The Program
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Children's Corner
About the Composer
Although Debussy enjoyed being a thorn in the side of France's
musical establishment, there was a strong streak of traditionalism
in his artistic makeup. The composer (who in later years signed
himself musicienfrançais) advocated for a
revival of the "pure French tradition," as exemplified by Baroque
composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. Debussy made his mark in the early
1890s with a series of boldly unconventional yet quintessentially
Gallic works: the String Quartet, La damoiselle élue, and
the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. By the time he
published his first book of Images for solo
piano in 1905, the composer and his aesthetic
principles—loosely subsumed under the rubric "Debussyism"—were the
object of both praise and censure. The term
impressionist became attached to him through his
association in the popular mind with Manet and other painters, but
Debussy rejected the label, insisting that his music depicted not
superficial impressions, but essential "realities."
About the Work
January 1908 was an eventful month for Debussy. On the
19th, he made his triumphant podium debut in Paris,
conducting the Orchestra of the Concerts Colonne in his symphonic
triptych La mer. The following day he married Emma Bardac,
the well-to-do singer for whom he had deserted his first wife four
years earlier. Over the ensuing months he wrote Children's
Corner as a present for their three-year-old daughter
Claude-Emma, affectionately known as Chouchou, or "Cabbage." In
this suite of six short pieces, Debussy set aside the rarefied
symbolist imagery of his earlier works and conjured the world of a
small girl with remarkable empathy and precision. "I live in a
world of imagination," he told an interviewer for Harper's
Weekly, "which is set in motion by something suggested by my
intimate surroundings rather than by outside influences, which
distract me and give me nothing."
A Closer Listen
The first piece, with its billowing arpeggios, serves as both
introduction and warm-up; Debussy himself described "Doctor Gradus
ad Parnassum" (the title refers to a book of musical
exercises) as "a kind of health-oriented, cumulative gymnastics."
The subdued, delicately rocking pulsations of "Jimbo's Lullaby"
have an almost soporific effect. In "Serenade for the Doll," the
piano mimics a guitar; the music is all lightness and quicksilver
transparency, in contrast to the muted pointillism of "The Snow is
Dancing," which according to Debussy should be "misty, dreary,
monotonous, and not too fast." The sound of panpipes suffuses "The
Little Shepherd," with its fitful, rhapsodic melody. Finally, the
strutting ragtime syncopations of "Golliwogg's Cakewalk" are
interrupted by the famous yearning theme from Wagner's Tristan
und Isolde, as if to suggest that romantic love, too, is
child's play.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Kinderszenen, Op. 15
About the Composer
In the seven years before his marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840,
Schumann wrote some of his best-loved keyboard works, including the
First and Second piano sonatas, Kreisleriana, the C-Major
Fantasy, and Kinderszenen (Scenes from
Childhood). Schumann was infatuated with Clara,
the budding pianist and composer, 10 years his junior; her father's
implacable opposition to the match had the predictable result of
propelling them into each other's arms. Nevertheless, living in
different cities—Robert in Leipzig and Clara in Vienna—the young
lovers were compelled to conduct their clandestine courtship
through letters and music. Schumann declared that his Sonata in
F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, was "a cry from my heart to yours." And
Clara wrote to Robert that "my wonderment increases" each time she
played the Kinderszenen. "You lay bare your entire inner
life in these scenes of touching simplicity."
About the Work
Schumann originally intended to include these short pieces in his
Novelletten, Op. 21, but later decided to publish them
separately, in part because their simplicity made them "accessible
to everyone" (and thus more salable). In a letter to Clara, he
described his Op. 15 as "an echo of the words you once wrote me to
the effect that 'you considered me at times almost like a child.'
In short, I really felt like a youth again, and I jotted down about
30 of these charming little things, from which I selected 12 [later
13] and called them Scenes from Childhood. I'm sure you
will enjoy them, but of course they will not satisfy you as a
virtuoso." Schumann added that the pieces "can be grasped at a
glance, and are as light as a bubble." To another friend he
remarked that he had not sketched his childhood scenes for
children, but as "reflections of an adult for other adults."
