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发表于 2007-1-3
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2. Piano playing and teaching.
That the majority of Field’s major works begin – and a high proportion end – quietly, betokens an original approach to the role of the virtuoso performer-composer. Regarded as the supreme pianist of his generation, his quiet, self-effacing attitude at the keyboard was as unusual as it was mesmeric: playing ‘as though he sat at his own fireside’, charismatic not through the grandeur of his technique but because of his musiciality and unmatched beauty of tone. (He once admonished Hummel during a public duet performance with a peremptory ‘ne tapez pas si fort’.) From the earliest, reviews emphasized the ‘sweetness and shading in his playing’, the ‘speed, evenness and purity of embellishment, strength and beauty of tone’, all achieved with ‘an inconceivable serenity in performance’. His pupil V.F. Odoyevsky recalled that ‘everywhere his first chord annihilated all his rivals’ and said that ‘under Field’s fingers the piano becomes an entirely different instrument’. Glinka, briefly also a pupil, remembered ‘his forceful, gentle, and distinct playing. It seemed that he did not strike the keys but his fingers fell on them as large raindrops and scattered like pearls on velvet’. Glinka did not agree with Liszt, who said in his presence that Field’s playing was ‘sleepy’. He considered rather that ‘Field’s music was often full of energy, capricious and diverse, but he did not make the art of music ugly by charlatanism, and did not chop cutlets with his fingers like the majority of modern fashionable pianists’. Both in London and Paris, Field’s performances of some of Bach’s preludes and fugues (Clementi owned the autograph of Das wohltemperirte Clavier Book 2) excited admiration for the precision and delicacy of his part-playing. Unusually, he also taught his pupils Bach, besides his own music and that of his virtuoso contemporaries, emphasizing effortless command and equality of all fingers, slow practice, and tonal control through hand techniques far in advance of his time, the whole subordinate to musical ends. Such distinguished pupils as Charles Mayer, Anton Kontski and Maria Szymanowska transmitted his style across Europe, while others – Aleksandr Gurilyov, Jean Rheinhardt and, particularly, Aleksandr Dubuque – laid the foundations of modern Russian pianism.
3. Works.
An acute ear for piano sonority ensured from the outset a new luminosity of sound in Field’s compositions, achieved through chord spacing, wide-ranging left-hand harmonic writing supported by the sustaining pedal, and an adventurous use of the expanding compass of the keyboard. London in Field’s youth was both in the forefront of mechanical advances in piano manufacture and the centre of activity for a group of forward-looking pianist-composers, the majority of foreign birth but including some whose residency was permanent (Clementi) or long-term (Dussek). Clementi’s influence on the formulation of Field’s style may be encapsulated in one work, his A major Sonata op.25, no.3 of 1790 (not op.2 no.4, as mistakenly identified by F.A. Gebhard and later writers, an early piece exploiting rapid octaves – which never formed part of Field’s technical armoury – among other alien features). Here melismatic decoration over slow-paced harmony, drone basses, fleet fingerwork, surprise metrical and modulatory interruption, and thematic similarities, are all reflected in Field’s Concerto no.1. The presence of Haydn and Dussek during these formative years afforded ready examples of the assimilation of folk elements into the current formal and harmonic idiom. Dussek’s London works gave Field a vital view of sonorous harmonic layout and melodic decoration, and the catalyst for the resumption of creative work in the early Russian years came specifically from Dussek’s three sonatas opp.61, 70 and 75 of 1807–11. Concordances of texture and gesture with op.61 and op.70, are clear in the first movement of Concerto no.2; passage-work and thematic elements from op.75 are found respectively in the first movement of Concerto no.3 and the waltz-rhythm finale to the Rondo h18, which was pre-published as a separate piano piece with concertos nos.1–3, in 1811. Nonetheless, there is a strikingly sudden maturity of utterance and range in both the publicly confident solo entry in Concerto no.2 (ex.1) and the private chromatic expression of the Fantaisie h15 (ex.2), both first published in that year.
