Antoine Mariotte, Sonata in F-sharp minor (1906), II. Nocturne

Since my students are presenting their recitals through recordings of their rep, which we’ll watch in a viewing party tonight, I thought I’d put myself under the uncomfortable experience of recording again. Feeling like I’m in the oddest sort of quarantimes as I’m accosted by the aggressive bombination of construction as my area begins to open up today.

I was recently gifted a copy of this score, which is out of print. Along with Paul Dukas’s great E-flat minor sonata, it must rank among the finest, most ambitious piano sonatas of the French Romantic tradition, despite my never having heard of it prior to this year (it remains a highlight in an otherwise terrible year) and despite this less-than-laudatory description of him in The Guardian, clearly an attempt to use slick wit to mask ignorance:

“This French naval officer, whose small oeuvre has sunk without trace, abandoned the high seas and turned to composition and conducting. He was a pupil of the arch-conservative Vincent d’Indy. Another five operas aside, Mariotte’s main musical distinction seems to have been to write a piano sonata (1906) in the oddly underused key of F sharp minor – putting him in the same company as Koussevitzky and his double bass concerto, a red herring perhaps but we are in aquatic mood. Clearly, as a composer, Mariotte was small fry.”

Mariotte did enter naval school as a teenager and continued to long for a life in music as he sailed the high seas, going as far as South China. Finally, while in Europe, thanks to a kind Admiral, he had access to a piano, studied with Widor on a six-month leave, and left the navy for good in 1897. He read Wilde’s “Salome,” set it to music before Richard Strauss did, and entered a prolonged legal battle with him for the rights to produce it, which he finally did in 1908.

The expansive Nocturne, the second movement of the sonata, is notable for its demands for specific dynamic shadings in separate voices, for its onrush of filigree more heroic than Chopinesque, and for its gorgeous, lilting 10/8 section at the end. Think Fauré meets Wagner. Finally, the sonata has a special significance from the gifter, as my copy contains an inscription from Mariotte, who gifted it to her mother, a fine pianist.

Stay healthy everyone, and if Mariotte could be shipbound for years without an instrument, surely we can make it through the next weeks and months.