Shéhérazade
MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées
Died December 28, 1937, Paris

In 1903 the French poet Tristan Klingsor (pen name of Arthur Leclère) published a collection of a hundred prose-poems on exotic topics, titled Shéhérazade. Klingsor's friend Maurice Ravel was instantly drawn to these poems (he noted that in them "I yielded to the profound attraction which the East has always held for me since my childhood") and resolved to set some of them to music. Ravel was attracted not only by the exotic topic but also by the subtle language and free-verse rhythms of Klingsor's poems: he asked the poet to read Shéhérazade finally chose three quite different texts. These settings are remarkable for their sensitivity to Klingsor's language. The vocal line is always clear, and the texts are at many points spoken and declaimed rather than "sung."

Ravel may have felt a lifelong fascination for the Orient, but it was a fascination undimmed by reality: he never traveled there and so was free to imagine it as an opulent, mysterious, sensual place, and that romantic fascination energizes these shimmering songs. Klingsor himself was surprised that Ravel chose to set Asie("Asia"), which reads like a long catalog of fantastic images, but that seems to have been its appeal for Ravel.

Many of the lines begin "Je voudrais . . ." ("I would like"), and each of these introduces its own brief chapter of exotic images: princesses, jewels, magical vistas, bloody assassins. Ravel writes a different sort of music for each of these, and this long opening song moves from a quiet beginning to its furious climax on the lines "those who die from love or else from hate."

The other two songs, both much shorter, are quite different. In La flûte enchantée ("The Enchanted Flute"), a slave-girl, locked in a room with her dozing elderly master, hears the sound of her lover playing the flute on the street below, and the sound of his flute caresses her cheek like a kiss. In contrast to the opulent and varied Asie, this song is spare, almost lean in its textures.

Ravel marks the beginning "Soft and expressive," and-appropriately-the solo flute has a central role. The final song, L'indifférent ("The Indifferent One"), is the most mysterious of the set-and the most provocative. It depicts what is only a transient moment: a youth of feminine demeanor passes by indifferently and disappears, and the poet is left moved and unsettled in the aftermath. Yet the sex of the speaker in Klingsor's poem is unclear, and this languid song drifts into silence in an atmosphere of uncertain sexuality.

String Quartet in F Major, Opus 135
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna

This quartet-Beethoven's last complete composition-comes from the fall of 1826, one of the blackest moments in his life. During the previous two years, Beethoven had written three string quartets on commission from Prince Nikolas Galitzin, and another, the Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Opus 131, composed between January and June 1826. Even then Beethoven was not done with the possibilities of the string quartet: he pressed on with still another, making sketches for the Quartet in F Major during the summer of 1826.

At that point his world collapsed. His twenty-year-old nephew Karl, who had become Beethoven's ward after a bitter court fight with the boy's mother, attempted suicide. The composer was shattered-friends reported that he suddenly looked seventy years old. When the young man had recovered enough to travel, Beethoven took him-and the sketches for the new quartet-to the country home of Beethoven's brother Johann in Gneixendorf, a village about thirty miles west of Vienna. There, as he nursed Karl back to health, Beethoven's own health began to fail. He would get up and compose at dawn, spend his days walking through the fields, and then resume composing in the evening. In Gneixendorf he completed the Quartet in F Major in October and wrote a new finale to his earlier Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130. These were his final works. When Beethoven returned to Vienna in December, he went almost immediately to bed and died the following March.

One would expect music composed under such turbulent circumstances to be anguished, but the Quartet in F Major is radiant music, full of sunlight-it is as if Beethoven achieved in this quartet the peace unavailable to him in life.

The opening movement, significantly marked Allegretto rather than the expected Allegro is in sonata form-though a sonata form without overt conflict-and Beethoven builds it on brief thematic fragments rather than long melodies. This is poised, relaxed music, and the final cadence-on the falling figure that has run throughout the movement-is remarkable for its understatement. By contrast, the Vivace bristles with energy. Its outer sections rocket along on a sharply-syncopated main idea, while the vigorous trio sends the first violin sailing high above the other voices. The ending is impressive: the music grows quiet, comes to a moment of stasis, and then Beethoven wrenches it to a stop with a sudden, stinging surprise.

The slow movement-Beethoven carefully marks it Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo-is built on the first violin's heartfelt opening melody; the even slower middle section, full of halting rhythms, spans only ten measures before the return of the opening material, now elaborately decorated. The final movement has occasioned the most comment. In the manuscript, Beethoven noted two three-note mottos at its beginning under the heading Der schwer gefasste Entschluss: "The Difficult Resolution." The first, solemnly intoned by viola and cello, asks the question: "Muss es sein?" ("Must it be?"). The violins' inverted answer, which comes at the Allegro, is set to the words "Es muss sein!" ("It must be!"). Coupled with the fact that this quartet is virtually Beethoven's final composition, these mottos have given rise to a great deal of pretentious nonsense from certain commentators, mainly to the effect that they must represent Beethoven's last thoughts, a stirring philosophical affirmation of life's possibilities. The actual origins of this motto are a great deal less imposing, for they arose from a dispute over an unpaid bill, and as a private joke for friends Beethoven wrote a humorous canon on the dispute, the theme of which he later adapted for this quartet movement. In any case, the mottos furnish material for what turns out to be a powerful but essentially cheerful movement. The coda, which begins pizzicato, gradually gives way to bowed notes and a cadence on the "Es muss sein!" motto.