There is also an ease in the early handling of Russian themes. David Brown’s reminder (in The New Grove Dictionary, 1980) that ‘the Russian thought more readily in terms of full melodic statements and subsequent variations’ concurs with Field’s own mastery of developing variation more easily than other Western composers of his time. His style also featured an uncommon fondness for pedal points, ostinato (and sometimes hemiola) patterns, and false relations. Three early duets (h10–12) reveal a keen ear for style. The first, using three themes, pioneers the sophisticated variation-rondo structure of the fantaisies, and introduces as local colour a balalaika figure. In h11 a very Russian treatment – repetition and subtle variation – is given to a melancholy, but as far as is known, original theme, while in the third duet, the constant variation of Russian folksong is created over a tonally shifting ostinato. Glimpses of Russian melody continue to be seen in later works, notably a hint of Aleksandr Alyab'yev’s Solovey in Nocturne no.8, an exotic section of balalaika-like repeated notes in Concerto no.7, and Kaminskaya (1949) found even a quotation from M.M. Sokolovsky’s comic opera The Miller in Concerto no.2. The varied harmonies applied to the Russian themes in Fantaisie no.3 and in Chanson russe variée h41 are knowingly apposite.
As a rapid modulating tool, the augmented 6th was to Field as the diminished 7th was to Weber, and appeared regularly from the London period alongside modulation by 3rds. Surprise key changes, often by tone or semitone, for drama or humour, tend to be quitted too soon for maximum effect, and long-term modulatory structure is wayward until tightened in the late years. Nonetheless, Field broadened his harmonic specturm to encompass suspension of the tonal centre by block chromaticism, as in Concerto no.5 (1815; ex.3), and superimposed dissonances beyond the vocabulary of his time in a late revision of Concerto no.4 (ex.4).
The 16 numbered nocturnes, and associated pieces in the same style entitled pastorale, romance or serenade, were perhaps some of the most widely-known and influential piano music in the early Romantic period. They dispensed with rigid formal considerations, relying on eliding variation of melody, harmony and accompaniment to achieve a unified variety in the exposition of a mood conjured without the assistance of a text or programme. Indeed, some of Field’s nocturnes are songlike structures – the ‘vocal’ verses introduced and separated by ‘accompaniment’ interludes – the whole accommodated within a single spectrum of variegated piano texture. In this, for the first time, dynamic differentiation is controlled by subtle blending of simultaneous graded finger pressures and sustaining pedal, as in Nocturne no.1 (ex.5), which also illustrates the shifts in melodic emphasis common to Field’s later revisions. While the majority of the nocturnes are treble melodies over accompaniment, nos.6 and 7 introduce thematic elements in the left hand and nos.13 and 15 explore a simpler, more Schumannesque texture, while no.14 is an extended operatic scena complete with interrupting recitative.
Field’s four substantial fantaisies (five with his solo arrangement, Andante, of the Quintet h34) are virtuoso works of high calibre, and in them he pioneered an influential early-Romantic large-scale episodic structure, not dependent on sonata form but a fusion of modulating rondo and variation elements. The variations are decorative after the Mozartian pattern rather than developmental like Beethoven’s (Field was not an admirer of Beethoven’s piano music, though he performed with pleasure the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata with Karol Lipiński); the best of them (deest 3, h20 and h41) are rewarding in both keyboard terms and harmony, as are the many instances of variation techniques in other works. The individual rondos, popular in their own time as brilliant entertainment music, bring less to us today, despite their pianistic and melodic felicities, and Field’s resource in this form is more fully shown in the final movements of the sonatas and concertos.
