Debussy's Petite Suite
began as a piece for piano, four hands, and was later recast for full
orchestra. The practice of reusing materials, translating them for
different media, was not new, of course. J.S. Bach often reused entire
movements, transferring them from one cantata to another, refreshing
them by changing the orchestration or perhaps the vocal quality of the
soloist. In the nineteenth century, it was also quite common for
composers to allow their works to be orchestrated by another
musician. The reworking of Petite Suite
for orchestra was accomplished not by Debussy himself, but by Henri
Büsser, a slightly younger French composer who was noted for his
orchestration skills. It has since been frequently arranged -- for
clarinets, for harp, for brass -- and is much loved as one of Debussy's
most appealingly melodic short pieces.
In its original form for piano, Petite Suite
was first performed on February 2, 1889 by Debussy in collaboration
with the pianist-publisher Jacques Durand. The work has a simple
lyricism that contrasts with much of the composer's music from the late
1880's, which was marked by trend-setting harmonies and colors that
drew the wrath of contemporary critics for being "too
modernistic." It may in fact originally have been written,
possibly at the suggestion of Durand, for the skilled amateur musicians
who commanded a great deal of attention at this period, and who
demanded chamber music that they could master. The piece in any
case is designed to entertain and delight.
There are four separate movements, each originally crafted to give equal opportunities to both pianists. En bateau,
or "In a Boat," the first movement, has an exquisite melody that is
accompanied by broken chords that clearly suggest ripples, eddies, and
whirlpools in water. Simple though it may be, this movement
actually uses one of the signature elements of Debussy's later harmonic
style—the wholetone scale. The next movement, entitled Cortège,
reminds the listener of a festival parade, a marching band processing
past in an exhilarating rush of musical pageantry. The beautiful Minuet
follows, and is pure musical magic. The Suite's most memorable
movement, it suggests the musical equivalent of elves at
play. In two of its passages, Debussy treats the melody in
parallel tenths, creating an eerie, open sound and foreshadowing a
compositional technique that he was later to exploit further. The
final movement is an energetic, festive dance movement with the title Ballet.
Cuatro estaciones porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) for violin and strings.
When
music lovers world-wide hear the phrase "The Four Seasons," they
immediately associate it with Antonio Vivaldi's memorable work.
Vivaldi ingeniously uses a colorful, programmatic musical language to
interweave natural topics into a tapestry of sound that infuses the
listener with the sense that they are there
– that they are actually experiencing each season in turn.
Composers ever since have referenced his masterpiece; and Astor
Piazzolla was to join their ranks when he composed his own Cuatro estaciones porteñas.
Piazzolla was a marvelous composer with a distinctive musical sound
that combined jazz and the Argentinian tango of his native land
together with classical forms and twentieth century harmonic
ideas. His music is filled with exciting rhythms that seem to
insist that the listener dance to their hypnotic beat, and with
luscious harmonies that incorporate dissonance yet remain largely
tonal. He was without question Argentina's greatest cultural
export, both as an unprecedented virtuoso on his chosen instrument, the
bandoneon—a large button accordion that is a common folk instrument in
Latin American countries—and as a composer. Most notably, he
single-handedly took the tango, an earthy, sensual, often disreputable
folk music that he enjoyed as a child, and elevated it into a
sophisticated form of high art. The term nuevo tango was coined to designate the modernization of the tango by Piazzolla and his followers.
The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires
is an extraordinarily interesting work. In its final shape, it
takes a tango-inspired work by Piazzolla and combines it with elements
easily recognizable from Vivaldi's model. Not only does it share
with Vivaldi the general concept of depicting four seasons in music; it
also presents a solo violin featured within an orchestral texture in
highly virtuosic style. Yet initially, this work was written for a folk
ensemble, not at all for virtuoso violin. The first to perform it was
the composer's own folk/chamber ensemble, specialists in nuevo tango.
In 1991 Jaques Morelenbaum arranged the work for a woodwind quintet,
three cellos, and a double bass; and it was recorded for an album
called The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.
The title paid obvious homage to Vivaldi's idea. Nevertheless,
there was still no solo violin part in either the folk ensemble version
or the classical chamber music version of the piece, and neither
version made harmonic or melodic references to Vivaldi. Finally,
in the late 1990's, Leonid Desyatnikov arranged the classical chamber
music version for full string orchestra with solo violin, and included
obvious allusions to Vivaldi's Four Seasons. This is the version of the work we will hear today.
