abstract: The concert vocalise, a dazzling wordless vocal etude intended for performance, is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century. Made famous by composers such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Maurice Ravel, the concert vocalise is generally a short, non-programmatic work with a relatively simple form. In contrast, Nikolai Medtner’s two monumental Op. 41 vocalises, the Sonata-Vocalise mit einem Motto “Geweihter Platz and the Suite Vocalise, are staggering in their length and formal complexity. They are also programmatically conceived, sharing the Goethe poem “Geweihter Platz” as their inspiration. The innovation of adding a textual element to a traditionally textless genre introduces a tantalizing new layer of complexity that demands further research and exploration. However, as with any innovation, it also offers new challenges to performers wishing to program either or both works. Current scholarship has yet to offer any kind of in-depth analysis of either work, leaving questions as to the structural and motivic elements which bind these large works together, not to mention questions related to exactly how Medtner addresses the challenge of linking specific parts of Goethe’s text to the textless portions of music. Furthermore, neither work is considered standard repertoire, and recordings and performances are limited, leaving aspiring performers in something of an informational desert. In this paper, I endeavor to fill this informational gap for performers and scholars alike by providing them with a brief biography of Medtner, an outline of the development of the concert vocalise genre, and the background of the Goethe poem that inspired Medtner. Then my in-depth analyses reveal underlying structural, motivic, and programmatic links both within and between the works. Finally, my performer’s guide, based on the analyses and my experience performing both works, offers suggestions regarding the interpretational, ensemble, and technical challenges presented by these great works. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music 2017

Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (1880-1951) was a Russian composer, pianist and pedagogue. While active during the period of Modernism, he was one of the last descendants of the nineteenth-century tradition. Without a doubt, Medtner was considered one of the most brilliant successors of the Russian piano school, though his compositions did not particularly bring him a great deal of popularity in his time. Nonetheless, his unique style of writing has always attracted a small circle of musicians and admirers, and more recently, there has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in Medtner’s music. In the 2000s, several recent prizewinners of the International Tchaikovsky Competition – Daniil Trifonov, Dmitry Masleev, and Lucas Debargue – have shown their special interest in Medtner’s music, and this has drawn public attention to Medtner’s major piano works. However, discussions regarding performance practice and interpretation in playing Medtner have only recently begun. Although dissertations focused on Medtner’s music began to appear in the 1960s, primary sources have been examined by only a limited number of scholars, due to geographic and linguistic barriers. This dissertation aims to formulate and answer performance practice issues to develop a practical approach to learning and performing Medtner’s piano compositions. Since the primary sources related to op. 38 are comparatively abundant, and the work contains several pieces of contrasting character, Forgotten Melodies can serve as a good model for developing an informed approach to interpreting Medtner’s piano music. Analyses of three major types of material are provided to trace the chronological development of ideas in op. 38: sound recordings of Medtner’s own playing; written records by the composer and his student; and the score Medtner had on which he noted down his ideas. In addition to Medtner’s publication The Muse and the Fashion, unpublished diaries and essays found at the Medtner Archive (‘Fond Metnera’) of the Glinka National Museum of Musical Culture (Moscow, Russia) have also been examined.

This research illustrates the performer-researcher's artistic process of reaching an understanding of music through performance, and explores how an effort to understand music at the instrument and in the context of music-making could influence our critical evaluation of the music. ​Engaged in the process of learning music, I seek to document my artistic practices as a reflective practitioner: to open up the performer-researcher's workspace, communicate the performativity of the music, and reveal my embodied doing-thinking as a performer. By involving in the performer-researcher's physical and intellectual trajectory, the focus of musicological research could be shifted from the study of music as writing to a practice-based study that communicates and values music as performance. ​This shift provides a chance to rethink musical works at the piano and place the music in a context in which music can be understood, communicated, and valued through performance. This has the potential to shed light on the performative value of music, and may challenge the existing critique of musical works by emphasising the centrality of musical performance in the realm of music research, perhaps revealing what has been neglected by the text and outcome-focused approaches to music. I believe this could lead us to assess musical works in a different value system by considering the music in and as performance.

