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Saturday, December 3, 2016

Program Notes

La mer – Three Symphonic Sketches

  1. De l’aube a midi sur La mer (From dawn to noon on the sea) – Tres lent (Very slow)
  2. Jeux de vagues (Play of the waves) – Allegro – dans un rythme tres souple – anime (Fast – with a very flexible pace – animated)
  3. Dialogue du vent et de La mer (Dialogue of the wind and the sea) – Anime et tumultueux (animated and tumultuous)

Claude Debussy
(Born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France in 1862; died in Paris in 1918)

Debussy had wisps of La mer (The Sea) washing through his head for about a decade, but it was officially begun in 1903 and finished in 1905. The success and acclaim that his two previous masterpieces had brought him, Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun (1894) and the opera Pelleas et Melisande (1902), had inspired Debussy to find an even freer kind of musical language. But such musical freedom had always been one of Debussy’s goals. And he was in good company, living in Paris in the intoxicating fin-de-siècle, where breaking boundaries had become the rule. Artists, writers and musicians all shared a table, literally, and exchanged ideas, each trying to represent physical reality or the emotional response to that reality. And this only built on itself as writers like Mallarmé and Maeterlinck tried to represent dreamscapes and psychological states of being. In the center of this heady mix was Claude Debussy, and his music is often considered to have launched musical modernity in the 20th Century. Certainly without Debussy’s influence, composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky would have written something quite different.

The “freedom” that Debussy was striving for was to bring the listener to a place where the senses overlap – like trying to see clearly at twilight, one must trust sound and sense of space more than one’s eyes.  Working on his score for La mer in Burgundy, very far from the sea, imagination and memory of things were his reality, and Debussy described his process this way:

“I have innumerable memories of the sea, and those, in my view, are worth more than a reality which, charming as it may be, tends to weigh too heavily on the imagination.”

Surely the opening of La mer is one of the great imaginative moments in the repertoire – the sustained note in bass and timpani unveil a newly glowing horizon, followed by light plucks on the harp creating exactly that surreal and dreamlike magic of dawn on the sea with a vast, ambient sound. It sets the atmosphere for different thematic “looks” at the sea, with ever changing themes passing by the stationery observer in the unfolding light – the motives appearing and then subsiding into another theme or musical color, gradually strengthening like the rising tide. Measure by measure, different sonorities are explored, and the expanse of the ocean grows. One of the most imaginative sea-like moments in the work is a representation of the rush of a great wave – the winds and strings powerfully building, pausing, then cresting with the smashing of cymbal and tam-tam, brass and winds.

The second movement, “Play of the waves,” is like being set in a boat and letting the currents and swells do as they please. Compositionally, it is a lovely balance to the three sketches as the capricious and frisky woodwind and string passages ripple, rise and fall, and pass in and out of focus.  These passages pull from both the first and last movements, bringing a macro-coherence to La mer – an ingenious technique of Debussy’s in which the themes feel in the here-and-now, yet only after the entire work is complete can one understand their musical completeness and dialogue between them all. Its ending is remarkably beautiful and clever, leaving us in our little boat, floating swiftly and quietly out to sea.

The third movement is, as subtitled, a dialogue. This is not only a dialogue between musical representations of Wind and Sea but also between musical spontaneity and a cohesion to the whole. In its orchestration, Debussy gives us some of his most charming and exotic colors, such as the celeste passage (a kind of toy piano) fleeting as a playful breeze, and some of his most powerful moments, such as the stuttering trumpets clammering amidst the orchestra’s sea-surge climax near the end.

Debussy created in La mer a three-movement succession of musical moments, and those moments are some of the most gorgeous he ever wrote. In what may be the crowning masterpiece from this moment of artistic experimentation at the turn of the century, Debussy manages to create a delightful feeling of continual renewal and capture the expressive freedom that he and Europe’s best creative minds were striving for. Undeniably, La mer set the stage for Debussy’s last great orchestral work, Jeux (1912), which in turn set the tone for a whole new generation of modern composers.

Cello Concerto in B-minor, Op. 104, B. 191
Allegro
Adagio, ma non troppo
Finale: Allegro moderato – Andante – Allegro vivo

Antonin Dvořák
(Born near Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic) in 1841; died in Prague in 1904)

In 1892, the American philanthropist Jeanette Thurber persuaded the Czech composer, Antonin Dvořák, to come to America for three years and head her newly formed National Conservatory of Music in New York City.  The idea was to foster grassroots classical music training and to help grow a Nationalist American music – and importantly, the Conservatory was to be open to all races.  Within a year of his appointment to this post, Dvořák was inspired to begin writing four new works: Symphony in E-Minor “from the New World,” his “American” String Quartet No. 12, the fantastic String Quintet No. 3, Op. 97, and lastly his exquisite Cello Concerto.  All of these works are masterpieces in their own right, but that they were written during Dvořák’s American tenure make them particularly special to Americans.

Inspired by having heard the Concerto for Cello by Victor Herbert (the composer of Babes in Toyland fame), Dvořák’s Cello Concerto was the last of his “American” compositions.  It was completed in 1895 at the end of his three-year contract, and with it he hoped to persuade Mrs. Thurber to end her contractual bidding.  Though Thurber wished to extend Dvořák’s contract for another two years, Dvořák wanted to return to Bohemia for good.  He had already provided, he told Thurber, a brilliant model for young American composers to follow for writing music, that his mission was complete.  The Concerto is certainly brilliant, and it is filled with beautiful themes as are his other American masterpieces.  The first theme of the first movement, beginning with the clarinet, may be one of Dvořák’s most unforgettable themes.  And the second theme, full of lyricism, is magnificently scored for horn and wins our hearts.  But the soul of this Concerto shows up in the solo cello.  Finally, after a lengthy absence, the cello soloist enters and begins making that instrument a true virtuosic voice for the first time in its history.  Whereas before Dvořák’s masterpiece the cello had found no prominent place in the orchestral repertoire as a soloist, this Concerto would forever change that.  It so impressed Brahms (Dvořák’s friend and supporter), that he remarked half-peevishly, “Why in the world didn’t I know one could write a cello concerto like this? If I’d only known I’d have done it long ago!”

Though Dvořák essentially wrote all of these four of his great American works on US soil, they are nonetheless inspired by Dvořák’s now-legendary homesickness, and the second movement Adagio is especially an homage to his homeland.  The contemplative beauty that begins the movement, so song-like and unassuming, is interrupted by a stormy passage that leads to a new theme.  The new theme is from one of Dvořák’s earlier songs, “Kéž duch můj sám” (Leave me alone), the first of his Four Songs, op. 82.  It was a song that was adored by Josefina Kaunitzová, the first love of Dvořák’s life back in Bohemia.  When Dvořák learned that she was very ill he incorporated the song into his Cello Concerto as a tribute to her.  It works wonderfully, if melancholically, into this movement, and the movement as a whole is one of Dvořák’s more beautiful creations.

The last movement does something that very few multi-movement works ever do – its main theme is also another one of Dvořák’s most unforgettable themes.  The Concerto originally ended with a headlong and spirited rush to the finale, but when Dvořák returned home from his American duties after Mrs. Thurber agreed that Dvořák had, indeed, fulfilled her proposed mission, Josefina Kaunitzová had died, and the composer added a more subdued Coda in her honor to precede the final, rousing bars.  It perhaps makes the Concerto even better for its departure from convention, and without any doubts, the quality of the work and its imaginative solo writing launched the cello’s concerto “career” in the repertoire like no other.

 

Program Notes by Max Derrickson