The first three sonatas (c1798–1801) are increasingly expansive in pre-Schubertian lyricism and modulatory resource, though their emphasis on pianistic luxuriance over cellular thematic invention renders them less close-knit than the C minor sonata which Pinto dedicated to Field in 1802. The fundamental stylistic influence is Dussek, in the richness of the sonorous virtuosity and cantabile coloratura. Even the opening of Sonata no.4 (1813) reflects Dussek’s op.10 no.3 of 1789, though the subsequent treatment, in (now more concise) sonata form (with motivically connected principal subjects), and an imaginatively harmonized folk rondo, is entirely original. sonatas nos.3 and 4 also reveal Field’s perhaps unexpected capacity for concentrated motivic development, seen again on a larger scale in concertos nos.4 and 7.
The concertos, despite their unconventional and often discursive form, were, from the publication of the first three (1811), central to the developing 19th-century piano concerto. Their orchestration is unusally imaginative, even in the many purely accompanied passages, with deftly telling wind writing, pizzicato, tremolando, muted and even col legno strings, and rhetorical (sometimes solo) timpani – Concerto no.7 opens in this way – while the powerful depiction of a storm in Concerto no.5 (1815), with climactic tam-tam and bell, is a worthy precursor of the Wolf’s Glen in Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821). Nonetheless, it is the originality of the piano writing, both heroic and delicate, which impinged on not only the concertos of Moscheles, Hummel, Kalkbrenner and their greater successors. Formally, Field soon adapted the rigours of strict sonata structure to accommodate one or more sections of contrasting atmospheric style and tempo, sometimes to avoid cellular development of mainly lyrical music, more often as an ‘inspirational aside’ to the main thrust of the principal ideas. Herein lay a weakening of control over the large span of the opening sonata and closing rondo movements which Field did not always surmount successfully (except in later revisions). By contrast the central movement – decorative variations or nocturne-like – consistently demonstrates the miniaturist’s mastery of harmonic nuance and melodic coloratura.
Miniatures of a blunter kind form the collections of short dances, mostly simple ternary structures in waltz rhythm. From the energetically bucolic to the suavely elegant, all share some common denominators – characteristic pedal effects in the écossaises, aspirated dotted rhythms elsewhere – and, despite doubts over authenticity, all but the last and finest, the Sehnsuchts-Walzer (h51), survive in editions from publishers with whom Field had known connections. The Six danses h42, though known only from an 1820 German edition, refer to the Kehraus also heard in Schumann’s Papillons, and may date from Field’s first visit to Vienna in 1802, a supposition supported by similarities to the waltz finale of the Sonata no.2 (London, 1801) and a typographical idiosyncracy on the title-page familiar from Russian editions of Field’s other music. The studies are of two kinds, scalic and figural finger exercises, which gain cohesion by modulating through all keys (h33 and 48), and attractive character-pieces that look forward to Stephen Heller (the left hand study from the Quinteth34) and the melodic studies of Carl Loeschhorn (h44 and that derived from Concerto no.4h28).
The chamber music, all for strings and piano, arose from three circumstances: the widespread Russian fondness for string quartet playing, the practice of rehearsing (and occasionally performing) concertos with soloist and string quartet only, and Field’s deliberate use of supporting accompaniment to sustain his early experiments in keyboard texture (internal evidence suggests that the Fantaisie h15 and Nocturne no.3 were also originally conceived in this form), hence the generally subordinate melodic role of the string parts, despite the felicitous scoring of the harmonic underpinning. Only the opening Pastorale of Divertissement no.2, and the Quintet h34, a fine single-movement fantaisie in rondo-variation form, show some equality between the forces.
