Piano Sonata No. 1 (1946) I. Lent -- Beaucoup plus allant II. Assez large -- Rapide Idil Biret, piano Pierre Boulez composed his First Piano Sonata in 1946. The Piano sonata was not as common to the first half of the twentieth century as it was to the nineteenth, and Boulez rarely wrote in a genre that had already been well explored. After Beethoven left behind his legacy of thirty-two sonatas, the most interesting developments have not been in the sonata style. This trend in avoiding territories evincing daunting musical genius has been called "the anxiety of influence," denoting why many composers would steer clear of the sonata genre after Beethoven. It is difficult to hear a sonata without Beethoven coming to mind, and it is equally difficult to avoid making a comparison to Beethoven under those circumstances. That being the case, the great piano works of composers such as Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, and others centered on sets of variations, fantasies, and other structures that did not immediately bring to mind the foreboding Beethoven Comparison. This angst did not seem to grasp Boulez. While history has welcomed him into the Western canon for his lasting contributions to music, he seems to have always known that his place was among the great names. While other composers may have written one or two sonatas after maturing as artists and then finally, painfully producing them in a heightened state of anxiety, Boulez wrote, published, and relentlessly promoted his First Piano Sonata at the age of twenty-one. It also contains direct references to Beethoven. Boulez has been recognized as an iconoclast and a great talent, and perhaps this stems from his fearlessness. He stood up to everyone who got in his way during the twentieth century, and in the case of his piano sonatas, he did not back down from Beethoven either. One advantage that Boulez had over the other post-Beethoven composers was a disparity of language. By 1948 he had crystallized serialism, which took Schoenberg's twelve-tone method further than even Webern, whom Boulez had pronounced the most important composer of the twentieth century. He took this proclamation to extremes, adding that the history of Western music was entirely encapsulated in the work of Webern, who had died in 1945, and that listening to music before his was not a relevant pursuit. As extreme as this position was, it lent Boulez the courage to produce this shockingly, eerily beautiful sonata. Hearing this work brings to mind the few musical prodigies of history whose work from this young age has maintained our interest: Mozart, Schubert, and perhaps a couple of others. Not only does Boulez consolidate a serialist language that has almost no precedent, except for one piece by his instructor, Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités. In reference to Beethoven's final piano sonata, Boulez's First Piano Sonata is cast in two similarly contrasting movements. The intensity of the work is fierce, and it has a delicacy of phrasing that is normally ascribed to mature masters. It is slightly less than eleven minutes in duration, and like all the music he would publish in his lifetime, explores the remotest nuances of seriousness. Boulez was a very serious young man about music. He was willing to humiliate people, even his own teacher (he once publicly referred to Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony as "brothel music.") Much of his middle-age involved making gestures of apology for his youthful outbursts, but Boulez possessed a charisma that overpowered most other people. His First Piano Sonata contains comparable charm and integrity. [allmusic.com] Art by Robert Delaunay