Chansons Madécasses
MAURICE RAVEL

If the Shéhérazade songs that opened this program come from early in Ravel's career, the Chansons Madécasses come from late in his life, and they offer some of his most advanced music. In 1925 Ravel received a commission from the American patron of arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for a set of songs, and she made an unusual request: Ravel was free to choose the texts, but she asked that they be accompanied, if possible, by an ensemble of flute, cello, and piano. Ravel-who had just completed Tzigane and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition-accepted that condition, and then he in turn made a surprising choice of texts.

The title Chansons Madécasses means "Songs of Madagascar" or "Madagascan Songs." For these songs, Ravel set three poems that Évariste Parny claimed to have translated from the original in 1787 under the title Chansons madécasses, traduites en françois, suivies de poésies fugitives. Scholars have doubted the authenticity of these "fugitive poems," suggesting that rather than translating native poetry, Parny (1753-1814) wrote them himself while living in India and based their style on poems from Madagascar. Whatever their origin, these songs and their shocking texts caused a sensation at their first performance on June 13, 1926 in Paris: the poems are surprising in their explicit sexuality and in their political sentiments, and some members of the audience walked out of that first performance. The almost visceral appeal of these songs was underlined by the lithographs that appeared in the first edition of the songs: dark, expressionistic, and violent, these crude woodcuts captured the spirit of the "native" songs perfectly.

Some observers have detected an unexpected influence on these songs: Arnold Schoenberg. The use of a solo singer and small instrumental ensemble recalls Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire of 1912, and Ravel freely admitted being aware of Schoenberg when he wrote these songs: "I am quite conscious of the fact that my Pierrot Lunaire are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written."

The first song, Nahandove, is explicitly erotic. "Nahandove" is the name of the poet's lover, and both poet and composer clearly like that name, lingering over it as much as they can. The poet waits for his lover in the moonlight. She arrives, they make love, then collapse together in the warm air; she leaves, and he is left alone, caught in the same longing he felt at the beginning.

If the first song was soft and erotic, the second song is violent and political. It opens with the singer's shouted "Aoua!" and then she warns "Méfiez-vous des blancs": beware of the white men who came making fine promises but who built forts and tried to subjugate the people. The piano plays a grim ostinato that drives the song to its climax when the natives revolt and drive out the white man; at this climax, the flute shouts out trumpet-like fanfares, but the song fades away on a final warning about the white man. France was fighting a colonial war in Morocco when this song was premièred in Paris, and several members of the audience rose and walked out ostentatiously, proclaiming that they would not listen to such subversive music while their nation was at war.

Il est doux . . . is a song of complete ease and languor: the poet lies in the moonlight as women move around him, anxious to serve. This atmosphere is captured by the free flute solos and cello in harmonics, as the poet celebrates the "attitudes of pleasure" around him. The final line is all the more effective for being unaccompanied.

The Rite of Spring
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum
Died April 6, 1971, New York City

In the spring of 1910, while completing the orchestration of The Firebird, Igor Stravinsky had the most famous dream in the history of music: "I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dancing herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring." This idea became The Rite of Spring, which Stravinsky began composing in the summer of 1911, immediately after the première of Petrushka. For help in creating a scenario that would evoke the spirit of pagan Russia, Stravinsky turned to the painter-archaelogist-geologist Nicholas Roerich, who summarized the action:

The first set should transport us to the foot of a sacred hill, in a lush plain, where Slavonic tribes are gathered together to celebrate the spring rites. In this scene there is an old witch, who predicts the future, a marriage by capture, round dances. Then comes the most solemn moment.

The wise elder is brought from the village to imprint his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth. During this rite the crowd is seized with a mystic terror. After this uprush of terrestrial joy, the second scene sets a celestial mystery before us. Young virgins dance on the sacred hill amid enchanted rocks; they choose the victim they intend to honor. In a moment she will dance her last dance before the ancients clad in bearskins to show that the bear was man's ancestor. Then the greybeards dedicate the victim to the god Yarilo.

This story of primitive violence and nature-worship in pagan Russia-inspired in part by Stravinsky's boyhood memories of the thunderous break-up of the ice in St. Petersburg each spring-became a half-hour ballet in two parts, "The Adoration of the Earth" and "The Sacrifice."

In the music, Stravinsky drew on the distant past and fused it with the modern. His themes (many adapted from ancient Lithuanian wedding tunes) are brief, of narrow compass, and based on the constantly-changing meters of Russian folk music, yet his harmonic language can be fiercely dissonant and "modern." Even more striking is the rhythmic imagination that animates this score: Stravinsky himself confessed that parts of the concluding "Sacrificial Dance" were so complicated that while he could play them, he could not write them down. The première may have provoked a noisy riot, but at a more civilized level it had an even greater impact: no composer writing after May 29, 1913, would ever be the same.

Stravinsky's teacher Rimsky-Korsakov once divided composers into two groups-those who could compose away from the piano and those who had to be at one-and he placed Stravinsky in the latter category: Stravinsky needed to hear music as he composed it. But no simple two-hand version could encompass The Rite of Spring, so Stravinsky wrote it out for piano four-hands (played at this performance in an arrangement for two pianos); he published this version in 1913, the year of the première (the orchestral score was not published until 1921).

Inevitably, the piano version loses much of what makes symphonic performances so exciting: the richly-varied instrumental palette and the sheer sonic impact of a huge orchestra. But the original piano version offers unusual insights into this music. Shorn of orchestral color, the simple black-and-white tones of the piano reveal the rhythmic and harmonic complexities of this score with crystalline clarity. And, beyond these, the keyboard version offers the rare pleasure of watching two virtuoso pianists master the incredible difficulties of a score usually left to a hundred performers.