Old Men Writing Short Pieces. Or, Why I Keep Playing the Last Music Composers Wrote

There is a moment in every composer's life when he stops writing symphonies and starts writing small things.

Beethoven called his last piano pieces Kleinigkeiten. Trifles. Then he wrote to his publisher that they were probably the best things of their kind he had ever written. That is the most Beethoven sentence imaginable. Modest for three words, then not modest at all.

I have spent the last few years with these trifles. Beethoven's Bagatelles Op. 126. Schubert's Drei Klavierstücke. Brahms's Op. 119. A handful of Debussy's last pieces. Small music, written by men who knew, more or less, that time was running out.

People sometimes ask me why I don't play the big late works instead. The Hammerklavier. The last sonatas. My answer is that the big works are speeches. The small ones are what the composer says after the guests have gone home.

Beethoven, 1824

By 1824 Beethoven was completely deaf. He had just finished the Ninth Symphony, a piece that needs a choir, an orchestra and, in most concert halls, a fundraising campaign. Then he sat down and wrote six short piano pieces that need one person and about twenty minutes.

He planned them as a cycle, which was unusual. Bagatelles were the leftovers of a composer's desk, the scraps you sold to pay the rent. These are not scraps. The first one sounds like someone humming to himself in an empty room. The fourth one sounds like the same person losing his temper with the furniture. The last one opens with a few bars of pure noise and then, without apology, becomes one of the gentlest things he ever wrote.

Schubert, May 1828

Schubert wrote the Drei Klavierstücke in May 1828. He died in November. He was thirty-one.

Nobody published them for forty years. When they finally appeared, in 1868, the editor did not put his name on them. The editor was Johannes Brahms. I like that very much. One composer quietly carrying another composer's last pieces into the world, and not even signing the delivery note.

The second piece is the one I return to most. It begins as a barcarolle, the kind of tune a gondolier sings, and then twice it walks into a room it should not have entered. The harmony goes dark, the tune disappears, and for a few minutes you are somewhere else entirely. Then Schubert brings you back, as if nothing had happened. That is the part I find hardest to play, and hardest to explain. There were days, while I was recording it, when his harmonies seemed to understand me better than I understood myself.

That same autumn he finished the Sonata in B-flat, D 960. It is not a short piece. But it is full of silences, and the silences are where it lives. A critic once wrote that in my D 960 the silences were as expressive as the notes. I have framed that sentence in my head. Not on the wall. In my head.

Brahms, 1893

Brahms's Op. 119 was his last music for solo piano. He was sixty, famous, rich and grumpy, and he sent the first Intermezzo to Clara Schumann with a warning. It teems with dissonances, he wrote, and "play very slowly" is not saying enough. Every bar and every note must sound like a ritardando, as if you wanted to suck the melancholy out of each one.

That is better advice than any lesson I ever had.

I once described this Intermezzo as all shadow and hesitation, like someone trying to speak but getting lost in thought. I still think so. It is music about not finishing your sentence.

And then the set ends with the Rhapsody. Loud, heroic, E-flat major, and it finishes in E-flat minor. The last thing Brahms wrote for the piano is a victory march that changes its mind on the final page. I cannot think of a more honest ending.

Debussy, February 1917

Paris, 1917. War, rationing, and a very cold winter. Debussy was ill with the cancer that would kill him the following year, and he had no coal.

So he wrote a short piece for his coal merchant, a Monsieur Tronquin, as thanks for finding him fuel, and very probably as payment.

The title is a line from Baudelaire's poem Le Balcon, Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon. Evenings lit by the glow of the coals. It lasts about two minutes. It is one of the most beautiful things he wrote, and the manuscript stayed out of sight for more than eighty years, until it surfaced in 2001.

I think about that coal merchant often. He received a manuscript by Claude Debussy in exchange for a delivery of fuel. I hope he kept warm. I hope he knew.

Why I keep playing them

These pieces are not farewells. Nobody wrote "goodbye" on the score. They are what happens when a composer has nothing left to prove and still has something to say.

They are also, practically, a gift to a pianist. They are short enough that an audience never tires, deep enough that I never tire either, and quiet enough that a hall has to lean in to hear them. My favorite concerts are the ones where the audience stops coughing somewhere in the second Schubert piece and doesn't start again until the interval.

This music is the program I call Visions in Sound, and it is the heart of my last album. In 2028 it will be two hundred years since Schubert died, and I intend to spend a good part of that year playing what he wrote in his last one.