Joyce Music – Boulez: Third Piano Sonata
- At May 03, 2022
- By Great Quail
- In Joyce
- 0
I have often compared this work with the plan of a city. One does not change its design, one perceives exactly what it is, and there are different ways of going through it. One can chose one’s own way through it, but there are certain traffic regulations.
—Pierre Boulez on the “Third Piano Sonata”
Troisième Sonate pour Piano
(1958 to never)
Formant I—Antiphonie (unpublished)
Formant II—Trope
Formant III—Constellation/Constellation-miroir
Formant IV—Strophe (unpublished)
Formant V—Séquence (unpublished)
Unassigned—Sigle
A musical labyrinth incorporating nonlinear design, performer-based decisions, and notions of form itself as a principle aesthetic, Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata represents a pinnacle of musical Modernism, an “open work” cast in ebony and ivory. Despite (or more likely, because of) this, the Third Piano Sonata is more often discussed than heard; and having spawned numerous essays, critiques, justifications, nearly-inscrutable liner notes, and snide post-mortems, it has produced more commentators than actual players. It’s also rather difficult to perform, requiring much preparation on the part of the interpreter in terms of organization as well as practice.
Essentially, the Third Piano Sonata arose from Boulez’s interest in literary Modernism, particularly as represented in the works of Stéphane Mallarmé and James Joyce. Mallarmé offered the multiple fascinations with form as aesthetic, with his typographical effects drawing attention to the relationships between the printed words and the page containing them; and later his belief that a book should contain a level of reader-initiated indeterminacy. Although Joyce held similar views to the French poet, his ideas on language and style were taken to greater extremes, and Finnegans Wake pointed the way to an open text, a cyclical work available for entry at multiple points. Boulez—always ready to overturn the old order in his quest for musical revolution—was greatly attracted to these ideas, and sought a way to adapt them to the compositional process. The result was the Third Piano Sonata, a “work-in-progress” that to this day awaits “completion.”
Design
The ideal version of the Third Piano Sonata has five movements, which Boulez called formants. Although all five formants contain very specific systems intended to open the work’s structure to aleatoric elements, only formants 2 and 3 have been published, so the work has never received a complete public performance by anyone save Boulez himself. Formant 2 is titled Trope, and formant 3 is Constellation. This is further complicated by the fact that the Constellation movement has a mirror-image double, Constellation-miroir, which may be played in its stead. Additionally, Boulez later published “Sigle,” a short fragment that so far remains unassigned to a formant. (The name may spark the interest of a Finnegans Wake reader, as it may be inspired by Joyce’s “Sigla.”)
Trope is made up of four fragments, each taking its name from related terms of literary criticism: Texte, Parenthèse, Commentaire, and Glose. The performer is free to choose which fragment serves as the beginning; as long as Commentaire is played either before or after Glose, and the performer plays through each fragment to the end in the direction selected. A clear inspiration here is Finnegans Wake; in fact, Boulez indicates that the score for Trope should be bound in a spiral to emphasis its nonlinearity.
The next formant, Constellation, serves as a labyrinth of sorts, allowing the performer the freedom to select a path through the movement from several alternative possibilities. (Something like an old “Choose Your Own Adventure” book.) The movement is essentially comprised of a series of “vertical” fragments called Points which are written in green ink; and “horizontal” fragments called Blocs, which are indicated in red ink. (Although a small sub-section named Mélanges reverses these color assignments.) After playing a fragment, arrows in the score prompt the performer to go to one of four possible next fragments, and so on through the piece. As if this weren’t enough, the reverse side of the sheets contain Constellation-miroir, which may played as a substitute for Constellation.
Both formants make unusual demands on the performer apart from the need to make choices regarding organization and rhythm. As the pianist Steffan Schleiermacher points out, the performer must also employ various resonance effects, including near-virtuoso “legwork” on the pedal and the use of piano harmonics—one key is depressed in a way that makes no sound, but causes a resonance effect when a neighboring key is firmly struck. As Schleiermacher writes in his notes to the piece, “The sounds seem to cast virtual shadows, to continue to sound in the background, while the next structure appears in the foreground.”
Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal.