Desyatnikov's linkages to Vivaldi are ingenious. For instance,
when it is summer in Argentina, Piazzolla's homeland, it is winter in
Italy, Vivaldi's homeland. To recognize this, Desyatnikov took
Piazzolla's Summer movement and skillfully wove direct quotes from Vivaldi's Winter
movement into the texture of the music. For those familiar with
Vivaldi's music, the insertion is obvious and creates a delightful
"Ah-HA" moment of recognition. Listeners unfamiliar with the Vivaldi
work may miss this fun; but they will still respond to the exciting
rhythmic momentum established by Piazzolla's tango-inspired rhythmic
pulse and Desyatnikov's skillfully orchestrated arrangement.
Piazzolla was an experimenter. Expressive dissonances and abrupt
shifts in tempo and meter are elements of his style that demand the
audience's concentration and yet continually delight the
imagination. Desyatnikov has taken those elements and transferred
them into the world of the virtuoso violin concerto. Various
special effects on the instruments required to perform this work
continually entertain and amaze us. The extraordinarily difficult
solo violin part is played sometimes using the bow hair, and at other
times the wooden part of the bow. In all four movements, the string
instruments turn into an extended percussion section, and then revert
to a more traditional style.
In Vivaldi's The Four Seasons,
each season includes three short movements. Piazzolla's variation gives
each season only one movement. Each of Piazzolla's seasons,
however, contains several sections that depict different moods within
the single movement. The Summer
movement, for example, contrasts the sassy, rhythmic tango with
remnants of the Italian Baroque. An extended, melancholy cello solo
dominates the first section of the Fall season. Slow, sultry, yet intensely rhythmic, Winter
gives the solo violinist the perfect opportunity for cadenza-like
displays of virtuosity. Even more quotes from Vivaldi, this time from
his Summer, are woven seamlessly into Piazzolla's intensely emotional Winter tango. In contrast, Spring in Buenos Aires is filled with excitement and a rhythmic electricity that propels the work to its brilliant conclusion.
Cuatro estaciones porteñas is a significant, highly entertaining, ingenious and inspired addition to the 20th-century violin repertoire.
Symphonie fantastique ("Episode de la vie d'un Artiste…en cinq parties") H. 48 Opus 14.
Symphonie fantastique
is the result of Hector Berlioz's intense infatuation with a pretty
British actress named Harriet Smithson. She had come to Paris to
perform in a Shakespeare play. Berlioz, who idolized Shakespeare,
eagerly went to see the production, and was smitten. But this was not
just any infatuation. Berlioz exemplified the ardently irrepressible
genius that was the driving force of French Romanticism; and his
new-found muse inspired him to create one of the most historically
influential works in the entire symphonic repertoire.
Passionate infatuation, however, is not what makes this work so significant. Berlioz took Beethoven's idea from the Pastoral Symphony
– that is, to tell a continuous story in a multi-movement symphonic
form -- and exploited it fully. He expanded the traditional four
movement symphony into a five-movement structure, and united the whole
work with a recurring musical motive that he called the idée fixe.
This motive, to him, exemplified the grace and beauty of his Beloved.
He also united the work by creating a story that links the movements.
The asymmetrical quality of his melodies is one of the distinctive
features of Berlioz's musical imagination; and in the Symphonie fantastique,
the long-breathed, unpredictable melodic lines have a discursive feel,
in a sort of musical metaphor for the work's literary intentions.
When the work was first performed under the composer's direction on
December 5, 1830, a program was given to the audience with a fanciful
prose description of that unifying story. It begins: "A young
musician of morbid sensibility…in a paroxysm of lovesick despair
attempts suicide, but takes only enough laudanum to induce
hallucinations, in which his Beloved appears as a recurring melody with
several personalities, finally as a bacchante at a satanic
ritual." (See Berlioz's program at the end of these notes.)
The first movement opens with a slow section depicting the hero's
despair. The Beloved theme is introduced and becomes the main
theme of the movement's sonata structure.
After this first
sighting of the Beloved, the hero goes to a dance and encounters her
again. This second movement, called A Ball,
is essentially a waltz without the typical central section. The
flute and oboe now play the Beloved theme in a unison triple time
transformation of the now-familiar melody. In the next day of the
hero's drug-induced dream, he goes to a Scene in the Country.
This slow movement is a pastoral transformation of the theme, complete
with antiphonal shepherds' duet on oboe and English horn. In one
of Berlioz's typically colorful orchestrations, four timpanists playing
very softly imitate a distant storm before the two shepherds reappear
to lead their flocks homeward.
