# J.N.Hummel - Piano Sonata in F Minor



## Daria (Dec 14, 2010)

Hello everyone! My name is Daria Gloukhova. My favourite composer is J.N.Hummel.
This is my recordings of Hummel`s Piano Sonata in F Minor:












What do you think about this?


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## Efraim (Jun 19, 2009)

Dear Daria,

I am happy to be the first who answers you. Although I can't say that Hummel is my favourite composer, he is a truly great composer I discovered only a few months ago: I turned on the radio and someone was playing an astonishing work I was unable to attribute to any of the famous composers. This was Hummel's Sonata in F Sharp Minor. Now I have it on CD together with the sonata you are playing here and an even earlier sonata (op. 13). The name of the pianist is Hae Won Chang. Your interpretation of the Sonata in F Minor I have just found and listened to on Youtube.

Unfortunately I am in no way a musician but simply a mad music lover, nevertheless I gladly impart my impressions to you if you are interested in them. After all interpreters don’t play only for specialists. 

The sonata in F Minor is modest in purpose and shape compared to that in F Sharp minor, which is a huge masterpiece, nothing less ambitious than Schumann’s best opuses and superior to them as to the perfection of the elaboration. During the first weeks I had the disc I listened almost exclusively F Sharp. Eventually I realized that the F Minor, with all its relative modesty, is also a perfect work: its emotional intensity and esthetical interest, though rather narrow in scope, never weaken for a while, which does happen even in the greatest works of Schumann and some others giants.

Hae Won Chang’s playing is enjoyable, but as far as I can see it, it hardly adds anything personnel to the works. Yours is at the opposite end of the scale: for you the score is but a raw material which you use to create a new work, with a fully personnel meaning and emotionally a lot more intense than what I thought was Hummel’s sonata… You copiously use crescendos, decrescendos, unexpected acceleratings, slowings down and other possibilities of expression the names of which I don’t know and which I suppose have not been prescribed by the author (if they had been Chang would follow them too). In other words, your playing is extremely personnel, subjective. What is interesting, in the whole I don’t like this kind of exceedingly subjective – thus, arbitrary - interpretations, therefore I should have to prefer Chang’s matter of fact reading, but your playing subjugated me… it is fully convincing. (With your reading of Mozart’s Fantasy you did it less: I think a work so over-loaded with unveiled emotions need not be “over-interpreted”.) I like a lot your Hummel… 

I would like to hear you playing Hummel’s F Sharp Minor Sonata. Do you play it?

I assume you are Russian and learned piano in Russia. Am I right?


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## Daria (Dec 14, 2010)

Many thanks for your extensive comment! Unfortunately, I have great difficulty with English. Should I use a Google-translator.
In fact, I'm very skeptical about the F-sharp minor Sonata. Personally for me, music of Hummel - a classic, but romanticized. And this Sonata - a clear imitation of Schumann, which makes Hummel's not so attractive.

As for me, I live in Moscow, and studied here.


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## Efraim (Jun 19, 2009)

Dear Daria,

Hummel's Sonata in F Sharp was written in 1818, when Schumann was only 8 years old, so it can not be an imitation of Schumann. On the contrary, this is an astonishing anticipation, indeed a prophecy, of what music was to become _after_ Beethoven and Schubert. Think that this sonata was written even _before /I] Beethoven's and Schubert's last 3 or 4 piano sonatas!

But I don't like it because of the date of its writing. This is a huge masterpiece. Schumann himself played or tried to play it, and I think it directly influenced both his and Brahms' sonata in the same key. I *beg you* to look after it closer! I beg you for your sake! It would be absurd that while your favourite composer is Hummel you don't like the very work that is looked upon as his greatest.

Best wishes_


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## Daria (Dec 14, 2010)

Dear Efraim!
I know the date of writing of both sonatas. But. There's something wrong. And I have very big doubts about the authorship of Hummel. Again, this is my subjective opinion, but it is based on a detailed study of Hummel`s creativity .


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## Efraim (Jun 19, 2009)

Your doubts about Hummel's authorship are entirely understandable, this sonata seems really to have been written by a different composer, and in a different musical environment. You should write and published a study on your stylistical analysis of it! But Schumann couldn't possibly have written this sonata, nor could Liszt or Chopin, for simple time-related reasons. As far as I know, no doubt was ever raised as to whether this is a genuine work of Hummel: it was published in 1818 as his work. If you say that in fact Beethoven or Schubert wrote it, you didn't solve the riddle, you only replaced it by another riddle.

Do you think the sonata _seems_ as a simple imitation of Schumann? I don't have this impression. Of course I can base my contention on no analysis, not being a musician. Don't you think the work has something clearly classical about itself, notwithstanding its explosive romantic spirit? Schumann's sonatas are of four movements while with its 3 movements Hummel's remains in Haydn's tradition in this respect, and also, I think, with respect to the clarity, the straightforwardness and the virtuosity of the elaboration. The whole work is sweeping like a work of Haydn, without Schumann's inevitable lingering between his outbursts.

And apart of that, even if it would be purely an imitation, why should it lessen its merit? I know Hummel's piano concertos only superficially but as far as I do know some of them, it is easy to mix them up with Mozart's. Do you like them less for this reason?

By the way, I am fond of a handful of works of Schumann, especially of the Opp. 17, 16, 4, 6, 11, 13... What do you play from Schumann? Do you play Haydn? I am all mad about his sonatas. Do you play Beethoven's Op. 106? In the last movement of Hummel's sonata I had the impression you do.


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