—Pierre Boulez
Perception
So how does this actually sound? Oddly enough, although relentlessly atonal, Trope and Constellation are fairly gentle, if a bit prickly. Both formants are basically static, lacking any sense of motion or narrative development, and in both, silence plays an important role. The music takes the form of tiny, spiky clusters of notes, each embedded in a field of silence with varying degrees of lingering sustain or pointillist crispness connecting them to the next cluster. Like drops of icy rain falling sporadically into a clear pool of silence, the music evades any sense of dramatic continuity, forcing the listener to focus on each isolated event rather than its overall relation to the whole. Although each cluster has its own microcosmic sense of dramatic unity, the sequence of clusters is without any perceivable structure or theme. Indeed, a casual listener remains blissfully unaware of the underlying mechanisms needed to generate the music, and I must confess, that having heard several permutations of the score, I could not readily tell that I was listening to different versions. Like Finnegans Wake, the overall piece retains its core identity no matter where you dip in for a sampling.
Choice, Chance, and Chaos
Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata was not without its share of controversy. Although Boulez readily credits Mallarmé’s “Le Coup de dés” as an influence, the piece bears even more similarities to Mallarmé’s notes on his unrealized project Livre, in which the poet describes a book with interchangeable pages that may be read in any order. Mallarmé indicates that such a work could be read by various “operators” to different audiences, all of which would generate unique experiences and interpretations. Moreover, Mallarmé used terms like “Constellations” to describe the indeterminate aspects of his idealized open work. Boulez, however, maintains that he developed his ideas independently of Livre, and that he only became aware of its existence after he had composed the majority of his sonata.
The piece also contributed to the growing antipathy between Pierre Boulez and John Cage after their falling out. In 1957 Boulez published an essay called “Aléa” (meaning a single die) in which he detailed his ideas on “controlled chance,” or limited indeterminacy; a compositional technique that would open a work to indeterminacy while still preserving creative control. In this essay he attacked pure chance operations, and rather arrogantly implied that those who pursued such a course were foolish and incompetent. The attack was obviously directed at Cage, who became quite angry with Boulez, once a friend and creative associate. Cage remarked, “After having repeatedly claimed that one could not do what I set out to do, Boulez discovered the Mallarmé Livre…. With me the principle had to be rejected outright, with Mallarmé it suddenly became acceptable to him. Now Boulez was promoting chance, only it had to be his kind of chance.” Cage’s anger was compounded by the popularity of the essay, which firmly established Boulez’s term “aleatory music” as the label for the type of music that Cage had practically invented.
The work is also controversial in the broader context of Modernist music, specifically as realized by Boulez in his three piano sonatas, which are often criticized as being too academic or even “unlistenable.” Many critics have remarked upon the apparent disconnect between the underlying theory and the music itself. While the process behind the Third Piano Sonata is ingenious, and the sheet music has a visual appeal that cannot be denied, many listeners find the music unpleasant, lacking the elegance and artistry of the printed score. As composer and critic Peggy Glanville-Hicks of the New York Herald Tribune wrote about the Second Piano Sonata, “The Boulez Sonata—to this reviewer—is chaos, organized, stabilized chaos….To the eye and intellect, the printed page of Boulez presents logic and design, but to the ear, its true arbiter, these are not apparent.”
While Glanville-Hicks makes a valid point, she ironically underlines the appeal of Boulez for some listeners: “organized, stabilized chaos.” Not everyone’s ear conducts the same arbitration, and Boulez is the perfect example of the humorous caveat, “You’ll like it if you’re the type who likes that sort of thing.” When played with sensitivity and conviction, Boulez’s piano sonatas reveal a sparkling world of abstract beauty and turbulent passion. Whether or not one finds them to one’s taste, they’re important works of twentieth-century music, and should not be overlooked.
Excerpts from To Boulez and Beyond, by Joan Peyser
From To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe Since the Rite of Spring, by Joan Peyser. Billboard Books, 1999. Thanks to Peyser for some of the material incorporated into my essay above.
