What is "piano sonata"

n. a sonata for piano

A piano sonata is a sonata written for a solo piano. Piano sonatas are usually written in three or four movements, although some piano sonatas have been written with a single movement ( Scarlatti, Scriabin, Medtner), two movements ( Haydn), five ( Brahms' Third Piano Sonata) or even more movements. The first movement is generally composed in sonata form.

Alban Berg's Piano Sonata , Op. 1, was published in 1910, but the exact date of composition is unknown; sources suggest that it was written in 1909. The Sonata is Berg's only piano work to which he gave an opus number.

The Piano Sonata BB 88 (Sz. 80) is a piano sonata by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, composed in June 1926. 1926 is known to musicologists as Bartók's "piano year", when he underwent a creative shift in part from Beethovenian intensity to a more Bachian craftsmanship.

The work is in three movements, with the following tempo indications:

• Allegro moderato
• Sostenuto e pesante
• Allegro molto

It is tonal, but highly dissonant, using the piano in a percussive fashion. Underneath clusters of repeated notes, the melody is folk-like. Each movement has a classical structure overall, in character with Bartók's frequent use of classical forms as vehicles for his most advanced thinking. Musicologist Halsey Stevens finds in the work early forms of many stylistic traits that became more fully developed in Bartók's "golden age", 1934-1940.

Bartók wrote Dittának, Budapesten, 1926, jun. at the end of the score. Ditta is the name of his second wife. A performance generally lasts around fifteen minutes. Bartók wrote the duration as ca. 12' 30" on the score.

Bartok wrote this piece with an Imperial Bösendorfer (piano) in mind, which has extra keys in the bass (97 keys in total). The 2nd movement of the sonata calls for these keys to be played.

Bartók had previously written a piano sonata in 1896, which is little known.

Edvard Grieg's Piano Sonata in E minor, Op. 7 was written in 1865 when he was 22 years old. The sonata was published a year later and revised in 1887. The work was Grieg's only piano sonata and it was dedicated to Danish composer Niels Gade. The sonata has four movements with the following tempo markings:

1. Allegro moderato
2. Andante molto
3. Alla Menuetto, ma poco più lento
4. Finale: Molto allegro

A typical performance lasts around 20 minutes.

In the first movement he used a technique probably most famously used by Bach and Shostakovich: his own name, more precisely his initials E-H-G (H being the German name for note B), begins the melody in the first two bars, which is reiterated in octaves and even echoed by the left hand in bars 13 and 14. He used the same method in his two compositions of the Lyric Pieces: "Gade", Op. 57, No. 2 and "Secret", Op. 57, No. 4, using the name of his admired colleague Gade.

In a 1944 letter to Ella Grainger, Percy Grainger mentioned planning to orchestrate the sonata. He apparently did so, but only a sketch is extant. However, an orchestration of the Menuetto by Danish composer Robert Henriques exists.

The Piano Sonata in B-flat minor is a work written by Julius Reubke between December 1856 and March 1857. Although it remains very obscure and is little performed (unlike the composer's Sonata on the 94th Psalm for organ), it combines the Lisztian technique of thematic transformation, colourful harmonies, virtuosic piano writing and a wide array of characters and sentiments.

The Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, Op. 26 was written by Samuel Barber in 1949 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the League of Composers. First performed by Vladimir Horowitz, the sonata has remained a popular concert staple ever since.

The Piano Sonata in E-flat minor is a musical work composed by Paul Dukas between 1899 and 1900, and published in 1901.

The Piano Sonata, sometimes also referred to as Sonata for Piano or in its original French form, Sonate pour piano, is a 1924 piano sonata by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

The Piano Sonata by Jean Barraqué is a significant serial composition from the period of avant-garde composition in France shortly after World War II.

Composed between 1950 and 1952, it is a large piece, lasting around fifty minutes, in a single movement divided into two connected sections, roughly equal in length. The densely dissonant polyphonic texture of the work resembles the Second Piano Sonata of Pierre Boulez, a work Barraqué knew well. In performance, however, the overall impact is quite different from anything of Boulez, and has often been claimed (e.g. by Hodeir (1961)), to be akin in spirit to the late sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven.

Paul Griffiths has written of the music of the sonata: 'contrasts of themes or keys are replaced by other polarities, in particular between perceptions of notes as sounds (acontextual, as if heard alone) and as tones (part of the unfolding of a serial form), between freedom and fixity in the registral placing of notes, between pulsed and pulseless rhythm and between sound and silence. In his preface to the composition Barraqué drew attention to another opposition, between a "free style" of motifs and chords in easy flow and a "strict style" of intensive, quasi-automatic process acknowledging the total serialism of the time. Compulsion, embodied in the strict music, may seem to spur protest in the free passages. But protest is compromised by having to be voiced in the same language, based on the same series.' Herbert Henck has also noted: 'The overall structure was based on juxtaposing a fast movement with a slow one of equal weight. But as the fast movement built up, slow sections were increasingly introduced, and the slow movement contained some fast ones, so that there was a balance of contrasts within the work as a whole. The piece closed in unision in a mediating tempo with a twelve-tone row, whose basic form determined the pitch structure of the whole work.'

The sonata was recorded commercially by Yvonne Loriod between 28 and 30 October 1957 and issued in 1958, but it was not given its first performance in public until 24 April 1967, when the Danish pianist Elisabeth Klein played it in a recital in Copenhagen, seemingly unaware that she was in fact giving the world première. It was subsequently recorded commercially by Claude Helffer in 1969, Roger Woodward in 1972, Stefan Litwin in 1997, Herbert Henck in 1999, and Jean-Frédéric Neuburger in 2011. The Sonata had been published by Aldo Bruzzichelli, Florence in 1966; the rights have since transferred to Bärenreiter-Verlag of Kassel. The original edition is rife with notational errors, and performers (e.g. Henck) had to prepare their own editions. However, there is Roger Woodward's recording of the sonata which was recently re-issued by Celestial Harmonies. Woodward could bypass the printed version and its shortcomings by working with Barraqué in Paris over months before Barraqué's early death at the age of 45. There are photographs, some of which were reproduced in the booklet of Woodward's CD, showing Barraqué and Woodward in two different settings, one working together at a desk and the other one working together in a recording studio with Woodward at the keyboard and Barraqué standing near, talking. Woodward's notes on his recording tell the story in great detail. As can Woodward, Claude Helffer can claim authenticity as he also had worked with Barraqué. Whilst Woodward's recording is in print, Helffer's can only be obtained as used vinyl and is increasingly difficult to find.

Bohuslav Martinů's Piano Sonata, H. 350 was written in Nice in the last months of 1954 for Rudolf Serkin, who premiered it in Düsseldorf in 1957 coupled with Ludwig van Beethoven's Sonata No. 29. The first performance in the Eastern Bloc took place in Brno later that year, by Eliška Nováková.

Framed by the Symphony No. 6 and the Piano Concerto No. 4, it is Martinů's largest solo piano work and a significant work of his late period, characterized by formal freedom, dramatic tension, harsh dissonant harmonies and changing rhythms. It consists of three movements:

1. Poco allegro
2. Moderato
3. Adagio - Poco allegro

Henri Dutilleux wrote his only piano sonata in 1947-1948.

It was dedicated to and premièred by his wife Geneviève Joy on 30 April 1948. It has since become one of the most acclaimed post- World War II works in the genre and has been championed by major pianists such as John Ogdon, Robert Levin, John Chen and Claire-Marie Le Guay.

Although Dutilleux had been active as a composer for ten years when he wrote his piano sonata, he viewed it as his Opus 1, the first work that he considered up to his mature standards.

Debussy, Ravel, Bartók and Prokofiev have been cited as influences on the piece although critics have also stressed that its language is original and distinctive, a personal synthesis of French Impressionism and Soviet music.