I detta examensarbete analyseras den ryska kompositören Nikolai Medtners Sonata Reminiscenza Op. 38 no. 1 från ett harmoniskt, motiviskt och strukturellt perspektiv. Denna analys innefattar också reflektioner kring några av författarens interpretationsmässiga val. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur styckets form och harmonik kopplar det samman såväl med den klassiska kompositionskonstens regler som med Medtners artistiska/poetiska mål. Studiens resultat påvisar att verket är såväl kompositionstekniskt fulländat som känslomässigt rikligt. Sonatformen är på ett sofistikerat vis implementerad i verkets struktur och återfinns som en integrerad del i musikens narrativ.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Rochester, 1972. / Analysis of piano quintets by Anton Webern, Louis Vierne, Edward Elgar, Bohuslav Martinů, Nikolay Medtner, and Ross Lee Finney. Vita. Bibliography: leaves [269-272]. Digitized version available online via the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music http://hdl.handle.net/1802/4819

Nikolai Medtner's works evidence an intense interest in symmetrical designs. This concern is manifest at all levels, from the large scale proportions of his numerous ingenious sonata forms to the symmetrically constructed themes and motives. Medtner's works include several instances of palindromic themes and periods. Some palindromic contours are achieved through immediate inversion, creating expansive, symmetrical waves. One of Medtner's thumbprints, symmetrical contrary voice-leading, consists of two or more voices which systematically expand or contract in exact mirror fashion. The contrary movement is usually stepwise, and may be either chromatic or diatonic. Occasionally even larger intervals, such as thirds and fourths, are subjected to this favourite mirroring technique. Such symmetrical expansion and contraction often controls the harmonic progression of several consecutive bars. One of the most striking aspects of Medtner's music is his sophisticated harmonic language. He was fascinated with symmetrical harmonic designs, such as the tritone, the French sixth chord, and the octatonic scale, and made endless and increasingly intricate explorations into these stuctures and the ways in which these apparently nontonal, non-hierarchical forms could be coordinated with the fundamental hierarchy of asymmetrical tonal forms, including triads, major and minor scales, and tonic-dominant relations. Medtner's late work, the Grozovaya Sonata, Opus 53 No.2, is the most concentrated and abstract of his works. The themes are built from highly lapidar motives, giving this work an intensely angular, rigorously mathematical character. All the symmetrical hallmarks of Medtner's language are in abundant evidence in this great work. Features include the extensive symmetrical mirroring of the opening section, frequent use of contrary voice leading as a generator of harmonic progression, and constant tritone shifting. Medtner also builds sequential chains based on two more symmetrical forms, the diminished seventh and the augmented triad. Finally, the design of this unique single movement sonata may be a hybrid of sonata form with palindrome. The Grozovaya Sonata is a microcosm of the symmetrical features of Medtner's language.

