Page 1 (1/31/20) Waltz in E-Flat Major, Op. 19 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
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Page 1 (1/31/20) Waltz in E-flat major, Op. 19 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849) Composed in 1831. Chopin’s Waltz in E-flat major, Op. 18, his first published specimen of the genre and one of his most beloved, was composed in 1831, when he was living anxiously in Vienna, almost unknown as a composer and only slightly appreciated as a pianist. In 1834, he sold it to the Parisian publisher Pleyel to finance his trip with Ferdinand Hiller to the Lower Rhineland Music Festival at Aachen, where Hiller introduced him to his long-time friend Felix Mendelssohn. The piece was dedicated upon its publication to Mlle. Laura Horsford, one of two sisters Chopin then counted among his aristocratic pupils. (Sister Emma had received the dedication of the Variations on “Je vends des scapulaires” from Hérold’s Ludovic, Op. 12 the year before.) The Waltz in E-flat follows the characteristic Viennese form of a continuous series of sixteen- measure strains filled with both new and repeated melodies that are capped by a vigorous coda. Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Composed 1831. In the Ballades, “Chopin reaches his full stature as the unapproachable genius of the pianoforte,” according to Arthur Hedley, “a master of rich and subtle harmony and, above all, a poet — one of those whose vision transcends the confines of nation and epoch, and whose mission it is to share with the world some of the beauty that is revealed to them alone.” Though the Ballades came to form a nicely cohesive set unified by their temporal scale, structural fluidity and supranational idiom, Chopin composed them over a period of more than a decade. He once suggested to Robert Schumann that he was “incited to the creation of the Ballades” by some poems of his Polish compatriot Adam Mickiewicz (1798- 1855), whom he met and played for in Paris around 1835. The English composer and author Alan Rawsthorne noted, however, that “to pin down these Ballades to definite stories is gratuitous and misleading, for in suggesting extra-musical connotations the attention is distracted from the purely musical scheme which is ... compelling in itself and completely satisfying.” Rather than obscuring the essential nature of these pieces, the apparently opposing views of Schumann and Rawsthorne lead directly to the very heart of Chopin’s achievement: the near-perfect melding of Romantic fantasy and feeling with an Apollonian control of form and figuration. By no other composer in the history of the art has the delicate balance between emotion and intellect been so finely achieved as by Chopin — heart and head are weighed perfectly in his, the most precisely calibrated of all musical scales. The first ideas for the Ballade No. 1 (G minor, Op. 23) were sketched in May and June 1831, when Chopin was living anxiously in Vienna. By the time the work was completed four years later, however, he had achieved such fame and fortune in Paris that he could dedicate the piece to Baron de Stockhausen, the Hanoverian ambassador to France, whom he counted among his noble pupils. Breitkopf und Härtel published the work in Leipzig in June 1836. (Chalgrin’s Arc de Triomphe and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots were also completed during that year.) Schumann called this Ballade “the most spirited and daring work of Chopin,” and reported that it was inspired by Mickiewicz’s Konrad Valenrod, a poetic epic concerning the battles between the pagan Lithuanians and the Christian Knights of the Teutonic Order. The work exhibits both the ingenious conflation of sectional, sonata and rondo forms and the voluptuous harmonic palette of Chopin’s Ballades. Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, Op. 9 ALEXANDER SCRIABIN (1872-1915) Composed in 1894. “The Muscovite seer”; “the Russian musical mystic”; “the clearest case of artistic egomania in the chronicles of music”: Alexander Scriabin was one of the most unusual of all composers. Living in the generation between Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, he showed an early talent for music and trod the accepted path of lessons, conservatory training, and teaching. His visions, however, refused to be Page 2 (1/31/20) channeled into the conventional forms of artistic expression, and he developed a style and a philosophy that were unique. He believed that mankind was approaching a final cataclysm from which a nobler race would emerge, with himself playing some exalted but ill-defined Messianic role in the new order. (He welcomed the beginning of World War I as the fulfillment of his prophecy.) As the transition through this apocalypse, Scriabin posited an enormous ritual that would purge humanity and make it fit for the millennium. He felt that he was