ABOUT THE MUSIC

Prélude à “L’après midi d’un faune”

(Prelude to “Afternoon of a Faun”)

Claude Debussy

Born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Died March 25, 1918, Paris

Approximate Performance Time

10 minutes

This shimmering, endlessly beautiful music is so familiar to us—and so loved—that it is difficult to comprehend how assaultive it was to audiences in the years after its premiere in December 1894. Saint-Saëns was outraged: “[It] is pretty sound, but it contains not the slightest musical idea in the real sense of the word. It’s as much a piece of music as the palette a painter has worked from is a painting.” Later his outrage took a more emphatic direction: “the doors of the Institute must at all costs be barred against a man capable of such atrocities.”

We smile, but Saint-Saëns had a point. Though it lacks the savagery of The Rite of Spring, the Prélude à “L’après midi d’un faune” may be an even more revolutionary piece of music, for it does away with musical form altogether—this is not music to be grasped intellectually, but simply to be heard and felt. Pierre Boulez has said that “just as modern poetry surely took root in certain of Baudelaire’s poems, so one is justified in saying that modern music was awakened by ‘L’après-midi d’un faune.’”

Debussy based this music on the poem “L’après-midi d’un faune” by his close friend, the Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé. The poem itself is dreamlike, a series of impressions and sensations rather than a narrative. It tells of the languorous memories of a faun on a sleepy afternoon as he recalls an amorous encounter the previous day with two passing forest nymphs. This encounter may or may not have taken place, and the faun’s memories—subject to drowsiness, warm sunlight, forgetting and drink— grow vague and finally blur into sleep.

Like the faun’s dream, Debussy’s music is directionless, and Saint-Saëns was right to feel assaulted. In the words of Italian pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni, this music “is like a beautiful sunset; it fades as one looks at it.” The famous opening flute solo (the sound of the faun’s pipe?) draws us into this soft and sensual world, and while the key signature may say E Major, Debussy’s music obliterates any sense of a stable tonality from the start. The middle section, introduced by woodwinds in octaves, may be a subtle variation of the opening flute melody—it is a measure of this dreamy music that we cannot be sure. The opening section returns to lead the music to its glowing close, finally in uncomplicated E Major. Debussy uses a small orchestra (without trombones, trumpets, tuba or any percussion but antique cymbals) and keeps the emphasis not on musical incident but on color, harmony and beauty of sound. Audiences have come to love this music precisely for its sunlit mists and glowing sound, but it is easy to understand why it troubled early listeners. Beneath its shimmering and gentle beauties lies an entirely new conception of what music might be.

Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME

25 minutes

Debussy never wrote a concerto. Like Schubert, he was not interested in large-scale compositions designed to show off the virtuosity of an individual performer. He did write for soloists, but these rhapsodies for clarinet and saxophone and a set of dances for harp were conceived primarily to show off those instruments, not their performers. However, as a young man struggling to find his way as a composer, Debussy did write a concerto-like piece for piano and orchestra. He chose to title it “fantaisie” rather than “concerto,” and that distinction was important to him.

The Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra had a very rough start. At age 21 Debussy won the Prix de Rome, which involved two years of study in Rome. It was the highest honor possible for a young French composer, but Debussy hated Rome and everything about it; he left that city early, and he did everything he could to circumvent the requirements of the prize, which included writing a series of pieces to demonstrate his progress. Eventually he had to present his works, and between October 1889 and April 1890 Debussy composed the Fantaisie, which was to be performed at a concert of the Société Nationale under the direction of Vincent d’Indy. At the end of the first rehearsal, d’Indy announced that due to time restrictions on rehearsals, he would present only the first movement of the Fantaisie at the concert. Debussy promptly climbed onto the stage, collected the parts off the orchestra’s music stands, and walked out the door. He never heard the Fantaisie, and it was not premiered until November 20, 1919, when Alfred Cortôt played it in London with the Royal Philharmonic. Debussy had been dead for over a year at that point.

Debussy’s choice of the title Fantaisie was a good one. The nineteenth-century concerto was based on a general form: sonata-form first movement, lyric slow movement, and a rondo or dance finale. Debussy wanted to write something completely different— a work for soloist and orchestra based not on the contrast of themes of sonata-form but instead on the continuous evolution of just one theme—and his Fantaisie is based almost entirely on this cyclical evolution of themes.

The Fantaisie is in three movements, and the second and third are joined. In the opening movement, the germinal theme is heard immediately in the woodwinds, and this theme will then reappear in a number of guises throughout. The opening may feel restrained, but the music soon pushes ahead at the Allegro giusto. This change in tempo does not bring a change in the gentle character of this music, however: throughout the score Debussy continually reminds the players that their performance should be très doux (“very gentle”) and espressivo. This opening movement may not be based on conflict and resolution, but it does drive to a surprisingly dramatic conclusion.

Debussy mutes the strings at the beginning of the Lento e molto espressivo, and there is a dreamy, almost diaphanous quality to this movement, which proceeds directly into the finale. That movement, marked Allegro molto, might be thought of as a variation movement—it is structured on continuous evolutions of the main theme.

Audiences hearing this music without knowing its composer might never guess that it is the work of Claude Debussy. When he wrote this music, he was still searching for an authentic voice, and the works that would begin to define that voice—the String Quartet and Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune—were still several years in the future. The Fantaisie may represent an unexpected side of Debussy, but this music remained important to him: as late as 1909 he spoke of going back to revise it, but he never got around to doing that.

Symphony No. 4 in G Major GUSTAV MAHLER

Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia

Died May 18, 1911, Vienna

Approximate Performance Time

55 minutes

In April 1897 Mahler was named director of the Vienna Court Opera, the most prestigious post in the world of music. But the fierce demands of that position brought his composing to a standstill, and from the summer of 1896 until the summer of 1899 he composed no new music. Finally established in Vienna, he could return to creative work, and during the summer of 1899 he retreated to the resort town of Alt-Aussee in the Styrian Alps and composed the first two movements of his Fourth Symphony. He completed the symphony the following year at his new summer home on the shores of the Wörthersee and led the premiere in Munich on November 25, 1901.

The Fourth is Mahler’s friendliest symphony—even people who claim not to like Mahler take this music to their hearts. At just under an hour in length, it is also the shortest of Mahler’s ten symphonies, and it is scored for an orchestra that is—by his standards—relatively modest: it lacks trombones and tuba. Mahler’s claim that the Fourth never rises to a fortissimo is not literally true, but it is figuratively true, for even at its loudest this symphony is Mahler’s most approachable work. Much of its charm comes from the text sung by the soprano in the last movement, with its wide-eyed child’s vision of heaven. In fact, several recordings use a boy soprano in place of a woman in the finale, because the sound of a child’s voice is exactly right in this music. This sense of a child’s vision—full of wonder, innocence and radiance— touches the entire Fourth Symphony.

The symphony opens with the sound of sleighbells, and violins quickly sing the graceful main subject. Mahler marks this movement Bedächtig (“Deliberately”), and it is remarkable for the profusion of its melodic material: a jaunty tune for clarinets, a broad and noble melody for cellos, a lyric melody for cellos, a poised little duet for oboes and bassoons. We arrive at what seems to be the development, and scarcely has this begun when an entirely new theme—a radiant call for four unison flutes—looks ahead to the celestial glories of the final movement. This movement proceeds melodically rather than dramatically – there are no battles fought and won here—and at the end the opening violin theme drives the movement to its ringing close on great G-Major chords.

The second movement—In gemächlicher Bewegung (“Moving leisurely”)—is in a rather free form: it might be described as a scherzo with two trios. Mahler requires here that the concertmaster play two violins, one of them tuned up a whole step to give it a whining, piercing sound—Mahler asks that it sound Wie eine Fiedel: “like a fiddle.” Mahler said that this movement was inspired by a self-portrait by the German painter Arnold Böcklin in which the devil—in this case a skeleton—plays a violin (with only one string!) in the painter’s ear. Despite all Mahler’s suggestions of demonic influence, this music remains genial rather than nightmarish—in Donald Francis Tovey’s wonderful phrase, the shadows cast here “are those of the nursery candlelight.”

However attractive the second movement may be, it finds its match in the third, marked Ruhevoll (“Peaceful”), which begins with some of the most beautiful music ever written: a long, glowing melody for cellos and its countertheme in the violins. This movement is in variation form, with the variations based on this opening theme and on a more somber second subject, sung first by the oboe. Near the close, violins suddenly leap up and the gates of heaven swing open: brilliant brass fanfares and smashing timpani offer a glimpse of paradise, but that finale must wait for this movement to reach its utterly peaceful close.

