The hardest thing in the world to accept is a death sentence. Creatively, I can think of two occasions when I felt that I was receiving one: the first occurred when I was a graduate student in a composition seminar, and Charles Dodge had just presented a new piece of his (coincidentally called Folia) which was written using all the latest twelve-tone serial techniques. After the presentation, the teacher announced: "this is the way all music will be written from now on." Considering that I was next to present and had a piano passacaglia in D minor in my bag, suddenly I was a dead duck. The second creative death knell sounded in 1985 when a visiting pianist asked me to play my new sonata (Piano Sonata no. 1): just as I was about to begin he proclaimed that "all the good piano music had already been written and that there was no need for any more."

Seven piano sonatas and two piano concertos later, I often think of those two events, especially in the light of "Il Trionfo della Folia," because this piece owes everything but its structure to the past. I was working on Piano Sonata No. 8 when I first met Walter Ponce, and he expressed considerable interest in the work. At that time I was not completely happy with the piece, but with Ponce's encouragement I got it hammered out as the kind of virtuoso vehicle that I had imagined it could be. Since the piece uses fragments at first, then complete phrases of the famous "Folia" theme and since the other materials trade on the gestures, if not real quotations from standard repertoire, I was justifiably concerned that the whole thing would come off merely as a bombastic rehash.

The real key to the piece is the integration of at least six kinds of musical complexes, all of which use intervals in varying orders from the "Folia" theme. Not until those ideas are fully fleshed out does "La Folia" emerge with its concomitant harmony and familiar bass. The real "trionfo" is that this familiar stuff becomes reborn in the integration of its variants. The piece is cast in a single movement to emphasize the continually developing and plastic nature of the musical materials.

CD's of the first three piano sonatas are available from Music&Arts Programs of America.

Paul Reale, November, 1997.