divinely called to create this ritual, this “Mystery” as he called it, and spent the last twelve years of his life concocting ideas for its realization. Scriabin’s mammoth “Mysterium” was to be performed in a specially built temple in India (in which country he never set foot), and was to include music, mime, fragrance, light, sculpture, costume, bells hung from the clouds, etc., etc., which were to represent the history of man from the dawn of time to the ultimate world convulsion. He even imagined a language of sighs and groans that would express feelings not translatable into mere words. He whipped all these fantasies together with a seething sexuality to create a vision of whirling emotional ferment quite unlike anything else in the history of music or any other art. In describing the Poem of Ecstasy to his friend Ivan Lipaev he said, “When you listen to it, look straight into the eye of the Sun!” During his early years, while he was busy teaching and plotting a pianist’s career, Scriabin immersed himself in the works of Chopin. (He claimed to have slept with scores of Chopin’s music under his pillow.) Scriabin’s two Op. 9 Pieces, composed in 1894 while he was recovering from a broken collar bone on his right side and could only play the piano with his left hand, are marked by a strong sense of melody, a richness of figuration, a clarity of form, and a traditional (but considerably extended) harmonic palette grown from his study of Chopin’s music. Jeux d’eau (“Fountains”) MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937) Composed in 1901. Premiered on April 5, 1902 in Paris by Ricardo Viñes. Henri de Régnier was among France’s leading poets at the dawn of the 20th century. Born to an old Norman family in Honfleur in 1864 and trained for a career in law, he came under the influence of Mallarmé and other of the Symbolists and began publishing his own poems in 1885 to considerable acclaim. When he met the young composer and pianist Maurice Ravel sometime around 1900, Régnier was compiling a set of poems titled La Cité des eaux inspired by the fountains of Versailles. An early entry into that collection (which was not published until 1903) was a verse called Fête d’eau that took as its subject the Bassin de Latone, the magnificent “basin” dedicated to Latona (Leto in Latin), a Titan in classical mythology, the daughter of Coeus and Phoebe, and mother of the god Apollo and the goddess Artemis; it was at that time Versailles’ only fully operational fountain. Ravel seems to have taken Régnier’s Fête d’eau as the point of creative departure for his piano piece Jeux d’eau, composed in the autumn of 1901 and inscribed with a line the composer asked the poet to affix to the manuscript in his own hand: The river god laughs at the water as it tickles him. Liszt in his 1877 Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este from Book III of the Années de Pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”) stood godfather to the expressive intent and some stylistic elements in Jeux d’eau (Ravel said that his piece should be “played in the way you play Liszt”), but there sounds here a new and distinctive musical voice, “the origin of all the pianistic innovations people have claimed to find in my work,” according to its composer. Jeux d’eau was received enthusiastically when Ricardo Viñes, who was to become one of the most stalwart champions of Ravel’s keyboard music, introduced it at the Salle Pleyel on April 5, 1902. Conductor and pianist Alfred Cortot summarized the effect of Jeux d’eau as “liquid poetry … transparent freshness,” and its lasting impression on music lovers was indicated by a delightful anecdote recounted in H.H. Stuckenschmidt’s biography of the composer: “In 1920 in Vienna, Ravel bought a leather portfolio and asked that it be sent to him at his hotel. After he spelled his name to the sales- woman, she asked if he were the composer of Jeux d’eau. When he admitted it, she refused to take his money and presented the portfolio to him out of gratitude for she joy she had experienced in playing this music.” Page 3 (1/31/20) “Ondine” from Gaspard de la Nuit (“Gaspard [Kaspar] of the Night”) MAURICE RAVEL Composed in 1908. Premiered on January 9, 1909 in Paris by Ricardo Viñes. Aloysius Bertrand was a master of the macabre, a sort-of French Edgar Allan Poe. Bertrand (1807- 1841), born in Paris, published a set of spectral tales in 1835 titled Gaspard de la nuit (“Gaspard [Kaspar] of the Night”) in which he sought to recreate in literary terms “the manner of Rembrandt and Callot.” (Jacques Callot was a 17th-century French etcher and engraver whose masterpiece is a series of grotesque engravings depicting the Miseries of War.) Ravel’s biographer Scott Goddard noted that Bertrand “had the uncanny ability of writing intimately and precisely of people who lived, and of things that were done, in the dim, irreclaimable past.