presents

STEPHEN HOUGH piano

Post-Performance Discussion
You are invited to remain in the theater immediately following the performance for an informal
discussion with the artists.

Funded in part by the Frank L. Harrington 1924 Fund No. 3, Sidney Stoneman 1933 Fund, David H. Hilton
1951 Fund No. 2 and by Hopkins Center Members.

Spaulding Auditorium’s Hamburg Steinway concert grand piano was purchased with generous gifts from
Members of the Hopkins Center and Members of the Hood Museum of Art; the class of 1942, in memory of
Allan Dingwall ’42; and anonymous donors.

Saturday, January 23, 2016 • 8 pm

Spaulding Auditorium • Dartmouth College
PROGRAM
Sonata in A minor, D. 784 Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Prelude Choral and Fugue César Franck (1822-1890)

• INTERMISSION •

Sonata No. 3 (Trinity) Stephen Hough (b. 1961)

Valse Oubliées Nos. 1 and 2 Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Transcendental Etudes Nos. 11 (Harmonies du soir) and 10 Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

PROGRAM NOTES
Sonata in A minor, D. 784
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Composed in 1823. Schubert’s health nearly
collapsed for good early in 1823. He was suffering
from anemia, fever, headaches, an ugly rash and a
nervous disorder as the result of syphilis and its
treatment (mercury in the early 19th century!—
his hair fell out and he had to wear a wig for
almost a year until it grew back), and his symptoms
became so acute that he was admitted to the
Vienna General Hospital in May. Schubert was
also constantly broke, living largely on the
generosity of his devoted companions, with only
an occasional pittance from some performance or
publication. He poured out his troubles in a letter
to Leopold Kupelweiser, a close friend recently
moved to Rome: “In a word, I feel myself to be
the most unhappy and wretched creature in the
world. Imagine a man whose health will never be
right again, and whose sheer despair over this
makes things constantly worse instead of better;
imagine a man whose most brilliant hopes have
perished, to whom the felicity of love and
friendship have nothing to offer but pain; whom
enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating kind) for all
things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask
you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?”
Schubert then quoted some forlorn lines from
Goethe’s poem Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen
at the Spinning Wheel), which he had set in 1814:
“‘My peace is gone, my heart is sore, I shall find it
never, nevermore’ [are words that] I may well sing
every day now, for each night on retiring to bed, I
hope I may not wake again, and each morning but
recalls yesterday’s grief.” Such anguish, however,
did not seem to thwart Schubert’s creative muse—
the “Unfinished” Symphony and the “Wanderer”
Fantasy were composed during the last three
months of 1822; the song cycle Die Schöne
Müllerin, many dances for piano and three
theatrical ventures (the Singspiel The Conspirators,
the incidental music to Rosamunde, and the
three-act opera Fierrabras) were all completed
before the end of 1823, as was the work in which
he seems to have vented most fully his torment:
the Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 784.
The A minor sonata of 1823 was composed
quickly in February, when Schubert’s health was in
a miserable state, and bears the quality of a
painful confessional—it is one of his bleakest and
most somber creations. The sonata’s mood is
established immediately at the outset by the main
theme, a string of enervated, hollow-interval,
PROGRAM NOTES CONTINUED
short-winded phrases given in barren octaves
comforted only by the leanest harmonies. Violent
outbursts in the transition try to rouse the music
from its lethargy, and the second theme, with its
brighter tonality, simple texture and hymnal
character, seems to hint of renewal, but it soon
breaks into pieces and shouted protests. The
exposition ends with sighs and silences, a grim
look into the void. The development section
makes much use of a powerful dotted-rhythm
figure from the transition, first in angry
transformations and then as an obbligato to a
ghost of the hymnal second theme, but this too
vanishes into silence. The recapitulation follows
closely the events of the exposition, the themes
restated with just enough additional urgency to
heighten their pathos. Two further outbursts, and
two relapses, are heard in the coda before the
movement expires with a stabbing note in hollow
octaves and the wan, hopeless half-smile of an A
major chord, pitched low on the keyboard.
The Andante is music of unsettled, and unsettling,
character, rather like a troubling dream that plays
in the mind at the moment of waking. A quiet,
smooth, arching strain, perhaps a glimpse of
some peaceable kingdom, appears at the outset,
but a viper slithers from the shadows in the form
of a twisting, chromatic motive. Pounding triplet
figures are invoked to exorcise the vision, but fail,
and the twisting motive insinuates itself again
with such effect as to take over the music
completely. Only a fading memory of the
peaceable strain of the opening is left to finish the
movement.
The finale, restless and feverish, offers little
comfort. Frenzied passages reminiscent of the old
Italian tarantella, the furious dance whose
exertions were said to rid the body of the poison
of the tarantula spider’s deadly bite, lead to
violent climaxes which are suddenly broken off,
as though gasping for breath. Lyrical moments
provide respite, but they are always overwhelmed
by the frenzied music. The Sonata ends with
flying, demonic scales and four hammered chords.
Dr. Richard E. Rodda, 2015
Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Op. 21
César Franck (1822-1890)
Composed in 1884. César Franck, the serious and
self-effacing artist who came to be venerated as
France’s greatest church musician, started his