Out of the silence, solo clarinet sings the main theme of the finale, marked Sehr behaglich (“Very comfortable”), and soon the soprano takes up her gentle song. Mahler had originally composed this song, titled Das himmlische Leben (“The Heavenly Life”), in 1892 when he was conductor of the Hamburg Opera. Its text, drawn from Das Knaben Wunderhorn, offers a child’s vision of

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE heaven. Mahler said that he wished to create a portrait of heaven as “clear blue sky,” and this vision of heaven glows with a child’s sense of wonder. It is a place full of apples, pears and grapes, a place where Saint Martha does the cooking, Saint Peter the fishing, where there is music and dancing and joy. The sleighbells from the symphony’s opening now return to separate the four stanzas, and at the end the soprano sings the key line: “Kein Musik ist ja nicht auf Erden” (“There is no such music on earth”). For this truly is heavenly music, music of such innocence that it feels as if it must have come from another world, and at the end of this most peaceful of Mahler symphonies the harp and contrabasses draw the music to a barely-audible close.

-Program notes by Eric Bromberger

PROGRAM NOTES | DINUR, MONTGOMERY AND THE "CLASSICAL" SYMPHONY

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

On September 28, 1790, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy died, and his successor Prince Anton did not share the family passion for music. Anton disbanded the Esterházys’ professional orchestra, and Haydn—who had been music director to the Esterházy family for thirty years— suddenly found himself without a job. He was given a generous pension, and at age 58 he looked forward to a quiet retirement. But suddenly his life changed. The impresario Johann Peter Salomon appeared in Vienna and invited the composer to come to London to put on a series of concerts of his own music. Haydn set off for new territory—and triumphed. His first visit, during the years 1791-92, was so successful that he returned for a second in 1794-95. For each visit he composed six symphonies, and the Symphony No. 104 was the last of the twelve. In fact, it would be his final symphony, for he would turn his attention to vocal music over the remaining years of his life. There is no particular reason to call No. 104 the “London”—that name might apply with equal accuracy to all twelve of the symphonies Haydn wrote for his visits to that city.

The first performance took place on May 4, 1795, at the King’s Theatre at Haymarket in London. Haydn was delighted by the quality of the orchestra, by the enthusiasm of the large audience and by the profits: “The room was full of select company...The whole audience was very pleased and so was I. I made four thousand gulden on this evening. Such a thing is possible only in England!”

Some have suggested that Haydn, released from his service to a refined aristocratic family and now faced with writing to please a middle-class audience, simplified his musical language to give it more immediate appeal, but this is not to suggest that there is anything condescending or compromised about this music. Quite the opposite. All of Haydn’s English symphonies show him at the height of his powers as a symphonist, and these twelve symphonies demonstrate a technical mastery, grand sonority and breadth of scope that would represent the furthest development of the symphony until Beethoven took up the form five years later.

From the moment of that festive premiere, Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 has been an audience favorite, and it is not hard to understand why. This is music not just of enormous technical accomplishment but full of energy and high spirits. That energy is evident from the first instant, when the symphony explodes to life on a ringing tutti fanfare. This noble call to order will return twice during the course of the long introduction before the music leaps ahead at the Allegro on a theme that seems simplicity itself. But this simple little tune will yield unexpected riches. Haydn had long been interested in building sonata-form movements on just one theme, and now he re-uses his principal theme in place of the expected second subject and proceeds to build much of the development on a string of repeated notes taken from that seminal idea.

The Andante gets off to a poised, almost innocent beginning, but soon this is interrupted by tumultuous outbursts from full orchestra, punctuated by timpani and brass. These in turn are set off by striking silences and passages for woodwinds alone. The Menuetto catches us by surprise rhythmically, for Haydn places the accent on the third beat here; the wistful, yearning trio section makes its way back to the minuet via an unexpected bridge passage.

The buoyant finale has set scholars searching for the source of its principal theme, first heard over a bagpipelike drone at the opening. Some have argued that this theme is based on a street-vendor’s cry that Haydn had heard in London: “Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns!” More recent research has shown that the theme is based on the Croatian folksong “Oj jelena,” which Haydn had heard while in the service of the Esterházy family. Whatever its source, the theme is developed with all the skill Haydn had acquired and refined in over forty years as a symphonist, and his final symphony rushes to its conclusion in a blaze of energy.

-Program notes by Eric Bromberger

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