The dissertation focuses on the early piano sonatas of Russian composer Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (1880–1951). It approaches them in the context of genre history, confronts them with other composers' works, and discusses them from various analytic perspectives. A special goal is to consider the pieces in the aesthetic environment of their time, and to regard them as peculiar instances of the ›sonata principle‹, an ageless conception of musical form. The study is subdivided in three large parts, the first of which presents a summary of sonata composition before Medtner, exploring lines of tradition in Western Europe and Russia. The second part concentrates on Medtner’s musical language and its stylistic features. The third and most comprehensive part provides detailed examinations of eight of Medtner’s piano sonatas, including aspects of their genesis and reception, and making use of recent methods of musical analysis. / Die Dissertation widmet sich den frühen Klaviersonaten des russischen Komponisten Nikolaj Karlovič Metner (1880–1951), die im Kontext ihrer Gattungsgeschichte und im Vergleich mit Musik anderer Urheber betrachtet werden. Ein Hauptanliegen der multiperspektivischen Analysen ist es, den Werkkorpus in ästhetische Kontexte der Entstehungszeit einzubetten und die Einzelwerke als Spezialfälle des ›Sonatenprinzips‹, eines zeitlosen Formkonzepts, darzustellen. Die Studie gliedert sich in drei Sektionen, deren erste die Entwicklungen des Sonatenkomponierens vor Metner zusammenfasst und Traditionslinien in Westeuropa und Russland nachzeichnet. Der zweite Teil ist eine Darstellung der Tonsprache Metners und ihrer stilistischen Merkmale. Der dritte und umfangreichste Teil präsentiert Detailanalysen von acht Klaviersonaten Metners und untersucht die Notentexte mit Hilfe aktueller Analysemethoden.

The dissertation focuses on the early piano sonatas of Russian composer Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (1880–1951). It approaches them in the context of genre history, confronts them with other composers' works, and discusses them from various analytic perspectives. A special goal is to consider the pieces in the aesthetic environment of their time, and to regard them as peculiar instances of the ›sonata principle‹, an ageless conception of musical form. The study is subdivided in three large parts, the first of which presents a summary of sonata composition before Medtner, exploring lines of tradition in Western Europe and Russia. The second part concentrates on Medtner’s musical language and its stylistic features. The third and most comprehensive part provides detailed examinations of eight of Medtner’s piano sonatas, including aspects of their genesis and reception, and making use of recent methods of musical analysis. / Die Dissertation widmet sich den frühen Klaviersonaten des russischen Komponisten Nikolaj Karlovič Metner (1880–1951), die im Kontext ihrer Gattungsgeschichte und im Vergleich mit Musik anderer Urheber betrachtet werden. Ein Hauptanliegen der multiperspektivischen Analysen ist es, den Werkkorpus in ästhetische Kontexte der Entstehungszeit einzubetten und die Einzelwerke als Spezialfälle des ›Sonatenprinzips‹, eines zeitlosen Formkonzepts, darzustellen. Die Studie gliedert sich in drei Sektionen, deren erste die Entwicklungen des Sonatenkomponierens vor Metner zusammenfasst und Traditionslinien in Westeuropa und Russland nachzeichnet. Der zweite Teil ist eine Darstellung der Tonsprache Metners und ihrer stilistischen Merkmale. Der dritte und umfangreichste Teil präsentiert Detailanalysen von acht Klaviersonaten Metners und untersucht die Notentexte mit Hilfe aktueller Analysemethoden.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the rapid growth of musical culture in Russia. This resulted in a large repertoire of piano music — ranging from miniatures to virtuosic etudes and sonatas. Growing out of the nineteenth century romantic tradition, and highly influenced by the social conditions of the time, Russian composers developed a distinctive style which closely reflected their culture, personalities and ideologies. There are several approaches to studying performance practice. One is to study the interpretations of other pianists. While this does have many advantages, it has not been adopted in this paper as it has one flaw: it still fails to capture the distinctive language of these composers. Rather, the paper will study the social and musical influences on the composers, and, more importantly, their philosophies about pianism and the purpose of music. This will be related to interpretative issues in the works. The repertoire has been divided into four areas. The paper commences with a study of the miniature, which is valuable in finding the ‘essence’ of a composer’s musical language expressed on a small scale. Here, the ‘elementary’ considerations in performance practice will be studied. The second chapter discusses etudes. This is useful in gaining an insight into composers’ conception of technique, and how this relates to performance practice. The third chapter deals with music that has extra-musical themes. This provides opportunity for a more detailed cultural and biographical study of the composers. To represent the large-scale repertoire of Russian composers, the sonata will be studied. Here, a detailed analysis of the composers’ musical language and its relationship to expression will be discussed. / Masters Thesis