career in the hurly-burly realm of the touring
virtuoso. His father, Nicholas-Joseph, divined the
boy’s talent early, and entered him in the Royal
Conservatory in the family’s hometown of Liège,
Belgium, with the hope of spawning a child
prodigy who would secure fame and fortune.
César blazed though his studies and won a first
prize in singing when he was nine and another
one for piano at age twelve. That same year,
Nicholas-Joseph, who forced his son to practice
incessantly and to compose some morceaux for
his recitals, showed off his budding virtuoso on a
tour around the country, including a performance
in Brussels in the presence of Leopold I, King of
the Belgians. Father Franck soon determined that
his son’s quickly burgeoning skills could not be
sufficiently nurtured in provincial Liège, and he
moved his entire clan to Paris in 1835 so that the
lad could be enrolled at the Conservatoire. César
gave his first recital in the city on November 17th.
Much to Nicholas-Joseph’s chagrin, the event
garnered little public notice and it was not until
Franck appeared again, in February 1837, that he
received formal press reviews. Though his father
cajoled him for the next decade to pursue his
concert career, Franck came to realize that he was
fit neither constitutionally nor musically to follow
such a course, and soon after his marriage to a
soubrette from the Comédie Française in 1848,
he simply abandoned chez Papa when the rest of
the family was out for walk one afternoon. He
never gave another thought to the rigorous life of
the traveling virtuoso.
PROGRAM NOTES CONTINUED
After his distasteful experience with the piano as
a youth, it is hardly surprising that Franck did not
compose again for the instrument until 1884,
when he wrote the cyclical triptych Prelude,
Chorale and Fugue; three years later, he created a
sequel for it with the Prelude, Aria and Finale.
While its title indicates its indebtedness to the
keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach, the
Prelude, Chorale and Fugue is very much music of
Late Romantic provenance, rich in harmony,
powerful in expression and masterful in formal
integration. The Prelude, filled, like its Baroque
namesake, with sweeping figurations and
improvisatory-sounding passages, is at once
religiously mystical and viscerally emotional, the
meeting of sacred and profane that Franck
mediates in his finest music. The Chorale, with its
somber melody and its downward striding bass
line, touches the essence of tragedy. An
anticipatory passage leads to the Fugue, which
begins in the expected manner but evolves into a
free contrapuntal fantasy on its thematic
components (as do many of Bach’s fugues). The
majestic formal cycle of the work is closed when
the figurations of the Prelude and the striding
Chorale melody are threaded through the
counterpoint of the closing pages.
Dr. Richard E. Rodda, 2015
Sonata No. 3 (Trinity) flourish is a reminder of the loop music (and
Stephen Hough (b. 1961)
Writing a piece today using a twelve-note row
seems almost like stepping back into a period
drama—a bygone age with very different
fashions. But serialism is a technique, with rules
to be learned, used or, if desired, rejected. In this
piece it is also a symbol of dogma, rules which
can liberate or enslave. The sonata (my third, in
three sections, with a row using connecting
major and minor thirds) is all about threes; and
as it was commissioned by The Tablet, a
Catholic magazine, I decided to include a
religious subtitle: Trinitas, Latin for Trinity,
another dogma, a theological ordering with
numbers.
Twelve-note pieces are made to be analyzed;
strictly speaking every bar can be picked apart;.
Suffice to say that the row used here has many
tonal implications, not least each time the G
major of notes ten, eleven and twelve resolve to
the C major of notes one and two, a constantly
reoccurring perfect cadence. In the first two sec-
tions the row is used in a strict, traditional man-
ner but halfway through the piece the music
lands on a screeching C major chord at the top of
the piano and from here onwards, the start of the
third section, it begins a more eclectic journey.
Firstly the row is used as the harmonic founda-
tion for a chaconne, then it is splintered into
hammering, repetitive loops in G sharp minor,
then it underpins with a discordant shadow a
familiar hymn tune (Nicea, a setting of the
Trinitarian text “Holy, Holy, Holy”), then it
disrupts the flow with a recurring, passionate
mantra. Finally, on the last page, it appears
vertically as a series of twelve six-part chords,
played as short and as soft as possible, each
chord leaving one note hanging in the air and
forming a new twelve-note row in the closing
seconds of the piece. A G sharp minor arpeggio
happens to introduce yet another new row) as
the music descends to rest on the same C and E
chord with which the piece began.
Stephen Hough
Two Valses Oubliées (“Forgotten Waltzes”)
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
In the early 1860s, after four decades of the most
flamboyantly sensational career ever granted to a
musician, Franz Liszt sought a more contemplative
life. Though he was still acclaimed as a peerless
pianist, excellent conductor and influential figure
in European musical life, Liszt experienced some
PROGRAM NOTES CONTINUED
serious reverses in the years surrounding his
fiftieth birthday, in 1861: he resigned his post as
music director at Weimar because of opposition
to his artistic policies as well as the growing
local animosity toward his long-time, and still
unwed, relationship with Princess Carolyne
Sayn-Wittgenstein; his recent orchestral
compositions were receiving scant attention;
Brahms, Joachim and other leading musicians
published a manifesto attacking the alleged
excesses of his music as well as those of Wagner
and other “New German” composers; his son
Daniel died in 1859, his daughter Blandine in
