“Fugitif”: a French word meaning “fleeting”, “evanescent”, but also “ephemeral” and “temporary”. This idea has been explored by various composers, each of whom has given it a personal interpretation.
This CD is intended as a reflection on transience, not only in music but in all reality. Impermanence and fugacity are the essence of every thing and every manifestation, and music is perhaps the art in which the concept of “fugitif” finds its finest expression.
Sound is intangible and fleeting.
I know no wisdom valid for all;
in my verses I entrust only fleeting visions.
In every fleeting vision I discern worlds,
filled with changeful, iridescent play.
These are the lines by the Symbolist poet Konstantin Bal’mont that inspired Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) to compose the Visions Fugitives, Op. 22, a set of twenty miniatures written between 1915 and 1917. Listening to this sequence of pieces, one almost feels as though one were reading brief diary pages in which the composer chose to record sensations, thoughts and visions. Although the Visions Fugitives were not necessarily conceived as a cycle (the composer himself would perform only a selection), Prokofiev nonetheless took particular care in placing them alongside one another and ordering them.
If in the first ten there is still room for light and playfulness, one might think of No. V, “Molto giocoso”, where one seems to hear the cries of children at play; No. VIII, “Commodo”, whose gentle melody recalls a song without words; or No. X, “Ridicolosamente”, a veritable prank, in the second half of the set something changes. The tone grows heavier and the music darkens. In No. XII, “Assai moderato”, the accompaniment suggests a waltz, yet its motion, emptied of any dance-like quality, recalls the monotonous tread of Schubert’s Leiermann. The climax of tragedy is reached in the last three miniatures. In No. XVIII, “Con una dolce lentezza”, one almost seems to see Death dancing with elegance, turning into a true premonition. No. XIX, “Presto agitatissimo e molto accentuato”, echoing the revolutionary unrest that broke out in Russia during those years, ends in an apocalyptic manner. The last, No. XX, “Lento”, is the vision of a post-apocalyptic landscape, where rubble, smoke and silence reign.
This affinity with the miniature has its roots already in the Romantic period, when composers increasingly felt the desire to flee the formal rigidity characteristic of Classicism. At times large-scale forms, such as the sonata, are taken as a point of departure and then adapted to individual expressive needs; more often, however, composers turn to small forms, to cycles of miniatures or album leaves, which allow complete freedom of expression.
It is precisely in this direction that Clara Schumann’s four Pièces Fugitives, Op. 15, composed in 1840 shortly after her marriage to Robert, can be placed. Here Pièces Fugitives refers to pieces that resist any structural rigidity. Particularly interesting is the way in which the composer chose to order the four pieces: it begins with “Larghetto”, intimate in character, followed by “Un poco agitato”, in marked contrast to the first, brilliant and marked by a strong rhythmic temperament. It then moves to “Andante espressivo”, which at times evokes a nocturne and at times a chorale, and which could stand as the slow movement of a sonata, before concluding unexpectedly with a “Scherzo”, usually reserved for a central movement within sonata form.
In the nineteenth century the form of the Pensées Fugitives also became established: brief salon pieces, free from any formal obligation, granting composers full expressive freedom. Samuil Maykapar (1867-1938) composed two sets of Pensées Fugitives, Op. 11, of which some movements have unfortunately been lost, and Op. 23. Both present a cyclic design in which the first piece has the character of a prologue, while the last functions almost as an epilogue, where new ideas and material already heard in the preceding movements merge, lending formal cohesion to the whole.
Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) also composed several Pensées Fugitives. In the three presented on this CD, Op. 66, Moszkowski offers a very different reading from Maykapar’s. The Polish composer’s Pensées, decidedly more virtuosic, are in no way connected to one another. Three miniatures, three distinct expressive profiles: the first is agitated, the second more playful and light, while the third takes on a more lyrical character, particularly in its central section.
Silvia Carlin © 2026