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ANTOINE REICHA Complete Piano Music, Volume Two Six Fugues, Op. 81 19 Variation 12 0:29 (publ. c. 1810) 25:38 20 Variation 13 0:33 1 No. 1 in C minor : Allegro 3:46 21 Variation 12: Reprise 0:34 2 No. 2 in E major : Allegro 4:22 22 Variation 14 0:34 3 No. 3 in C major : 23 Variation 15 0:34 Allegro moderato 5:26 24 Variation 16 0:36 4 No. 4 in E fat major : 25 Variation 17 0:34 Allegro assai 3:01 26 Variation 18 0:35 5 No. 5 in E minor : Allegro 3:37 27 Variation 19 1:32 6 No. 6 in F minor : Allegro 5:26 28 Variation 20 0:34 29 Variation 21, Marcia 0:37 Étude de Piano ou 57 Variations sur 30 Variation 22 0:31 un même thème,suivies d’un Rondeau, 31 Variation 23 0:32 Op. 102 (publ. c. 1824) 42:28 32 Variation 24 0:39 33 7 Theme – Gavotte française: Variation 25, La Bizarre 0:30 34 Variation 26 0:40 Allegretto poco andante 0:33 35 8 Variation 1 0:32 Variation 27 0:38 36 9 Variation 2 0:34 Variation 28 0:45 37 10 Variation 3 0:33 Variation 29, 11 Variation 4 0:32 Folies d’Espagne 0:55 38 12 Variation 5 0:28 Variation 30 0:35 39 13 Variation 6 0:33 Variation 31 0:38 40 14 Variation 7 0:35 Variation 32 0:38 41 15 Variation 8 0:33 Variation 33 0:38 42 16 Variation 9 0:37 Variation 34 0:39 43 17 Variation 10 0:35 Variation 35 0:34 44 18 Variation 11 0:35 Variation 36 0:37 2 45 Variation 37 0:55 56 Variation 48 0:32 46 Variation 38, Pastorale 1:03 57 Variation 49 0:32 47 Variation 39, La Tempête 0:39 58 Variation 50 0:35 48 Variation 40, Le Calme 0:50 59 Variation 51, Le Badinage 0:41 49 Variation 41 0:33 60 Variation 52 0:21 50 Variation 42 0:33 61 Variation 53 0:18 51 Variation 43 0:38 62 Variation 54, Le Désespoir 0:35 52 Variation 44 0:35 63 Variation 55, La Chasse 0:35 53 Variation 45 0:43 64 Variation 56 0:34 54 Variation 46 0:31 65 Variation 54: Reprise 0:37 55 Variation 47 0:43 66 Variation 57 0:53 67 Rondo: Allegretto 5:04 Henrik Löwenmark, piano TT 68:06 FIRST RECORDINGS 3 REICHA AND THE PIANO, VOLUME TWO by Henrik Löwenmark History has not dealt even-handedly with the composer Antoine Reicha (1770–1836): some of his many achievements have been emphasised at the expense of other, equally important, activities. Most unfairly of all, his role as a highly infuential pedagogue, theorist and innovator has overshadowed his music. Te runaway success of his wind quintets has obscured the fact that he wrote many works, ofen much more interesting ones, in other genres; and his reputation as a composer mainly of chamber music has resulted in surprisingly little interest being shown in his rich and extensive output for piano. Although important steps have been taken during the last decades – recordings above all, but new editions of, and academic research into, his works are slowly but steadily making their mark – the picture that posterity holds of him remains incomplete. In his large and admittedly uneven production, there is a wide spectrum of artistic attitudes and approaches, ofen contradictory. Within this œuvre, one fnds dry academic exercises, highly original experiments and works of enormous spirit and playfulness, as well as pieces of considerable depth and weight. Music for piano forms a substantial part of that output – surprisingly, since he was never active as a professional pianist, in contrast to so many of his contemporaries who started their careers as virtuosos performing their own music on the most fashionable instrument of the day. Born in Prague on 26 February 1770, Antonín Rejcha was only ten months old at the death of his father (who had been released from serfdom only six years earlier), leaving him in the care of a mother and stepfather who did nothing about his education. Te thirst for knowledge that marked his adult career was already a potent element in his make-up and so, at age eleven, he took care of his own destiny and fed to his paternal grandfather in Klatovy, a village near the Bavarian border, and then continued towards Wallerstein, in Swabia, to his uncle Josef, composer and principal 4 cellist in the private orchestra of the local count. Josef took the boy in and taught him to play the fute, violin and piano; his French wife taught her nephew French and German. In 1785, Josef was appointed principal Kapellmeister to the court in Bonn. Anton,1 of course, moved with his adoptive family and before long was playing fute in the electoral orchestra, alongside a ffeen-year-old violist by the name of Ludwig van Beethoven. Reicha