A Closer Listen
Their apparently programmatic nature notwithstanding, Schumann
conceived the Kinderszenen as abstract music and
added the descriptive titles as an afterthought. Simplicity was
indeed his watchword. Each of these 13 captivating miniatures is
characterized by clear, uncomplicated harmonies, symmetrical phrase
structures, and memorable tunes or rhythmic patterns, with abundant
repetition. There is no attempt to tie the pieces together
thematically, although three of them—"By the Fireside," "Knight of
the Hobby Horse," and "Almost Too Serious"—are loosely linked by
the use of a similar syncopated figure. The scenes range in mood
from the playful staccato of "Blind Man's Bluff" to the
self-conscious pomposity of "An Important Event" and the tender
yearning of "Dreaming." In the end, Schumann puts away childish
things and leaves us, in "The Poet Speaks," ruminating on the
meaning of it all.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
La boîte à joujoux
About the Composer
A devotee of the theater, Debussy flirted with opera and ballet
throughout his life, but he abandoned more dramatic projects than
he completed. (Among the catalogue of tantalizing might-have-been
works is an opera based on Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House
of Usher.) In the end, only three of his ballets reached the
stage. La boîte à joujoux (The Toy Box),
composed in 1913, was preceded by the Egyptian-themed
Khamma, commissioned by the British dancer Maud Allan in
1910 but not performed until 1947; and Jeux
(Games), written for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in
1913. The latter's Paris premiere was overshadowed by the
succès fou two weeks later of Stravinsky's The
Rite of Spring. But this unfortunate coincidence did not deter
Debussy from trying again, this time with an unpretentious "ballet
for children" set to a scenario by Andre Hellé, a noted illustrator
of children's books.
About the Work
As Debussy described it in a 1914 interview, "La boîte à
joujoux is a pantomime to the kind of music that I have
written in Christmas and New Year albums for children, a work to
amuse children, nothing more." Above all, he wanted to amuse his
beloved Chouchou, now nine years old; to help put himself in the
mood, he had even held "confidential talks" with his daughter's
castoff dolls. Debussy summarized the ballet's plot as follows: "A
cardboard soldier falls in love with a doll, he tries to show off
to her, but she betrays him with Polichinelle. The soldier learns
of this and terrible things begin to happen: There is a battle
between wooden soldiers and Polichinelles. In short, the soldier in
love with the beautiful doll is gravely wounded in the battle, the
doll nurses him and … they all live happily ever after."
The ballet, the composer continued, was "simplicity itself—quite
childish. Only how do you put that across in the theater—the
natural simplicity of it? The characters have to retain the angular
movements and burlesque appearance of the cardboard originals,
without which the play would lose all its significance." To
accentuate the story's innocence, Debussy proposed to have La
boîte à joujoux performed by marionettes, as in the
open-air puppet shows he had enjoyed as a young man. Hellé
convinced him to assign the roles to children instead. Yet when the
ballet was finally produced in 1919, in an orchestration completed
after the composer's death by André Caplet, the toy-box characters
were played by adults.
A Closer Listen
Like the orchestral version, Debussy's original piano score is
divided into four tableaux. An atmospheric prelude sets the scene:
A circling melody, embedded in a chiaroscuro wash of harmonies,
grows more and more animated as the sleeping toys awaken. Starting
with the soldier's martial tune, Debussy introduces each of the
main characters with a distinctive theme that will identify it
throughout the ballet. These short, easily recognizable leitmotifs
point to one of the score's conspicuous virtues: its economy of
means. For all its kinetic vitality and sharply delineated
gestures, the music seldom draws attention to itself. Instead, it
limns the simple plot vividly but discreetly, in keeping with
Debussy's insistence that "the action mainly consists of
movement, not ballet in the usual
sense."
In a bow to convention, Debussy structured the first tableau as a
series of character dances, featuring ungainly leaps for
Polchinelle, a graceful waltz for the doll, and a rousing sailor's
jig. Hints of French folksongs and an exotic Indian melody enliven
the festivities. The second tableau transports us to a field of
battle, where, in a mood of tense expectancy, the toy soldiers
march into position and take part in a brief, clangorous skirmish.
The scene changes to a pastoral setting, with a shepherd intoning a
melancholy ditty on his reedy chalumeau. Then the action suddenly
flashes forward 20 years—by way of a fleeting snatch of
Mendelssohn's "Wedding March"—to a picture of blissful
domesticity.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation