64 / 128
64 BRAHMS_INTÉGRALE DE L’ŒUVRE POUR PIANO
‘
Of course the works illuminate each other: one finds in
some pieces the answer to the questions posed by others,
and each of them allows one to advance – for example,
when you’ve worked out how to sustain the great arch
of the Handel Variations over the duration of the work,
or how to conserve an expressive value amid and despite
the technical difficulties of the Paganini Variations
(with that extraordinary ascendancy of Bach and the
predominance of counterpoint), you have acquired
irreplaceable tools for constructing the architecture of
the sonatas, and hence even their musical discourse.
The variations make you aware of the two major
preoccupations of pulsation and sonority, especially as
these are central to Brahms’s style, and present not only
in the variations themselves but also in the sonatas. It’s
a hallmark of his writing, which works around the issue
of elusiveness – as if he were saying “everything escapes
me but I pursue expressiveness by all possible means”. . . ’