The Program
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Quatre chansons de jeunesse
When Debussy was still a student at the Paris Conservatory, he
worked as an accompanist for the voice classes of Madame
Moreau-Sainti, whose students included a gifted (and married)
coloratura soprano named Marie-Blanche Vasnier. "Achille," as he
was known then, was infatuated with her. When he won the Prix de
Rome in 1884, he presented her with a collection of 13 songs, from
which the first four songs on the program are taken.
The manuscript anthology begins with five songs to texts by Paul
Verlaine, the poet with whom Debussy is forever linked. In
Verlaine's Fêtes galantes (Gallant
Festivities), the 19th century waxes nostalgic for
18th-century French courtly life before the French Revolution. As
in the paintings of Antoine Watteau, elegant courtiers play at
roles from the Italian commedia dell'arte.
In "Pantomime," we meet the tipsy clown Pierrot, with his white
face and white ruff; his beloved Columbine; the young lover
Clitandre; the dupe Cassandre; and the clown Harlequin. Coloratura
skills are definitely required for this song. In "Clair de lune,"
the beloved's soul is likened to a landscape in which courtiers,
their desire constrained by politesse, make music and dance in an
exquisite but melancholy nocturnal setting. Debussy's later setting
of this same poem for the 1891 Fêtes galantes I is a
masterpiece, but this earlier setting has its charms as well.
The young Debussy was often drawn to the poetry of Théodore de
Banville, among the Parnassian poets who repudiated Romantic
extremes of emotion and cultivated "art for art's sake." We meet
another incarnation of the commedia dell'arte's famous clown
Pierrot in Banville's and Debussy's song of the same name.
Jean-Gaspard Debureau, invoked at the end, was a celebrated mime
whose most famous creation for the Théâtre des Funambules was
Pierrot. The character of Baptiste in Marcel Carné's 1945 classic
movie Les enfants du paradis (Children of
Paradise) is based on Debureau. Mischievously, Debussy quotes
the French folk song, "Au clair de la lune / Mon ami Pierrot,"
dating back to at least the mid-18th century, in his own
creation.
For "Apparition," Debussy chose a poem by the great Symbolist poet
Stéphane Mallarmé, in whose famous Tuesday salons the young
composer took part. If this sophisticated music still shows the
influence of Jules Massenet's music, there are also signs of the
true Debussy to appear shortly thereafter.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Six Songs, Op. 38
Rachmaninoff, who was born into a noble but impoverished family of
Tatar descent, studied at the St. Petersburg and Moscow
conservatories, became friends with a then unknown bass named
Fyodor Chaliapin in 1897, and composed three operas, three piano
concertos, and much else before going into permanent exile in 1917.
In the year of his death, he became an American citizen.
Between 1890 and his departure from Russia, he composed more than
80 songs in which we hear an essentially 19th-century Russian
style, marked by long-breathed melodies, rich Romantic harmonies,
and—Rachmaninoff's hallmark—an abiding sense of melancholy. These
songs are in the tradition of the Russian romans ("song"
or "romance"), influenced by the early 19th-century French
romance; in its aim to share emotion with sympathetic
friends, the romans is unlike the German Lied and the
"realist" songs of Mussorgsky and, later, Shostakovich. Perhaps
because he was cut off from the Russian singers and poets who had
nurtured his songs, Rachmaninoff wrote almost nothing else in this
genre after 1917.
The Op. 38 songs were his last before going into exile and
abandoning song altogether. Here, Rachmaninoff turns away from
Russia's Romantic poets to the Symbolists who became a force to
reckon with in the early 20th century. One would expect songs by
one of the century's greatest pianists to feature sumptuous
textures and sweeping melodies, and the first song, "In My Garden
at Night," does not disappoint. For Aleksandr Blok's lament based
on an Armenian poem (Blok is one of Russia's most important lyric
poets after Pushkin), Rachmaninoff punctuates the accompaniment
with stabs of pain and fashions an ultra-rich climax before the
song dies away in sorrow.
The words of the second song, "To Her," were written by Andrei
Bely, whose novel St. Petersburg was regarded by
Vladimir Nabokov as one of the great prose works of the 20th
century. Like obsessive thoughts of the beloved for whom the
persona waits longingly, the bare, unharmonized figure we hear in
the piano at the beginning haunts throughout the first half of the
song.
The eccentric "Ego-Futurist" Igor Severyanin (a pseudonym meaning
"Man from the North") put aside his more bizarre vein of verse for
the darling hymn "Daisies." Rachmaninoff sets most of the song in
the treble register, with a dip into the lower regions for the plea
that earth and sky might nourish such beauty.
In 1915, a friend reproached Rachmaninoff for his supposed bad
taste in poetry for music, so the composer decided to explore new
territory in Russian Symbolist verse for his Op. 38 songs,
including "The Rat-Catcher" by Valery Bryusov; this poet began by
translating Verlaine and ended by embracing Bolshevism. The myth of
the pied piper is about the power of music to seduce, and we hear
that power in the difficult piano part. In Rachmaninoff's last
songs before exile, the accompaniment becomes more virtuosic than
before—he was, after all, one of the greatest pianists who ever
lived.
A major figure of the so-called "Silver Age" of Russian Symbolist
literature, Fyodor Sologub writes of enchanted worlds of reverie in
"A Dream"; Rachmaninoff begins with a dreamy transparency of
texture that builds to the kind of lush climax familiar to anyone
who has played or heard his piano concertos and other works. The
long postlude, after words are hushed in sleep, is purest
Rachmaninoff.
Another major Symbolist writer was Konstantin Balmont, who spent
the last two decades of his life in exile. "A-u!" is the biggest
song of the opus, an opulent, sweeping work that amply displays
Rachmaninoff's trademark harmonic richness.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
La bonne cuisine
In 1947, Bernstein—the first conductor-composer born and trained in
America to achieve worldwide fame—dipped into a Parisian cookbook
entitled La bonne cuisine française: Tout ce qui a rapport à la
table of 1873 by Émile Dumont. When Bernstein entitled
his four chosen recipes La bonne cuisine, he knew that
song aficionados would understand the ironic reference to Gabriel
Fauré's song cycle La bonne chanson; that we hear
references to French mélodie (later 19th-century
French art-song) in the music is only to be expected, but
American-born irony, blues, and other influences are also audible.
Dumont's cookbook is not for dieters, with its vast quantities of
lard, butter, claret, and more, but if these dishes are a culinary
"heart attack on a plate," they are a musical delight.
Bernstein provided his own witty English texts for these songs—the
recipes undergo indigestible metamorphosis in the process—dedicated
to the great singer Jennie Tourel as "the onlie begetter" (a
reference borrowed from Shakespeare's dedication to the mysterious
Mr. W. H., who supposedly inspired his sonnets). Two of the recipes
are French dishes, and two hail from elsewhere, beginning with
British "Plum Pudding," prefaced by a tongue-in-cheek directive
matematico ("mathematical"). Do not stray from these
instructions, the bass beat at the start tells us; one hears a
singer determined to stick to the letter of the culinary law.
Nowhere else in music is Crisco invoked with such ardor.
"Oxtail Stew" is an inimitably French dish, and Americanized
Frenchness sounds here. A fluid, slithering figure in the
piano—very "soupy"—starts us off, followed by bluesy staccato
chords as the tails are removed from the stew, swathed in a piquant
sauce, and served up on their own.
"Tavouk Gueunksis" is both a Turkish chicken dish and a delightful
excuse for Bernstein to create an unconventional Turkish march—with
five beats per bar instead of four. At the beginning, the dish is
announced in declamatory style before the pseudo-exotic "alla
turca" strains commence, complete with mimicry of cymbals
striking.
