Gymnopédies No. 3 and No. 1
Erik Satie (Orchestrated by Claude Debussy)
b. Honfleur, France / May 17, 1866
d. Paris, France / July 1, 1925
Satie was one of the great eccentrics of music. His offbeat, oddly titled creations (Flabby Preludes, Automatic Descriptions, Next to Last Thoughts, etc.) mirrored his surreal life, much of which he spent playing the piano in Parisian cafés. In time he won a certain amount of success and many devoted followers, including Ravel and the young composers known as Les Six. His music was largely forgotten between his death and his music’s revival in the 1960s.
Satie composed the Three Gymnopédies in the Spring of 1888. These gentle, emotionally cool piano pieces are his best-known works. He said they were inspired by French author Gustave Flaubert’s exotic historical novel Salammbó (1862). Another possible source of the name came from ancient Greece. Gymnopédie is the Greco-French term for the Gymnopaidiai, a singing and dancing ritual performed by boys during the feast of Apollo in Sparta.
Satie met and befriended fellow composer Claude Debussy in 1891. They used to get together at the home of Swiss conductor Gustave Doret. In 1896, Doret suggested that Debussy orchestrate the Gymnopédies, and Satie agreed. For unknown reasons, Debussy chose to arrange only the first and third of them. He also reversed their order, leaving the most familiar, No. 1, for last.
Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major, “Egyptian”, Op. 103
Camille Saint-Saëns
b. Paris, France / October 9, 1835
d. Algiers, Algeria / December 16, 1921
Music was only the foremost of Saint-Saëns’ many interests. This 19th Century Renaissance man also developed a working knowledge of several sciences, published volumes of poetry, saw his plays produced on the stage, and wrote reams of newspaper articles on many different topics, while somehow finding time to travel extensively. He led a full musical life, as well. It included conducting orchestras, giving recitals on both the piano and the organ, preparing new editions of music by earlier composers, and composing nearly 300 works of his own. During a period when French composers’ reputations rested first of all with their degree of success in the emotional world of the theater, Saint-Saëns proved himself a maverick by preferring the cooler, more abstract realm of instrumental music.
He had made his public debut as a pianist in 1846, age 11. To honor the fiftieth anniversary of that event, a gala concert was to be staged at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. For the occasion, he composed a new piano concerto, his fifth, and played the solo part himself at the premiere on June 3, 1896. He had written it (and his second sonata for violin and piano) during the previous winter, during a vacation in North Africa. He had often visited that locale since his first trip there in 1873. The Concerto contains several impressions of his journeys: the blinding brightness of an Egyptian morning (first movement), the twilight croaking of frogs in the Nile valley (second movement), and in the Finale, the sound of a ship’s propellers. The second movement is particularly evocative, including as it does a Nubian love song that Saint-Saëns heard sung by boatmen, then jotted down on his shirt cuff. Together, these reminiscences have earned the Concerto its nickname, “Egyptian.”
The first movement’s simple, gentle opening offers the key to its basic nature. To be sure, it contains moments of drama, and the orchestral coloring is fairly exotic, but on the whole this is a restrained creation. The rhapsodic reverie of the second movement opens with bold flourishes, after which the solo piano introduces the languorous, highly ornamented principal theme. The second subject bears a less “Eastern” but equally romantic profile. Virtuosity and animation, having so far played relatively minor parts in the Concerto, at last make their presence felt in the Finale. This is a playful, charming movement that concludes with a burst of bravura from the soloist. The composer later transcribed it for solo piano as a test piece in the piano examinations at the Paris Conservatoire.
Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14
Hector Berlioz
b. La Côte-Saint-André, France / December 11, 1803
d. Paris, France / March 8, 1869
In 1827, while Berlioz was studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he developed a typically all consuming passion for Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress whom he saw perform a number of works by Shakespeare. His attempts to communicate with her came to nothing. This unhappy experience inspired him to compose Episode in the Life of an Artist – Grand Fantastic Symphony in Five Parts. He did so partly at the call of his brilliant creative imagination, partly for a more practical reason: he hoped it would win him the kind of reputation that would impress Harriet Smithson. In it, he broke new compositional ground by synthesizing events from his life with purely imaginary ones.
Smithson’s stage company returned to Paris in 1832; Berlioz made sure she heard the piece he had written for her. One thing led to another, and they were married the following year. Their relationship, alas, proved not to be a happy one.
“A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair,” the final revision of the Symphony’s published program begins. “The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become a melody to him, an idée fixe (fixed idea) as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.”
After the first movement’s brooding introduction, the violins introduce the beloved’s recurring melody, the idée fixe. Its attractive yet nervous character sets the tone for the balance of this section, a portrait in sound of the hero’s tempestuous emotions. An elegant Waltz follows. At a fancy party, the composer spies his beloved across a crowded ballroom, only to lose her in the crush of swirling dancers.
Next, he retires to the country to rest, but is troubled by doubting thoughts regarding his lady love. Berlioz provides a picturesque rustic idyll, complete with shepherds piping to one another across the fields, an image achieved by placing the oboe soloist behind the stage and having him (or her) engage in a call-and-response dialogue with the on-stage English horn player. At the end of the movement, no fewer than four timpani players are called into action to provide the sounds of distant thunder.
In the fourth movement, to the strains of an alternately sinister and pompous March, the hero is led to the guillotine and beheaded for the murder of his beloved. Finally, at a witches’ Sabbath held at his own funeral, he encounters his beloved for the last time. Transformed into a fiendish spirit (and accompanied by a suitably twisted version of the idée fixe), she leads a mob of demons in a frenzied, mocking round dance. Berlioz makes brilliant use of the medieval Plainchant melody, Dies irae (Day of Wrath), which he introduces through the awe-inspiring sound of two tubas.
© 2008 Don Anderson. All rights reserved.
