With every piece of music \u2014 really, every piece \u2014\u00a0 there is a crucial matter at the outset: how to begin<\/i>?\u00a0 It\u2019s almost too obvious to mention, but it\u2019s too important to be left always unsaid. There\u2019s a particularly dense sense of potential in the opening melody of Joseph Haydn\u2019s Piano Trio No 44 E Major which brings the question straight up.\u00a0 Haydn writes the first bars to sound as though the three performers are a single plucked instrument (perhaps a mandolin), strumming a tune of absolutest simplicity.\u00a0 It is unsettlingly innocent in its demeanor, and its apparent simplicity is quickly undermined by the second version of the phrase, in which the keyboard adds enough chromaticism that the music seems perhaps to undergo a lyric expansion, and perhaps also to simply melt.\u00a0 The trio then regathers its brightness, but even after two phrases we all know that the game is on \u2014 some game of variations and radical shifts of tone is set in motion. A combined sense both of economy and of instability which drives the movement ever forward \u2014 qualities derived from the strange singleness of the opening moments.<\/p>\n
The second movement introduces itself even more radically. (\u2018Radical\u2019 in the same sense that a radish is radical vegetable: rooted and reduced to basics.) It presents a dark, open-ended variant of the first movement theme with all voices in unison. There is no variation in the rhythmic profile at the opening, which gives it an ancient or processional atmosphere, and the beginning comes to an end with an open-ended question, almost a challenge: how will we deal with this? The opening thesis is addressed by a remarkably long and singing piano solo, which uses the first few bars as ground-bass for its wide wandering.\u00a0 As the movement goes on, this ground remains stubbornly in place (eighth notes are absolutely constant) even as mood, key and register vary.\u00a0 The raw opening of the movement remains a constant presence. If it weren\u2019t for the Allegretto<\/i> tempo marking, it might be a dirge: however widely it varies, it seems unable to alter the steady passage of time.<\/p>\n
Classical last-movements are most often rondos, which means, once again, it\u2019s worth paying attention to what happens at the start. But in this case, it\u2019s doubly worth paying attention: the last movement becomes so quickly so involved with a minor section inside of itself, it\u2019s easy to forget where it all came from, and hard to decide whether rondo expectations might be met at all.\u00a0 A listener can always hang on to the appoggiatura at the end of each gesture as a sort of unifying principle, but that\u2019s not very much to hold.\u00a0 The mood shifts wildly.\u00a0 And the minor section, toward its end, seems in danger of not escaping itself at all.\u00a0 <\/span>Even after this escape, a series of pauses seems to indicate that the last movement may have to end as sharply as the second did\u2026 which perhaps, in the end, it does\u2026 because once things get moving, they can be hard to stop\u2026 and sometimes, at the end,\u00a0you might just have to put your foot down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With every piece of music \u2014 really, every piece \u2014\u00a0 there is a crucial matter at the outset: how to begin?\u00a0 It\u2019s almost too obvious to mention, but it\u2019s too important to be left always unsaid. There\u2019s a particularly dense sense of potential in the opening melody of Joseph Haydn\u2019s Piano Trio No 44 E […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1029"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1029"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1180,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1029\/revisions\/1180"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}