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Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905) was a Cubano pianist and composer. In his youth he had contact with the eminent American pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) who sent Cervantes off to the Paris Conservatory. He returned to Cuba fully versed in European Romanticism, and he became a leading light in Cuba's musical life. Cervantes wrote dozens of brief pieces he called "Danzas Cubanas" that made be the best expression of his musical "creolism." The current pieces were published in 1899 by G. Schirmer of New York. I need to do more research on Cervantes and these pieces, for he will appear again on Musical Snacks.

For some persons Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) is no less important as a composer for piano than Chopin. Although his songs are part of the repertoire of every classical singer, the many piano works are not known quite as well, especially in America. This is too bad, for the music can be extraordinary. The little "song without words" is an early piece, written when Fauré was eighteen and just about perfect in its scope and execution. It gives only the barest hints of the depth of the music to come later.

Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" comprises 48 preludes and fugues, 24 in each of two books. Of the pieces in the first book, I have never heard the A major Prelude and Fugue performed outside of complete performances of Book I. The reason could be that the fugue is complicated and elusive with respect to its affect. Generally it is played rather slowly. Even Glenn Gould, known for sometimes outlandish tempos, took 2:22​ in his recording. I determined to try the fugue faster (1:48​) in hope of revealing a kind of Brownian motion quality. Sometimes an unusually fast tempo allows for a different sort of hearing; I'm thinking of things like Carlos Kleiber conducting Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or Van Halen doing "Hot for Teacher."

There is a thing called "ambient music." Look it up if you don't know what it is. I've always thought that the first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, if played too slowly in a very reverberant space, could constitute the greatest ambient piece ever created. In other words, Beethoven would be the Beethoven of ambient music. Here it is. A more appropriate version of the entire "Moonlight" Sonata will appear as a future Musical Snack.

Debussy's twelve etudes, constituting his last major work for piano, were largely neglected for decades after the composer's death. They were too advanced, too elusive to sit under the easy heading of "impressionist" music. Despite Debussy's general popularity I never heard even one of the etudes performed until my friend Craig Nies play the complete set for one of his graduate recitals (I still remember the phenomenal performance). Fortunately the tide of opinion has turned, and the etudes are gradually being viewed as among the most ambitious, audacious, and successful piano works composed in the twentieth century. Each of the twelve pieces comprehends a particular musical or pianistic issue. The present pieces ("for composite arpeggios") is next to last in the set and includes some of the most rapturous textures ever imagined for the piano. Debussy's inspiration is burning white hot.

This is Debussy's "Footprints in the Snow," one of the saddest and most beautiful pieces in music. It seemed appropriate for the snow of this tragic time. Will the countless victims of the pandemic be obscured and ultimately forgotten, as mere footprints in the snow? We cannot allow this.

At the outset of his career Johannes Brahms composed a set of four ballades for piano, published as Op. 10. It seems likely that some of the music was conceived during his teenage years. The fourth ballade is my favorite Brahms piece. Although replete with devices that reveal Brahms's expertise in composition, it is also the most Romantic thing he every wrote: elusive, ambiguous, genuinely open-ended. I can't even tell you what key it's in, not really, but it provokes emotions for which we do not have names.

Except for items published posthumously, Op. 15, No. 3, may be the least familiar of Chopin's 21 nocturnes for piano. It is very slow, perhaps mournful, and the second part seems to suggest a liturgical setting, complete with ancient modal elements. Its tragic beauty seems appropriate for the year 2020.

Schubert's eight impromptus were the original musical snacks, the ur-snacks, so to speak, short but substantial piano pieces in varying forms. He published them in two sets of four. The first set, Op. 90, contains the best-known items, but the present Impromptu in A flat from the second set is popular as well. Interesting to note that "impromptu" was not Schubert's name but came from the publisher. In his chronological catalog of Schubert's works Otto Erich Deutsch assigned the number 935 to this set and gave its year of composition as 1827, the year before the composer died. Musicians and writers often have described presentiments of death in some of Schubert's later works (or maybe he was just having a bad day). There is none of that in this lovely, perfect lyric piece, with outer sections that sing and a middle section that flows as a cool, clear mountain stream.

Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831) was a Polish composer and pianist who probably studied with Chopin's teacher Elsner and who definitely worked with John Field, the Irish composer/pianist associated with the nocturne. Szymanowska was also mother-in-law of Adam Mickiewicz, the national poet of Poland, and likely the mistress of Goethe.

There is divided opinion about how much her music influenced Chopin, but you can't miss the connection (and Chopin was born twenty-one years later). The Nocturne in B flat is undated, but in some respects it recalls Field's most familiar piece, his own nocturne in the same key. Nonetheless, there is some unkempt energy here of a sort absent in Field and Chopin. The coda (the last bit, starting around 3:15 in this video) is to die for. Szymanowska was significant for various reasons and we are fortunate that her music is being reprinted and recorded.