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

Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune

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 [Prélude].”

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.

The Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune is heard at this recital in an arrangement for flute and piano.

 

 

 

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

Le merle noir

Throughout his life Olivier Messiaen was fascinated by birds and birdsong. His second wife, Yvonne Loriod, recalled a story from the composer himself: “[Messiaen] was eighteen months old, and being pushed in a pram by his mother, when a bird began to sing, and he immediately threw down his bottle and raised his hand to tell his mother to be quiet and listen to the bird.” Messiaen traveled throughout the world, notating and recording the songs of birds, and so passionate was he about hearing new birdsong that he would sometimes sleep in barns so that he could hear the morning song of birds.

Birdsong began to appear in Messiaen’s music when he was still a young man, but in the 1950s it became a central feature of his music. In 1951 he wrote a brief work for flute and piano called Le merle noir (The Blackbird), and this was followed by a piano concerto called Reveil des oiseaux (Wakening of Birds, 1953), Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds, 1956), and Catalogue d’oiseaux (Catalog of Birds, composed 1956–58). Birdsong would remain an important part of Messiaen’s music across the long span of his career, and Yvonne Loriod has noted that it had a religious significance for him: “Messiaen always used to say, ‘I was born a believer,’ and never at any point in his life did he have a shadow of doubt. And birds were for him master musicians who sang to the glory of God, and he himself wanted to sing as they do.”

Le merle noir was the first of these birdsong-inspired compositions. Every year, the Paris Conservatory holds its concours, a term-ending examination for its instrumental students, and for these exams the Conservatory invites leading French composers to write brief pieces for students. The general stipulation is that the piece should include both a slow section, in which students can demonstrate their tone, and a fast section that will let them show off their agility and virtuosity. Curiously, what seems like a mere academic exercise has produced some very distinguished pieces, music that has transcended its origin to enter the repertory. These pieces include Fauré’s Fantasy for Flute, Debussy’s Rhapsody for Clarinet, Jolivet’s Concertino for Trumpet, and Pierre Sancan’s Sonatina, among others.

For the 1951 concours, Olivier Messiaen was invited to write the test-piece for the Conservatory’s flute-players, and he responded with Le merle noir. The work has no specified meter (the barlines are present simply to indicate phrasing), and it is freely structured: Messiaen alternates florid, cadenza-like passages for the flute alone with ensemble passages that develop with the two instruments in tight canon. Throughout, Messiaen insures that the flutist must demonstrate many aspects of that instrument’s technique, including the ability to sustain a singing sound, wide skips, rapid articulation, and fluttertonguing (this is, after all, an examination piece). The closing section, marked “Vif” (Lively) and based on the blackbird’s song, rushes Le merle noir to its animated close.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Syrinx

Debussy’s reputation was established by an early work that prominently displayed the flute, but the popularity of Prelude à l'après midi d'un faune has overshadowed the fact that one of his last—and most individual—works also features the flute. In 1913 poet and playwright Gabriel Mourey approached Debussy about composing music for Mourey’s three-act dramatic poem Psyché, to be presented in a private home that fall; the poem would include an account of the death of Pan, god of forest, fields, and herds. In mythology, Pan had once pursued a nymph named Syrinx, who fled his advances; when capture was imminent, she prayed to be turned into a reed, and from this reed Pan cut the pipes on which he played. Debussy was wary of the project and resisted at first, finally agreeing to furnish only an offstage flute solo that would depict the last melody Pan played before his death.

As he so often did, Debussy put off composition until the last minute and then had to scramble to get the music done; late in November 1913 he wrote to Mourey to complain that this piece “in truth . . . is a devil!” Debussy did get it done in time for the first performance of the poem, but the music itself was not published until 1927, long after his death. Debussy had called the work La flûte de Pan, but the publisher gave it the name Syrinx.

