Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Rhapsodie for Clarinet and Piano
Claude DEBUSSY
Born August 22, 1862, Saint Germain-en-Laye
Died March 25, 1918, Paris

In 1908 Debussy was named to the advisory board of the Paris Conservatory. It was only a minor position, but for a composer never wholly free from financial worries it was a welcome appointment. Debussy’s duties appear to have centered around the Conservatory’s annual concours, the examinations held at the end of each academic year for instrumentalists. In 1909 Debussy was asked to provide two test-pieces for the concours for clarinetists. Debussy was a notoriously lazy composer who seemed to take a perverse delight in missing deadlines, and being asked to write academic pieces would seem exactly the situation to bring out this side of him. But–for whatever reasons–he found writing these pieces for clarinet an attractive challenge, and he completed them in 1910. The first, titled simply Petite pièce, is a sight-reading exercise, but the other, much more substantial, is an examination piece intended to test musicianship. Titled Première Rhapsodie, it puts clarinetists through their paces, offering the opportunity to demonstrate a singing, sustained sound in the opening section in 4/4 and to show off the agility of their technique in the jaunty and chromatic fast section in 2/4. Debussy could be sour and self-deprecating, but he was delighted by the Rhapsodie and described it as “one of the most pleasing pieces I have ever written.”

Debussy liked this music enough that the following year he arranged it for clarinet and orchestra, and that version has proven particularly effective. Debussy’s title Première Rhapsodie for Clarinet and Piano seems to imply that he intended to write more, but he did not. His Second Rhapsodie, not nearly so well known as the First, is for saxophone.

Chansons de Bilitis
La flûte de Pan
La chevelure
Le tombeau des naïades

In the late 1880s, the young Debussy became friends with a remarkable figure in Parisian artistic circles, Pierre Louÿs. A photographer, poet, and author of erotic novels, Louÿs published his Chansons de Bilitis in 1894, the same year Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was premièred. The Chansons, purportedly Greek poems in the manner of Sappho, were actually the work of Louÿs himself. They tell of a Greek maiden “born at the beginning of the sixth century preceding our era, in a mountain village on the banks of the Melas forming the eastern boundary of Pamphylia.” Specifically they tell of Bilitis’ sexual awakening and experience, a topic that might have seemed risqué even in Paris, but Roger Nichols has noted that Louÿs’ technique is “to lend blatantly erotic situations a certain dignity by placing them in an antique never-never land.”

Debussy, whose Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun inhabits that same never-never land of languid sensuality, was drawn to Louÿs’ prose-poems and set three of them in 1897-8. But Debussy found setting them to music very difficult: he was unsure whether the poems were suited to–or even needed–music. Overcome by the language of the poems, Debussy wrote to Louÿs: “Now will you tell me what my three little bits of music can bring to a straightforward reading of our poems? Nothing. My dear fellow, I will even say that my music, blundering in, would divide the listeners’ excitement. Really, what is the point of harmonizing the voice of Bilitis in major or minor, since she is the possessor of the most persuasive voice in the world?” Debussy, in fact, later made settings of further Bilitis poems, but simply had them recited and wrote music for two flutes, two harps and celesta to accompany that recitation.

The three “songs” of the Chansons de Bilitis are very unusual. While precisely notated as to pitch, rhythm, and expression, these prose-poem settings can seem almost like recitations themselves. All three are extremely slow, and all three recount states of mind rather than action. Nevertheless, these states of mind–charged as they are with erotic awareness–have a power all their own. The songs form a progression, which might be described as innocent love, sexual love, and withered love.

“La flûte de Pan” tells of the awakening of love. The shepherd’s pipe of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is heard here in the piano’s opening phrase. Caught in the wonder of young love, Bilitis shares the flute of the shepherd boy, and it feels like honey to her lips. The girl stays out so late that the frogs croak (quietly in the piano), and she worries what her mother will say.

Quite a different Bilitis appears in the frankly sexual “La chevelure” (“The Tresses of Hair”). Here Bilitis tells of the boy’s dream about her, and the music moves from the sleepy beginning to the passionate outburst at “lips upon my lips” and the climax at “entered into my dream” before the music fades into nothing at the close.

In “Le tombeau des naïades,” an experienced Bilitis is searching for the traces of lost love as her sandals slog through dirty snow. The music’s slow pace mirrors this death of passion (Debussy marks it “Softly and wearily”), and at the end her lover declares the satyrs and nymphs dead and peers through a slice of ice at the empty sky above them.

