program notes

Tailleferre: Concertino for Harp and Orchestra

“The world is divided into two aesthetic styles: French and German,” the American composer Ned Rorem once declared. “German art is known for being profoundly superficial and French art for being superficially profound.” He added mischievously: “I am French. If you disagree with my analysis, then you are German.”

In the aftermath of the gruesome First World War—well before Rorem made his observation—a small group of likeminded young composers emerged in 1920s Paris who seemed to illustrate this division. A critic dubbed them “Les Six” (“The Six”), an allusion to the nickname “The Five” that had been in vogue in the 19th century for a circle of composers based in Saint Petersburg who helped define Russian classical music.

Movements were all the rage at the time—especially in the visual arts— and the members of Les Six were bright, provocative, and naughtily iconoclastic figures who bonded over a desire to open up new spaces by dismantling the reverence applied to German tradition. In its place, they celebrated values of frivolity and spontaneous play. They mocked academic seriousness, taking cues from the iconoclastic humor of Erik Satie.

Satie himself recognized the gifts of Germaine Tailleferre and became an important early champion. From the start, she had struggled with her father’s opposition to a musical career—even though her talent was obvious early on, when she won prizes as a piano prodigy. The sole woman among Les Six, Tailleferre was only in her 20s when the group became known but outlived all of her colleagues. Moreover, she did not sympathize with the group’s disdain for Debussy and Ravel. In fact, Tailleferre had studied with Ravel and developed a close friendship with him. She continued composing throughout her long life and died in 1983, having reached the age of 91. Her creative output ranges widely, from solo and chamber pieces to operas and many film scores.

The Concertino for Harp and Orchestra dates from 1926-27, when Tailleferre was living in the United States with her husband Ralph Barton, New Yorker cartoonist and caricaturist, to whom she dedicated the score. They had married very soon after meeting, though the relationship proved shortlived and ended in divorce. (Barton, pining over his previous wife—who later married the playwright Eugene O’Neill— would commit suicide in 1931.)

While she was working on the Concertino, Tailleferre and Barton became something of a power couple in New York: Tailleferre’s fame at the time actually eclipsed that of her husband. Serge Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony in the premiere, with Marcel Grandjany as the harpist. The Concertino’s first movement shows Tailleferre’s links to the Neoclassical aesthetic of Igor Stravinsky but also her characteristic humor, casting the

soloist in multiple roles—including a lengthy cadenza. The middle movement is touching, gently pierced by a mysterious melancholy, and the finale recalls the bustling, animated crowd scenes of Stravinsky’s Petrushka. The Boston audience immediately loved the piece— including Charlie Chaplin, who was in attendance.

Claude Debussy: Danses for Harp

Over the centuries, certain traits have become associated with French musical identity. Among these are a preference for clarity of texture, a special sensitivity to timbre and color, and a rhythmic flexibility that mirrors qualities of the French language. While Claude Debussy arguably opened the door to musical Modernism in Europe, he remained in touch with these longstanding French values.

The Danse sacrée et danse profane (Sacred Dance and Profane Dance) from 1904 is an example of Debussy in a more “traditional” mode—though he would soon go on to complete one of his orchestral masterworks, La mer, a sequence of “symphonic sketches” that show the composer at his most visionary and innovative.

This pair of dances, which are conceived as a single work for solo harp and string orchestra, has a pragmatic origin. For the French piano manufacturer Pleyel, the acoustician Gustave Lyon had recently designed a chromatic harp that used crossstringing to replace the pedal system of the conventional harp (which allows the latter to play accidental notes). Pleyel wanted to publicize its new instrument and asked Debussy to write a piece to be used for Conservatory auditions. In the process, Debussy added a gem to the harp repertoire, though the new Pleyel instrument soon became an historical curiosity: it proved too inconvenient to deal with tuning issues and thus never superseded the older type of harp. But Debussy’s score is readily playable on conventional harp. (Ravel was similarly asked in 1905 to write a piece to showcase the Érard company’s new double-action pedal harp.)

The Sacred Dance evokes an “antique” air by suggesting Gregorian plainchant. This music of the spirit leads on without pause to the second dance, whose “profane” nature refers to the world of the body, of the liberating joy of dance—here conveyed by a graceful waltz tempo.

Offenbach: Galop (Can-Can) from Orpheus in the Underworld

Jacques Offenbach was born the son of a cantor into a German-Jewish family from Cologne—he jokingly signed his correspondence “O. de Cologne”—but was sent to Paris as a teenager to study at the Conservatory. He spent the rest of his life in France and became a shaping force in the history of French opera, setting the tone for the Paris of the Second Empire with his pioneering series of operettas and comic operas.

Orphée aux Enfers, (“Orpheus in the Underworld”) was one of his greatest successes. It opened in 1854 but was later expanded and still broke box office records in that version in the 1870s. The absurd plot parodies the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with wickedly witty sophistication. Offenbach targets artistic conventions along with the social and political realities of Paris in the middle of the 19th century. In this version, Eurydice is only too happy to be separated from her boring violin teacher husband Orpheus. The moralizing character Public Opinion gets Orpheus to head down to the Underworld to do his duty and find his deceased wife—and a depraved assembly of gods intervenes.

The passage we hear comes from the finale, where, so to speak, all hell breaks loose and Eurydice ends up becoming a devotee of the god Bacchus. Titled “galop infernal” (a galop refers to a wildly animated dance in duple meter), this music is also known as the “Can-Can” and is associated with an up-tempo number featuring chorus girls executing high kicks. After Offenbach’s death, the Moulin Rouge cabaret in Paris, regarded as the birthplace of the modern can-can, adopted this fizzy excerpt as its signature.

Ravel: Pavane for a Dead Princess

Pavane pour une infante défunte (“Pavane for a Dead Little Princess”) is an early piece from Maurice Ravel’s years at the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied composition with Fauré. (The young composer’s already advanced outlook resulted in his expulsion.) He was commissioned to write the Pavane in 1899 by a real, living princess: the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, born in the USA as Winnaretta Singer and heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. In 1893, she married the aristocrat Edmond de Polignac (in a lavender marriage), and their salon gatherings featured performances of works by important contemporary composers. Admirers of the writing of Marcel Proust have a sense of what these salons must have been like—it was there that Proust acquired much of his musical education.

The Pavane began as a piano piece. The pianist Ricardo Viñes, Ravel’s friend since 1888, gave the belated premiere in 1902; its popularity brought the composer’s name before a wider public. Ravel later orchestrated the music in 1910.

Preoccupation with forms of dance recurs across Ravel’s compositions. There is also a connection with language and poetry. The alluring combination of sounds represented by the words “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” Ravel explained, prompted his imagination aside from any actual picture of an historical young princess. Musically, Ravel alludes to a stately, ceremonial dance in duple meter from Spain and Italy that became widespread in courts of the late Renaissance. Ravel described this work of poignant yet sensuous charm as “an evocation of a pavane that a

little princess may in times of old have danced at the Spanish court.” The harmonies that clothe the evocative melody create an illusion of antiquity.

Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin

Ravel began composing Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1914 as a tribute, for solo piano, to the French Baroque. He modeled it on the keyboard music of François Couperin (1668-1733). Yet the name “Couperin” could also stand for the distinguished dynasty of composers by that name and, by extension, as Ravel put it, for “18th-century French music in general.”

The outbreak of the First World War interrupted his progress—and changed the meaning of the project. The middle-aged composer enlisted and served as an ambulance driver; he witnessed the nightmarish reality of the combat close-up. Ravel’s military discharge followed the death of his mother in 1917, which plunged him into a depression. He nevertheless found the will to complete Le Tombeau as a six-movement, neo-Baroque keyboard suite. Marguerite Long, the widow of one of its dedicatees gave the premiere in 1919—the year in which Ravel decided to orchestrate four of the movements for a suite, which has also been produced as a ballet. Several composers have gone on to orchestrate the remaining two movements from the original keyboard suite. A “tombeau” in French culture refers to a literary and musical practice of homage. Ravel expanded his homage to Couperin into a vehicle to express contemporary cultural patriotism as well as to commemorate those who had died in the First World War. He dedicated each movement to a friend he had lost (or, in Rigaudon, to a pair of brothers killed on the same day early in the War).

This music is an early example of neoClassicism because of its emulation of forms from the past—in this case, of the dance forms that comprised the Baroque keyboard suite. But Tombeau is infused with Ravel’s own sensibility, whether in its poignant and justright harmonic choices or its crystalclear textures. The Prélude, with its charmingly shaped phrases and gentle wind scoring, hardly suggests a war memorial in the traditional sense. But to refute the charge that Ravel was merely being cavalier, Marguerite Long responded: “When a musician of genius gives [the dead] the best of himself and … something they would have enjoyed, isn’t that the most moving tribute he can make?”

The Forlane refers to an Italian dance: to do its sprightly meter justice, Ravel actually transcribed an example by Couperin before composing his version. The intersection of Baroque rhythm with modern harmony and color here is a good example of Ravel’s inventiveness. The Menuet gives prominence to the oboe and balances grace with pathos, especially in the shift to the minor in the middle section and in a reflective coda after the

reprise. The Rigaudon—a dance of folk origin which was co-opted by courtly styles—is the most-assertive movement in the suite. A shadow falls in the melancholy musings of the contrasting middle section, but the Tombeau ends with bright proclamations from the trumpet. Memory survives.

Program notes (c)2021 Thomas May