Discussions

Felix Draeseke is one of the most genuinely fascinating forgotten figures in nineteenth century German music. He began as an ardent adherent of the New German School of Liszt and Wagner, bowled over by hearing Liszt's performances of Wagner's Lohengrin in Weimar, where he took up residence in 1856 to immerse himself in the music of the future. His early Piano Sonata quasi Fantasia won Liszt's unreserved admiration as one of the most important piano sonatas after Beethoven, and he was described by one contemporary as an especially dangerous beast among the progressives, a composer whose works were performed by the leading artists of the day including Hans von Bülow, Arthur Nikisch, and Karl Böhm. By the mid-1870s, however, Draeseke had noticeably begun to plough a more conservative furrow after settling in Dresden, where he eventually joined the faculty of the Royal Saxon Conservatory. The Sonata in B flat major, Op. 38, composed in the mid-1880s and published in 1888, belongs to this later period. It is the work of a composer who had absorbed the progressive chromatic language of his era and was now directing it into more classical formal structures, combining the harmonic richness of the Wagnerian tradition with the disciplined architecture of the sonata. The result sits at an interesting crossroads: neither simply conservative nor simply progressive, but a synthesis of the two impulses that defined his career. The work is in three movements. The opening Allegro moderato begins with an attractive chromatic theme, followed by a contrasting second subject built on a pithy motif that sets off against the long-breathed first theme. The slow movement offers the most sustained lyrical writing of the three, with both instruments given generous melodic material. The finale brings the work to an energetic close. Throughout, the two instruments are treated as full partners, the piano never reduced to mere accompaniment and the clarinet never merely decorative. Draeseke's music slipped into near-total obscurity after the Second World War, when changes in fashion and political climate conspired against him, and this Sonata is one of the works Bryce has championed across Canada wherever the opportunity has arisen.