Julius Reubke - Piano Sonata (GSARCI VIDEO REVIVAL)

"What does your conscience say?" Nietzsche asks. "You shall become who you are." A peculiarly poignant question mark hangs over the works of young composers cut off at the moment of realization -- Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, for instance, Guillaume Lekeu, Lili Boulanger, or Julius Reubke. Qualities suggesting genius vary widely, but in every case, though we cannot say who these eternally young people might have become, there is no doubt they would have been, each, someone to be reckoned with. The 22-year-old Reubke came to Weimar in 1856 a fledgeling composer but a formidable pianist whose promise was immediately recognized by Liszt, who drew Reubke into the charmed circle of brilliant youngsters from all over the world who came to study piano with him, a band that included Hans von Bülow, Carl Tausig, Hans von Bronsart, Karl Klindworth, and Alexander Ritter, to name the most prominent, as well as poet and composer Peter Cornelius and the composer Joachim Raff. A Scherzo and Mazurka from Reubke's student days demonstrate the influence of Chopin, Weber, and Mendelssohn given a fillip by Reubke's preternatural facility at the piano. But it was Liszt's example which spurred him to embark upon the task of creating himself. Liszt's sonata, completed in 1853, has become so banefully familiar that we forget it was an avant-garde work, as we now say, a primary item of "the music of the future" in the parlance of its time, that is, music whose methods and portent made a decisive break with the past that were not readily understood. Notoriously, the 20 year-old Brahms fell asleep as Liszt performed it for him. But Reubke grasped it at once and the wonder is how completely he assimilated the Lisztian manner, the tightly organized single-movement form, thematic metamorphoses, virtuosic rhetorical flourishes, episodes of great dash, and moment melting into crooning lyricism against a backdrop of titanic struggle inform his piano sonata (1857). With hindsight, Reubke's virtuosic turbulence looms as the struggle of a personality being born, though winged with the attractiveness of prodigious youth imperishably captured. Critic Richard Pohl recalled the composer "Playing us his sonata...sunk in his creation, Reubke forgot everything about him, and we then looked at his pale appearance, at the unnatural shine of his gleaming eyes, heard his heavy breath, and were aware of how wordless fatigue overwhelmed him after such hours of excitement -- we suspected then that he would not be with us long."

(AllMusic)

Please take note that the audio AND the sheet music ARE NOT mine. Please change the quality to a minimum of 480p if the video is blurry.

Original audio:    • Reubke - Piano Sonata in B-flat minor...  
Original sheet music: imslp.org