In the decade 1821–31, Field encountered a creative crisis, presaged by the extensive revisions to Concerto no.6 between the first performance (1819) and publication (1823), and confirmed by his indecision over the final version of Concerto no.7 (1821–32). Of new music, only the Fantaisie no.3, in its original form with orchestra, and the Nocturnes nos.9 and 10, were completed and published immediately. For the rest, he returned to earlier works (primarily Sonatas no.1 and 3, Concertos nos.1–5, the two Quintets h18 and 34), to intensify their harmonic and melodic content and, above all, to reassess their overall proportions, particularly those movements in sonata form. He had published a considerably more concise orchestral edition of Concerto no.4 by 1819. The similar shortening of Concerto no.2 (A-Wgm) was not published, but, perhaps through increasingly unreliable health, the emphasis lay with radical reworkings of accompanied works for solo piano. He made valuable concert sonatas out of concertos nos.1–5 (Plantinga describes Clementi’s less successful similar efforts three decades earlier), though the notable adaptation of sonata form – especially the reduction of the recapitulations to token, almost coda-like, reminiscences of the lengthy expositions and developments – had no influence on his contemporaries or immediate successors, as they too were not published. Field’s late grasp of sonata structure in early Romantic terms is in marked contrast to Hummel’s adhrence to formal repetition.
4. Legacy.
Brahms owned a copy of Field’s first three nocturnes and his Variations op.21 no.1 reflect the widespread triplet accompaniment figures, pedal notes and semitonal clashes of Nocturne no.3, while Schumann viewed afresh many details of its ideas in his Romanze op.28 no.2. His many eulogistic reviews of Field’s music suggest a thorough knowledge of it, particularly of Concerto no.7, the autograph full score of which he studied: hence the slower interlude in the first movement, the intermezzo style for a central movement (erased in Field’s case, perhaps mistakenly, before publication), and the waltz-rhythm finale, which his own piano concerto shares. Liszt, probably through his friendship with Glinka, used rare Russian published sources incorporating Field’s late revisions for his edition of the nocturnes and adopted much of Field’s idiosyncratic but idiomatic fingering into his own music.
Field was offended by the close concordances between his Romanceh30 and Chopin’s Nocturne op.9 no.2; Branson (1973) catalogued myriad other derivations, both virtuoso and poetic, many of which were already in Field’s vocabulary by the time of Chopin’s early childhood. The Fieldian songlike character-piece, transmitted to Mendelssohn directly through his teacher Ludwig Berger, and to numberless others throughout the 19th century, reached the 20th with the nocturnes of Skryabin and Fauré, while Metner is glimpsed in Field’s Nocturne no.11. Earlier, his pupil I.F. Laskovsky’s piano music (especially the two sets of variations on Russian folk melodies, the Barcarolle and Chansonnette sans paroles) reflects Field’s own and, if Glinka adopted Field’s figuration without his piquant dissonance, his masterly handling of folksong stems directly from Field.
Asaf'yev (1947) asserted that, through Dubuque’s pupils Balakirev and Nikolay Zverev (Zverev taught Skryabin and Rachmaninoff), ‘the history of the Russian Piano School Field’s tradition was long and influential’. The popularity of his music waned, apart from the nocturnes, only in the last years of the 19th century. Ferruccio Busoni did not live to instigate his planned Field revival in the 1920s, and no other great pianist has yet taken up Field’s challenge of bel canto and self-effacing virtuosity. Indeed, they may neither mirror his performing practice nor study his final texts until editions that include his fingering and the mature revisions to many of his most substantial works are published. Nonetheless, Field remains one of the most original figures in the development of Romantic piano music.
