‘Almost all of Alkan’s surviving works are written for the piano. The finest of these
were completed during the fifteen years from 1847. During this period Alkan published
the Grande Sonate.
Much of Alkan’s writing has a melancholy or depressive component, perhaps most
effectively described as “cold”. It should not be concluded, however, that his music is
doleful or mourning. Alkanian melancholia can be, paradoxically, very high-voltage
indeed. His intense rhythmic pulse, simultaneous exploitation of the highest and lowest
reaches of the keyboard, and generation of almost unbelievable sonorities leave the
listener both exhilarated and appalled. At its most icy and magnificent, when the
performer is almost prone with the effort of delivering himself of the extreme emotional
and physical demands of his music, Alkan generates the most remarkable sensation in his
listeners that they have just smelled, or, more precisely, ‘thought that they smelled’ some
deep smoking thing.
The effect of this marvellous writing arrests even a present-day listener; the sadness, the
demonism, the omnipresent foreboding, the palpably sinister all gleam darkly through the
rush of sound. Alkan’s freshness of effect is startling: the conjuring of Weber and Liszt,
once so evocative of misfortune, have been rendered in our century as trite and banal
through the counterfeiting and reworking of their techniques by advertising, cartoons, and
the latest world-première network movie. In listening to Alkan’s works, we recall an
almost forgotten ability to be stirred by these dark emotions. His obsessional repetitions,
the haunting melodies and distressing harmonies, the propulsive power and almost
suffocating intensity of the music deliver a formidable shock.
The sanctum sanctorum of Alkan’s music is found in the twelve Minor Key Etudes
(published in 1857) and the Grande Sonata (published in 1848). The technical demands
of this music are so burdensome that a performance is restricted to only a handful of
pianists. Notwithstanding the musical literacy of the nineteenth century, one wonders
how a musical publisher could have ever believed that there was a popular market for
works of this difficulty.
The Grande Sonate was written when Alkan was only thirty-three and shows him to be
then possessed of both a fabulous technique and an incomparable sense of personal
isolation. Subtitled ‘Les Quatres Ages’, each of the four movements (titled “20 years”,
“30 years: Quasi-Faust”, “40 years: Un heureux ménage”, and “50 years: Prométhée
enchaîné”) is a psychological evocation of a period of creative life.
The structure of the Grande Sonate is most unusual, progressing from a brisk Scherzo
first movement to an “Assez vite” second movement, to a slow third movement in G
major and thence to a last movement marked “Extrêmement lent”, in G-sharp minor; the
effect of these progressively slower and cooler movements is one of increasing gravity
and burden. The Scherzo is disarmingly precocious, rocketing through many key
changes before focusing on D-sharp minor, the cool and remote key of the Quasi-Faust
second movement. “Quasi-Faust” is one of the most remarkable pieces of music – let
alone piano music – of the nineteenth century, with its closely fought struggle between