Griffes - Piano Sonata (Part 1/2)

Piano Sonata (1919)

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) is often fancifully titled the "American Impressionist." At the age of 19, Griffes traveled to Germany to study with Engelbert Humperdinck, through which he became enamored with the compositions of R. Strauss, Wolf, and Brahms. Griffes' earliest works are indelibly Wagnerian, but he later emulated what was then modern French and Russian music, namely Debussy and Scriabin. After four years abroad, he returned to America and taught at the Hackley School of Music in New York. In less than a decade after his return, critics praised Griffes as an original voice in a rather sterile juncture of American art-music. Influenza claimed his life, however, at the age of 35. He left a small but remarkable oeuvre and one can only wonder if he would have become a major American composer had he lived longer.

His single Piano Sonata is a late-Romantic powerhouse and slightly influenced by Debussy and Scriabin; the sonata is even based on a single synthetic scale. Musicologist Wilfred Mellers says, "This disturbingly powerful Sonata is an American parable in musical terms, telling us what happens to the ego alone in the industrial wilderness.... Griffes' Sonata is an astonishing and frightening work; its Orientalism is not an escape into dream but a consequence of desperation such as could have occurred only in a spiritually barbarous world."

Category:

Music

Tags:

• debussy
• scriabin
• liszt
• rachmaninov

[ragtimemarkbirnbaum]

scriabin--if he stayed in the american wilderness

[connectwired]

Definitely, it's interesting to hear some of the "American" riffs and scales used in this piece as well, ones that never appear in Debussy's music.

[Scarbo09]

No one plays this like I hear it in my head, but this is a fairly good performance nevertheless. Does the pianist have a name? It is my experience that most pianists have names. So if he does, in fact, have a name, perhaps it could be posted here, and make his mother proud.

[pjfdincelli]

Who is the pianist? Tks.

[barberjazz]

There's something undeniably schizophrenic about this entire piece; almost a series of vignettes forcibly molded into a coherent whole.

Very, very, very American. Brilliant.

[GabMelonius]

i can't stand all these fortes and fortissimos, they give me headache... But that's why i listen to this! Despair beautifully turned into music.

[GaryPansey]

"Spiritually barbarous world..." in 1919; imagine if he could have lived to 1929!

[radioplug14]

By far, his masterpiece. Griffes would have been a great composer and it really would have been interesting to see what he would have done in the 30s and 40s given the tumultuous world of composition at that time.

8:40 is the best part of the whole thing in my opinion :)

[acadeca8006]

This is really good :)