List of works
H 1 – Variations for piano on "Fal Lal La" in A major
H 2 – Rondo "Favorite Hornpipe" for piano in A major
H 3 – Rondo "Go the devil" for piano in C major
H 4 – Variations for piano on "Since then I'm doom'd" in C major
H 5 – Rondo "Slave, bear the sparkling goblet" for piano (lost)
H 6 – Rondo "The two slaves dances" for piano in G major
H 7 – Variations for piano on "Logie of Buchan" in C major
H 8 – Piano Sonata Op. 1 No. 1 in E flat major
H 8 – Piano Sonata Op. 1 No. 2 in A major
H 8 – Piano Sonata Op. 1 No. 3 in C minor
H 9 – Pleyel's Concertante for piano, violin & cello in F major
H 10 – Air russe varié for piano 4 hands in A minor
H 11 – Andante for piano 4 hands in C minor
H 12 – Danse des ours for piano 4 hands in E flat major
H 13 – Divertissement No. 1 for piano in E major
H 13 – Nocturne for piano (12) in E major
H 14 – Divertissement No. 2 for piano in A major
H 14 – Nocturne for piano (7) in A major
H 15 – Fantasia for piano Op. 3 on "Guardami un poco" in A major
H 16 – Marche triomphale for piano in E flat major
H 17 – Piano Sonata in B flat major
H 18 – Rondeau for piano in A flat major
H 18 – Waltz for piano in A flat major
H 19 – Grande valse for piano 4 hands in A major
H 20 – Variations for piano on "Vive Henry IV" in A minor
H 21 – Polonaise for piano in E flat major
H 22 – Variations for piano on "Kamarinskaya" in B flat major
H 23 – Rondo "Speed the Plough" for piano in B major
H 24 – Nocturne for piano No. 1 in E flat major
H 25 – Nocturne for piano No. 2 in C minor
H 26 – Nocturne for piano No. 3 in A flat major
H 27 – Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major (1799)
H 27 – Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major
H 27 – Variations for piano on "Within a mile" in B flat major
H 28 – Piano Concerto No. 4 in E flat major (1814, revised 1819)
H 28 – Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 4 in E flat major
H 29 – Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 3 in E flat major
H 30 – Nocturne for piano No. 9 (8) in E flat major
H 31 – Piano Concerto No. 2 in A flat major (1811)
H 31 – Poco adagio from Piano Concerto No. 2 in E flat major
H 31 – Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 2 in A flat major
H 32 – Piano Concerto No. 3 in E flat major (1811)
H 33 – Exercice modulé sur tous les tons majeurs et mineurs for piano
H 34 – Piano Quintet in A flat major
H 35 – Fantasia for piano on "Ah! quel dommage" in G major
H 36 – Nocturne for piano No. 4 in A major
H 37 – Nocturne for piano No. 5 in B flat major
H 38 – Rondo for piano in A major
H 39 – Piano Concerto No. 5 in C major "L'incendie par l'orage" (1817)
H 39 – Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 5 in C major
H 40 – Nocturne for piano No. 6 in F major
H 41 – Variations for piano on a Russian folksong in D minor
H 42 – 6 Dances for piano
H 43 – Rondo for piano 4 hands in G major
H 44 – Exercice nouveau No. 1 for piano in C major
H 45 – Nocturne for piano No. 7 (13) in C major
H 46 – Nocturne for piano No. 8 (9) in E minor
H 47 – The Maid of Valdarno (lost)
H 48 – Exercice nouveau No. 2 for piano in C major
H 49 – Piano Concerto No. 6 in C major (1819, revised 1820)
H 49 – Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 6 in C major
H 50 – 2 Songs
H 51 – Sehnsuchts-Walzer for piano in E major
H 52 – Rondoletto for piano in E flat major
H 53 – Rondo "Come again, come again" for piano in E major
H 54 – Nocturne for piano No. 10 in E major
H 55 – Nocturne for piano in C major "Le troubadour"
H 56 – Nocturne for piano No. 11 in E flat major
H 57 – Fantasia for piano on "We met" in G major
H 58 – Nocturne for piano No. 12 (14) in G major
H 58 – Piano Concerto No. 7 in C minor (1822, revised 1822-32)
H 59 – Nocturne for piano No. 13 (15) in D minor
H 60 – Nocturne for piano No. 14 (16) in C major
H 61 – Nocturne for piano No. 15 (17) in C major
H 62 – Nocturne for piano No. 16 (18) in F major
H 63 – Nocturne for piano in B flat major
H 64 – Andante inedit for piano in E flat major
H 65 – Pastorale for piano (lost)
H 66 – Nocturne for piano "Dernière pensée" (lost)
H 67 – 88 passages doigtés for piano (lost)
H deest – Exercice for piano in A flat major
H deest – Fantasia for piano on "Dans le jardin" in A minor
H deest – Largo for piano in C minor
H deest – Prelude for piano in C minor
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