The first time I heard this music, I was taken aback at how sad it begins, a textbook example of “sehnsucht,” a German word that means yearning, longing, and/or melancholic desire.
But the piece is not just a meditation on sadness. There is an enormous range of emotion in the music that follows including a stern and majestic section of trills (5:07) followed by a dreamy melody full of regret (5:58), a fleet middle part with a playful section marked “con delicatezza” (10:52), and finally a fugue (15:25) that starts in a slow boil, expanding massively until the entire edifice collapses upon itself with a shocking pivot to the opening melody one final time.
Here are Martha Argerich and Eduardo Delgado to play this masterpiece for you:
