12:11, 21st May 2021

Thomas de Hartmann specialist Elan Sicroff unlocks the secrets of two nocturnes by the Russian master

The Nocturnes Op 7 No 5 and Op 84 No 1 by Thomas de Hartmann provide a good introduction to his music, bookending his creative work. Before going into detailed discussion about them, however, some information about this largely unknown composer is in order.

De Hartmann (1885-1956) was born into the Russian aristocracy in Ukraine. He studied composition with Anton Arensky (teacher of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Scriabin) and later with Sergei Tanaieff, a master of counterpoint trusted by Tchaikovsky for his critical advice. De Hartmann was also a student of the virtuoso pianist Annette Essipova — another of Prokofiev’s teachers — at the St Petersburg Conservatory.

In 1906 de Hartmann was catapulted to fame by the performance of his ballet La Fleurette Rouge (The Red Flower) starring Nijinsky, Fokine, Pavlova and Karsavina. It was staged for six consecutive seasons in St Petersburg and another in Moscow before the advent of the First World War.

De Hartmann relocated to Munich in 1908 to study conducting with Felix Mottl, a pupil of Wagner. There he met his lifelong friend Wassily Kandinsky and joined the avantgarde in art and music. Impressionist and modernist elements began to appear in his writing. In 1916 de Hartmann met his spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff, with whom he worked for the next 13 years. Together they composed a large body of sacred music from the East, mostly for the piano.

From 1928 to 1935, de Hartmann composed around 50 film scores to support himself while living outside of Paris. The years from 1935 to 1949 marked his most productive period. He composed many large works for orchestra, solo piano, voice and chamber ensemble. By the late 1940s he was well known in France and Belgium, where many great musicians performed his music, including the cellist Paul Tortelier, flautists Jean-Pierre Rampal and Marcel Moyse, violinist Alexander Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet, and conductors Serge Koussevitzky and Eugène Bigot.

De Hartmann moved to the United States in 1950, where his last works were composed in the modernist idiom. He died in Princeton, New Jersey on 28 March 1956.

Nocturne Op 7/5

The Nocturne Op 7/5 was composed in 1902 when de Hartmann was 17 years old. It is one of his Six Pieces dedicated to Annette Essipova. Each explores a different Romantic form, in styles reminiscent of Schumann, Chopin and Musorgsky. They include a Prelude, Etude, Scherzo, Impromptu, Nocturne and Novelette.

When I first came across these pieces in the late 1970s, I felt certain that they were destined to enter the piano repertoire: they are all gorgeous and reflect Arensky’s Romanticism and Essipova’s virtuosity. The Nocturne may be the easiest of the group to play.

In 2017 I brought a sampling of de Hartmann’s work for assessment by the Dutch composer Gilius van Bergeijk. He told me that de Hartmann ‘used functional harmony in a non-functional way’. This helped me to understand why I found his music so difficult to memorise.

Even in this early work, de Hartmann’s musical language is subtle and rich. He creates constantly shifting colours by moving between the tonic minor and its relative major, and avoids the dominant until the eighth bar. Instead, he uses chord relationships built on the second, fourth, and sixth degrees of the scale.

An interesting example of his chord sequencing comes with the progression beginning in bar 14: from F minor to B diminished (bar 14) we expect him to go to C (dominant of F), but instead he moves to A-flat (bar 15) and establishes the key of A-flat with an E-flat dominant 11th chord. Then in bar 17 he moves suddenly to C major, after all. This development section is ultra-Romantic and anticipates the film scores that de Hartmann would compose in France in the 1930s.

The beautiful coda at bar 53, the ‘moral of the story,’ recapitulates some of the harmonic material from the beginning of the piece (bar 5), ending in a series of brooding broken chords in B-flat minor.

A few pointers for studying this piece:

• I recommend playing the right-hand melody alone without the inner voice in order to get a sense of the tempo and flow.
• Take de Hartmann’s pp dynamic at the beginning seriously – the sound should be very atmospheric. The middle voice should be a ripple, a mere suggestion, as quiet as you can play it.
• There are some inaccuracies in notation in this piece. For example, notice the dotted rhythms in bar 1, bar 3 and elsewhere. However, I have found them easily decipherable, and they may be corrected when the music is republished.
• There may be a mistake with the last note in bar 12, left hand. He may have meant to write B-flat instead of a D-flat.
• Beginning at bar 37 the finger-work in the right hand is quite intricate and will need some unusual fingering to maintain the legato. In bar 39, for the fourth triplet semiquaver in the right hand leading to the beginning of the second beat, I have found that 4-5-4-1 is a way to negotiate, albeit with an uncomfortable squeeze.
• Bar 37 to the end: it is of paramount importance that the left-hand melody be heard as primary. This can be difficult unless one trusts the right-hand filigree and keeps most of the attention in the left hand.

Nocturne Op 84/1 – The Music of the Stars: ‘Look into the depths of eternity’

Shortly before meeting Kandinsky in 1908, de Hartmann began to express dissatisfaction with his early work in composition:

‘To my surprise I took myself to account and began to realise that all that had attracted me in my youth, all that I had dearly loved in music, no longer satisfied me and was, so to say, outdated.’

‘Without inner growth there is no life for me.’

These statements mark the beginning of the active phase of de Hartmann’s quest for meaning, expressed through music. From this point onward much of his output has an underlying programme. Often it is clearly expressed through the words to his songs and the descriptive subtitles of his instrumental music. Love of a Poet Op 59, nine songs set to poems by Pushkin, explores different aspects of love, while in the Six Commentaries from ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce Op 71 de Hartmann applies stream of consciousness to music. By his later works, the ideas are often philosophical, even metaphysical: ‘the poetic idea of the fourth dimension’ in the Second Piano Sonata Op 82, and ‘Look into the depths of eternity’ in The Music of the Stars Op 84/1.

The Music of the Stars is clearly programme music. The sparkling dissonant chords in the upper register of the piano first evoke individual stars, then recognisable patterns, then constellations and shooting stars. The use of overtones, whole tone patterns and unusual chord combinations in the bass create the feeling of spaciousness and emptiness. At bar 22 the stars begin to sing: an unworldly, bitonal affair. From bar 29 a change occurs. The alternating E minor and D minor chords a ninth apart stretch the musical fabric, making way for a new and momentous announcement in bar 31. For the first time an unadorned tonal melody appears in a much lower register than the rest of the piece. It lasts for only a short time before dissolving, leaving the listener watching the stars from a distance, as in the beginning. Then all disappears into emptiness, with the last two notes an octave apart held by the pedal.

All well and good, but what lies behind this programme, we might ask? It is the assertion that different levels of consciousness are available to man. At the beginning we see only stars. Then awareness increases and patterns emerge. The critical moment comes in bar 32, with the descent of the melody into a lower register. Paradoxically, this symbolises a jump in the listener’s own awareness: one is now on the same level as the stars, and they appear close at hand. The melody that follows expresses a message that can now be understood. The experience doesn’t last long, and the listener/observer returns to ordinary awareness, with the stars again at a distance. The last two notes, Bs, an octave apart with the pedal held, evoke the emptiness of the Void.

A few pointers for playing this piece:

• In bar 7 and bar 8 I find that using the third finger on the G in the left hand makes the cross-over more reliable.
• The jumps in the left hand in bars 10-15 can be awkward. In bar 10 I take the g’’ on the last beat in the middle stave with the right hand. I do the same on the first and sixth beats from bar 11 to bar 15.
• As with the Nocturne Op 7/5, it is helpful to play the melody line in the right hand alone, to get a sense of the flow. Afterwards, one can take the piece apart and enter into each of the dissonant harmonies, as slowly as necessary.

Otherwise, except for the awkwardness negotiating the right-hand notes in the quasi cadenza section, there are no technical difficulties in the virtuosic sense. But how to capture the mood? From the outset, one should have a mental conception of what the piece wants to express. The programme notes above may provide a starting point.

By far the greatest difficulty lies with the dynamic, which ranges for the most part between ppp and pppp. Each of the stars really needs to twinkle in this piece, on the border between audibility and silence. Keep your fingers on the surface of the keys and make your staccato by pinging horizontally to the next note, rather than vertically. Your touch should be very shallow, with just enough pressure to make a sound. If you don’t play softly enough, the effect will be lost.

Elan Sicroff’s recordings of Thomas de Hartmann’s nocturnes Opp 7/5 and 81/1 can be heard on his new album The Piano Music of Thomas de Hartmann (Nimbus NI6409)