Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) wrote his Three Piano Sonatas, Op. 10 at the turning point between two major stages of his life. He was no longer the young Viennese virtuoso of 1795–1796, but he was not yet the composer whose name would shake up the music world of the early 19th century. Back then, Vienna knew him as a brilliant improviser and an assertive personality who was fascinating and terrifying his contemporaries in the salon of Prince Lichnowsky. Describing his playing, Carl Czerny wrote: “He does not play the piano, he speaks through it.” This rhetorical power is also reflected in his Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10, No. 3 (1797–1798), which clearly shows Beethoven ceasing to understand the piano sonata as an elegant genre for high society, instead turning it into a dramatic architectural form capable of expressive depth. The first edition, issued in 1798, was received with respect, but the response was unambiguous: in periodicals, some reviewers admired the “power of the ideas”, while others complained about “unheard-of coarseness”.

The explosive first movement contains everything the composer would so often employ in later works: restless, fragmentary motifs, sudden dynamic shifts, dramatic expression, and radiantly energetic rhythm. In the second movement (Largo e mesto), Beethoven creates the spiritual world that we are more familiar with from his late string quartets: chromatic harmonies, sorrowful dissonances, melodies that sound like a songful expression of quiet suffering, and long phrases that do not allow themselves to be broken. It is here that Beethoven’s sense of tragedy was born. The following Menuet brings relief, yet it is elaborated with masterful delicacy. Beethoven also wrote a highly sophisticated finale. After the dark Largo, the joy of playing is restored, but from the very beginning, the virtuosic action is a spirited dialogue arising from questions that resound in perfectly composed pauses. The Sonata in D Major is a work in which the young virtuoso becomes a thinker at the piano, a formal dramatist, and an architect of musical language. In it, Beethoven is for the first time speaking his own language fully—a language that the whole musical world would soon come to know.

While Beethoven was a fiery, outspoken, and blunt extrovert whose music, ranging from piano sonatas to monumental symphonies, was aimed at the public sphere, Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) represented almost the exact opposite: an introverted, restrained, and deeply sensitive poet of the piano who chose almost exclusively the intimate sound of a single instrument instead of the orchestra. Chopin was a special kind of genius: an unassuming but radically innovative musician.

It was the mazurka that stood at the foundation of his musical identity. That dance stayed with Chopin from the moment when, as a boy, he was listening to a village band, until his years of exile in Paris, when it represented a lifeline to his homeland. Around the year 1830, the Polish public began to envision Chopin, a 20-year-old musical genius at the time, as the creator of Poland’s national school of opera, the ideal composer to lead Polish music into its great Romantic epoch. However, Chopin was headed in a different direction: it was for the piano rather than the operatic stage that he created his nation’s musical language. In the course of three decades, he wrote no less than 58 mazurkas. Each is a miniature world, a “diary”, and a laboratory for compositional experiments. “The mazurkas contain everything that I feel”, wrote Chopin in a letter. For this reason, he devoted himself to the mazurka all his life. It was his memory, his homeland in exile, his language of feelings, an image of Poland, and ultimately even his quiet testament. The Mazurka in F Minor, Op. 68, No. 4 (1849) is Chopin’s very last completed work. With its tenderness and its unresolved form, it stands as an epitaph to the mazurka and to Chopin’s life.

Robert Schumann (1810–1856) was one of Romanticism’s most mysterious figures: a man with exceptional musical and literary gifts, a fragile psyche, and a brilliant imagination. All of those attributes are interwoven into the cycle Kreisleriana. Already by 1832, he noted in his diary: “I’m torn between music and poetry”, adding: “Music is my second language—and often the truer one.” This duality gave rise to a cycle sometimes called the first work for piano to function like a psychological novel. Schumann’s inspiration was the author and musical aesthete E. T. A. Hoffmann, with his conception of Romantic fantasticality, his duality of artistic personality, and his ideal of “inward listening”. Hoffmann’s literary figure of the Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler—a brilliant, moody, and restless musician—had become the composer’s altar ego. In 1838, torn apart by his separation from Clara, Schumann composed this cycle of almost excruciating intensity. To Clara he wrote: “All of Kreisleriana is a frenzy for you”, and even more urgently: “Everything I write is for you; you are the music within me.” Clara replied cautiously, however: “I’m having a hard time finding my orientation in Kreisleriana”, whereupon Schumann succinctly expressed the music’s essence: “It’s madness—but I’m like that, too.”

The cycle consists of eight movements—individual embodiments of Kreisler—that alternate between Schumann’s dual aspects: the mercurial Florestan (1, 3, 5, 7) and dreamy Eusebius (2, 4, 6, 8). The music of two souls in one body climaxes in the demonically fierce seventh movement (Sehr rasch), while the conclusion drifts away into the mists. Some critics of the period already went to the very heart of Schumann’s new kind of pianistic poetry: “Restless, nervous, almost impossible to grasp”, “too much introspection and too little form”. In his new work, Schumann was said to have demonstrated “peerless imagination and a new world of pianistic expression.” Today, Schumann’s Kreisleriana is rightly regarded as a pivotal work in cyclical form, in which the composer created one of his most intimate artistic statements.

Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was a phenomenon who defined his era not only through music, but also by the presence, energy, and societal aura that made him one of the most prominent European figures of the 19th century. As a pianist, he represented something his contemporaries regarded as unprecedented: “Liszt has a god-like touch at the piano”, wrote Berlioz admiringly after one performance. In later life, Liszt showed a different face as a theorist, conductor, concert organiser, spiritual thinker, and supporter of musical modernists. However, his musical world remained grounded in the landscape of his childhood—Hungary. “These Hungarian Rhapsodies are just a stylised echo of what I heard in my childhood”, he wrote in 1853, when the pieces appeared in print. The words “stylised echo” are important: Liszt was not a folklore expert, but rather an artist. What he considered “Hungarian” music was actually the style of urban Gypsy bands, characterized by verbunkos, csárdás, improvisatory rubato, and virtuosic ornamentation. He clearly formulated this himself: “What I wanted to create was not a work of ethnography, but instead a poem for the piano on Hungarian themes.”

The Hungarian Rhapsodies therefore are not folklore, but rather a myth about folklore—a Romantic stylisation of passion, national pride, and wild freedom. Audiences of the 19th century loved them. The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C sharp Minor (1847) represents the pinnacle of this Lisztian stylisation. It is based on the contrast between a slow dance (lassan) and a fast one (friska) in an entirely free form that Liszt chose deliberately: “In rhapsodies, I seek the freedom that eludes usual forms.” Rhapsody No. 12 remains a fascinating legend in sound, in which Liszt transformed the Hungary he remembered into grand Romantic theatre.