# Short Piano Pieces: Schubert to Stockhausen **Franz Schubert** (1797–1828) _Klavierstück in E-flat major, D 946 No. 2 (1828)_ **Johannes Brahms** (1833–1897) _Intermezzo in E-flat minor, Op. 118 No. 6 (1893)_ **Arnold Schoenberg** (1874–1951) _Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 (1911)_ **Karlheinz Stockhausen** (1928–2007) _Klavierstück III (1952)_ **Ludwig van Beethoven** (1770–1827) _Bagatelle in A major, Op. 119 No. 10 (c. 1822)_ This collection of short piano pieces tells a story. Schubert saw his last Autumn in 1828. Despite suffering extreme exhaustion and debilitating headaches, he summoned the strength to produce some of his best work: three sonatas, the C major String Quintet, the Schwanengesang, and this small piano piece. The draft lay in a drawer for forty years until it found its way into Brahms' hands, who saw its value and prepared it for publication. Brahms also turned to the small piano piece late in life. His lifelong friend and unfulfilled love, the pianist and composer Clara Schumann, was seventy-four and in declining health. The collection of _Intermezzos_ Op. 118 from 1893 was the last music he would send her. The sixth, marked _Andante, largo e mesto_ — slow, broad, and sad — is the darkest of the set. While some composers seem to paint with a broad brush, Brahms worked more like a jeweller. Every detail is crafted under a microscope, with larger structures built from small motives in continual variation. (A motive is a tiny musical idea.) Arnold Schoenberg picked up this baton and ran with it. He argued that Brahms's method was the future of music, and he weaved his own compositions into increasingly dense webs of motivic relationships. He was searching for a new style: a music with no figuration, no repetition, no 'filler,' a music where motivic relationships were everything. He found it in _Six Little Piano Pieces,_ which focused so completely on the motive that it left harmony behind. It was the first fully atonal composition. The sixth, nine measures long, was written under the shadow of Mahler's funeral; Schoenberg heard in it "the memory of bells," the end of an age. Stockhausen then picked up the baton from Schoenberg. Where Schoenberg organized all his pitches into dense webs, Stockhausen organized _everything_ – pitches, durations, dynamics, and articulations. His shortest work, _Klavierstück III_, was an experiment in this style. One thread runs through them all, from Schubert to Stockhausen — the desire to distill one's ideas into smaller, denser, and more potent brews. The set closes with Beethoven's shortest piece, the Tenth Bagatelle in A major, Op. 119, a reminder that the story, really, began with him.