In "Rabbit at Top Speed," we meet a host or hostess in a dilemma:
Unexpected company has arrived, and dinner must be
provided—quickly. Racing through ingredients so sinful that
tastiness is assured, the musicians only pause to linger in
momentary sensuous delight over the mention of lots of red wine,
after which the helter-skelter pace resumes. Bernstein's deployment
of bubbling trills in the piano to depict boiling water is only one
of many delicious details. No wonder the last words ("and serve")
sound so triumphant.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS
Modinhas e canções, Series I
Villa-Lobos was among the most significant composers in
20th-century Brazil. Largely an auto-didact, he immersed himself in
the music of Brazilian choroes, or itinerant street
musicians. For him, the modernist aesthetic called for a break with
European Romantic tonality; he was determined to renew and
legitimize a distinctly Brazilian musical vocabulary, with elements
taken from Portuguese, Afro-Brazilian, Amerindian, and other
peoples of his country. After living in Europe—primarily
Paris—throughout the 1920s, Villa-Lobos returned to Brazil by the
time he composed his first set of Modinhas e canções; the
term modinha comes from a genre of 18th- and
19th-century light, sentimental Portuguese love songs, while
canções is a more generic term for "songs."
"Canção do Marinheiro" is a sailor's song to words by the late
15th- and early 16th-century dramatist Gil Vicente, called "the
Trobadour." Above the unchanging, mournful beat in the piano and
the oceanic low bass tones, the persona sings of lovers, all of
whom also sing. This is a haunting work, capped off by a final,
passionate threnody on the exclamation, "Ah!"
Viriato Corrêa was one of the foremost dramatists in 20th-century
Brazil; "Lundú da Marqueza de Santos" comes from his play
Marqueza de Santos, as a lover laments the beautiful
marchioness's absence.
The "Cantilena" is based on a traditional "house slave song" from a
particular region in the northeast Brazilian state of Bahia on the
Atlantic. The slow, heavy, repeated beats of a work song emphasize
a slave's longing for his former home, the little ranch preferable
by far to any king's blandishments. This song is especially moving
when words cede to wordless melody near the end.
Villa-Lobos's meowing lament for a lost cat, "A Gatinha parda," is
a work one can add to Rossini's "Duetto buffo di due gatti" ("Comic
Duet for Two Cats") and Ravel's cats in heat in his opera
L'enfant et les sortilèges. The light, tripping gait
evokes a child who asks where its lost cat might be and imitates
its calls to entice it back home.
"Remeiro de S. Francisco" is a mestizo song
(mestizo designates a person of mixed race) from
Bahia. For this song of an oarsman who has been sold this very day,
we hear rowing rhythms and a lament punctuated with occasional
cries of heightened and heart-rending despair.
"Nhapôpé" is a folkloric evocation of love to driving, motoric
rhythms. In legend, Nhapôpé is a rare and beautiful bird who, when
its wing is wounded, seeks healing in a human heart; here, a lover
tells the beloved that she is Nhapôpé and that he is her
lover.
"Evocação" is the most extended song in the set; it tells of
remembered May-time passion, now past and understood to be an
illusion—but one that still makes the persona happy. The sultry,
smoky atmosphere of a nightclub in Rio, its crooner giving voice to
impassioned and impossible love, is audible in these strains.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS
"Melodia sentimental"
Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest is
an exotic romance novel from 1904 by William Henry Hudson; in his
tale of a lost world and lost tribes, a traveler to the Guyana
jungle of southeastern Venezuela encounters the bird-girl Rima and
falls in love with her. In 1959, the novel was made into a film
starring Audrey Hepburn as Rima and Anthony Perkins as the traveler
Abel, but the movie was a failure with both critics and audiences.
Villa-Lobos was asked to compose the music, but Hollywood
intervened, to the composer's displeasure.
Villa-Lobos created a symphonic poem entitled Floresta do
Amazonas, or Forest of the Amazon, from his film
music and then extracted a song from it, "Melodia sentimental." His
friend, poet Dora Vasconcelos, provided the ardent words; any lover
who fails to succumb to music this luscious is simply not
listening.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
FRANCISCO ERNANI BRAGA
"Engenho novo"
Francesco Ernani Braga studied music in Paris (with Jules Massenet)
and Germany (he was an ardent Wagnerite), but he was also Brazilian
to the core and harmonized six Afro-Brazilian folk songs. "Engenho
novo" is an amusing specimen of onomatopoeia, imitating sounds in
the external world: Workers operating a sugar-processing machine in
Rio Grande do Norte in northeastern Brazil attempt to imitate the
sound of the new invention.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation