CLAUDE DEBUSSY
b. 1862 in St. Germain-en-Laye
d. 1918 in Paris

First Rhapsody for Clarinet

In 1908 Debussy was named to the advisory board of the Paris Conservatory. It was only a minor position, but for a composer never wholly free from financial worries it was a welcome appointment. Debussy’s duties appear to have centered around the Conservatory’s annual concours, the examinations held at the end of each academic year for instrumentalists. In 1909 Debussy was asked to provide two test-pieces for the concours for clarinetists. Debussy was a notoriously lazy composer who seemed to take a perverse delight in missing deadlines, and being asked to write academic pieces would seem exactly the situation to bring out this side of him. But, for whatever reasons, he found writing these pieces for clarinet an attractive challenge and completed them in 1910.

The first, titled simply Petite pièce, is a sight-reading exercise, but the other, much more substantial, is an examination piece intended to test musicianship. Titled First Rhapsody, it puts clarinetists through their paces, offering the opportunity to demonstrate a singing, sustained sound in the opening section in 4/4 and to show off the agility of their technique in the jaunty and chromatic fast section in 2/4. Debussy could be sour and self-deprecating, but he was delighted by the Rhapsody and described it as “one of the most pleasing pieces I have ever written.”

Debussy liked this music enough that the following year he arranged it for clarinet and orchestra, and that version has proven particularly effective. Debussy’s title First Rhapsody for Clarinet seems to imply that he intended to write more, but he did not. His Second Rhapsody, not nearly so well known as the First, is for saxophone.

 

MAURICE RAVEL
b. 1875 in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées
d. 1937 in Paris

Sonata for Violin and Cello

The composition of the Sonata for Violin and Cello was difficult for Ravel, and he worked on this brief piece for two years before completing it in 1922. This was a bleak period emotionally for the composer: he had just gone through the torment of the First World War (in which he had served as an ambulance driver) and suffered the death of his mother in 1917. This spare work is dedicated to the memory of Debussy, who had died in 1918.

Writing for two linear instruments without the harmonic foundation and richness of piano accompaniment brings special problems. Ravel himself noted his solution: “Economy of means is here carried to its extreme limits; there are no harmonies to please the ear, but a pronounced reaction in favor of melody.” Listeners accustomed to the sometimes lush and exotic harmonies of Ravel’s music for orchestra and for piano will find this sonata lean and ingenious, more striking for its brilliance than its emotional content.

The brief sonata is in four movements. The Allegro requires the two instruments to play in different keys, and the resulting clash, often on the interval of major and minor thirds, provides much of this movement’s harmonic pungency. The cello’s opening theme is taken up by the violin and developed with much energy by both instruments.

The brilliant Très vif—the sonata’s scherzo—is notable for its instrumental effects, particularly the pizzicato ostinato played at times by both instruments. It has been said, incorrectly, that this movement lacks melodic content: the first distinct theme is played by the pizzicato violin. But it is true that this movement is made distinctive more by its sounds—the snapping pizzicatos, buzzing trills, and eerie harmonics—than by its melodies.

The Lent is the Sonata’s most immediately attractive movement: the cello’s soulful opening melody is soon taken up by the violin, and their extended duet sings gracefully. An agitated middle section gives way to the return of the opening material. The finale, marked “Lively, with spirit,” is a sort of rondo based on the cello’s spiccato opening theme which the violin takes over in turn. Several brief episodes interrupt the rondo theme before this brilliant, energetic movement comes to its sudden close on a pizzicato chord.

