Aspen Music Festival and School Robert Spano, Music Director The 2020 Mercedes T. Bass Sunday Concert Series Alan Fletcher, President and CEO A Recital by Andreas Haefliger, piano

Sunday, August 16, 2020 3 pm

BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, op. 106, "Hammerklavier" (1817–18) 49' (1770–1827) Allegro Scherzo: Assai vivace Adagio sostenuto: Appassionato e con molto sentimento Largo: Allegro risoluto

With special thanks to Linda and Alan Englander, Mary E. Giese, in memory of Erik Giese, Jane and Gerald Katcher, Becky and Mike Murray, Patricia Papper, in memory of Manny Papper, and the Louis & Harold Price Foundation, Inc.

The Aspen Music Festival and School uses Steinway and Boston pianos, designed by Steinway & Sons; Steinway & Sons is represented in Colorado exclusively by Schmitt Music. Aspen Music Festival and School Robert Spano, Music Director Alan Fletcher, President and CEO A Recital by Andreas Haefliger Sunday, August 16, 2020 3 pm

Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Orchestre de Paris, London Symphony Orchestra and . He has ongoing regular relationships with the Lucerne and Edinburgh Festi- Coming from a rich tradition, Andreas Haefliger vals, Vienna Konzerthaus, and other major halls across North “belongs to that elite group of interpreters...one of the most America and Asia. serious, questing on the circuit today...breathtaking virtuosity...a complete Beethovenian” -The Daily Telegraph, Haefliger is a regular visitor to London’s with May 2018 his “Perspectives” series, in which he performs the complete piano works of Beethoven alongside works by other compos- Haefliger was born into a distinguished Swiss musical fam- ers from Mozart to Ligeti. This series has formed the focus ily and grew up in , going on to study at the Juilliard of Haefliger’s solo recital appearances and CD recordings in School in New York. He was quickly recognized as a pianist recent years. of the first rank, and engagements with major US orchestras followed swiftly—the , , , Boston Symphony, Pittsburgh, Chicago and the Or- chestras among them. In his native , Haefliger has appeared with the great orchestras and festivals, including the Royal , Rotterdam Philharmonic, Mu- nich Philharmonic, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Deutsche

Photo credit: Marco Borggreve A RECITAL BY ANDREAS HAEFLIGER • PROGRAM NOTE all other creations of this master not only through its most rich and grand fantasy but also in regard to artistic perfection and sustained style, will mark a new period LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN in Beethoven’s pianoforte works”—an astonishingly Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, op. 106, foresighted prediction for a work of such overwhelming “Hammerklavier” difficulty.

In the fall of 1817 Beethoven had been contracted to Though while composing the sonata Beethoven had compose a symphony for the London Philharmonic mentioned in a letter that he was reduced to writing Society. There was also to be a visit to London, which “almost for the sake of bread alone,” he can have in the end he never undertook, partly owing to his had no illusions that Opus 106 would be financially precarious health, partly to a general indecision that remunerative: there cannot have been many musicians tormented him at the time. (One wonders whether a in the world who were up to its demands. Indeed, London visit would have been as successful as Haydn’s there are few enough even today, when our concert twenty-five years earlier, and whether it might have life is an endless Beethoven festival! The nickname spurred a number of new symphonies.) But instead of Hammerklavier is simply the German word for piano; getting started with the symphony, he was suddenly Beethoven applied it to this sonata because he was going caught up in work on a new piano sonata (though through a stage of pro-Germanic cultural chauvinism. that this time, the winter of 1817–818, he also did Still, it is easy enough for the average listener to see the some sketching on what eventually became the Ninth word “hammer” embedded in the German term and Symphony). Still, it was not a pleasant period. As he to think in terms of physical labor. There is no question wrote to his friend Zmeskall on August 21, 1817, “As for that the work is a challenge to any performer, but me, I often despair and should like to die. For I can see Beethoven’s writing calls for a singing quality as much as no end to all my infirmities. God have mercy on me. I it does for rhythmic power and clarity. consider myself as good as lost…. If the present state of affairs does not cease, next year I shall be not in London Here as elsewhere in Beethoven’s work, the sketchbooks but probably in my grave.” show how much the character of his music is due to his constant sketching and reworking, seeking always an The difficulties connected with the legal case over his approach to an ideal conception that may have been guardianship of his nephew Carl (which culminated only dimly realized at first. Most of the themes in the in a humiliating courtroom defeat late in 1818 and sonata, when they make their first appearance in the Beethoven’s decision to resign as guardian the following sketchbooks, are little more than conventional formulas March) had a good deal to do with his depressed mood. of the day, the sort that anyone could turn out at a moment’s notice. But as they underwent the composer’s Still, though he did not produce many compositions refining fire, they became more individual, personal, at this time, the main work that he did finish was of an characteristic—ultimately to become something that impressive magnitude: the B-flat Sonata, which has could have been written by no one else. remained ever since one of the truly gigantic works of the piano repertory. Beethoven himself was pleased The main theme, heard in the first two measures of the with it, though he rather underestimated its staying Allegro, contains a germ cell that recurs in the later power: “There you have a sonata that will give pianists movements of the sonata as well—a melodic movement something to do, a work that will be played in fifty years’ upward of a third (first heard expanded to a tenth from time.” the opening bass note), followed by the same interval downward. The first movement has a character almost He completed the piece in the autumn of 1818; Czerny of violence, requiring the soloist to declaim in a way played it in Beethoven’s presence in the spring of 1819. that pianists had rarely, if ever, been called on to do Artaria published it in Vienna, and the Wiener Zeitung before. Beethoven’s contemporaries saw in this a heady noted, at its appearance: “Now we shall put aside all the defiance of convention, a powerful new resource for usual eulogies which would be superfluous anyway for pianism. At the same time, the sonata is full of song- the admirer’s of Beethoven’s high artistic talent, thereby like moments, even in the midst of some of the most meeting the composer’s wishes at the same time; we powerful passages. note only in a few lines of this work, which excels above A RECITAL BY ANDREAS HAEFLIGER • PROGRAM NOTE The scherzo is based from the outset on the germ motive heard at the beginning of the sonata. The simple old A-B-A pattern of the Scherzo-Trio combination is made more complex by the two different Trios, the first in 3/4 time, the second a quite different passage in 2/4 before the return to the scherzo, which is somewhat recast and provided with a presto coda.

The Adagio, arriving surprisingly in F-sharp minor, is one of the great slow movements in the entire repertory. Its extended sonata-form unfolds songfully and is made to seem even more spacious and extended by its slow yet sustained tempo.

The finale beings with a complex introduction, constantly changing tempo and character and key: another example of Beethoven’s interest in searching out the finale as a response to the foregoing movements. Eventually the introduction settles on the dominant of the home key and a trill seems to prepare the listener for a cadence leading to a new beginning. But after a few bars’ preparation, the trill turns out to be itself part of that new beginning, the statement of a gigantic and elaborate fugue, ranking only with the Grosse Fuge, Opus 130, as Beethoven’s grandest summation of the contrapuntal art that so captivated his attention in his last decade.

—© STEVEN LEDBETTER