This talk was given on August 20 2015 before the Auckland Philharmonia's "French Twist" concert. The programme was Debussy's "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un Faune", Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, and Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony. The piano soloist was Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and the conductor Andrew Gourlay.
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“Nymphs
whose rosy flesh
can
spur the drowsy air to dancing -
Did
I love a dream?
My,
my doubt, the residue of all my nights
dissolves
into a maze
merely
a budding grove -
Proof
that what I took for rapture
was
a subterfuge of roses
Just
suppose those women had no other
reality
than figments of a faun’s deluded mind.”
This
is a tiny sliver, a moment of Mallarmé's poetic monologue, the Afternoon of a
Faun, translated by Richard Howard. You can hear in it the languid,
transgressive, musical qualities that must have initially attracted Claude
Debussy, inspiring the delicate haze of a musical scene we’ll hear tonight,
which in turn provoked the notoriously suggestive choreography of Vatslav
Nijinsky.
Debussy
saw in the symbolist poets and Mallarmé in particular a conceptual but
especially a musical connection. He believed, and I quote, “that the poetic
work of Monsieur Mallarmé remains today the best model that exists of the music
of words”. Initially Mallarmé and Debussy had planned a collaboration, a theatrical reading of Mallarmé's poem The Afternoon of a Faun, with incidental music by Debussy, but the project
fell through, and Debussy continued alone, using Mallarmé's poetry as a
springboard for a purely musical exploration.
In
describing his approach to the work, Debussy regaled a critic with this musing:
“Is
it perhaps the dream left over at the bottom of the faun’s flute? To be more
precise it is the general impression of the poem. If the music were to follow
it more closely it would run out of breath… All the same it follows the
ascending shape of the poem as well as the scenery so marvellously described in
the text, together with the humanity brought to it by thirty-two violinists who
have got up too early! As for the ending, it’s a prolongation of the last line:
‘Couple farewell, I go to see what you became.”
The
idea of prolongation, suspending a moment of dream, an erotic reverie, is an
important one – Mallarmé effused to Debussy after the first performance that
“the music prolongs the emotion of my poem.”
Rather
than a literal “word-painting”, rather than being simply a “tone poem”, Debussy
takes the essence and energy of the poem and enlists it in a musical
exploration that goes far beyond the narrative of the text. Debussy not only
evokes the erotic transgressiveness of the poem but develops his own kind of
purely musical transgressiveness in new kinds of harmony and form. Pierre
Boulez called it the beginning of musical modernism, the real turn of the
century.
Nevertheless
the text has a lot to answer for – the opening flute solo, our point of entry
into the work, is also Debussy’s point of entry into the literal stuff of the
poem. From Mallarmé’s line “A single line of sound, aloof, disinterested” Debussy
extracts a now-iconic sliver of solo flute.
PLAY opening
of Prelude l’apres midi
Inviting Mallarmé to the premiere, Debussy wrote – “I need not say how happy I should be
if you were kind enough to honour with your presence the arabesque, which, by
an excess of pride perhaps, I believe to have been dictated by the flute of
your faun.” The
flute melody, or arabesque as it is named here, returns periodically, a kind of
melodic refrain, a structural pivot around which Debussy weaves his harmonic
and textural magic. The ambiguity of that opening line allows for a whole
catalogue of harmonic possibilities, resolutions and non-resolutions,
trajectories and misdirections.
But
it’s not so much the harmonic language, beginning at Wagner’s Tristan chord and
slipping off into new directions, but rather it’s Debussy’s fluid treatment of
form and timbre, that gives the work its radical modernity. Boulez
calls it a “mobile expressiveness” – and the flute solo might be what we could
think of as the central pivot of a musical mobile, returning from different
angles each time, spinning its shapes, adjacent harmonies and colours dangling
from its delicate structure, as we lie beneath it, transfixed, perhaps like the
nymph’s veil beneath the titillated faun. What was special about it to Boulez
was its flexibility and instantaneousness – instead of a huge Wagnerian teleology,
a grand arch towards ecstasy, Debussy had built a shimmering musical object
that at any individual moment could be observed moving or frozen, twisting in
the breeze, not beholden to any strictly linear narrative.
