Anton Rubinstejn was born on 28th November 1829 in Balta Podalia, in Ukraine. He began a promising career as an enfant prodige at just ten years of age, then taken around half of Europe by his teacher Alexandre Villoing, settling in Berlin with his family between 1844 and 1846 where he took lessons in harmony and counterpoint from Siegfried Dehn. Following his father’s death he returned to Moscow and made his debut with his first important works as a composer and pianist around the age of twenty. (He died in Peterhof on 20th November 1894.) He accomplished very wide range of activities (1850 – 1894) of great historical interest, particularly in the field of piano virtuosity, because Rubinstejn comes to the fore just when the great composers and pianists of the generation of the ‘10s (Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt) had almost finished their careers (except of course in the case of Liszt, who died in 1886). Rubinstejn therefore finds himself competing only with the Hungarian Titan and with a myriad of other minor musicians who churned out a huge quantity of pieces for an instrument which by now had completely conquered the music-lovers of the day. In a way Rubinstejn, Russian of German origin, with a family converted to Christianity, would have the same fate that shortly hereafter would touch the figure and career of Tchaikovsky, both considered to be in an ambiguous
position between the traditions of Eastern and Western Europe. Nevertheless, Rubinstejn did not acquire the stature and the genius of Tchaikovsky, who would have a much more rosy and imperishable future. Rubinstejn also had the misfortune to turn against the Russian nationalist movements and to represent a champion of traditional conservative teaching. However, his very important place in Russian culture, above all in the field of the development of music study (he would run the St. Petersburg Conservatory from its foundation in 1862, even if discontinuously) is out of the question and since Rubinstejn devoted himself with encyclopaedic ambition to all fields of music production he remains fundamentally a Western-style composer who uses certain components of the Russian ethos for coloristic, narrative purposes. And as a pianist and lecturer he has the merit of founding a school of extremely prestigious level that still produces, without a doubt, marvellous fruit. And yet, if it had not been for the fond apostleship of his own best pupil, the outstanding Josef Hofmann, who, moreover, took care to honour the master through memories and laudatory writings rather than with the public presentation of his immense amount of work,the name of Rubinstejn would have been practically known only by a limited public. At the present time, Rubinstein’s prospects are somewhat brighter, due to the diffusion that recordings have allowed, showing us a sufficiently high number of representative works, and not only in the field of solo piano music.
The first three piano sonatas were written between 1847 and 1855; in 1877 he composed the fourth and last one. In the early ‘50s Brahms, from his part, dealt with the genre of the Sonata in a way that does not reach the stylistic perfection that can be seen in Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, dating back to 1853. So in a few years the scholar (and the performer) have at their disposal at least three different models to understand a form that had been brought to the highest expressive levels by Beethoven and which had subsequently been cultivated, with strong personal imprints, by Schumann, Chopin and to a lesser extent by Mendelssohn. There is certainly something Schumannesque, and a lively influence of Mendelssohn in these sonatas of Rubinstejn, a musician evidently influenceof his Berlin apprenticeship period. But there is also, in these sonatas, an original piano invention, and it is certainly not secondary that a rich writing, among otherthings, of extensive massed chords (prohibitive for those without a very large hand) has contributed somewhat to their rarity in modern performance. The lack of a established performance practice deriving from a historical tradition makes the study of these works even more problematic. Although many great pianists of the second half of the nineteenth century and later certainly did not disdain the inclusion in their repertoires some of the many smaller pieces - the famous Melody in F, the Romance opus 44 No.1, the Valse-Caprice - we have not in fact prestigious testimonies to the four Sonatas, until
they were rediscovered in the 1980s by Leslie Howard. The first Sonata in E minor op.12 is dated between 1847 and 1848 and develops according to the four canonical movements (Allegro appassionato - Andante largamente - Moderato - Moderato con fuoco). The character and the metric of the first movement cannot but remind us of Grieg’s Sonata in the same key (composed twenty years later!), but the main theme possesses a strength and a character that go well beyond the more salon-like approach of Grieg and the beauty of the second them is beyond dispute. The second movement has the character of a tripartite hymn, with a main melody in C major accompanied by large chords and a central section in A minor that stands out in its original piano texture. The Scherzo in A minor is of Mendelssohnian lightness, with an interesting contrapuntal Trio in A major. Again to an anticipation of the character of thesonata of Grieg we return with the stormy finale. Also in this case the second idea, in the major, brings an oasis of serenity in a context that is further enriched by a development fugato on the first theme. Triumphant is the return of the second theme, where always the use of large massed chords underline a frequent and original feature of Rubinstein’s piano writing. The third Sonata in F major op.41 is also in four movements (Allegro risoluto con fuoco - Allegretto con moto - Andante - Allegro vivace) and remained among all four the composer’s favourite. He inserted it into his famous historical programmes through which he intended to present the development of the art of the piano, proposing himself as the last link in a chain that started from Byrd and Bull. The first movement is bi-thematic, with a first theme still in the Mendelssohnian style and a second idea in the form of a cantabile waltz. Very interesting is the following Allegretto con moto in A minor characterised by a contrast between legato and staccato (detached) and the appearance of a mysterious major-key Trio. The following Andante is rather too much in debt to certain pieces of Schumann to be able to boast great autonomous value, which can be perceived instead in the Finale, a tarantella in the unusual tonality of F minor, whose main idea is enriched by the appearance of a melody of lyrical mould (in D flat major) and by a further section characterised by repeated chords. The musical utterance becomes more and more lively until it ends in a Presto in F major, closing the Sonata in an atmosphere of jubilation.