About this Piece

Nikolai Medtner was steeped in Russia’s late-Romantic musical culture from childhood. Born in 1880, he began his piano studies at age 6 and graduated from Moscow Conservatory with top honors in 1900, eight years after his fellow composer-pianist Rachmaninoff. A few years later, he abandoned a promising career as a touring virtuoso and teacher to focus on composition. His extensive catalog of works––all written for the piano, either solo or in ensemble––include 14 sonatas, three concertos, and dozens of short character pieces, plus assorted chamber works and more than 100 songs. Deeply conservative in both his musical aesthetics and his social outlook, Medtner opposed the Bolshevik regime and left Russia for good in 1921; he spent the last years of his self-imposed exile in London, pining for the homeland that had turned its back on him.

Medtner’s musical language was fully developed by the turn of the 20th century, when he composed the Sonata in F minor, and changed but little thereafter. It was grounded in a Romantic conception of harmony and form, which he considered essentially synonymous. “Form (the construction of a musical work) is harmony,” Medtner wrote. “Every musician who wants to penetrate into the mystery of musical construction will find himself standing before the closed door of any (even the simplest) construction, if he does not have the necessary key––the fundamental sense of harmony.” Despite their characteristically turbulent chromaticism, the first and last movements of the Op. 5 Sonata are securely anchored in F minor. A no less important structural element is Medtner’s use of recurring motifs, such as the descending six-note melody that serves as the second theme of the opening sonata-form Allegro. (Listen for it again in the Finale, which consists almost entirely of material presented earlier in the sonata.) The air of spiritual unease that haunts the portentous, march-like Intermezzo is partly dispelled by the religious intensity of the ensuing slow movement, marked divoto (devout).

—Harry Haskell © 2026 Carnegie Hall