This is the second post in an audio series about classical piano. Listen to the intro post:
Classical piano is awesome, and problematic and bumbling, but still, it’s awesome
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Fantasy in D minor is mysterious and foreboding, and you’re never quite sure what it’s building toward. Later, it suddenly switches to D major. This part is vintage Mozart, fast and flighty, supremely confident.
Mozart, who was Austrian, composed the piece in 1782, directly in the middle of what would become known as the Classical (big C) period of Western European musical arts. The Classical label suggests definitive, foundational music, the peak of the form. Mozart was a genius, but he was not, as the many myths go, a revolutionary superhuman. In fact, he wasn’t even the one to lay the groundwork for what we, today, call classical (small c) music.
That would be Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach composed far too much breathtaking music for me to pluck out something that epitomizes the myriad innovations of his Baroque style. I like to listen to Bach for feeling, and few of his pieces evoke a more full-bodied sense of awe than his Prelude in A minor. Bach wrote it around 1710, when he was a court organist in his native Germany. And this is a piano transcription that Franz Liszt made 130 years later.
Liszt was a formidable composer, and perhaps the greatest pianist of the 19th century, which encompassed most of the Romantic era. But he was not the one to bridge the gap between the Classics and Romantics.
That would be Ludwig van Beethoven, of Germany.
While Beethoven’s early work has the sound of his Classical predecessors, his later compositions are radical experiments, and in the final movement of his penultimate sonata, Opus 110, the transformation is complete. There is nothing holy in this piece, just the struggle of light and dark, until the final fugue explodes in a triumph of hope. Beethoven wrote it in 1821, as his hearing was failing him. Three years later, he wrote the Ninth Symphony; three years after that, he was dead, and the Romantic era swung away.
This is Frédéric Chopin’s first waltz, from 1833. Chopin was a Polish composer, mostly for piano, who moved to Paris when he was twenty-one and never left. He was three months older than—and greatly admired by—the German composer Robert Schumann.
This is Schumann’s Fantasie in C. It was written in 1836. When it was published, in 1839, after revisions, Schumann dedicated it his good friend from Hungary, Franz Liszt. And Liszt returned the favor fifteen years later, when, in 1854, he dedicated his Sonata in B minor to Schumann.
The Romantic tradition extended to Russia, where Modest Mussorgsky was writing a ten-set piano suite.
This is Pictures at an Exhibition, from 1874, and its sounds helped inspire composers like Claude Debussy, who was in France breaking ground with Impressionism, as in this 1890 piece, the second of the Two Arabesques.
All this time, the Germanic Romantic tradition remained strong. This is Johannes Brahms, who was born the year of the Chopin waltz we heard a few minutes ago. It’s an intermezzo that Brahms published when he was sixty, in 1893, and I could listen to it forever.
In the 20th Century—a time of global warfare, mass consumerism, and instantaneous recording and communications—classical music splintered into dozens of sub-genres. In the beginning, Romanticism still reigned, with a composer like Sergei Rachmaninoff, a Russian, most comfortable in lush emotional aches; this is one of his preludes, from 1903.
I also love the sort of Post-Romantic Modernism of Jean Sibelius, from Finland. Here is one of his wonderful little pieces, Souvenir, from 1922.
And let’s jump now to mid-century, with this prelude from the Russian Dmitri Shostakovich . . .
. . . and, finally, to 1979, with Mad Rush, from the American Philip Glass.
OK, so what do these pieces have in common? Well, to paraphrase Duke Ellington, the American jazz icon, they sound good, not bad.
As for what makes them classical, with a small-c, we should remember that that’s an invented label with a jagged history, and that it persists as an umbrella term for the American listening public, while composers, conductors, performers, historians, scholars, and students of the art form discard it.
The Western European musical arts that we call “classical” are steeped in perceptions of harmony and melody, consonance and dissonance, in counterpoint, in precise notational constructions and a steady trickle of instrumental innovations. It’s all wonderful, but none of it speaks to how to play the notes and accept the space between them. It doesn’t explain why listeners are drawn to a performance or a piece.
One of the joys of music is discovery; but there is more classical piano than anyone could ever hope to know, especially when including contemporary compositions. Any narrative omits magnitudes more than it includes; every piece deserves its own lecture, every composer their own educational course, every performance a lifetime of listening.
I’ve strung together the sounds I love because, ultimately, that’s music: tones over time. It’s what we immerse ourselves in, and it’s where we can wonder whether the two-and-a-half centuries between a Bach and a Glass are really that great.
Nathan Schiller 
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