably related (they are statement, retrograde inversion, restatement and retrograde), are separated by three trios forming variations on the same figures.
Then the fourth movement is as ramified as the first. Beginning with desperate suggestions around the basic ideas, it plunges into the bass for an ominous serial statement that gives rise to the first quasi-fugue. This settles into a soft “grisaille sonore", but soon come motifs hurled out “dans une nuance forte, exaspérée". Another, longer contrapuntal development leads to a climax of vehemence, with such markings as “encore plus violent" and “pulvériser le son". Finally the music arrives at tranquillity, or exhaustion, with the series returning as a sequence of four motifs to be mused upon.
Where the first two sonatas were the works of a young man in Paris, the Third (1955-57) was written by the internationally renowned composer of Le Marteau sans maître. The serial techniques he had discovered in that work - techniques of endless transformation - had given him a new attitude to form. In an essay on the new sonata (“Sonate, que me veux-tu?") he reflected on how “definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to present-day musical thought, ... which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent discovering". Where tonal gravitation had provided the impetus for directed musical processes, serial thought invited composer, performer and listener into “a universe in perpetual expansion", a world not of paths but of labyrinths.
Hence the Third Sonata, designed in five “formants" (not movements, because they do not move forward so much as multifariously ebb and flow), to be played in almost any order having the biggest - Constellation, or Constellation-Miroir in its published retrograde version - central. Printed, like Mallarmé's poem Un coup de dés, as a network of lines floating on the paper, Constellation-Miroir can similarly be read in many different ways: at the end of each sequence the player is offered a choice from up to four places to go next, within a broad form of alternating “points" (music made from single notes) and “blocks" (music in chords and arpeggios). This “formant" begins with a short mixed section, followed by three phases of points separated by two of blocks.
In Trope the frame itself is mutable, since the four sections - “Texte", “Commentaire", “Glose" and “Parenthèse" - can be alternatively ordered, allowing the relatively elementary “Texte" to come before, after or in the middle of its elaborations. Within “Commentaire" and “Parenthèse", too, there is room for choice, whether or not to play interpolations. These, bracketed off in the printed music, connect the piece, through the slow movement of the Second Sonata, to the medieval practice of troping chants, i.e. inserting embellishments. As in Constellation-Miroir, the piano is used very much as a resonator, with the pedals employed to capture and prolong echoes from attacks that are over.
Even unheard, the three further formants, long delayed in Boulez's greater storehouse of works in progress, add to this sonata a larger sense of potentiality. (Paul Griffiths)
Pierre Boulez (1925 - )
Piano Sonata No.1
1) 1. Lent - Beaucoup plus allant [5:06]
2) 2. Assez large - Rapide [4:38]
Piano Sonata No.2
3) 1. Extrèmement rapide [6:04]
4) 2. Lent [11:42]
5) 3. Modéré, presque vif [2:32]
6) 4. Vif [10:48]
Piano Sonata No.3
Formant 2 - Trope
7) Parenthèse [2:33]
8) Glose [1:26]
9) Commentaire [2:20]
10) Texte [1:21]
Formant 3 - Miroir
11) Mélange [0:28]
12) Points 3 [1:43]
13) Blocs II [3:24]
14) Points 2 [1:58]
15) Blocs I [3:06]
16) Points 1 [0:43]
Paavali Jumppanen
2005 Deutsche Grammophon 20/21 Series
1 CD DDD
477 5328 5 GH
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