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PROGRAM NOTES Masterworks I: French Moderns Quad City Symphony Orchestra PROGRAM NOTES Masterworks I: French Moderns By Jacob Bancks Associate Professor of Music Augustana College CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) creature with goat’s legs and man’s head Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude and torso; not a “fawn”, or baby deer). If you to the Afternoon of a Faun) can imagine your everyday, waking life be- ing like a dream where every desire is frus- Instrumentation: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, trated, and that falling asleep is your only 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, percussion, 2 gateway to fulfillment, you might be on your harps, and strings. way to understanding the beauty of Mal- Premiere: December 22, 1894, Paris, Gustave larmé’s poem. Doret conducting. QCSO Performance History: Harry John Brown Did I love a dream? conducting in 1953; Charles Gigante conduct- ing in 1960; James Dixon conducting in 1969, My doubt, mass of ancient night, ends 1976, 1982, and 1990; Mark Gibson (guest) extreme conducting in 1998; Mark Russell Smith con- In many a subtle branch, that remaining ducting in 2008. the true Woods themselves, proves, alas, that I In 1886 Jean Moréas wrote an article in Le too Figaro articulating the ideals that were ani- Offered myself, alone, as triumph, the mating a new generation of poets. This Sym- false ideal of roses. bolist Manifesto included the exhortation to artists that their core ideas should be hidden If Mallarmé’s goal, in line with the Symbolist behind “sumptuous lounge robes of extra- Manifesto, was to write sensuous and evoc- neous analogies.” This was essential, he be- ative poetry that carefully obscured his cen- lieved, because Symbolism “consists in tral idea, he was clearly highly successful. never approaching the concentrated kernel of the Idea in itself.” In other words, what- Incidentally, his poem also abounds in spe- ever animating idea sits at the core of a Sym- cifically musical imagery. For example, bolist work of art must be carefully ob- scured, like a concealed relic. The great twin reed we play under the azure ceiling, It is difficult to imagine a more perfect ex- That turning towards itself the cheek’s ample of this than Stéphane Mallarmé’s The quivering, Afternoon of a Faun, a poem written from Dreams, in a long solo, so we might the viewpoint of a sexually eager, pro- amuse foundly confused faun (i.e., a mythic The beauties round about by false notes generation prior to Debussy’s, said the work that confuse… “has a pretty sonority, but one does not find in it the least musical idea… Debussy did not For a composer of Claude Debussy’s artistic create a style; he cultivated an absence of disposition, this poetry was irresistible. The style, logic, and common sense.” In con- “great twin reed,” the “long solo,” and trast, Maurice Ravel, Debussy’s younger most especially the “false notes that con- contemporary, posited that Prelude had in it fuse” suggested a new kind of orchestral “more musical substance… than in the won- music, one that embodied the murky quali- derfully immense Ninth Symphony by Bee- ties of Symbolist poetry, but with the added thoven.” Later iconoclasts like Igor Stravin- “sumptuous lounge robes” of wordless mu- sky and Pierre Boulez pointed to the work’s sic. musical materials (obscure modulations, un- expected juxtapositions, and vivid orches- The core of Debussy’s tone poem is a recur- tration) as the root of their own modernist ring flute solo (perhaps inspired by Mal- musical projects. In this sense, the work is larmé’s description of a “sonorous, empty most certainly a prelude, not just to Mal- and monotonous line”) which is not so much larmé’s poem, but to the musical develop- developed in a classical sense as mysteri- ments of the 75 years to follow. ously transformed and re-contextualized in its various iterations throughout the piece. Things to Listen for in Debussy was famously skeptical of “devel- Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun opment” in the nineteenth century, Ger- ¯ There’s no way you’ll miss the lus- manic sense: he detested Wagner’s leitmo- cious, haunting flute solo at the piece’s tifs, and once famously remarked that the beginning, and in its many later in- development section of a Brahms symphony stances. Note that this first version fits was the prime opportunity to step out for a almost entirely in the instrument’s low- cigarette. So, if we are most accustomed to est octave, its least powerful range. We hearing short, simple motives lucidly extrap- rarely hear the flute this low because it olated across long periods of time (in, for is so easily buried by other instruments. example, a Brahms symphony), for De- Debussy has to be very careful about bussy’s work we have to adjust our ears to how he accompanies a solo like this! In- hear