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Theodor Leschetizky Nocturne No 2 in AMajor Op 12 Park
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Teodor Leszetycki - Drugi nokturn • Composed sometime between 1852 and 1854 • Pianist: Clara Park • Bio • Teodor Leszetycki (1830-1915) is probably most well known for his role as a pedagogue. All across the little blurbs written as programs for the brilliant composers Paderewski and Friedman and all of the biographical notes for the masters Horszowski, Wittgenstein, and Moiseiwitsch one can see the scribble student of Theodor Leschetizky. Surely, as his pupil Ethel Newcomb relates, his pupils were as his family. He treated them with gentle, patient kindness and was incredibly open to people as they came to him. A significant indicator of his open philosophy was his instructions to Newcomb when she began to assist him in pedagogy to abandon all methodology and let the student's needs speak for himself. Curiously, he was also a proponent of his pupils learning pieces as their main technical development; he saw technical exercises as superfluous to piano playing. • Leszetycki as a teacher is noted for his importance, but Leszetycki as a composer is often overlooked. Having been born in Łańcut at the Potocki estate, he had access to both Polish and German ideas. As if that did not leave his musical formation open enough, he was invited by Anton Rubinstein to teach in St. Petersburg. As we see in Paderewski and, by extension, Stojowski, Leszetycki had a very cosmopolitan compositional approach, himself having absorbed Italian, French, German, Polish, Russian, and Bohemian music. The exposure to this wide variety of music and his own cultivation of knowledge results in technically complex music with an expressive aim and all the charm of the romantic era. • Finally, a little eyecatching detail that one encounters while reading about Leszetycki is his motto. We likely see mottos as cartoonish catchphrases with little meaning in themselves beyond announcing the predilections of the one to whom the motto is tethered. Although Leszetycki's motto No life without art, no art without life! can be as shallow as a catchphrase or as deep as one's own introspection about the value of one's own life and the value that art adds to it can go. • The Nocturne • Nocturnes are often inundated with a heap of references to Chopin, John Field, and occasionally, Maria Szymanowska. Of course, the mood in Leszetycki's 2nd nocturne is similar by nature of the genre, but the technical means of achieving this dreamy, drowsy trance surprises. There are staples, of course, the Chopinesque decorations on the melody, the rocking A-Major chords used as texture, and the slow descent of arpeggios in the form of triplets that are commonplace in Field, Szymanowska, and Dobrzyński cannot be overlooked. But the switch of the texturing to the higher registers and eventually to the right hand with the melody going down into the lower registers (1:05) dazzles with its unexpectedness. Following this passage, the technique necessary to preserve the melody with the ascending thirds and fourths gives the pianist an opportunity for true interpretive poetry. As the piece unfolds, even more layering is revealed (3:07). As the dreamy atmosphere comes closer and closer to the climax, the music seeks sharper and sharper definition, and the loud octaves burst through the fuzzy clouds with the thick lines of reality before the dreaminess returns and the piece ends in quiet reflection.
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