The hero's dreams then turn dramatically morbid. The fourth movement, March to the Scaffold,
recreates a scene from the French Revolution. The protagonist
dreams that he has been sentenced to death for killing his
Beloved. The Beloved theme appears only briefly in this movement
in a humorous transformation scored comically for the highest, or
E-flat clarinet…as though the Beloved has come back to mock his
fate. The music graphically portrays a mob scene that concludes
with the protagonist's death; he is guillotined and his head bounces
into a waiting basket with pizzicato precision while the crowd shouts
wild approval.
The final movement was perhaps
most influential in catapulting this work into the historical hall of
fame. Totally without precedent before 1830, in a burst of
originality it liberates orchestral color, overthrows the tyranny of
bar-lines and downbeat accents, and boasts an interior four-part
structure that had never before been used. The movement simply thumbs
its nose at the academic musical dogmas of the time.
The first section of Dream of the Witches' Sabbath
includes the Beloved's melody, which is now further distorted and
vulgarized by the clarinets. Distant bells announce the
movement's second section, in which bassoons and tuba play the
hauntingly recognizable Dies irae chant from the Gregorian Mass for the Dead.
The third section is a macabre dance of the witches, a fantastic yet
frightening fugue. The final section melds ominous statements of
the apocalyptic Dies irae with the theme from the fugal witches' dance—light and darkness in a duel of wills. The idée fixe
makes its final appearance, transformed into a cheap music-hall tune as
the figure of the Beloved assumes center-stage in the witches' sabbath
celebration, mocking the protagonist's misplaced passion and miserable
fate. So we reach the electrifying end of a profound example of
compositional brilliance.
Berlioz's program notes for Symphonie Fantastique follow:
"Part I: Reveries--Passions. The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted with that moral disease that a well-known writer calls the vague des passions,
sees for the first time a woman who embodies all the charms of the
ideal being he has imagined in his dreams, and falls desperately in
love with her. Through an odd whim, whenever the beloved image appears
in the mind's eye of the artist, it is linked with a musical thought
whose character, passionate but at the same time noble and shy, he
finds similar to the one he attributes to his Beloved. This melodic
image and the model it reflects pursue him incessantly like a double idée fixe.
That is the reason for the constant appearance, in every moment of the
symphony, of the melody that begins the first Allegro. The passage from
this state of melancholy reverie, interrupted by a few fits of
groundless joy, to one of frenzied passion, with its moments of fury,
of jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears, its religious
consolations--this is the subject of the first movement.
"Part II: A Ball.
The artist finds himself in the most varied situations--in the midst of
the tumult of a party, in the peaceful contemplation of nature; but
everywhere, in the town, in the country, the beloved image appears
before him and disturbs his peace of mind.
"Part III: Scene in the Country. Finding himself one evening in the country, he hears in the distance two shepherds piping a ranz des vaches
(shepherd's song) in dialogue. This pastoral duet, the scenery, the
quiet rustling of the trees gently brushed by the wind, the hopes he
has recently found reason to entertain--all come together to afford his
heart an unaccustomed calm, and to give a more cheerful color to his
ideas. He reflects upon his isolation; he hopes that his loneliness
will soon be over. But what if she were deceiving him! This mingling of
hope and fear, these ideas of happiness disturbed by black
presentiments, form the subject of the Adagio. At the end, one of the
shepherds takes up the ranz des vaches; the other no longer replies. Distant thunder--loneliness--silence.
"Part IV: March to the Scaffold.
Convinced that his love is unappreciated, the artist poisons himself
with opium. The dose of narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him
into a sleep accompanied by the most horrible visions. He dreams that
he has killed his Beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to the
scaffold, and that he is witnessing his own execution. The procession
moves forward to the sounds of a march that is sometimes somber and
fierce, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which the muffled sound
of heavy steps gives way without transition to the noisiest clamor. At
the end, the idée fixe returns for a moment, like a final thought of love before the fatal blow.
"Part V: A Witches' Sabbath.
He sees himself at the sabbath, in the midst of a frightful troop of
ghosts, sorcerers, and monsters of every species, all gathered for his
funeral; strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, distant cries
which other cries seem to answer. The Beloved melody appears again, but
it has lost its character of nobility and shyness; it is now no more
than a dance tune, mean, trivial and grotesque. It is she, coming to
join the sabbath ... a roar of joy at her arrival. She takes part in
the devilish orgy--funeral knell--burlesque parody of the Dies irae--sabbath round-dance--the sabbath round-dance and the Dies irae combined."