more arcane, musically ambiguous mo- terestingly enough, it’s the same range tives appear and reappear in puzzling, unex- of pitches in the bassoon’s high register pected ways. In other words, for Debussy that Stravinsky uses to begin The Rite of and other Symbolists, good art was not a Spring, a work which owes much to De- reasoned argument, but rather an incanta- bussy. tion. ¯ The solo’s end is marked with a harp glissando, its most iconic gesture and Being the first piece of its kind both in ex- (befitting the faun) itself a dreamy “illu- pressive arc and harmonic invention, in its sion”. Because of the unique construc- reception Prelude confounded traditional- tion of the harp, what sound to our ears ists and inspired modernists. Camille Saint- like arpeggios are actually a series of Saëns, the leading composer of the 2 QCSO Program Notes 2018-19, Masterworks I seven-note scales with various repeated ¯ For all its ambiguity, the flute solo pitches. ends in a triadic manner (i.e., imitating a ¯ Though Debussy is indeed artful at major triad, the least ambiguous har- crafting every moment of sound, note monic entity). The closing words of Mal- how he also makes stunning use of si- larmé’s poem seem entirely fitting: lences. “Farewell... I go to see the shadow you ¯ You will notice whenever the flute have become.” solo returns that something subtle changes about how it feels. Sometimes CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) the notes of solo itself are different, but Nocturnes more often it is the harmonic context that changes, particularly the lowest Instrumentation: 3 flutes (third flute doubling bass note in the orchestra. piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 3 ¯ Clearly if we left everything to the bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, “sonorous, empty and monotonous tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, female line” of the flute, this piece could never chorus, and strings. get going, so Debussy uses the other Premiere: December 9, 1900 (first two move- ments only) and October 27, 1901 (complete woodwind soloists to move things work), Lamoureux Orchestra, Paris, Camille along. He begins with the somewhat Chevillard conducting. scatterbrained clarinet (who has figures QCSO Performance History: Harry John Brown in both the all-half-step chromatic scale conducting in 1951; Charles Gigante conduct- and all-whole-step whole tone scale), ul- ing in 1959; James Dixon conducting in 1965, timately entrusting the oboe with the 1970, 1978, and 1987. middle section’s more stable theme, clearly (for a moment at least) in the key Like all modernists, Debussy was eager to of E major. forge a path toward the new, the unex- ¯ After a third section with longer me- pected, and the unexplainable. But modern- lodic lines over pulsing triplets in the ism has frequently paired this forward-look- woodwinds and horns, the flute solo re- ing spirit with an equally-emphatic rejection turns, but this time at a slightly higher of precedent. In short, it is a line of thinking pitch level. both bewitched by the future and haunted ¯ The oboe again plays foil to the se- by the past. Case in point: Debussy spent a rene flute with a foolhardy, herky-jerky, tortuous decade writing and revising his trill-and-grace-note-laden solo, which only opera, Pélleas et Mélisande, desperate the flute and English horn eventually to avoid any indebtedness to operatic cli- come to imitate. chés, as epitomized in the works of Richard ¯ The final section is marked with a Wagner. As soon as Debussy thought he shockingly sparse orchestral texture: had succeeded in exorcising his opera’s two solo violins, a set of “antique cym- nineteenth century demons, he bemoaned bals” or crotales (sounding like a hyper- that “the ghost of old Klingsor” (the nefari- charged glockenspiel), and the solo flute ous wizard in Wagner’s Parsifal) “kept ap- and solo cello in octaves. pearing in the corner.” QCSO Program Notes 2018-19, Masterworks I 3 Opera was not the only genre in which De- descriptions, and he was reportedly inspired bussy attempted to transcend musical his- by the works of American painter James tory. He wrote, for example, two books of MacNeill Whistler. In the second movement, piano preludes, a genre loaded with histori- Fêtes (“Festivals”), Debussy’s description is cal baggage from its many Baroque and Ro- downright psychedelic: his music “gives us mantic manifestations. And when he re- the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmos- named his orchestral work Three Scenes at phere with sudden flashes of light. There is Twilight to the more succinct Nocturnes (lit- also the episode of the procession (a daz- erally, “night pieces”), he likewise set out to zling fantastic vision), which passes through avoid the nineteenth century trappings of the festive scene and becomes merged in it.
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