Perhaps
it is this mobile expressiveness, along with the erotic subtext of the scene,
that lends it so well to dance. Almost twenty years after the orchestral
premiere, Nijinsky choreographed and performed it with the Ballet Russe, and
it’s worth quoting at length a review of that original ballet production from
Auguste Rodin.
“Nijinsky has never
been so remarkable as in his latest role. No more jumps - nothing but
half-conscious animal gestures and poses. He lies down, leans on his elbow,
walks with bent knees, draws himself up, advancing and retreating, some-times
slowly, sometimes with jerky angular movements. His eyes flicker, he stretches
his arms, he opens his hands out flat, the fingers together, and as he turns
away his head he continues to express his desire with a deliberate awkwardness
that seems natural. Form and meaning are indissolubly wedded in his body, which
is totally expressive of the mind within... His beauty is that of antique
frescoes and sculptures: he is the ideal model, whom one longs to draw and
sculpt.”
Ravel
said of his Piano concerto in G: “it’s a concerto in the truest sense of the
word: I mean that it is written very much in the same spirit as those of Mozart
and Saint-Saens.” At
its essence it’s a divertissement: a sparkling vessel for virtuosity and
entertainment. It might not have the formal contortions and harmonic slippage
of the Debussy but it has an incredible classical clarity and lightness, and
its own kinds of harmonic and formal invention. It’s not pushing the boundaries
of the canon perhaps in the way musicologists think a canonic work ought to - but
it’s a masterclass in melodic diversion, proportion, and especially in
orchestration.
PLAY opening
of Ravel Piano Concerto in G
It’s
worth picking out some of those striking orchestral colours. Numerous wind
entries approach perilous heights: both bassoon and horn solos in particular
are pushed to high extremes of register where their very timbral identity
starts to become ambiguous and malleable. Ravel is a kind of magician here,
turning one sound into another: the scratchy tone of the low piccolo resembles
a medieval fife; the treacherous horn solo I mentioned a moment ago - to my
ears at least - sounds like a kind of brassy flute; in the finale a pair of
bassoonists become the coruscating left hand of a pianist – right at the edge
of performability, flickering figurations that splash piano idiom into the
orchestra. Throughout
the concerto are some of the most iconic solos in the orchestral repertoire –
Ravel manages to capture and transform the spirit of each instrument, and most
of all the brilliantly percussive, iridescent piano solo. Trill
glissandi, blues harmonies, percussive paradiddles; this is the virtuosity of a
mechanical industrial world: hard-edged, shiny, clear and bright.
We
are attracted to these surface elements: we love the sensuality of Ravel’s
colours and harmonies, his control, his precision. But more than that what
makes the concerto is a synthesis of emotion and intellect, surface and
substance. On
the surface it’s percussive, syncopated, bristling with energy, but there’s melancholy
underneath, and for the pianist all sorts of different touches are required. Not
least for the second movement, with its seemingly endless melodic line that
never repeats itself, continually recycling and reinventing, and of course its wonderful
gentle polyrhythm. In the left hand a slow 6/8, two groups of an accompanying
waltz pattern, against a doubly slow 3/4 cantabile line in the right hand. It’s
perhaps one of the most iconic slow movements in any concerto; Ravel himself
was drawn to the Mozart clarinet quintet as a model, perhaps more than any
superficial jazz influence.
Here’s
Ravel again: “What is being written today without the influence of jazz? It is
not the only influence, however: in the concerto one also finds bass
accompaniments from the time of Bach, and a melody that recalls Mozart, the
Mozart of the clarinet quintet, which by the way is the most beautiful piece he
ever wrote.”
Like
Ravel himself, musicologist Michael Russ suggests that the jazz influence is
often overstated, that “many of the harmonic preoccupations which we call
‘jazzy’ [actually] followed on from Ravel’s own innovations.” Ravel
embraced his compositional lineage and place in the world, and alongside Mozart
and Bach you can hear Gershwin, Stravinsky, and the music of Ravel’s native
Basque region. Each one respectfully, without the slightest sense of parody.