soon began studying composition. In his brief autobiography, Notes sur Antoine Reicha (c. 1824), he writes that, when he moved to Hamburg in 1794, he had abandoned all plans of being a musician, although that did not prevent him from giving piano-lessons. In other words, he must have developed a somewhat diferent relationship with the instrument: it never became a vehicle for virtuosic display, nor for obtaining employment from some nobleman or for fnding new pupils. Rather, it became a very important vessel for experiment and pedagogical ideas as well as for purely ‘artful’ music. Indeed, the chief distinguishing feature of Reicha’s piano music is its innocent mixture of experimental, advanced, didactic and simple characteristics. Tere is an almost complete absence of the operatic fantasias, fashy variations, commonplace rondos and other pieces that at the time were fooding a growing market – Reicha seems to have refused to depend on them. And even when he is at his most entertaining, he never firts with the listener – or the performer. Reicha may not have had the same thorough training in piano-playing as, for example, Beethoven and Clementi; and in the years when he remained a practising musician, his main instrument was the fute, and so he did not have to keep up his pianism. Tis background may explain some of the ‘faws’ (strange part-writing, odd doublings, ‘hollow’ sounds and so on) in his piano compositions – his textures are ofen not as full and rich as those of his more illustrious pianist-colleagues. He also recurrently employed unusual pianistic textures, ranging in extremes from advanced solutions and fgurations to a degree of unidiomatic clumsiness. But these characteristics can be partly explained as the conscious, deliberate endeavour of his searching mind to go beyond 1 His germanicised name became ‘Antoine’ in 1799 when he frst moved to Paris and he retained this spelling for the rest of his life, even during the period (1802–8) he spent in Vienna. Similarly, the Czech ‘Rejcha’ became, and remained, ‘Reicha’, although pronounced diferently in German and French. 5 the self-evident and conventionally euphonious – it was simply a matter of a very personal style, as with Janáček or Satie, for example. Be that as it may, one moves here in a territory with many rather strange and odd ways of writing, to which the ear takes its time to become accustomed, let alone accept. Te same goes for phrasing, form, pauses and harmony, where all sorts of surprises and peculiarities can be found. Tey may seem a mark of eccentricity, but that would be to misinterpret his aims, and they are certainly not typical of all his piano pieces. Another trait is his sparing use of performing instructions, in contrast with a trend that was on a marked increase among his contemporaries, not least Beethoven. He never indicates more than two f or pp; there are not many markings of forte and piano nor for crescendo and diminuendo (signs or words); and indications such as ritenuto, calando, rinforzando, dolce, agitato, con espressione, smorzando, poco, sempre and so on are few and far between. Reicha’s view, perhaps infuenced by tradition (which, of course, he accepted or rejected as he wished), can be found in the last sentence of the preface to the six piano trios published as his Op. 101: ‘Le grand mérite de l’exécution consiste en ce qu’on sente et devine les intentions de l’auteur, pour l’indication desquelles il n’existe pas de signes’ (‘Te great merit in performance consists of how to feel and divine the intentions of the composer, for the indication of which there are no signs’). How well, then, did Reicha play the piano? To judge from the music itself he must have been quite accomplished, but that does not prove much; it simply isn’t known, even if he writes in his autobiography that he was often asked at informal gatherings to play some of the Trente-six fugues – published by Reicha himself in Vienna in 1804 and 1805 – which had gained something of a reputation. In spite of these considerations, Reicha’s piano music as a whole has a higher musical density, so to speak, than that of Clementi, Dussek and Hummel, since their considerably larger output contains so many works of more or less routine character and/or in popular style. Here Reicha is much closer to his friend Beethoven in his seriousness of purpose and rejection of the demands of the market.

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