In the fall of 1943, when Boulez first arrived from Provence, he moved into a tiny apartment on rue Beautreillis, near the historic Place des Vosges. In his cluttered, tiny rooms he kept his manuscripts rolled up like papyrus on the floor. In addition to the manuscripts there was a narrow bed, a small desk, an electric heater, and several African masks. Reproductions of Paul Klee were on the walls; the works of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and James Joyce were on the shelves. (Chapter 19)
Perhaps to resist the increasing popularization and, on occasion, the vulgarization of art which had flourished under neoclassicism and socialist realism and had been encouraged by radio and films, perhaps to restore a more intellectually aristocratic elite, many artists—both in Europe and the United States—began to build on the refined, inaccessible language that had roots earlier in the century. This is not to say that it was the intent of Schoenberg, Kandinsky, or Pound to be as hermetic as they were; it is rather to point out that inaccessibility was certainly a consequence of what each of them did. But those artists who came of age after World War II elevated this secondary consequence to a primary purpose. For Boulez, James Joyce was a critical symbol. He had read Ulysses in French, and an exhibit in 1949 at Le Hune bookshop in Paris increased his excitement about Joyce’s work. Recalling what drew him to Joyce, Boulez cites the “specificity of technique for each chapter, the fact that technique and story were one. The technique reflected exactly what Joyce meant; it was rich and I had never met it before in a book.”
But it was Finnegans Wake that overwhelmed the group. In a letter to Cage written in December 1949, a young French poet wrote:
The advent of Finnegans Wake at Pierre’s has not yet finished provoking many arguments and discussions. There were several stormy sessions on Rue Beatreillis where the tone of things reached such a high pitch that the vocabulary consisted of several forceful “merdes” which each of the participants flung at each other without any mental reservation concerning the parsimony of the words used.
If by now the heated arguments have abated somewhat, discussions are still frequent on the subject. I must admit, to be completely objective, that after experiencing Joyce in a very serious way my admiration for Faulkner has vanished.
It is possible that technique alone did not draw Boulez to Joyce for the similarities between the two artists transcended technique. Both Boulez and Joyce were raised devout Catholics; both became disenchanted when they were still young. Both were clearly in search of a father, a search that dominated both men’s lives. (Leopold Bloom was to Stephen Dedalus what Barrault, Souvchinsky, and Strobel were to Boulez.) Both moved towards revolution in the political arena but neither liked manifestos when drawn up by others. Art alone was the route for Joyce and Boulez. It gave them the stature and dignity they sought. Able to renounce the dogma they had been taught, each cast his own revolution in most dogmatic of aesthetic terms. Thus Boulez built Structures on a medieval-like musical language with its secrets hidden from the public at large. Like Finnegans Wake, which inspired numerous “skeleton keys” and “guides,” Structures inspired musical analyses. That the traditional value of beauty played virtually no role in Boulez’s conception is revealed by a passage Boulez wrote to Cage on the eve of his trip to New York: “Soon Monroe Street will see us and hear us. Tell [the pianist] David Tudor, whom I am very eager to know, that he should get some aspirin ready—I am doing as much myself—for Structures is not easy to listen to. But since he has worked on your Music for Changes [here Boulez makes a diagram excerpting CAGE from CHANGES] I would say he is properly prepared.” (Chapter 24)
Excerpts from ‘Sonata, que me veux-tu’ by Pierre Boulez
Originally published in Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik, Vol. III, 1960, pp.27-50. Excerpted from Boulez’s collection of essays, Orientations (Harvard University Press, 1986.)
Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent ‘discovering’ rather like the state of ‘permanent revolution’. […]
What impelled me to write this Third Piano Sonata? It may well be that literary affiliations played a more important part than purely musical considerations. In fact my present mode of thought derives from my reflections on literature rather than on music. Not that I had any wish to write music with a literary reference, for in that case the literary influence would have been very superficial. No, the fact is that I believe that some writers at the present time have gone much further than composers in the organization, the actual mental structure, of their works.
I must at once disclaim any idea of embarking on a literary dissertation, something for which I have no qualifications. I simply want to say something about the two writers who have the most stimulated my thinking and thus most profoundly influenced me, namely Joyce and Mallarmé. A close examination of the structure of Joyce’s two great novels [Ulysses and Finnegans Wake] will reveal the astonishing degree to which the novel has been revolutionized. The novel observes itself qua novel, as it were, reflects on itself and is aware that it is a novel—hence the logic and coherence of the writer’s prodigious technique, perpetually on the alert and generating universes that themselves expand. In the same way music, as I see it, is not exclusively concerned with ‘expression’, but must also be aware of itself and become the object of its own reflection. For me this is one of the primary essentials of the language of poetry, and has been since Mallarmé, with whom poetry became on object in itself, justified in the first place by poetic research, in the true sense.
