One of the great Bohemian
Romantics, Dussek came of age in the
Netherlands and North Germany where
he may have taken lessons from C.P.E.
Bach; in St Petersburg where, in 1783,
he became implicated in a plot against
Catherine II; and in Berlin where, in
1784, he formally presented himself
as a pianist. In 1786 he went to Paris,
in 1789 London. His celebrated return
to Prague in 1802 was recalled by Tomášek
in his Autobiography (1845-50):
‘There was [...] something
magical about the way in which Dussek
with all his charming grace of manner,
through his wonderful touch, extorted
from the instrument delicious and at
the same time emphatic tones. His fingers
were like a company of ten singers,
endowed with equal executive powers
and able to produce with the utmost
perfection whatever their director could
require. I never saw the Prague public
so enchanted as they were on this occasion
by Dussek's splendid playing. His fine
declamatory style, especially in cantabile
phrases, stands as the ideal for every
artistic performance - something which
no other pianist since has reached […]’
Interestingly, Tomášek
says, it was Dussek - and not Liszt
- who ‘was the first [to place] his
instrument sideways upon the platform,
in which our pianoforte heroes now all
follow [...] though they may have no
very interesting profile to exhibit’.
Dussek’s sonatas used
to be available in a Musica Antiqua
Bohemica edition (1960-63, Vols. 46,
53, 59, 63 - hard to find these days
though the British Library holds a reference
set). ‘Antique’ embellishment/lingua
classica/‘modern’ pianism aside,
what’s striking about them is the progressiveness
of their harmonic language, their frequently
unorthodox approach to tonality (prophetic
at times of Chopin, Schumann and Brahms),
and their structuring – beckoning/influencing
as much Beethoven (discussed famously
by Harold Truscott in Arnold & Fortune’s
1971 Beethoven Companion)
as Weber, Liszt, Smetana ...
The daring and gracious
... Tunes and turns one’s somehow always
known ... The fragment of a motif
reaching from the finale of Beethoven’s
Op. 101 a decade later to Brahms’s E
minor Cello Sonata fugue via the scherzo
of Schumann’s Op. 11 lurking in the
opening (1:26) of the ‘grand, noble,
sublime [...] magnificent’ (Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung, Leipzig 1810)
Op. 64… The Allegro of Beethoven’s
recently published Op. 7 teasing around
the second group (1:12) of the first
movement of Op. 44 – like Op. 64 a sub-titled
but otherwise non-representational work,
dedicated to Dussek’s London friend,
publisher and rival, Clementi ... Schubert,
fifteen years on, never far away ...
The late 19th century accused
Dussek of ‘diffuseness of design’ (Macfarren).
Yet admired his final sonatas (Opp.
64, 75, 77 [1807-12]) as ‘amongst the
best of his day [...] the indifference
now shown to them [1895] – so far, at
least, as the concert platform is concerned
– is proof of ignorance, or bad taste’
(Shedlock). CPO’s objective revival
lets us re-judge.
Most often recorded
of the canon, the ‘dark key’ Élégie
harmonique [...] en forme de Sonate
was written on death of Prince Louis
Ferdinand of Prussia, killed by a French
hussar at the Battle of Saalfeld (October
1806), aged thirty-three. Spohr tells
us that Dussek’s association with the
soldiering post-Frederican (dedicatee
of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto),
whose service he entered in 1804, was
‘wild and reckless’. LF, ‘capital pianist’
and composer, got to share his aspirations
with empathetic companion, JLD got to
travel the Napoleonic killing-fields.
Opening with a quotation from Haydn’s
Seven Last Words, it’s an obsession-poem,
a sonata quasi una fantasia in
all but name, profoundly tensioned.
In his thoughtful booklet essay, Lorenz
Luyken comments on the stark oppositions
of the first movement tempo agitato.
All, he suggests, ‘lack a periodic rounding;
they have the effect of incompleteness,
temporariness’, in their ‘caesura-less’
succession ‘like a series of unconsoled
and restless emotional states, like
fleeting episodes of a dream’. The breathless,
syncopated, vacant staring of the finale
he sees as a ‘symbol of despondent,
hopeless mourning’.
Becker - better than
Novotný on Supraphon - has the
aristocratic measure of the style, pathos
and wit, the innocent finger-work and
delirious virtuosity, natural to Dussek.
In something like the gravely felt Adagio
of Op. 44 - presaging the B major-within-E
flat parallel of the Beethoven Emperor/Weber
Second Concerto slow movements - he
shows how to paint an eloquent scene.
And where others might lose the thread
in repetitious forms or figurations,
he doesn’t: the rondo of the A flat
Op. 64 is a miracle of dexterous charm,
colour and variety, the folk-like refrain
irresistible in phrasing and rubato.
Instrumental balance
and production is good - the long
gaps between works fully justified.
Beware, however, that editing isn’t
necessarily foolproof, the first movement
of Op. 44 losing out in several passages
– the worst at 1:42: a nasty ambience
change, the sound suddenly brightening
like a curtain drawn back.
Ateş
Orga
Markus Becker (piano)
