This is the middle of a little essay written for Paul Nauert's Episodes and Elegies for piano.
Again, contact Paul for a link to the performance and for a copy of the score.
After the Prologue, the First Episode continues with the idea of 9ths, minor and major, still in the air. The opening bar has the right hand playing a curious twittering from E to F# and then from F to G twice, while the left hand, also in the treble, finds its way from Db to D. This augurs what will happen in the rest of Episode I: a good part of the piece happens in the middle and upper register, and contains arching figures galloping or even leaping upward (e.g. bars 4-11, 28-31, 40-43), recalling the frustrated flight of the Prologue. Keep your ears open to the heart of this fleeting episode: a soft and mysterious quasi-C minor theme is played under that curious twittering, now rocking from Gb to F above. Large and somewhat ironically grave chords marked pesante interrupt the here-and-there merriment a few times, and attempt to have the last word, but the last bar begs to differ!
The musical arches of Episode II feature runs of notes upward and downward, often culminating in capstones or keystones of 9ths or 7ths (e.g. bars 15, 16, and 26-30). And the links to the previous sections, pesante chords and a variation on Episode I’s twittering (cf. bars 41-45 and bars 1-8 of Episode I), show us that the two sections are parts of a larger story. The arching figures give way to a lonely linearity in the final bars (69-95). An Eb starts the long melody, and there seems to be a struggle among Eb, E, and C to establish the dominance of their respective minor-scale sounds. A final large, slow arch brings the movement to a close, and also forms a bridge to the First Elegy, whose opening melody in a D tonality gives the impression of a lonely Dalinian landscape, where an enigmatic figure wanders among a few strange yet recognizable objects.
Surrealism did not give rise to much music: Erik Satie, George Antheil, and early composers of musique concrète were considered candidates. But at this point in the work it is worth considering whether Paul Nauert has, intentionally or not, forged his own musical bridges into a land beyond reality. The silences, the unexpected juxtapositions of exuberance with loneliness, the long solitary notes echoing off into bleak, unknown horizons, all create a canvas worthy of Dali, Miró, or de Chirico.
Elegy I offers us this surreal nature, as it unifies major elements heard in the first 3 movements: e.g. the “D melody” contains both the yearning upward arching of the earlier music and the happy twittering. During the opening bars, the solo line is joined subtly by a second and then a third voice, and we hear a reminiscence in bars 25-30 of the Prologue’s final moments. The trinity of voices, a deliciously polyphonic episode, forms a ninth (D-G-E) and fades away into silence. With tender difficulty, a long unadorned theme starts a descent punctuated with happy, upward dancing pirouettes, but weighed down by low notes in the bass. The pesante chords of the earlier music reappear as tamed shadows, or as Paul has written, as “little chorales” (bars 70-73, and 83-87) and alternate with shadows of the birdlike calls from Episode I. The First Elegy ends with a melody in the higher register: the theme ends on D to contrast with a low C in the bass, the interval of the ninth preserving the unifying idea in the work, and also offering us a vast emptiness between the bass and the treble.