In music the difficulty of taking this step is a matter of style. Music has no ‘meaning’: it does not make use of sounds which hover ambiguously, as words do, between objective sense and reflective significance. In principle both poet and novelist express themselves by means of words taken from the current vocabulary, and can make use of the ambiguity arising from the fact that a word can both denote a utilitarian object and also serve as a cipher of reflective thought. A large part of Joyce’s world is constructed from the conscious and rational application of ‘stylistic exercises’ of this kind. Everyone will remember Stephen’s excursus on Hamlet in chapter 4 of Ulysses and that astonishing chapter 14, where the growth of a foetus in the womb is suggested by a series of pastiches in which the evolution of the English language is traced from Chaucer to the present day.
Words can be used in this way because they possess a power of reference, a ‘meaning’. With music the problem is different and, as we shall see, it presents itself in a different guise: here the only ‘play’ possible is an interplay between styles and forms…. It must be our concern in the future to follow the examples of Joyce and Mallarmé and to jettison the concept of a work as a simple journey starting with a departure and ending with an arrival. We are assured by Euclidean geometry that a straight line is the shortest way from one point to another, which is roughly the definition for a closed cycle. In this perspective a work is one, a single object of contemplation or delectation, which the listener finds in front of him and in relation to which he takes up his position. Such a work follows a single course, which can be reproduced identically and is unavoidably linked to such considerations as the speed at which it unfolds and the immediacy of its effectiveness. Finally, Western classical music is opposed to all active participation, and this sometimes makes it difficult to establish any really significant contact, even if actual boredom does not intervene between the musical object and the listener contemplating it. […]
As against this classical procedure the idea of a maze seems to me the most important recent innovation in the creative sphere. I can already hear the malicious retort that I shall inevitably receive—that quite a number of Ariadne’s clue-threads may well be needed to make any progress in such a maze possible, and that not everyone feels the call to become a Theseus. Don’t let this worry us! The modern conception of the maze in a work of art is certainly one of the most considerable advances in Western thought, and is one upon which it is impossible to go back…. As I see it, the idea of a labyrinth, or maze, in a work of art is roughly comparable to Kafka’s procedure in his short story ‘The Burrow’. The artist creates his own maze; he may even settle in an already existing maze since any construction he inhabits he cannot help but mould to himself. He builds it in exactly the same way as a subterranean animal builds the burrow so well described by Kafka, continually moving his supplies for the sake of secrecy and changing the network of passages to confuse the outsider. Similarly the work must keep a certain number of passageways open by means of precise dispositions in which chance represents the ‘points’, which can be switched at the last moment. It has already been brought to my notice that this idea of ‘points’ does not really belong to the category of pure chance but rather to that of indeterminate choice, which is something quite different. In any construction containing as many ramifications as a modern work of art total indeterminacy is not possible, since it contradicts—to the point of absurdity—the very idea of mental organization and of style. Given these facts, the very physical appearance of the work will be changed; and once the musical conception has been revolutionized, the actual physical presentation of the score must inevitably be altered.
Here again I should like to refer to my own personal experience. Reading and rereading Mallarmé’s ‘Le Coup de dés’, I was greatly struck by its appearance on the page, its actual typological presentation, and came to realize that this formed an essential part of the new form: the typographical material had to undergo a metamorphosis for Mallarmé. The actual printing of ‘Le Coup de dés’ is of fundamental and primary importance, not only as regards pagination—the spatial disposition of the text with its blanks—but also the typographical character. […]
Such formal, visual, physical—and indeed decorative presentation of a poem (though the poet does not include this)—suggested to me the idea of finding equivalents in music. […]
My sonata, with the five formants that it comprises, may be called a kind of ‘work in progress’, to echo Joyce. I find the concept of works as independent fragments increasingly alien, and I have a marked preference for large structural groups centered on a cluster of determinate possibilities (Joyce’s influence again). The five formants clearly permit the genesis of other distinct entities, complete in themselves but structurally connected with the original formants: these entities I call développants. Such a ‘book’ would thus constitute a maze, a spiral in time. […]
One final word. Form is becoming autonomous and tending towards an absolute character hitherto unknown; purely personal accident is now rejected as intrusion. The great works of which I have been speaking—those of Mallarmé and Joyce—are the data for a new age in which texts are becoming, as it were, ‘anonymous’, ‘speaking for themselves without any author’s voice’. If I had to name the motive underlying the work that I have been trying to describe, it would be the search for an ‘anonymity’ of this kind.
—Pierre Boulez, 1960. Translation by David Noakes and Paul Jacobs.
Liner Notes from the 1993 Music & Arts CD
Liner notes written by pianist Jeffrey Swann:
The Troisième Sonate pour Piano of Pierre Boulez is one of history’s most celebrated incomplete works. Indeed, it is practically unique in that the composer himself retired considerable portions of the work after its initial appearance in 1958 “for revision”—and 35 years later has still not reinstated them. It is probably safe to say that the two movements—or formants as Boulez calls them—that we now have represent the definitive form of the work. It is nevertheless worth while to give the initial conception which is as follows:
A. Antiphonie
B. Trope
C. Constellation or Constellation-miroir
D. Strophe
E. Séquence
From what remains of the original form, we can see that Antiphonie and Séquence were very brief, whereas Strophe was approximately of the size of Trope; the two formants we have, therefore, represent by far the greater part of the work. The second part of the title Constellation, Constellation-miroir, refers to the fact that this formant may be played in reverse order—i.e., in a mirror image—if Trope is to follow it instead of preceding it.
The Troisième Sonate is a remarkable mid-20th-century expression of a peculiarly French sound universe. One feels everywhere not so much the influence but the shadow of Debussy and Messiaen in its bright colors and splashy effects. Nevertheless the salient quality of the Troisième Sonate is its aleatoric aspect—that at least in theory each performance should be quite different in content, and that the performer should have the power to make significant compositional decisions, ideally spontaneously. In 1958 this seemed to represent a total change in direction of Boulez’ compositional style. It was an attempt to express the aesthetic of the open work; the conception of a work which is not exhausted in any given performance but which constantly redefines itself within precise parameters given by the composer, the concept of the “work in progress.” The expression “work in progress” links the Troisième Sonate to James Joyce’s original title for Finnegans Wake. This connection and similar connections to other literary works, especially Mallarmé, is particularly important, especially in Boulez own explanation of the work’s aesthetic.
It must be said that from the historical reference of 1993, the highly pretentious and complex terminology and defining aesthetic dialectic in which Boulez and his commentators luxuriated seems as arcane and indeed of as distant a past as early 18th-century writing about the Colors and Temperaments of music—or even a treatise by Boetheus in the early Middle Ages. From our standpoint, the introduction of chance elements seems more a response to the influence of John Cage and other American innovators of the early 50s, as well as a necessary and highly salubrious reaction to the totally organized music of the Darmstadt School, the climax of which is manifested in Boulez Structures, especially the Second Book. The chance elements here are far less pervasive than in Cage but nevertheless give the present work a fluidity and spontaneity which is a new and endearing quality of this work as well as works such as the Mallarmé Live and Domaine.
The very idea of recording a piece which should be compositionally different in each performance is, of course, contradictory. I have attempted to mitigate this contradiction by giving two versions of each formant. Neither of these should be seen as definitive in any way, but rather representational of the work’s kaleidoscopic possibilities.
The organization of Trope is relatively simple. The formant consists of four sections, Texte, Parenthèse, Commentaire, and Glose. These may be played in various orders (actually there are eight possible sequences). The dramatic effect of the formant var- is radically according to the order chosen—the order usually performed, Texte, Parenthèse, Glose, Commentaire, proceeds from simplicity to ever-growing complexity and brilliance and concludes emphatically. This is the order I have chosen for one of my performances. Other orders, however, offer quite different and fascinating perspectives, as my alternative solution: Commentaire, Glose, Texte, Parenthèse, shows.
Other than the sequence of sections, the aleatoric aspect of Trope is represented in passages in the sections Parenthèse and Commentaire, which are written in smaller notation and whose performance is optional. If performed, these passages are to be played in a markedly freer style than the others. I might add that this is extremely difficult to portray in performance, since the rhythmic complexity of the work as a whole makes rubato a problematic concept in practice. Nevertheless the inclusion or omission of various passages greatly alters the dramatic quality of the sections involved.
The third formant, Constellation or Constellation-miroir, is much more complex in its aleatoric possibilities. In this formant the performer is given a large number of short fragments varying in length from one or two to perhaps as many as 30 seconds. Each fragment is preceded and followed by a series of arrows in myriad and highly mysterious forms whose purpose is to indicate from which fragments it is possible to arrive at the present one and to which fragments it is possible to go. Only the initial fragment, which lacks preceding arrows, and the concluding one, which lacks following arrows, differ. One must play all fragments in any given performance and no fragment may be repeated. This limitation severely restricts the possibilities of fragment order. Nevertheless there must be many thousands of potential performance possibilities. In addition, other characteristics, such as dynamics and tempo, vary according to the route by which one has arrived at a given fragment.
The fragments themselves are printed in either red or green and belong to compositional groups entitled Blocs or Points. The formant opens (or closes in its Miroir version) with a short section entitled Mélange in which Blocs and Points are intermingled. The Blocs and Points sections have quite noticeably different textures and moods. The Points are distinctly polyphonic and linear and greatly exploit a peculiar technique by which the pianist creates a shifting kaleidoscope of overtones by pressing down and releasing individual notes and chords without letting them sound. In many places this technique represents the most difficult aspect of the work to realize, especially on pianos without a lot of resonance. The Blocs sections are much more chordal and utilize dense blocks of notes which are held down over extended passages without being played, creating a distinctly “blurry” sound effect.
Given the complexity of this formant, it is obviously a great temptation for the performer to decide in advance which route he will take. Indeed, the danger of finding oneself in a “dead end” from which one is forced either to skip a passage or repeat one is so great that a certain amount of preplanning is probably essential. Nevertheless it is important to retain the spontaneous quality of the work. As can be seen from the two performances on this disc, the possibilities for variety are enormous. I myself arbitrarily decided in the first performance to take those paths which seemed to offer the greatest possibilities for continuity, both dramatic and sonorous, while in the second performance to take those which offered the greatest possibilities for abrupt contrast.
Liner Notes from the Naxos CD
Liner notes written by Dominique Druhen:
Written between 1957 and 1958, the Third Sonata is a work that has given rise to a number of commentaries. Its plan has been described by the composer himself in a famous theoretical article. As the ambition of Pierre Boulez was to take into consideration the researches of certain writers in form—principally the idea of the Livre formulated by Mallarmé in 1885—a great many commentators have gone one better than the literary tenor of the plan, interesting in itself but bearing little relevance to the listener.
The Third Sonata of Pierre Boulez was conceived at a time when composers were questioning the idea of the freedom of the interpreter, after a historical phase, called post-serial, which had laid down, even in its smallest details, the different parameters of musical interpretation. The Third Sonata reacts against the tyranny of the composer and opens certain doors, but, happily it can be said, closes others.
The freedom that is given to the interpreter in this work concerns the order of movements and the internal arrangement of dialogue within each of the movements. That is all. This freedom is not audible to the listener, to whom, in general, two different and successive interpretations are not offered. The opening of the work—reacting against the tradition of a fixed order that affects the idea itself of the score—is found again strangely in the fact that the Third Sonata, which is always described as in five movements (or formative elements) by the composer and his commentators, has in fact only two published movements—Trope and Constellation (or Constellation-miroir). The others exist, but are to be revised. The work is therefore always open, in the sense that it is always still in process of composition.
The opening is reduced, if one follows what is published. Theoretically there are eight possibilities of reading the order of the formative elements. Since the published score consists simply of two elements, the choices are reduced to two: Trope can be played before Constellation or after Constellation-miroir, which is the double reflection of Constellation, when the order of reading is reversed.
Musically Constellation (or Constellation-miroir) is a passage marked with arrows that connects the Points sections (figured in green) and the Blocs sections (figured in red). This unlinear passage which makes the score a real navigation map nevertheless excludes primary simplifications: Blocs and Points are to be understood as tendencies respectively towards vertical chords and to horizontal lines and are susceptible to mixture between the two.
Trope offers another kind of beginning. The score is a spirally bound book that can be opened wherever one likes but must be played to the end wherever one starts and whatever the direction chosen. In the two formulative elements the musical material is more rarefied than in the second sonata. The discourse proceeds always in bursts of sound but the composer has preferred sustained notes, resonances, in short, introspection.
Recordings
Compact Disc
Fortunately, there are numerous recordings of the Third Piano Sonata. They are listed below in chronological order of performance/release. While the 1993 Swann CD remains my first choice, either Chen or Biret makes a fine alternative!
Boulez: Trois Sonates pour Piano
Piano: Claude Helffer
LP: Naive Astree, 1970
CD: Disques Montaigne, 2006
The original release of the Third Piano Sonata was Guilde Internationale du Disque SMS 2590, 1970, with Claude Helffer on piano. This CD collects that version, along with Helffer playing the First and Second sonatas.
Charles Wuorinen: Second Sonata; Pierre Boulez: Troisième Sonate pour Piano; 2 Versions
Piano: Jeffrey Swann
CD: Music & Arts Program, 1993
This disc contains two versions of Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata, along with a recording of Charles Wuorinen’s wonderful Second Piano Sonata. Swann’s playing throughout the disc is superb, sensitive to nuance and attentive to the changing dynamics of each piece. He offers two different versions of the Third Piano Sonata, varying the order of Trope and taking different paths through Constellation-miroir. Swann’s liner notes are also the most informative of the bunch, and it’s obvious his commitment to the work is total. Highly recommended!
Boulez: Piano Sonatas No. 1-3
Piano: Idil Biret
CD: Naxos, 1995
Biret’s exquisite playing is subtle and expressive, and the disc includes all three of Boulez’s ground-breaking sonatas. Biret plays Trope in the order: Glose, Texte, Parenthèse, Commentaire, followed by Constellation-miroir.
Piano Music of the Darmstadt School, Vol. 1
Piano: Steffan Schleiermacher
CD: DG Scene, 2000
Schleiermacher attacks the work with great precision, outlining harder edges than Biret and Chen but lacking their expressionism. Schleiermacher plays Trope in the order of: Glose, Commentaire, Texte, Parenthèse, followed by Constellation-miroir. The disc also contains “Sigle,” so it’s essential for a completist.
Boulez: The Three Piano Sonatas
Piano: Paavali Jumppanen
CD: DG 20/21, 2005
Another packaging of all three Boulez sonatas. Jumppanen plays Trope in the order: Parenthèse, Glose, Commentaire, Texte, followed by Constellation. Of all the recordings listed here, this is the only one that plays Constellation rather than Constellation-miroir.
Boulez: Notations & Piano Sonatas
Piano: Pi-Hsien Chen
CD: Hathut, 2011
Another excellent choice, as this disc contains all three of Boulez’s piano sonatas plus his groundbreaking Notations. Like Biret, Chen’s playing is quite expressionistic, and may even please listeners unaccustomed to atonal music!
Boulez: Complete Music for Solo Piano
Piano: Marc Ponthus
CD: Bridge, 2016
This disc contains all three piano sonatas, plus Douze Notations and Incises.
Online Video
The following excerpts and live performances are available on YouTube.
Boulez: Piano Sonata No. 3 (Trope)
Piano: Idil Biret, Posted 2011
Simply an excerpt from the Naxos CD.
Boulez: Piano Sonata No. 3 (Trope and Constellation-Miroir)
Piano: James Imam, Posted 2013
Performance for the Steinway Society of Western Pennsylvania’s recital series.
Boulez: Piano Sonata No. 3
Piano: Alfonso Gómez, Posted 2017
Concert at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, March 2017.
Boulez: Piano Sonata No. 3
Piano: Pierre Boulez, Posted 2017
And except from the Neos Darmstadt Aura Documents box set.
Boulez: “Sigle” from Piano Sonata No. 3, Formant 1, “Antiphonie”
Piano: Steffan Schleiermacher, Posted 2022
This is from the “Darmstadt” CD, and shows the score.
Additional Information
Third Piano Sonata Wikipedia Page
This informative page details all three of Boulez’s piano sonatas.
Trope Score
UE sells the score for Trope, and it’s worth peeking at the preview!
“The Concept of ‘Alea’ in Pierre Boulez’s Constellation-miroir.”
Anne Trenkamp, Music & Letters, January 1976. An informative paper on indeterminacy in the Third Piano Sonata. Sadly, it’s locked behind the JSTOR paywall.
“‘Alea’ and the Concept of the ‘Work in Progress’”
Peter O’Hagen, Pierre Boulez Studies, 20 October 2016. Another good paper, but also behind a paywall.
Pierre Boulez: Other Joyce-Related Works
Pierre Boulez Main Page
Return to the Brazen Head’s Pierre Boulez profile.
Répons (1981)
Requiring an orchestra, six soloists, a digital processor and six loudspeakers, Boulez considers this inventive work to use Joycean techniques.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 1 June 2022
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