1862. In 1860, Liszt made out his last will and
testament, and the next year he went with the
Princess to Rome, where they hoped she would
be granted a divorce by Pope Pius IX so that they
could marry on the composer’s fiftieth birthday,
October 22nd. Their petition was denied,
however, and they never spoke of marriage again,
even after her husband died in 1864. Liszt spent
much of 1863 cloistered in the monastery of the
Madonna del Rosario at Monte Mario receiving
the religious instruction that led to him being
granted “minor orders,” which allowed him to
perform a few small priestly duties but not to
officiate at Mass or to hear confession.
The change in Liszt’s attitude toward his life was
paralleled by a reconsideration of his musical
speech, and numerous piano works from his last
years are marked by sobriety, austerity and
introspection. The Valses Oubliées (“Forgotten
Waltzes”), composed in 1881 (No. 1), 1883 (Nos.
2 and 3) and 1884 (No. 4), filter the most joyous
and carefree genre of the 19th century—the
Viennese waltz—through the prism of Liszt’s
septuagenarian worldview. Rather than the
irresistible, floating delight of the music of the
Strausses, Liszt’s late waltzes are filled with
uncertainty, often halting and able to establish
sustained rhythmic motion only with repeated
effort, ranging in mood from uneasy nostalgia to
near-frenzy or even diabolism. There are still
episodes of typically Lisztian virtuosity here, but
these frequently have to be wrested from
fragmented phrases whose energy seems almost
played out. Each of the Valses ends quietly,
questioningly: only No. 2 reaches an affirmative
harmonic close—the last one simply stops on an
unresolved chord. The Valses Oubliées could not
have been written by a young composer. They are
the end-of-life thoughts of the man who was
arguably the most brilliant and accomplished
musician of his generation, but they also reflect
the very real concerns of anyone who lives into
old age, almost seeming to reflect again on the
poem by Lamartine that Liszt had associated with
his tone poem Les Préludes three decades before
—“What is life but a series of preludes to that
unknown hymn, the first and solemn note of which
is intoned by Death?”
Dr. Richard E. Rodda, 2015
Two Transcendental Etudes
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Composed in 1837-1838; revised in 1851. In 1826,
when, at the age of fifteen, Liszt was being
displayed in Paris as a child prodigy by his father,
he composed a set of Twelve Etudes. The pieces
were published in Marseilles as his Op. 1 the
following year with a dedication to Mlle. Lydie
Garella, then one of his most favored piano duet
partners. Five years later, in Paris in 1831, Liszt
heard Paganini play for the first time and he spent
the next several years trying to find keyboard
equivalents for the dazzling feats that the
legendary violinist accomplished on his
instrument. To that end, Liszt undertook a
thorough transformation of his old Op. 1 Etudes
in 1837, and produced one of the most awesome
documents of instrumental virtuosity of the
Romantic century—the Twelve Transcendental
Etudes.
Liszt’s Op. 1 Etudes found their principal influences
PROGRAM NOTES CONTINUED
in the finger-exercising teaching pieces of his
teacher Carl Czerny and the lyrical effusions of
fashionable Italian opera. (Liszt’s dozens of
arrangements, paraphrases, fantasias and
reminiscences on operatic themes were among
the most popular numbers on his recitals.) He had
originally intended to produce a cycle of 48
numbers which, like the two books of Bach’s Well-
Tempered Clavier, would include two pieces in
each of the major and minor keys (C major, A
minor; F major, D minor; B-flat major, G minor,
etc.), but he completed only twelve movements,
giving them no titles except for their tempo
markings. He took up the Etudes again in 1837,
by which time his affair with the Countess Marie
d’Agoult, wife of the equerry to the Dauphin of
France, had progressed to the point of the
imminent birth of their second child, an event that
they chose to await among the Italian lakes—
Cosima, later the wife of both Hans von Bülow
and Richard Wagner, was born at Bellagio on Lake
Como on Christmas Eve. In addition to the
inspiration provided by the enrichment of his
family life and the spectacular northern Italian
scenery, Liszt may also have returned to the genre
of the Etude out of a certain sense of professional
pride and one-upmanship, since Frédéric Chopin
had issued his Op. 25 Etudes earlier that year with
a dedication to none other than Countess
d’Agoult. Liszt retained the thematic materials
and key structures of his earlier pieces (he added
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Stephen Hough piano is regarded as a
renaissance man of his time. Over the course of
his career he has distinguished himself as a true
polymath, not only securing a reputation as a
uniquely insightful concert pianist but also as a
writer and composer. Hough is commended for
his mastery of the instrument along with an
individual and inquisitive mind which has earned
a title to only one—Mazeppa, associated with
Victor Hugo’s swashbuckling poem about the
16th-century Polish hero), but created in his
Études d’Exécution Transcendante piano works of
almost symphonic breadth whose difficulty of
performance led Robert Schumann to call them
“Sturm- und Graus-Etuden [‘Studies of Storm and
Dread’], suitable for perhaps only ten or twelve
players in the whole world.” Hector Berlioz
believed that “no one else in the world could
flatter himself that he could approach being able
to perform them.” Liszt returned yet again to the
Transcendental Etudes, in 1851, when he
alleviated some of their technical difficulties,
tightened their formal structures, and added
poetic titles to all but two of them. (Both the 1837
and 1851 versions were dedicated to Czerny.)
Even in this “simplified” final form, the version
usually heard today in the concert hall, the
