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the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry of

the West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000B South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

wunv.nga.gov

The Sixty-fifth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,611th Concert

Thomas Mastroianni, pianist

March 25, 2007

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

From Annees de pelerinage, deuxieme annee, Italie (1837-1849)

Sonetto 47 del Petrarca

Sonetto 104 del Petrarca

Sonetto 123 del Petrarca

Apres une lecture du Dante

INTERMISSION

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Preludes pour piano, Book 2 (1910-1912)

Brouillards

Feuilles mortes

La Puerta del Vino

Les Fees sont d’exquises danseuses

Bruyeres

General Lavine— Eccentric

La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune

Ondine

Hommage a S. Pickwick Esq., p.p.m.p.c.

Canope

Les Tierces alternees

Feux d'artifice

The Musician

Thomas Mastroianni is active as a chamber musician, concert soloist, lecturer, 

and recitalist throughout the United States and in Europe, Latin America,

Russia, South America, and the Far East. Fie recently performed with the

National Symphony Orchestra; appeared in Bulgaria, Italy, and Spain; and 

gave master classes, lectures, and recitals in New York City and Rio de

Janeiro. His many workshops and lecture-recitals have covered such topics 

as “Performance Anxiety,” “The Team Approach to Wellness for the Performer,” “Chopin and Bel Canto,” “The Italian Aspect of Liszt,” and “Musical

Memory.” Mastroianni spoke at the National Museum ofAmerican History’s

Piano 300 exhibition, and he has been a frequent preperformance lecturer at

WolfTrap Farm Park. He is a cofounder ofthe Amalfi Coast Music Festival

in Italy, where he teaches, performs, and gives master classes each summer.

Mastroianni’s interest in researching pianists’ physiological problems

has led him to work closely with members ofthe medical profession and

appear with them in workshops and panel discussions to present findings.

He has coauthored two articles on the problems of performing musicians’

with Richard Norris, md, and presented a series on wellness at the 2002

World Piano Pedagogy Conference. His article “Memory and Anxiety”

recently appeared in the International Societyfor the Study ofTension in

Performance Journal, published in London.

A native of Pittsburgh, Mastroianni earned bachelor and master ofscience 

degrees from The Juilliard School, where he was a scholarship student of

Beveridge Webster’s. After military service, he earned a doctorate in piano performance from Indiana University, where he worked with Sidney Foster and

Bela Nagy. Before becoming a professor emeritus ofpiano at The Benjamin T.

Rome School of Music at The Catholic University ofAmerica, he served there

as dean ofmusic for nine years and as chairman ofthe piano department for

twenty-five years. He previously served as chairman ofthe applied music division and professor ofpiano at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

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Program Notes

The first half ofthe program that Thomas Mastroianni has chosen explores

connections between the music of Franz Liszt and poetry, and the second 

half demonstrates some parallels between the music ofClaude Debussy and 

the aesthetics ofseveral visual artists whose works he knew.

Liszt read and admired the works ofthe great Renaissance poets Petrarch

and Dante, which were much on the composer’s mind as he wrote a musical 

“pilgrimage” based on his travels in Italy. The Petrarchan sonnets after which

three ofthe movements ofAnnies de pelerinage, deuxieme annee, Italie are

named are also among the texts that Liszt set for solo voice in the late 1830s.

The translations projected during the performance are not poetic renditions 

but are intended as faithful translations ofthe poetry Liszt realized in music.

Dante’s Divine Comedy was the inspiration for Apres une lecture du Dante

(After a Reading of Dante). During their Italian sojourn in the 1830s, Liszt

and Marie d’Agout were said to have read aloud to each other from Dante’s

masterpiece on a daily basis. The movement captures Liszt’s vision ofsuffering souls, salvation, and earthly love. Several interpreters of Liszt’s music

have recognized the symbolism in his use of pianistic figures, such as high

tremolo (a symbol for things celestial) and the tritone (a symbol for things

diabolical), and particularly key signatures. Following the poem’s course, 

the movement’s opening passage begins with tritone figures, recalling 

Dante’s gates ofhell, and concludes in the key of A-flat major, Liszt’s key

for earthly love. (A-flat major is also the key oftwo of Liszt’s important love

songs, Liebestraume (Dream of Love, 1839) and Pace non trovo (I Find No

Peace, 1839), the latter ofwhich provides another reference to Petrarch, 

since its text is his Sonnet 47.) The passage that follows the opening is

similar but finishes with a cadence in the key of B major, Liszt’s symbol

for salvation. In the course ofthese two briefintroductory passages, he 

presents three principal themes from the Divine Comedy—temptation, love,

and salvation—that are the essence ofthe entire work.

4

A quick sketch ofthe form of Apres une lecture (a single-movement 

sonata) reveals a manipulation oftonalities that grows out of Liszt’s exploration of Dante’s text. The exposition begins with a D-minor theme containing

serpentine chromaticism that suggests Dante’s chain ofsuffering souls. The

second theme includes majestic octaves in the key of F-sharp major, a key

totally unrelated to D minor, but one that also has symbolic connotations: it

represents heaven or eternal life. The third and final theme ofthe exposition

recalls the story of Francesca da Rimini, a contemporary of Dante’s whose 

sad story is recounted in the Divine Comedy. Liszt poignantly retells the story

of Francesca and her lover, who were doomed to experience heavenly bliss

for only a brieftime and then to suffer, using the key of F-sharp major. As

Dante expressed it, “There is no greater pain than to glimpse happiness

while in misery.”

The final element ofthe sonata, the recapitulation, also has a symbolic

undertone. It includes a fleeting glimpse ofthe exposition’s first theme, this

time in D major rather than D minor, where D major is the key Liszt used to

symbolize Jesus Christ. This theme fragment is also presented amid angelic

tremolos in the high register ofthe piano, resulting in a Wagnerian sound

that creates a glow not unlike those that artists of Liszt’s time frequently 

painted around the figure ofChrist. The third theme is also recapitulated 

in D major, and the piece ends firmly in this key.

Claude Debussy is popularly identified as the great impressionist composer. Fie was profoundly affected by the work of Edgar Degas, Edouard

Manet, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, even though

Debussy actively composed between 1895 and 1915, long after the impressionist period in art had waned. Although he was interested in the work of

contemporary artists, known today as post-impressionists (among them Paul

Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec),

Debussy’s personal art collection consisted ofJapanese woodcuts and copies

of paintings by J. M.W, Turner and James McNeill Whistler. Debussy and all

ofthe artists mentioned here had one very important interest in common: 

symbolist poetry and the philosophy behind it. They studiously read the

works of Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur

5
Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine, and subscribed to the theory of correspondences as set forth by Baudelaire, who maintained that all artistic endeavor 

is related and was fond ofsaying, “Music is poetry without words; art is

poetry without sound.”

Debussy assigned a word or phrase to each of his Preludes (and to many

of his other works as well) that generally refers to something other than

music—a scene, an aspect of human nature, or a phrase from a symbolist poem. He added these as postscripts, at the end of his musical scores,

using parentheses and ellipses to imply that the ideas were incidental or

peripheral. Some ofthe postscripts are quotes or characters from literature

that Debussy was reading when he wrote the Preludes: Les Fees sont d’exquises

danseuses is the title of an illustration in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington

Gardens (1906); S. Pickwick Esq. is the main character in Charles Dickens’

The Pickwick Papers (1836); and La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune is

a phrase from a description ofthe coronation of George v as emperor of

India in the December 1912 issue of Le Temps. La Puerta del Vino (The Wine

Gate) is one ofthe entrances to the Alhambra Palace in Grenada, a picture

postcard ofwhich Debussy received in 1910 from the Spanish composer

Manuel de Falla. It inspired Debussy to write a prelude with distinctly Spanish rhythms and a melody that imitates cantejondo, the wailing, mournful

singing offlamenco vocalists.

The images shown during Thomas Mastroianni’s performance of

Debussy's Preludes, Book 2, were selected by Stephen Aclcert, head ofthe 

National Gallery’s music department. They include paintings by Turner,

Whistler, and various impressionist artists, as well as illustrations and drawings from contemporary publications that Debussy might have had in mind

as he wrote the pieces.

Program notes on Liszt by Thomas Mastroianni

Program notes on Debussy by Stephen Ackert

6

Next Week at the National Gallery of Art

Mark Kosower, cellist

Jee-Won Oh, pianist

Ginastera, Cinco canciones populares argentinas, op.

Khachaturian, Sonata

Stroppa, Ay, There’s the Rub

Mendelssohn, Sonata no. 2 in D Major, op. 58

April 1, 2007

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court