Nikolai Medtner: Piano Sonatas I

Description

Born in Moscow into a family of German origin, trained at the Conservatoire under the aegis of Sergej Taneyev, and early determined, contrary to the expectations of a brilliant career as a pianist, to devote himself to composition, Nikolai Medtner occupies a singular position in the history of the piano sonata. Taneyev, struck by his contrapuntal intuition, went so far as to describe him as “born with sonata form”, and the phrase, for once, does not sound hyperbolic. In him the lesson of the classics, and above all of Beethoven, never becomes antiquarian observance, but inner discipline, an ethic of form, the necessity of making a living organism spring from a minimal nucleus. The programme of this disc, bringing together Sonata in F minor op. 5, the complete Sonaten-Triade op. 11 and Sonata in G minor op. 22, allows one to follow the moment at which that vocation takes shape and asserts itself in a voice already unmistakable, poised between lyrical ardour, contrapuntal science and an almost religious sense of the architecture of sound.
Sonata in F minor op. 5, Medtner’s first major public statement, still bears the marks of a fevered youth, yet already reveals a mastery of large-scale discourse that many contemporaries perceived as something exceptional. The sonata is in four movements, and precisely this articulation, unusual when set against the preference that the composer would later show for unified form, allows one to grasp with clarity his way of conceiving drama. The opening Allegro sets a conflict in motion while setting out themes. The material seems to advance through insistent interrogations, through surges that find no outlet, through tolling figures that already suggest that bell sonority so dear to the Russian imagination. The ensuing Intermezzo offers no respite; rather, it tightens the psychological knot with an unsettling, almost obsessive concision. At the centre unfolds Largo divoto, one of the earliest revelations of Medtner’s spiritual dimension. The very title directs listening towards a meditation that is not a mere lyrical oasis but a prayer, in an attempt to transfigure turmoil into invocation. Here the writing assumes an almost sarabande-like tread and a choral gravity, with echoes that seem to come from a liturgical horizon. Family tradition sought to recognise in the second theme of the first movement a musical portrait of Anna Bratenskaya, the composer’s great love; whether or not true in its details, this memory illuminates the profoundly autobiographical character of the sonata. In the Finale. Allegro risoluto the preceding material returns transfigured: the motif of uncertainty is converted into constructive energy, the melodic line assumes the profile of a religioso chorale, the texture grows denser up to episodes of almost fugal rigour, and the conclusion, kindled by liberating tolling, sounds like a victory won inwardly rather than proclaimed outwardly.
After this threshold, for a time Medtner concentrates his imagination on short pieces and on Goethe’s verses. It is therefore natural that Sonaten-Triade op. 11 should arise under the sign of German poetry. The motto drawn from Aussöhnung, the concluding section of Trilogie der Leidenschaft, offers the most persuasive key with which to enter this triptych of passions, suffering and redemption, where music and love appear as forces capable of lightening the heart without effacing its wound. In filigree one still senses the story of Anna, though by now transfigured into a broader meditation on emotional destiny and on the salvific power of song. The dedication to the memory of Andrei, Anna’s brother, introduces a shadow of mourning, but does not alter the deeper meaning of the work, which remains fundamentally ascensional. The three sonatas of op. 11 embody a conception almost without precedent in Russian piano literature. They are autonomous, were published separately, and do not necessarily presuppose complete performance; yet, heard together, they resemble the three panels of a single great ideal sonata, or rather the three spiritual stages of a single journey. More perceptive critics have recognised in them a non-cyclical triptych, a new formal idea that anticipates many later adventures of the Russian one-movement sonata. The first, in A flat major, opens with an almost germinal simplicity, from which the whole movement unfolds with admirable naturalness. The dominant impression is one of joy, not naïve but hard-won, as though Medtner wished to strip Romantic fervour of all superfluous emphasis and restore it to a nobility of classical breadth. Even in the more animated passages there remains a quality of serene impetus, sealed by a luminous coda. The second sonata, the Sonata-Elegy in D minor, is the point of greatest emotional concentration within the triad. The principal theme has a sorrowful, almost declamatory inflection, and yet the writing carefully avoids elegiac self-indulgence. More subtle is the gesture with which Medtner insinuates an allusion to the Dies irae: a distant memory of death, softened and interiorised. In the recapitulation, when the principal elements of the discourse tend to overlap and recognise one another, one perceives that specifically Medtnerian capacity to transform polyphony into psychology. The quick and surprisingly affirmative coda transcends the elegy. As so often in this composer, pain is compelled to become form, rhythm, redemptive energy. The third sonata, in C major, bears the eloquent indication con passione innocente. Few formulae could define with equal precision the art of Medtner when it relinquishes tragic tension without relinquishing depth. C major, a key that he often associates with a sphere of purity and reverence, here provides the setting for one of his most memorable melodic inventions. The repeated exposition imparts to the musical thought an almost ritual character; the development introduces new material without breaking the atmosphere of pensive candour; the coda embroiders all the preceding threads into a dense and radiant fabric. The result is the perfect conclusion to a trilogy which, though traversed by mourning and memory, asserts itself through the vitality of its final codettas and through an underlying confidence that has nothing superficial about it.
With Sonata in G minor op. 22 Medtner reaches another stage of his art. The dedication to Georgy Catoire is not a marginal detail, for it evokes a Muscovite constellation in which rigour of workmanship and harmonic refinement could still converse without yielding to mere virtuoso exteriority. It is no accident that this work would become the most frequently performed of his sonatas. Here the composer abandons the multi-movement model and fashions a single-span organism that proceeds not by juxtaposition of sections, but by continuous growth. In this sense the work goes beyond the Lisztian paradigm of the unitary sonata: it does not juxtapose contrasting blocks as it also allows an initial idea to deform itself, expand, generate its own opposite and finally reabsorb it. The listener truly has the impression of an unbroken line, stretched from the incipit to the coda, as though every episode were already implicit in the breath of the initial gesture. The opening Tenebroso carries within itself all the requisite darkness, but it is not a static prelude. The germinal material already contains the accelerating motion that will issue in the Allegro assai, and along the way one witnesses the incessant metamorphosis of the same thought. Interludium. Andante lugubre does not interrupt the flow; rather, it constitutes its deepest echo chamber, a sudden dimming of the light through which the discourse recovers new propulsive force. The tonal design too, constructed upon a succession of alternating thirds, contributes to this impression of the sternest equilibrium within a fantasy perpetually on the alert. The great coda gathers and intensifies what had previously been dispersed, confirming the rarest trait of Medtner: the identity between thematic invention and formal destiny.
In these early and central sonatas there is already present everything that prevents Medtner from being assimilated either to formulaic late Romanticism or to the avant-gardes that surrounded him. The cantabile element is constant, yet never indulgent; contrapuntal complexity is of the highest order, yet never becomes mere display; German culture and Russian memory coexist in a language that unites chorale, bell sonority, elegy, narrative impetus and constructive discipline. If his music took time to be recognised, that is perhaps due precisely to this severe freedom, to this reluctance to separate thought from emotion. To hear op. 5, op. 11 and op. 22 today is therefore to witness the birth of a great composer for the piano and the progressive revelation of a poetics in which the sonata once again becomes, in the highest sense, a form of memory, ordeal and redemption. The first sonata regards drama as a trial to be traversed, the Triad transforms private experience into a lyrical parable, op. 22 condenses everything within a logic of continuous growth. Thus the course of the disc acquires the compactness of a true inward Bildungsroman. Each stage thus broadens the previous one without contradicting it.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2026