LES ADIUEX

The title Les Adieux refers first to Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 81a — a work that names farewell, absence, and return in its three movements. Yet this programme treats that farewell as more than an external event. It asks what remains afterwards: memory, consolation, unrest, mist — and finally the possibility of light returning.

Beethoven’s sonata Op. 81a arose around the departure of Archduke Rudolph from Vienna during the Napoleonic occupation of 1809. Its movements bear the programmatic titles The Farewell, Absence, and The Return. Unlike many later Romantic farewell works, it does not remain in lament. It traces an arc — from the painful moment of leaving, through the inner emptiness of absence, to the eruptive joy of return — and so becomes the conceptual point of departure for the entire evening.

On this explicitly named farewell follows Brahms’s Intermezzo in E-flat major, Op. 117 No. 1, a more inward form of remembering. Brahms prefaced it with lines from a Scottish ballad: “Sleep softly, my child, sleep soft and fair.” The intermezzo is no dramatic lament but a cradle-song, in which consolation, tenderness, and melancholy are inseparably bound — the first echo of the farewell, no longer an event but an inner state.

Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133 carry this introspection to a still more fragile place. Among his last piano works, written in 1853 shortly before the final collapse of his mental health, the title seems to promise morning light and renewal. Yet this dawn is not simply bright. The music feels like light shining through uncertainty and mental distance: morning is here, but not yet clear. The first half closes not with certainty, but with a sensitive, almost metaphysical openness.

The second half opens with Janáček’s cycle In the Mists. With Janáček the world turns blurred, groping, brittle; the music speaks in short gestures, interruptions, and condensed fragments of memory. It searches more than it narrates — for orientation, for language, for solid ground. After the farewell, the memory, and the uncertain morning, the mist stands as an image of an inner landscape where past and present flow into one another.

Weinberg’s Lullaby, Op. 1 takes up the cradle-song idea in a different historical world. Born in Warsaw in 1919, Weinberg fled the National Socialists into the Soviet Union in 1939; his family was murdered in the Holocaust. His early lullaby appears here not as biographical illustration but as a fragile human voice after the mist — more exposed, lonelier, more vulnerable than Brahms’s; not a sentimental resting point, but a quiet remnant of humanity.

The evening closes with Beethoven’s late sonata Op. 110. After the outward farewell of Op. 81a, Beethoven returns as the composer of an inner homecoming. The sonata begins songfully, almost simply, yet leads into one of the most shattering passages in the literature: the Arioso dolente, a lament of great vulnerability. From it the fugue arises — an attempt to regain order and strength; it breaks off, sinks back, and finally rises in inverted form with heightened energy.

For precisely this reason the sonata is no easy triumph. Its light is not naïve — it is born of interruption, lament, and exhaustion. At the end stands not the erasure of pain but its transformation into movement, form, and vital force. So Op. 110 answers the farewell of the first Beethoven sonata on a deeper level: not only does the absent one return, but the inner voice, too, finds its way back to itself.