Prof. Dr. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf

The pianist Johannes Kiem makes the impossible a reality: Wagnerian ‘Tristan harmony’ at the pianistic level of Liszt’s B minor sonata – live, composed in real time using themes called out by the audience. He often operates between the poles of Liszt and Wagner, who once stated: ‘since becoming acquainted with Liszt’s compositions, I have turned into an entirely different fellow harmonically than I was before’. If the pieces that come into being during his concerts were to be notated and subjected to music-theoretical analysis, we would see that Johannes Kiem rigorously employs the compositional techniques and vivid piano textures of the 19th century.

The musical motifs presented to him are developed and treated with the full means of Wagnerian harmonic alteration. We hear mediant relationships and enharmonic modulations, both tritone substitutions and enharmonic scale degree models, the half-diminished chord as a long-range axis, as well as reinterpretive modulations via the Neapolitan sixth. And finally there is chromaticism, which opens up infinite possibilities of harmonic movement. Accordingly, where the starting motif allows it, there are explorations of tonal boundaries as in early Schönberg or Alban Berg, impressionist layering techniques or the ‘constant enharmonic modulation’ of Scriabin’s middle period.

What Kiem conjures up is shaped by the compositional models of the 19th-century piano composers – Chopin, Liszt or Scriabin. The ‘unstationary’ piano technique of Franz Liszt (who, like Chopin, was also a ‘live improviser’) is especially evident. This leads to passagework techniques and sequential models, augmentations and extensions, as well as polyphonic structures through appearances of the thematic material in the inner and lower voices. The virtuoso character is defined by eruptive outbursts and archaic irruptions, coupled with a Lisztian profundity in the unprofound (and vice versa). Dance-like rhythmic tension and nonchalant shadiness, where called for, round out the dynamic character of the pieces.

On the other hand, Kiem’s choices of form and piano texture are dependent on the respective starting motif, which means that moments recalling Chopin’s Nocturnes can appear as easily as a stylistic drift towards Scriabin’s fluid piano writing. Accordingly, musical shape is modulated in ever new, multi-faceted ways using the given themes.

As a result, one hears neither academic style exercises nor simply motifs wrapped in jazz and Latin grooves or ready-made Baroque-Classical models, but rather strict constructions in which virtuoso concert pieces of original quality are composed in real time. The resulting pieces are multi-layered works of music. The notion of improvisation as conventionally understood is quite inadequate to characterise them; it only expresses helplessness and is, strictly speaking, incorrect. Instead, with great pianistic sensitivity, fuelled by the spirit of Wagnerian harmony and the character of 19th-century piano aesthetics, formally closed pieces are born which satisfy all requirements of composition – with the particularity that we have never heard any of them before. Every one is a premiere.

Prof. Dr. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf
(Professor of Composition at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Academy of Music and Theatre, Leipzig)

Translation: Wieland Hoban.