LEOPOLD GODOWSKY

(1870-1938)



SONATA NO. 2 IN G MINOR
FOR SOLO VIOLIN BY J. S. BACH

very freely transcribed and
adapted
for the pianoforte (1923)
Adagio - Fuga - Siciliana - Presto (Finale)

by
Carlo Grante

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Godowsky's piano music, even though highly complex and rich in polyphonic texture, never suggests sounds other than those of the piano. It never evokes an orchestra, or specific instruments. Instead, Godowsky seems to trying to discover and express the innermost nature of the piano itself. His "perfect piano" demands attention to countless details: a utopian perfectionism which seeks to project every single note as "Klangfarben" - rather than subsume notes within some larger sound-mass (as often happens in works that embody the archetypes of Lisztian pianism). Underpinning the poetry of Godowsky's piano writing is a solid matrix of Bach-like polyphony. The inner coherence of the music, and its relative freedom from filler material, derives from Godowsky's single-minded treatment of thematic figurations and remarkable attentiveness to the interplay of imitative devices. Each of his works propels itself by means of a continuous cycle of tiny births and deaths and rebirths, subtle thematic references, and indefatigable decorative activity.

Godowsky's arrangements of six of Bach's works for solo violin and cello were composed twenty or more years after the majority of the "Studies on Chopin Etudes" and are his most mature achievements in the art of transcription. In his Sonata in G minor, Bach adopts the traditional four-movement scheme of the Italian church sonata (slow-fast-slow-fast), and demands that the listener infer or flesh out subsidiary voices that are only suggested, hinted at, or imagined. Godowsky, in his relentless search for textural richness, favors polyphonic completeness and consequently great harmonic density throughout. In the broad opening Adagio, he fleshes out the long notes of the original with clever imitative material, new dynamic and rhythmic schemes, cadenzas, a harmonic rhythm that grows ever faster and richer, and an ingenious anticipation of the Fuga that follows. Bach may well have conceived his fugue for organ, not violin, and Godowsky's treatment of it results in piano writing of unprecedented polydynamic complexity. (Bach alternates polyphonic and monophonic material, and shifts between fast and slow harmonic rhythms; Godowsky concentrates on the Gothic rather than the Corellian aspects of the movement, and uses highly effective part-writing to develop massive sonorities.) Bach's Siciliana only hints at polyphony, in the manner of Westhoff; Godowsky creates an extended polyphonic treatment, developing thematic, rhythmic, and melodic ideas in almost every measure - at times in the accompaniment, madrigal-style. To the innately etude-like quality of the Presto's running sixteenth notes, Godowsky adds new and unexpected melodic lines that complement the music's structure.


LEOPOLD GODOWSKY

SCHUBERT SONGS

freely transcribed
for the piano (1926)

Das Wandern
Morgengruss
Die Forelle


by Carlo Grante


Keyboard music of the romantic period draws on a wide vocabulary of rhetorical figures, which are usually derived from accompaniments to thematic material. These figures aim to characterize or establish moods and subjects. Schubert, in particular, has bequeathed an enormous vocabulary of rhetorical figures. For example, the spinning motive, used to superb effect in "Gretchen am Spinnrade", quickly became a much-used gesture in the piano literature of the period. Godowsky's response to Schubert's vocabulary is typical. He never allows rhetorical figures to remain intact, in his transcriptions of twelve of Schubert's Songs. As an example, the water motive in Die Forelle is dissected and manipulated to the point where it loses much of its original character. But Godowsky's methods vary considerably from song to song. His variations on Das Wandern stray immediately from the particulars of Schubert's text, whereas his elaborate metamorphosis of Morgengruss shows him pulled this way and that by Schubert's every word.


LEOPOLD GODOWSKY

STUDIES ON CHOPIN ETUDES

Study 1 on Op. 10 No. 1 in C major (1899)

Study 4 on Op.10. No. 2 in A minor (1903)

Study 13 on Op. 10. No. 6 in E-flat minor
for Left Hand (1909)


by
Carlo Grante


As the Chopin Etudes are, as compositions in study form, universally acknowledged to be the highest attainment in the realm of beautiful pianoforte music combined with indispensable mechanical and technical usefulness, the author thought it wisest to build upon their solid and invulnerable foundation, for the purpose of furthering the art of pianoforte playing. [...] The original Chopin Etudes remain as intact now as they were before any arrangements of them were ever published; in fact, the author claims that, after assiduously studying the present versions, many hidden beauties in the original Etudes will reveal themselves even to the less observant student. [Leopold Godowsky]

This is how Leopold Godowsky would justify his extraordinary reworking of the famous Etudes of Chopin. Famous, in some ways "too famous" Chopin's Etudes are widely venerated as sublime archetypes of piano writing, and (justifications aside) Godowsky's drastic elaborations are often dismissed as tampering of the worst sort. But it is precisely the archetypal nature of Chopin's Etudes - intangibly but inescapably available to the mind and fingers of every pianist and piano composer - that allows Godowsky to create a heavy monument to their greatness without at the same time crushing them under its weight.

One always wonders if Chopin's Op. 10 No. 1 has a "theme". Performers tend to bring out the bass line - but this is little more than a ground, not a theme. There is, however, a rudimentary melodic line (or "melos") implicit in the voicing of the Etude's arpeggiated chords. This is the very thing which Godowsky chooses to emphasize in Study 1, with cavernous two-handed chords in the lower register that drive arpeggios across the entire keyboard. Study 4 reworks the chromatic scalar material of Op. 10 No. 2 into 4:3 polyrhythms. The Study's subtitle ("Ignis fatuus") underscores a connection with Liszt's "Feux Follets" - a work which projects its chromaticism in a similar albeit more homophonic way. Study 13 achieves several compositional and poetic goals. It elaborates the semitonal inflection of the Etude's original accompaniment (developing from this a massive web of sonorities). The resulting polyphony (springing from the texture of the accompaniment) is scarcely conceivable for a single hand. Godowsky adds new melodic lines that are ideal companions to Chopin's primary thematic material. Some listeners will recognize Blumenfeld's Etude for Left Hand as the Study's pianistic (if not stylistic) ancestor. [Program note by Carlo Grante]