Piano Quintet in F-sharp Minor
Reynaldo HAHN
Born August 9, 1874, Caracas
Died January 28, 1947, Paris

Born in Venezuela to German parents, Reynaldo Hahn was taken to Paris at age three and had all his musical training in the City of Light. Hahn appears to have been one of those people who could do it all. He was a fine pianist and had a beautiful baritone voice, and he would give recitals in which he sang his own songs while he played the piano, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as he sang. He was an accomplished conductor who conducted at the Salzburg Festival, became director of the Paris Opera in the final years of his life, and was an early champion of Mozart’s operas. He also served for some years as music critic of Le Figaro. Hahn composed operas, ballets, orchestral music, songs, and operettas, and it was as a composer of operettas that he had his greatest success: one of these–Ciboulette of 1923, set in a fruit and vegetable market–ran for over a thousand performances. Hahn struck a distinctive, elegant, and witty figure in Paris salons; he was Marcel Proust’s lover, and he also wrote a biography of Sarah Bernhardt, one of his close friends.

Hahn composed his Piano Quintet in F-sharp Minor in 1922, when he was 48; it was published the following year by Heugel, who had been Hahn’s publisher since he was 17. Listening to this polished, charming music, no one would sense that in these years Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Prokofiev were in the process of transforming music. Hahn’s Quintet seems to come from the nineteenth century and to inhabit the same emotional and harmonic world as Fauré and Franck. Hahn marks the first movement Molto agitato e con fuoco,though that marking might seem a little fierce for this elegant, propulsive music. The surging opening idea is heard immediately over murmuring piano accompaniment, and this material is extended at some length before the jagged second subject arrives. Hahn’s development of this material is long, but textures remain light and clear throughout this movement, which drives to a firm close on its opening theme.

The middle movement is in three-part form. Over steady piano chords, the cello sings the long opening theme (in C-sharp minor), and this is taken up by the other strings. The central section relaxes on a lovely melody for violin in F major, and in the concluding section Hahn combines his two principal themes gracefully. The movement ends in utter calm.

The finale, marked Allegretto grazioso, is graceful music indeed. It bursts to life on the piano’s fresh opening melody, and quickly strings and piano are trading this idea. This finale is far from the con fuoco spirit of the first movement or the C-sharp minor sobriety of the second, and one almost does not recognize that Hahn is deftly recalling themes from those two movements as he proceeds. Spirits remain open and bright throughout this good-natured music, and Hahn’s Quintet concludes in a shower of sparkling energy.

Danses Sacrée et Profane for Harp and String Quartet, L. 103
Claude DEBUSSY

The Pleyel company of Paris had long been famous for its pianos (Chopin particularly admired the Pleyel piano), and in 1897 the firm introduced a new instrument, the chromatic harp. Previous harps had been able to manage only seven notes in an octave and had to use pedals to create the other notes, but the chromatic harp dispensed with pedals and instead offered strings tuned to all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. The company naturally wanted to show off its new instrument, and Pleyel and the Brussels Conservatory jointly commissioned a new work for chromatic harp from Debussy in 1904.

That year was one of the most important, productive, and turbulent in the composer’s life. Deep in work on La mer, Debussy left his wife that year for Emma Bardac, the estranged wife of a wealthy banker; under the spell of this new affair, Debussy composed one of his finest pieces for piano, L’isle joyeuse. But Debussy’s distraught wife attempted suicide, and during the resulting scandal many of his friends angrily deserted him. Doubtless the commission for the new harp piece was welcome to the composer, who was almost destitute at this point–he stopped work on La mer to write it.

The Danses Sacrée et Profane are scored for chromatic harp and string orchestra. This is music of delicacy and understatement, and Debussy keeps the harp firmly in the spotlight: the string accompaniment is lean (and in fact the Danses are sometimes performed as chamber music, with the harp accompanied by string quartet). Listeners should be a little wary of Debussy’s title, which is intentionally vague and probably meant simply to be evocative. There is nothing distinctly sacred about the first, while the second evokes no images of pagan ritual. Instead, this is intimate and sometimes haunting music, well-calculated to show off the new instrument and to please audiences. The somber Danse Sacrée–based on a melody by Debussy’s friend, the Portuguese composer-conductor Francisco de Lacerda–is poised and formal in its lean-lined melodies. The music flows without pause–and with an almost imperceptible quickening of pace–into the Danse Profane, which is brighter, more relaxed, and more animated. Sparkling runs show off the possibilities of the new instrument and finally drive the dance to its emphatic concluding pizzicato.

The Danses Sacrée et Profane were first performed in November 1904 at one of the Concerts Colonnes in Paris by the harpist Mme. Wurmser-Delcourt. Reviewers, still outraged by Debussy’s domestic scandal earlier that year, gave it only a lukewarm welcome. Debussy, still pressed for money, may have worried that the music would have few performances in its harp version, and that same year he arranged it for two pianos; it is still sometimes performed (and recorded) in this arrangement. The dedication, however, is to Gustave Lyon, the inventor of the chromatic harp.

Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, L. 137

Near the end of his life Debussy planned a cycle of six sonatas for various combinations of instruments. He completed only the first three: for cello and piano (1915); flute, viola, and harp (1915); and violin and piano (1917). Projected–but never written–were sonatas for oboe, horn, and harpsichord; for trumpet, clarinet, bassoon, and piano; and a final sonata that would have included all the instruments from the five earlier sonatas.

This was not a happy period in Debussy’s life. He was suffering from the cancer of the colon that would eventually kill him, and World War I was raging across Europe–Paris was actually being shelled on the day the composer died there. The three sonatas that Debussy completed have never achieved the popularity of his earlier works, and Debussy himself deprecated them with the self-irony that marked his painful final years. But this music has a power all its own, and listeners who put aside their preconceptions about what Debussy should sound like (and about what a sonata should be) will find this spare music moving and–in its austere way–painfully beautiful. Debussy wrote the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp in 1915 in a small cottage in Pourville, looking out over the English Channel. He had originally intended to use oboe instead of viola, and the revision is fortunate, for the completed sonata contrasts three different sonorities: plucked strings, bowed strings, and a wind instrument. Of the three sonatas, this is the least severe. Listening to this ethereal music, one would not guess that the most cataclysmic war history had ever seen was raging across trenches 100 miles east of where it was written.

The Sonata’s structure is as unusual as Debussy’s choice of instruments. The opening movement, Pastorale, offers six different melodic ideas, but these often feel more like fragments than fully-stated themes. The movement is not in traditional sonata form; the melodic ideas recur in an unusual sequence, and the tempo changes so often that the movement seems to break down into short episodes.

The same design shapes the final two movements. The Interlude is marked Tempo de menuetto, but that is only a general indication of speed, for there is nothing minuet-like about this movement, which brings back themes from the first movement. The Finale too is freely-structured. Whirring harp figures launch this movement on its way, and the other voices quickly join it. But even in this rapid finale the mood remains subdued, the music fragmentary.

Something of Debussy’s own mood at the time he wrote the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp may be seen in letters to his friend Robert Godet. At just the time he was finishing the sonata, Debussy wrote: “I am writing down all the music that passes through my head, like a madman, and rather sadly.” And after hearing the sonata performed for the first time the following year, Debussy wrote: “The sound of it is not bad, though it is not for me to speak to you of the music. I could do so, however, without embarrassment for it is the music of a Debussy I no longer know. It is frightfully mournful and I don’t know whether one should laugh or cry–perhaps both?”

Introduction and Allegro
Maurice RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrennes
Died December 28, 1937, Paris

In the spring of 1905, Ravel–then 30 years old had just come through a bruising scandal: he had been denied the Prix de Rome for the third consecutive year, and the resulting outcry had forced the resignation of the director of the Paris Conservatory. Now he was anxious to put this strain behind him and go sailing to Amsterdam, then up the Rhine as far as Frankfurt, and back to Le Havre.

But complications stood in the way. First, the Erard Company, maker of harps and pianos, had commissioned a work for harp that he had to finish before he could go. Usually a slow and meticulous worker, Ravel got this piece done in eight days “and three sleepless nights” of work. And then there was the matter of proper clothing. The most fastidiously-dressed composer who ever lived (for his American tour of 1928, he would take along twenty pairs of pajamas and fifty pastel shirts), Ravel hurried to his tailor to order the proper clothes for a yacht trip. In his haste, Ravel left the manuscript of the new harp piece sitting on the tailor’s counter. Fearing the worst, he returned from the trip several weeks later to find that the tailor had carefully saved it for him.

The harp piece was the Introduction and Allegro: a ten-minute work for harp and a chamber ensemble of flute, clarinet, and string quartet, first performed in Paris on February 22, 1907. As one might expect, given the source of the commission, it features the harp prominently, but the Introduction and Allegro is not, despite what some have claimed, a miniature harp concerto, though it has a cadenza for that instrument near the close. Rather, it is a genuine chamber work that contrasts three quite different sonorities: the smooth sound of woodwinds, the percussive sound of harp, and the warm resonance of strings. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the Introduction and Allegro is the range of different sounds Ravel achieves with this small ensemble. Ravel asks the strings for tremolos, pizzicatos, harmonics, and sul tasto bowing (over the fingerboard to produce an especially soft sound); the winds are given rapidly-repeated staccatos and swirling arpeggios, while the writing for harp is thoroughly idiomatic, making imaginative use of pedaling and harmonics.

The very opening makes clear Ravel’s intention to contrast these sounds. Woodwinds introduce the haunting opening theme (Ravel marks it expressif), strings answer them, and the harp in turn responds to the strings. The Introduction is quite brief, and at the Allegro the music surges ahead as the harp alone introduces the playful main theme. The music builds to an animated climax and suddenly breaks off for the harp’s cadenza, which is beautifully written for the instrument. In its closing moments, the left hand has the main theme in harmonics while the right hand accompanies with high and very faint glissandos. The other instruments rejoin the harp for the rush to the colorful cadence.