page_title: Charles-Valentin Alkan
section_title: Style
hierarchical_section_title: Charles-Valentin Alkan / Music / Style
caption_attribution_description: English: Extract from second movement of Alkan's Grande sonate 'Les quatre ages' op. 33
context_page_description: Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French-Jewish composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.
  Alkan earned many awards at the Conservatoire de Paris, which he entered before he was six. His career in the salons and concert halls of Paris was marked by his occasional long withdrawals from public performance, for personal reasons. Although he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Parisian artistic world, including Eugène Delacroix and George Sand, from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing with his compositions – virtually all of which are for the keyboard. During this period he published, among other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys and all the minor keys. The latter includes his Symphony for Solo Piano and Concerto for Solo Piano, which are often considered among his masterpieces and are of great musical and technical complexity.
context_section_description: "Like ... Chopin", writes pianist and academic Kenneth Hamilton, "Alkan's musical output was centred almost exclusively on the piano". Some of his music requires extreme technical virtuosity, clearly reflecting his own abilities, often calling for great velocity, enormous leaps at speed, long stretches of fast repeated notes, and the maintenance of widely spaced contrapuntal lines. The illustration (right) from the Grande sonate is analysed by Smith as "six parts in invertible counterpoint, plus two extra voices and three doublings – eleven parts in all." Some typical musical devices, such as a sudden explosive final chord following a quiet passage, were established at an early stage in Alkan's compositions.
  Macdonald suggests that
  unlike Wagner, Alkan did not seek to refashion the world through opera; nor, like Berlioz, to dazzle the crowds by putting orchestral music at the service of literary expression; nor even, as with Chopin or Liszt, to extend the field of harmonic idiom. Armed with his key instrument, the piano, he sought incessantly to transcend its inherent technical limits, remaining apparently insensible to the restrictions which had withheld more restrained composers.
  However, not all of Alkan's music is either lengthy or technically difficult; for example, many of the Op. 31 Préludes and of the set of Esquisses, Op. 63.
  Moreover, in terms of structure, Alkan in his compositions sticks to traditional musical forms, although he often took them to extremes, as he did with piano technique. The study Op. 39, no. 8 (the first movement of the Concerto for solo piano) takes almost half an hour in performance. Describing this "gigantic" piece, Ronald Smith comments that it convinces for the same reasons as does the music of the classical masters; "the underlying unity of its principal themes, and a key structure that is basically simple and sound."
  Some of Alkan's music gives hints of the obsessiveness which some have detected in his personality. The Chant Op. 38, no. 2, entitled Fa, repeats the note of its title incessantly (in total 414 times) against shifting harmonies which make it "cut ... into the texture with the ruthless precision of a laser beam." In modelling his five sets of Chants on the first book of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, Alkan ensured that the pieces in each of his sets followed precisely the same key signatures, and even the moods, of the original. Alkan was rigorous in his enharmonic spelling, occasionally modulating to keys containing double-sharps or double-flats, so pianists are occasionally required to come to terms with unusual keys such as E♯ major, the enharmonic equivalent to F major, and the occasional triple-sharp.
caption: Extract from the second movement of the sonata Les quatre âges Op. 33, displaying one of Alkan's most complex musical textures
exif: {}