Not
everyone looked kindly on this kind of eclecticism. Stravinsky’s arch-propagandist
and right-hand man Robert Craft was dismissive of Ravel’s later music, and
especially of his incorporation of these diverse influences. Craft on Ravel:
“he never regained his path after the War, when he became the influenced rather
than the influencer.” Not
only uncharitable, but simply untrue. While at the time it may have been
Stravinsky that was leading fashion, one could argue that Ravel had a sizeable
influence on the course of music making throughout the twentieth century. His
advanced understanding of timbre made him the spiritual ancestor of spectralist
music and some might say the godfather of modern orchestration. And
aside from all that these surface influences were all just part of a synthesis
into Ravel’s own voice, so succinctly captured in this slow movement.
PLAY opening
of 2nd mvmt Ravel
As
a younger person playing in Auckland Youth Orchestra on a tour to the United
States, I was lucky to experience the Ravel Concerto in many performances with
John-Paul Muir as a soloist. John-Paul was brilliant, of course, and I loved
the concerto – but in my adolescent arrogance I didn’t think Ravel understood
syncopation – I didn’t like the fact that my ear was confused, that I couldn’t
lock into a catchy metric pattern – at that glacial tempo I thought the sense
of polyrhythm was totally lost, wasted.
But actually it has its own soft kind of
swing. And it’s the rhythmic ambiguity and fluidity that makes it shine and
swing above all the brilliant noise of the outer movements, that gives it its floating
quality, but also its weighty emotional heart. What seems effortless in its
continuous lyrical flow Ravel actually slaved over more than any of the flashy
mechanics. The composer referred to it nostalgically: “That flowing phrase! How
I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!”
Far
from Debussy’s languid sonic bath, or Ravel’s suspended Mozartian lyricism, Prokofiev’s
sixth symphony is music of angular motion, anxious risk, brief skittering
episodes of brutality and nostalgia. The tempo and texture change restlessly. But
like Debussy, Prokofiev is full of misdirection, albeit in a far more agitated
manner; a slippery harmonic blur in Debussy becomes a jolt in Prokofiev; in a
pinch a pastoral character transforms into a funereal, or a martial one. And
the Second World War looms large, but Prokofiev generally resists the
straightforwardly militaristic; his are the quiet patterings of discontent
rather than the volleys of machine-gun fire. This is Prokofiev after all, not
Shostakovich.
Michael
Steinberg calls the sixth a symphony of conflicting and unresolved emotions.
Following on from a relative box office hit in the form of the Fifth Symphony,
the sixth is sceptical where the fifth seemed triumphant. As
in the Ravel there is a tension between the sharp, bright musical surface and
what lies underneath it. When we think of Prokofiev we think of his wit, his craft,
his inventiveness, but under all the compositional play and presentation
there’s something darker and more unsettling. And
as in Ravel the heart of the music is at its temporal centre, in its central slow
movement. But
where Ravel’s melancholic lyricism is tinged with eccentricity, coloured with
bluesy modal mixture and surreal episodes at the fringes, Prokofiev’s is framed
with heavy, harsh strokes. Steinberg is not being melodramatic when he makes
the claim that Prokofiev had not written such lacerating music as the opening
of the second movement in more than twenty years.
PLAY
Prokofiev 6th Symphony, 2nd movement opening
Beginning
and ending the second movement is this music of grating anguish, intense,
screaming stuff. Woodwinds grind in chromatic parallel motion against a
stubborn bass pedal, over which a piercing lament… but these outbursts are
fleeting, dangerous, taboo – quickly passed over but etched in the memory. From
these dizzying, angular heights it’s quite a leap to the apparent optimism of
the finale. Superficially it seems upbeat, but it has a forced, manic quality,
and the threat of violence is never far away. One can’t escape the sneaking
suspicion that it’s the optimism of a pop star singing at a mafia wedding, the
fear lurking behind a brittle façade of craft and professionalism.
As
a listener the Prokofiev requires a different sort of approach from the Debussy
and Ravel. At face value the lurching tone might seem bewildering; but it’s the
conflicts and discontinuities between phrases and textures that I think are the
key to getting the most out of this work. As Arnold Whitall puts it, there’s a
continual opposition between exuberance and melancholy, and between the
familiar and the unexpected – out of context each one seems straightforward but
the lurching of tone calls that into question. It’s
a kind of power struggle, an argument, one of the last great statements of the
marginalized artist under Stalin. Take a deep breath and enjoy the concert.
Thank you.
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