 

 

OLIVIER MESSIAEN
b. 1908 in Avignon
d. 1992 in Paris

Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet For the End of Time)

Called up during World War II, Olivier Messiaen was serving as a medical auxiliary when the Germans overran France in the spring of 1940. He was taken prisoner and sent to a POW camp east of Dresden, where he discovered among his fellow prisoners a violinist, a clarinetist, and a cellist. A sympathetic German camp commander supplied Messiaen with manuscript paper and arranged to have an upright piano, old and out of tune, brought in for his use. That fall, Messiaen wrote an extended work called Quartet for the End of Time for the four musicians, who gave the premiere performance at that prison camp, Stalag VIII A, on January 15, 1941. Their audience consisted of 5000 fellow POWs, who sat outside in sub-freezing temperatures to hear the performance. “Never have I been listened to with such attention and understanding,” said Messiaen of that occasion.

It would be incorrect, however, to assume that the Quartet for the End of Time was written in response to the seemingly-endless existence of prisoners of war. Rather, Messiaen—a devout Christian—took his inspiration from the Revelation of St. John the Divine in the Apocrypha, specifically from the tenth chapter: “I saw a mighty angel, descending from heaven, clothed in a cloud, having a rainbow on his head. His face was as the sun, his feet as columns of fire. He placed his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the earth, and, supporting himself on the sea and on the earth, he raised his hand towards Heaven and swore by Him who lives forever and ever, saying: There will be no more Time; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God will be completed.”

The Quartet is an expression of faith in the resurrection from temporal existence, a faith expressed in many ways. For example, the work is in eight movements because while seven is “the perfect number” (the number of days of the creation), the music here “extends into eternity and becomes the eighth, of unfailing light, of immutable peace.” The notion of the dissolution of time is further reflected in the metrical notation of the music itself. Messiaen sometimes uses traditional meters and bar lines, but the actual metric flow of the music often has nothing to do with the prescribed measures; at other points he dispenses with an established meter altogether. The instrumentation varies (only in certain movements do all four instruments play simultaneously), and the Quartet also marks the first appearance of birdsong in Messiaen's music—he was fascinated by the songs of individual birds, carefully notated these songs, and used them as an important thematic feature of his music from this point on.

Messiaen himself prepared a detailed and colorful description of the eight movements, worth quoting at length:

Vocalise, for the angel who announces the end of time: The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of that mighty angel, his hair a rainbow and his clothing mist, who places one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. Between these sections are the ineffable harmonies of heaven. From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chords, encircling with their distant carillon the plainchant-like recitativo of the violin and cello.

Abyss of the birds: The abyss is Time, with its sadnesses and tedium. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are the desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song!

Intermezzo Scherzo: Of a more outgoing character than the other movements but related to them, nonetheless, by various melodic references.

Praise to the Eternity of Jesus:  Jesus is here considered as one with the Word. A long phrase, infinitely slow, by the cello expatiates with love and reverence on the everlastingness of the Word, might and dulcet, “which the years can in no way exhaust.” Majestically the melody unfolds itself at a distance both intimate and awesome. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Dance of fury for the seven trumpets: Rhythmically the most idiosyncratic movement of the set. The four instruments in unison give the effect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse attend various catastrophes, the trumpet of the seventh angel announces the consummation of the mystery of God). Use of extended note values, augmented or diminished rhythmic patterns, non-retrogradable rhythms—a systematic use of values which, read from left to right or from right to left, remain the same. Music of stone, formidable sonority; movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury, of icelike frenzy. Listen particularly to the terrifying fortissimo of the theme in augmentation and with change of register of its different notes, toward the end of the piece.

Clusters of rainbows, for the angel who announces the end of time: Here certain passages from the second movement return. The mighty angel appears, and in particular the rainbow that envelops him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, of wisdom, of every quiver of luminosity and sound). In my dreamings I hear and see ordered melodies and chords, familiar hues and forms; then, following the transitory stage, I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: Behold the cluster, behold the rainbows!

Praise to the Immortality of Jesus: Expansive violin solo balancing the cello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus—to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate His life to us. It is total love. Its slow rising to a supreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the Son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise—And I repeat anew what I said above: All this is mere striving and childish stammering if one compares it to the overwhelming grandeur of the subject!