Music and Arts' Anton Eberl: The Complete Sonatas for Solo Piano represents a triumph of dedicated scholarship on the part of fortepianist
John Khouri that stretches back more than five decades. Intrigued with a piano sonata attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but not believed to be written by him,
Khouri finally discovered that the sonata was the work of an alleged Mozart pupil, Anton Eberl, about whom little was known, but who did not outlive his master by even two decades. Once armed with this information,
Khouri went on the hunt for whatever he could find of Eberl's major keyboard music, and Anton Eberl: The Complete Sonatas for Solo Piano is the result.
One thing that is striking here is that
Khouri has located a composer who is clearly a key transitional figure between classical and romantic keyboard music, easily the equal of Jan Ladislav Dussek and more forward thinking than Muzio Clementi.
Khouri discovered in short measure that rather like Eberl's younger contemporary Joseph Wölfl -- who was close to Beethoven and studied with both Mozarts pére and fils -- Eberl had developed a posthumous inferiority complex owing to the way his music was handled by "experts" long after his death and to long-held assessments of its relative quality. Undaunted by such ego-driven half-interest,
Khouri scoured the libraries of Europe to find the six sonatas, sonatina, fantasy, and toccata heard here. He plays them on two rare period instruments, a Jacob Pfister instrument from ca. 1820 and a copy made by Kandik and Belt of an eighteenth century pedal piano, an instrument well known to Mozart but out of use by the mid-nineteenth century.
What an extraordinary discovery this is -- what
Khouri reveals is that this music sounds nothing like Beethoven, but that Eberl maintained his close contact with the influence of Mozart as long as he continued to compose, but gradually expanded it into a romantic idiom by virtue of expanded development schemes and adopting his technique to the newer six-octave pianos available after 1800, the likes of which Mozart never lived to see. The later sonatas, ergo, give us a hint of what Mozart might have done in the realm of the piano sonata had he lived a decade or two longer.
Khouri plays with tremendous enthusiasm, and the recording captures these obscure keyboard instruments in a pleasantly reverberant ambience without losing the sound of the instrument or bringing it so close that we can hear the clatter of every moving mechanism on it.
While this is a worthwhile endeavor in every way, special attention should be paid to the extraordinary grand Sonata in G minor, Op. 39, written in honor of Grand Duchess Maria Paulowna, aunt to Princess Sophie of the Netherlands and a significant patroness of musicians. In its day, this sonata was recognized as "among the most attractive, most brilliant, most difficult works of this composer" and hardly seems less so now; the level of challenge is indeed very high and it is an important rediscovery; with all due respect to
Khouri's titanic effort on the Pfister Grand, one is nonetheless curious as to how this would sound on a modern grand.
The passage, in the wake of the French revolution, of classical style into the romantic around 1800 was one of the most pivotal and cataclysmic events in the history of Western music, and dozens of composers were deep in the thick of its development. By causing the broad shoulders of Beethoven to bear the weight of this entire historic development, past musicologists did a poor job evaluating what happened in the period and who was involved.
Khouri has done more than merely take out the trash in recording Anton Eberl: The Complete Sonatas for Solo Piano and making this music available; he has filled in a fitful, stubbornly missing piece of the puzzle in Western canon that anyone concerned with its history should be glad to find in place once again.