Transcendental Etudes remain among the most
imposing technical and interpretative challenges
in the piano’s realm.
The lovely Harmonies du Soir (“Evening
Harmonies”) conjures a peaceful evening scene
through which tolls the sound of distant bells. The
highly esteemed pianist-composer Ferruccio
Busoni proposed the title Appassionata for the
tempestuous unnamed Tenth Etude.
Dr. Richard E. Rodda, 2015
him a multitude of prestigious awards and a
long-standing international following.
In 2001, Hough was the first classical performing
artist to win a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
He was awarded Northwestern University’s 2008
Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano, won the Royal
Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award in
ABOUT THE ARTIST CONTINUED
2010 and in January 2014 was made a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire
by Queen Elizabeth in the New Year’s Honors
List. He has appeared with most of the major
European and American orchestras and plays
recitals regularly in major halls and concert series
around the world. His recent engagements
include recitals in Chicago, Hong Kong, London,
New York’s Lincoln Center, Paris, San Francisco
and Sydney; performances with the Czech,
London, Los Angeles and New York
Philharmonics, the Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh,
San Francisco, St. Louis, National, Montreal,
Atlanta and Toronto symphonies, and the
Cleveland, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Budapest
Festival and Russian National Orchestras; and a
performance televised worldwide with the Berlin
Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle. He is also a
regular guest at festivals such as Aldeburgh,
Aspen, Blossom, Edinburgh, Hollywood Bowl,
Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Salzburg, Tanglewood,
Verbier and the BBC Proms, where he has made
over 20 concerto appearances, including playing
all of the works written by Tchaikovsky for piano
and orchestra over the summer of 2009, a series
he later repeated with the Chicago Symphony.
Hough’s 15/16 season begins with an extensive
tour to Asia, which includes complete Beethoven
cycles in Australia and Singapore, followed by
recitals in Beijing, Taipei and Tokyo. That season
continues with return appearances with the
Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic,
and the San Francisco, Montreal, Houston,
Vancouver and New Jersey symphonies
among others in North America as well as
re-engagements with the London Philharmonic
Orchestra and the Finnish Radio Symphony
Orchestra in Europe; and recitals at New York’s
92nd Street Y, London’s Barbican Centre, and in
Quebec, Kansas City and at Dartmouth and
Northwestern University.
Many of Hough’s catalogue of over 50 albums
have garnered international prizes including the
Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Diapason d’Or,
Monde de la Musique, several Grammy
nominations, eight Gramophone Magazine
Awards including Record of the Year in 1996 and
2003, and the Gramophone Gold Disc Award in
2008, which named his complete Saint-Saens
Piano Concertos as the best recording of the
past 30 years. His 2012 recording of the
complete Chopin Waltzes received the Diapason
d’Or de l’Annee, France’s most prestigious
recording award. His 2005 live recording of the
Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos was the fastest
selling recording in Hyperion’s history, while his
1987 recording of the Hummel concertos remains
Chandos’ best-selling disc to date. Hough’s most
recent releases, all for Hyperion, include Stephen
Hough’s French Album featuring works by Fauré,
Ravel, Debussy, Poulenc and Hough’s own
arrangements of works by Massenet and
Delibes; the two Brahms Piano Concertos with
the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra under Mark
Wigglesworth; and In the Night featuring
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Schumann’s
Carnaval and his third second piano sonata
notturno luminoso, Grieg’s Lyric Pieces; and a
recording of his mass, Missa Mirabilis with the
Colorado Symphony. Hough is also the featured
artist in an iPad app about the Liszt Piano Sonata,
which includes a fully-filmed performance and
was released by the cutting-edge, award-winning
company Touch Press.
Published by Josef Weinberger, Hough has
composed works for orchestra, choir, chamber
ensemble and solo piano. His Mass of Innocence
and Experience and Missa Mirabilis were
respectively commissioned by and performed at
London’s Westminster Abbey and Westminster
Cathedral. In 2012, the Indianapolis Symphony
commissioned and performed Hough’s own
ABOUT THE ARTIST CONTINUED
orchestration of Missa Mirabilis, which was
subsequently performed by the BBC Symphony
as part of Hough’s residency with the orchestra.
Hough has also been commissioned by the
musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic, London’s
National Gallery, Wigmore Hall, Le Musée de
Louvre and Musica Viva Australia among others
and he has performed his two piano sonatas,
Sonata No. 1 (broken branches) and Sonata No.
2 (notturno luminoso) on recital programs in
London, New York, St. Paul and Chicago.
A noted writer, Hough regularly contributes
articles for The Guardian, The Times, The Tablet,
Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine and was
invited by The Telegraph in London in 2008 to
start a blog that has become one of the most
popular and influential forums for cultural
discussion. His book, The Bible as Prayer, was
published by Continuum and Paulist Press in
2007.
Hough resides in London where he is a visiting
professor at the Royal Academy of Music and
holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at
his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in
Manchester. He is also a member of the faculty
at The Juilliard School. For more information,
visit www.stephenhough.com. Stephen Hough
last performed at the Hopkins Center in 1985.

CONNECTING ARTISTS TO THE COMMUNITY

While at Dartmouth, Stephen Hough taught a piano master class, joined students in the East
Wheelock Residential Cluster for dinner and discussion, and will participate in a post-performance
discussion. For more information on Hop Outreach & Arts Education, call 603.646.2010 or visit hop.
dartmouth.edu/online/outreach.

HOPKINS CENTER DIRECTORATE

Marga Rahmann ‘78, P’12 Interim Director
Jay Cary ‘68, T’71 Business and Administrative Officer Bill Pence Director of Hopkins Center Film
Joseph Clifford Director of Audience Engagement Joshua Price Kol ‘93 Director of Student Performance Programs
Margaret Lawrence Director of Programming

HOPKINS CENTER BOARD OF OVERSEERS

Austin M. Beutner ’82, P’19
Kenneth L. Burns H’93
Barbara J. Couch
Allan H. Glick ’60, T’61, P’88, GP’19
Barry Grove ’73
Caroline Diamond Harrison ’86, P’16, P’18
Kelly Fowler Hunter ’83, T’88, P’13, P’15, P’19
Robert H. Manegold ’75, P’02, P’06
Michael A. Marriott ’84, P’18
Nini Meyer
Hans C. Morris ’80, P’11, P’14 Chair of the Board
Robert S. Weil ’40, P’73 Honorary
Jennifer A. Williams ’85
Diana L. Taylor ’77 Trustee Representative

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