Piano Sonatas (Boulez) - Third Piano Sonata

Third Piano Sonata

The Third Piano Sonata was first performed by the composer in Cologne and Darmstadt in 1958, in a "preliminary version" of its five-movement form. One motivating force for its composition was Boulez's desire to explore aleatoric music. He published several writings, both criticizing the practice and suggesting its reformation, leading up to the composition of this sonata in 1955–57/63. Boulez has published only two complete movements of this work (in 1963), and a fragment of another (in Universal Edition 1967), the other movements having been written up to various stages of elaboration but not completed to the composer's satisfaction. Of the unpublished movements (or "formants", as Boulez calls them), described in Edwards 1989, the one titled "Antiphonie" is the most fully developed. It has been analysed by Pascal Decroupet (2004, 152–59). The formant titled "Strophe" is the one least developed since the preliminary form but:

a 1958 radio tape of the composer's Cologne performance of the Third Piano Sonata shows that the wealth of cross-reference introduced by the inclusion of the other three movements, even in their preliminary versions, contributes exponentially to the complex, multiform effect of the whole. (Edwards 1989, 5–6)

A facsimile of the manuscript of the preliminary version of the remaining formant, "Séquence", was published in Schatz and Strobel 1977, but was subsequently continued to nearly twice its original length (Edwards 1989, 4).

1. "Antiphonie" (unpublished except for a fragment, called "Sigle" )
2. "Trope"
3. "Constellation" (published only in its retrograde version, as "Constellation-Miroir")
4. "Strophe" (unpublished)
5. "Séquence" (unpublished, except for a facsimile of the preliminary-version manuscript)