Certain critics have taken pains to try to show that this very brief piece (only 35 measures) bears some relationship to sonata form. A far better approach is simply to listen to Syrinx as the sad and evocative song of the god Pan as he plays one final time on his pipes. The music is metrically quite free: Debussy originally wrote it without bar lines, leaving it to the individual artist to supply the phrasing and rubato that help bring the music to expressive life (bar lines were added when the music was published, however). Debussy keeps much of Syrinx in the flute’s languorous lower register—rather than sounding silvery or brilliant, the music glows softly and sadly.

 

 

ANDRÉ JOLIVET
b. 1905 in Paris
d. 1974 in Paris

Incantations (selections)

André Jolivet came from a cultivated family (his father was a painter, his mother a musician), but his parents were aware of the difficulties of making a life in music, and they discouraged the young man from following his passion for music. Instead, at the age of twenty-two Jolivet became a schoolteacher in Paris and taught for several years. But he continued to study music, and contact with the works of Schoenberg and (more importantly) Varèse convinced him to return to music. In 1936 Jolivet, Olivier Messiaen, Daniel Lesur, and Yves Baudrier formed the group Jeune France, whose aim was to “propagate a living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic consciousness.”

In that same year Jolivet composed his five Incantations for solo flute. These years have been described as Jolivet’s “magic period,” a time when he proclaimed that his goal was to “give back to music its original, ancient meaning, when it was the magical, incantatory expression of the religious beliefs of human groups.” The flute in a sense might be thought a “primitive” instrument—in its earliest form it was fashioned from a reed—and Jolivet has spoken of an important connection between the instrument and its player: the flute, he notes, “is the musical instrument par excellence because, endowed with life by the breath, man’s deepest emanation, the flute charges sounds with what is both visceral and cosmic in us.”

The flute may have had its origins in a “primitive” instrument, but Jolivet’s Incantations demand a sophisticated, virtuoso performer on the complex modern instrument it has become. Because the flute is a linear instrument, a harmonic foundation can only be suggested, and these brief pieces require huge leaps across the instrument’s range, a wide dynamic palette, techniques such as fluttertonguing, and a number of repeated figures. These pieces are in a sense ritual exhortations, and Jolivet has said that his intention in them was “to generate musical feeling and, in the most sensitive (or the “newest”) listeners, a feeling similar to the panic impulses of primitive man.”

The present performance will offer selections 3 and 4 from the Incantations. The titles of the five pieces translate as:
1. To welcome the negotiators—and that the conference be peaceful
2. That the child to be born shall be a son
3. That the harvest be rich—fruit of the furrows that the laborer traces
4. For the serene communion of the being with the world
5. For the chief’s burial—to secure the protection of his spirit.

                                                                                               

ANDRÉ JOLIVET

Chant de Linos

The Chant de Linos was written in wartime France. In 1944 Claude Delvincourt, the head of the Paris Conservatory, asked André Jolivet to write a piece for the Conservatory’s annual concours: the term-ending exams for its performance students. Specifically, Delvincourt asked Jolivet to write the test-piece for the flute students, requiring only that it be “difficult.” Jolivet responded by composing the Chant de Linos and dedicating the piece, in its original version for flute and piano, to Gaston Crunelle, professor of flute at the Conservatory. But Jolivet felt that this music needed a richer setting, and he quickly prepared a second version for flute, violin, viola, cello, and harp. In this final form, the Chant de Linos was premiered in Paris on June 1, 1945.

Jolivet noted that the Chant de Linos “was in ancient Greece a variety of threnody: a funeral lamentation, a grieving interrupted by cries and dances.” That description catches the essence of his own piece, which alternates two distinctly different kinds of music: the flute sings its song of grief, full of somber dignity, and this atmosphere of formal grieving is broken repeatedly by outbursts of energy and violence. The result is a piece of music that works equally well in the concert hall or as an examination piece for students. Jolivet takes the flute through the full compass of its technique, from athletic leaps to runs across its entire range to fluttertonguing, and the player must be prepared to leave off such brilliance and to play with a lyric, singing style (Delvincourt’s request that this music be difficult was more than satisfied). Jolivet takes his performers through a series of sharply-contrasted episodes before finally propelling matters to an extremely fast and brilliant conclusion.

 

Program notes ©2008 by Eric Bromberger