Joseph Martin Kraus - Piano Sonata in E major VB196 (1787)

Mario MARTINOLI, fortepiano Instrument: Ferdinando Granziera, Milan, 1990, after Andreas Stein, ca. 1782. Recording: 9-11 July 2003, Rovereto (Italy) Publication date: 2004 for Stradivarius (http://www.stradivarius.it) Purchase CD at http://www.stradivarius.it/scheda.php... The works for pianoforte of Joseph Martin Kraus comprise a fairly limited number of compositions and are marginal in comparison with the rest of his output, which is mainly orchestral and operatic. Nonetheless, his piano music is of the highest quality and of great musical, historical and artistic value. Kraus was quite clearly a composer with a profound technical knowledge of his instrument and was thoroughly at home with the forms and language of late seventeenth century piano composition. His main piano works are two large sonatas, (a third is lost); the others are short pieces written over roughly ten years, although there is some uncertainty about the reasons why they were composed. His central work for piano is undoubtedly the monumental Sonata in E Major, published in Stockholm in 1788 by Ahlström and written between 1787 and 1788. This is one of the most original and complex late seventeenth-century piano compositions and is a worthy addition to any good modern pianists basic repertoire. Kraus here is quite clearly an innovator and deliberately pushes beyond the established, safe boundaries of the compositional models of his day in his search for a new template for form and expression. The same attitude lay behind the way in which he tackled the completion of his huge opera Æneas i Cartago. This splendid sonata contains all the main characteristics of Kraus music: a predominance of darker tone-colours and minor keys employed for dramatic effect, as occurs in the development of the first movement with its empfindsam approach and in the penultimate variation of the third movement; the huge expansion of phrasing and overall discourse, making the sonata unusually big for its time; finally comes the supremacy of musical narration over form, characterized by flexibility and the ability to provide continually new slants on the same material. Although divided into three sections, this sonata is in fact one extremely long single movement in conception and is also quite clearly one of a kind, not only among Kraus own works but also other composers outputs for the instrument during this period. Kraus manages to combine his typical approach to symphonic and operatic works with the genuinely pianistic nature of this sonata, making it a truly virtuoso tour de force with huge demands on the performers ability double octaves, scales, arpeggios, frequent sudden transitions from fortissimo to pianissimo (and viceversa), expressive use of pauses, bass and upper-treble registers to the fore and endless experimentation with tone colour. This is programme music, certainly, although the real subject of the work is actually the piano itself. A successful experiment in combining form and instrumental resources, this sonata contains the seeds of that modernism which would make its appearance ten years later in Beethovens early piano works, at any rate as far as his opus 31, and it would perhaps not be too far-fetched to consider Kraus sonata as the true forerunner of Beethovens great piano works (albeit unintentionally, of course), a great deal more so than anything by Mozart or Haydn. On the matter of who Kraus composed the sonata for, there is no conclusive evidence. It may have been for some virtuoso performer passing through Stockholm, for his publisher Olof Ahlström, an excellent pianist in his own right, or possibly even for himself. Kraus could in fact hold his own on the instrument, although he did not compose a great deal for the piano, being first and foremost a violinist. Indeed, a number of reports by his contemporaries actually went so far as to rave about his performances: he plays the pianoforte like an angel was supposedly the comment of the Spanish envoy to Stockholm Miranda. Leaving such matters aside, it is undeniable that Kraus had a high opinion of his own sonata because he devoted a great deal of attention to preparing the first edition. This is readily apparent in the great number of dynamic markings he made and the fact that the manuscript score and the printed version are by and large the same.