Continuing my survey of music around the circle of fifths, looking for composers neglected for reasons other than the musical merit of their compositions. We’re now at four sharps with C-sharp minor, a key that seems more suited to the piano than the orchestra.
Fanny Mendelssohn had more opportunities to develop as a composer than Maria Anna Mozart. But Mendelssohn being a woman and Jewish, she was essentially forgotten during the Third Reich. I was completely unaware of her nice little Mélodie in C-sharp minor, played here by Sirka Schwartz-Uppendieck at a church in Germany.
Cécile Chaminade got to a much higher opus number count, but most of her compositions were little solo piano pieces that could earn her a quick, tidy profit. Once in a while she had the opportunity to write larger compositions for piano and orchestra, like the Konzertstück in C-sharp minor, Opus 40, played here as a piano duet.
Despite the distance from C major, composers deemed great by the Reichsmusikkammer still loom large in the catalog of music in C-sharp minor. I hope you agree with me that Beethoven is a great composer because of his Herculean efforts to get every note just right. But according to people like Hans Pfitzner, Beethoven is great only because Beethoven is German.
Beethoven’s sketchbooks show how he arrived at many of his most inspired ideas through a long process of revision, starting with mediocre, forgettable melodies. As opposed to many Nazi German composers who started with mediocre, forgettable melodies and ended with a not much better finished product.
Although Beethoven tried to destroy his sketchbooks before his death, a lot of them survived him, and in some cases contain far more music than what eventually made it into his finished compositions. Our own Library of Congress has quite a bit of material on this.
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C-sharp minor, Opus 27, No. 2, known popularly as the "Moonlight” Sonata, is probably the most famous piece in C-sharp minor by anyone. Here's Valentina Lisitsa playing it.
Valentina Lisitsa is just one of several pianists I could have chosen. Like, for example, Tiffany Poon.
I came across a fascinating big band version, don’t know if it’s in the original key but it doesn’t matter, it’s very fun.
Since the parallel major of C-sharp minor is C-sharp major, considered unwieldy with seven sharps, Beethoven’s contemporaries would not have expected a composition in C-sharp minor to end in C-sharp major [corrected per a comment]. That’s certainly not the case with the Moonlight Sonata, though Beethoven himself would have had no trouble playing in such a key.
Beethoven’s late quartets deserve to be better known. Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Opus 131, begins and ends in C-sharp minor, passing through D major, A major and E major.
Joseph Martin Kraus wrote a Symphony in C-sharp minor (VB 140) which he later reworked in the more manageable key of C minor (VB 142). Both the C-sharp minor and the C minor have been recorded on the Naxos label by a Swedish orchestra, but the Haydn 2032 project preferred the latter for their YouTube series.
This next one definitely does not have the endorsement of the Reichsmusikkammer, on account of the composer being ethnically Jewish (though he did convert to Catholicism).
Referring to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 as being in C-sharp minor strikes some composers and musicologists as odd. The words “in C-sharp minor” imply that it starts in C-sharp minor and ends up in C-sharp minor or C-sharp major. If anything, a stronger case can be made for it being in D major. The overall tonal scheme is: C-sharp minor — A minor — D major — F major — D major.
The whole symphony runs almost 80 minutes.
Objectively, more happens in Mahler’s Fifth than in Bruckner’s Fifth (which is more conventionally in B-flat major, though an argument could be made that it’s in D minor), but Bruckner’s Fifth holds my attention better than Mahler’s.
The overall tonal scheme of the Mahler Fifth suggests a certain aimless rambling, and the recurrence of certain Part I motifs in Part III doesn’t really help to my mind make the symphony feel like a cohesive whole. Taking the F major Adagietto out of context is much more forgivable (and thinkable) than taking anything by Bruckner out of context.
However, the insistence on the myth that Bruckner did not complete his Symphony No. 9 in D minor, leaving only a few undecipherable sketches for the finale, and thereby ignoring the almost complete musical narrative for the finale that Bruckner actually wrote down, has led to a situation in which Bruckner’s Ninth can be perceived to progress from D minor to C-sharp minor and eventually E major.
But for Bruckner, D major was the only valid key in which to end a D minor symphony, however much the Schenkerian analysis might show distant tonalities like C-sharp minor and F-sharp major. Using the Te Deum (in C major) was simply a desperate fallback from a composer who considered multiple scenarios. Bruckner prayed to God to grant him time to finish, but he also understood it was up to Him to grant the request or not.
And so, after the serene but not completely settled E major tonic chord that ends the Adagio, the finale begins with nervous tritone mutterings. Bruckner left so much material for the finale that we now have a very clear idea of what he was getting at, a 20- to 30-minute finale, and all the available reconstructions are pretty much equal in their first ten minutes or so.
Bruckner also used C-sharp minor for the Adagio of his Symphony No. 7 in E major. After the confident luminance of the opening Allegro moderato, we descend to a funeral darkness with the introduction of Wagner tubas to Bruckner’s oeuvre.
The Wagner tubas are really modified horns. If you can afford it, you can buy a tenor in B-flat, a bass in F (same transposition as the so-called “French” horn) or a double B-flat/F that you can switch with a trigger. Instruments in E-flat might also be available, which might be handy for Wagner’s music but not Bruckner’s, as he consistently wrote the B-flat and F instruments. In the Seventh Symphony, that means a key signature of D-sharp minor for the former and G-sharp minor for the latter.
I’m gonna hold off on Bruckner performance videos to the open thread on E major, which maybe I’ll publish next Monday.
The open thread question: What is your favorite music in C-sharp minor?