DEDICATION:  to Margaret Saunders Ott, whose faith in me sustains me to this day.

This recital, consisting of four works scattered over nearly a century and a half and played without pause, evocatively fills in the narrative traced by its title.  We begin with a telescoped version of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes cycle, which itself follows the evolution of the simple, robust, and naive optimism of the opening two etudes through the more ephemeral hopes of “Feux Follets” ("Will-o-the-Wisp") and the frustrated raging of the f minor etude into the cold, blackened despair of "Chasse Neige".  The dying away of the final b-flat minor chord is interrupted by the harsh dissonance of the famous repeated chord which begins Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstuck IX, a meditation on entropy and disintegration.  At the end, Stockhausen's music breaks apart into ever smaller and weaker fragments.
 

From this void comes the cloud of whirling energy and satire which is Charles Ives' pianistic take on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "updated" parody of Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress".  In Hawthorne's re-telling, the pilgrimage to the Heavenly City is greatly simplified through the convenience of the then-modern steam-powered locomotive engine.  Riding in the easy comfort of the railroad car, the travelers are tempted away by the distractions of the modern world, and occasionally glimpse the old-fashioned pilgrims through the window, trudging to their goal on foot.  The noise and hoopla of the railroad disappears suddenly, and we are left with Beethoven's  stubborn,  visionary statement of the unshakable faith shared by Ives' pilgrims, now informed by a lifetime of confronting the complexities and terrors of the real world.
 

In addition to this programmatic narrative, there are strictly musical elements which bind this program together.  The repeated note motive which opens the second Liszt etude is developed all out of proportion in the first minutes of the Stockhausen, reverts to its original rhythm as the famous opening motto of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as quoted by Ives, and finds both an echo and an apotheosis just before the return of the fugue which closes the Beethoven.  It's interesting to note that Ives prefers to think of this motive, known as Beethoven's "fate" motive ("thus fate knocks at the door"), as a "human faith motive" ("the Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries, radiant in the faith that it will be opened -- and that the human will become the Divine!").  The hymn-like opening of the sonata is foreshadowed by the pilgrim's hymn in "The Celestial Railroad" (both begin with a drop of a major third  -- as does Ives' quotation of Beethoven's Fifth).  The rising fourths of Beethoven's fugue recall the superimposed fourths of Stockhausen's repeated chord.  The very end of Beethoven's f minor scherzo movement recapitulates almost exactly the brief tune which closes Liszt's f minor etude.
 
 
 

Franz Liszt:
Transcendental Etudes
 (selections)
    Preludio
    Molto vivace
    Feux follets
    Allegro agitato molto
    Chasse - neige
 

“I thought, ‘WHAT has gotten into Mozart?’” – John Cage
 
 
 
 
 

Karlheinz Stockhausen:
Klavierstuck IX
 

Klavierstuck IX is electronic music re-imagined as live music on an acoustic instrument.  Feedback and tape loops are created, echo and reverb effects explored, tones filtered, new sound complexes are synthesized (listen to how the sustained chords build and  evolve).  The trajectory is from an order which is artificial, rigid, authority imposed from above (Stockhausen was a teenager during the years of the Third Reich) to a "disorder" which is intuitive, improvisational, personal.  Robin Maconie points out in his excellent study of Stockhausen that the opening tempo "echoes the sound of marching feet."
 
 
 
 

Charles Ives:
The Celestial Railroad
 

The manuscript Ives left of “The Celestial Railroad” is a mess, with second thoughts, shorthand revisions, deletions, and borrowings, all indecipherably superimposed in Ives’ nearly illegible handwriting.  For each performer to find a unique solution to this puzzle – a personal vision, differing from any other – seems to me to be very much in the spirit of Ives’ musical philosophy.

John Cage professed a special affinity for the extremely soft bell-tones which hover like ghosts at the threshold of audibility over the hymn, and it is to his memory that this recording of those tones is dedicated.
 
 
 
 

Ludwig van Beethoven:
Sonata in A-flat, Opus 110
   Moderato cantabile, molto espressivo
   Allegro molto
   Adagio, ma non troppo –
   Fuga:  Allegro, ma non troppo
 

The second movement -- a scherzo in 2/4 -- does it start with a strong downbeat measure or is the first bar an introduction?  I opt for an unelegant, four-on-the-floor square downbeat to emphasize the crude pop music (quotations of the folk songs "Our cat has kittens" and, even better, "I'm a slob, you're a slob") which Beethoven, in a feat worthy of John Zorn, throws between the sublime ecstasies of the outer movements.

Beethoven’s fugal writing is an act of faith culminating in an outburst of joy:  his faith in his subject is redeemed when he discovers that, after turning it upside down and playing it against itself one voice at half speed and the other at triple speed, he can combine the inverted form over a version of the subject going an unbelievable six times the original tempo.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Franz Liszt:  from the Transcendental Etudes
1.  Preludio
2.  Molto vivace
3.  Feux follets
4.  Allegro agitato molto
5.  Chasse - neige

 Karlheinz Stockhausen:
6.  Klavierstuck IX

       Charles Ives:
7.  The Celestial Railroad

       Ludwig van Beethoven:  Sonata in A-flat, Opus 110
8.    Moderato cantabile, molto espressivo
9.    Allegro molto
10.  Adagio, ma non troppo –
11.  Fuga:  Allegro, ma non troppo

Stephen Drury, piano

recorded and edited by Joel Gordon
produced by Stephen Drury and Joel Gordon
Recorded in John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Harvard University
 

Special thanks to Joel Gordon, Warren Nichols, the Charles Ives collections at the Yale University Music Library, and John Zorn.