#sandiegosymphony
The Third Republic in France began and ended with two catastrophes: the brutal invasion of France in 1870 by Bismarck and his North German coalition, which overthrew the Second Empire of Napoleon lll; and the even more brutal 1940 invasion by Hitler and the forces of Nazi Germany.
In between, came one of the most glorious periods in French culture: a revolution in the visual arts from the Impressionists to Matisse and Picasso; the creation of some of the greatest literary masterpieces in the French language; and an astounding torrent of music in every style and form, including scores which changed the sound of the symphony orchestra forever.
This was a time when foreigners from around the globe moved to Paris to be at the center of innovation. Russians like Turgenev and Stravinsky, and the great impresario Diaghilev with his Ballets russes; Americans like Henry James, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. And, of course, Picasso, from Spain.
This program celebrates two of the greatest names from French music of this period, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, with works not only beautiful in themselves, but making fascinating connections with painting, ballet and literature.
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L’isle joyeuse (The Joyful Isle)
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germaine-en-Laye
Died March 25, 1918, Paris
[~7 min.]
The original idea for Debussy’s piano piece L’isle joyeuse (The Joyful Isle) came from a poem, En bateau (On a boat), by Paul Verlaine from his collection Fêtes galantes, which in turn was inspired by a series of paintings by the great 18th century painter Antoine Watteau. These paintings – erotic, subversive and provocative – depict commedia dell’arte figures Pierrot, Harlequin and Columbine, and their friends and frivolous young aristocrats, playing, dancing, eating and making love in a mythical landscape half-French, half-Ancient Greek.
One painting in particular caught Verlaine’s and Debussy’s imaginations: L’embarquement pour Cythère (The Embarkation for Cythera). This world-famous image, now in the Louvre in Paris, depicts a group of obviously rich young people setting out on a short voyage to the Greek island of Cythera (Kythira), supposedly the birthplace of Venus, the goddess of Love. The painting is an outrageous celebration of the erotic light-heartedness and irresponsibility of youth.[1]
Verlaine’s witty and disturbing homage to this painting begins:
“The shepherd's star flickers
In the deep dark water, and the boat’s pilot
Searches for a lighter in his pants.
This is the moment, gentlemen,
Now or never, to be bold;
I’m putting my two hands everywhere!”
The poem ends with the sea at night:
“Meanwhile, the moon rises
And on its brief journey
The skiff skims gaily over the dreamy water.”
For Debussy, both poem and painting had a deeply personal significance. In the summer of 1904, he abandoned his wife Lilly and ran off with Emma Bardac, the wife of a wealthy Paris banker. The result was a public scandal. To escape the outcry, Debussy and Bardac retreated to the isle of Jersey, part of the British Channel Islands, and therefore beyond the French police and press. There, in the luxury of the Grand Hotel, St Helier, right above the beach, Debussy completed a work he had already sketched: a virtuosic piano celebration of the illicit joys of the Island of Love.
During this time, he wrote to a friend back in Paris:
“The sea has behaved beautifully towards me and shown herself to me in all her different guises. I am stunned.”
A few years later, toward the end of his life, Debussy made friends with the young Italian conductor Bernadino Molinari and encouraged and guided Molinari in the making of this fantastical orchestration of what was already a masterpiece for piano.
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La boîte à joujoux (The Toybox)
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
[~35min.]
In the final years before the First World War, Debussy wrote three ballets. In those days, Diaghilev, and his Russian dancers, designers and choreographers were taking Paris by storm (especially with three famous masterpieces by Stravinsky). Ballet was all the rage, and the impresario was keen to involve French or French-based artists in his project too. He invited Matisse and Picasso to design for him, and commissioned ballets from Ravel (Daphnis et Chloë) and Debussy (Jeux).
Around the same time, one of Diaghilev’s rivals, the Canadian dancer and choreographer, Maud Allen, commissioned Debussy to write a ‘legend in dance’, Khamma. Disliking the subject and Ms. Allen, Debussy wrote the piano score only, and left his friend the composer Charles Koechlin to complete the full score under his supervision.
A year later, in 1913, he was asked by the successful children’s writer and illustrator André Hellé to write music for his short book La boîte à joujoux (The Box of Toys). Originally, Debussy planned a musical puppet show to the charming story, but then changed his idea to human dancers.
It’s not hard to find a reason for Debussy’s fascination with this story. His daughter with his second wife, Emma Bardac – Claude-Emma, but known to her family as Chouchou – was born in 1905 a year after L’isle Joyeuse. Debussy famously loved Chouchou more than anyone else in his life. While she was still a toddler, he wrote for her his famous piano suite Children’s Corner, and when Hellé suggested The Box of Toys, he decided to write something his by-then 8-year-old child would enjoy. He even quotes in the ballet from the piano pieces and from other tunes he knew Chouchou would recognise and smile at.
Hellé’s story is both simple and (as is often the case with children’s books) somewhat peculiar.
The setting is a toyshop, presumably in Paris. When the shop-keeper closes up for the night, the toys come to life and emerge from their box. We meet the three main characters: a toy soldier; a wicked Polichinelle (the commedia dell’arte character of Pulcinella, familiar from Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name); and a pretty doll.
The soldier falls in love with the doll, but the scheming polichinelle tries to steal her away. A comical battle of toy-soldiers ensues, in which two armies fire dried peas at one another, and the soldier is wounded. Filled with pity, the doll nurses him back to life and marries him. The polichinelle is defeated.
The soldier and the doll buy a sheep farm and have many children. The polichinelle has become their servant. All the characters grow old.
Then dawn comes, the toys climb back into their box, the shopkeeper returns and another day begins.
Debussy completed a piano score, but – he was seriously ill by this stage – left the orchestral score to be completed under his supervision by another trusted friend and protegé, the composer André Caplet.
In 1919, a year after Debussy’s death, and shortly after the end of World War I, this score was first performed as a ballet; and Hellé published a charming version of it as a book for children, with quotations from Debussy’s music, and delightfully detailed illustrations which you will see projected above the orchestra in this performance.
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L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Magical Spells)
MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France
Died December 28, 1937, Paris
[~48 min.]
The First World War from 1914 to 1918 cost millions of lives and transformed life and society in many countries, and particularly in France in the last years of the Third Republic.
Many artists, including the ailing Debussy, created patriotic works in support of the French cause against the invading German Empire. Several younger ones, including Ravel, volunteered for service at the front. After being refused by the French Air Force, the composer became a lorry driver at the front for over two years, during which time he saw terrible things which took a heavy toll on his mental and physical health and eventually led to a breakdown.
It was during this wartime service that Ravel was contacted by the leading French writer Colette (best-known nowadays for her scandalous novels Chéri and Gigi, the latter of which became famous as a film-musical by Lerner and Loewe). Colette had sketched an idea for a fairy-tale ballet and wanted Ravel to write the music. He was interested but once the two artists discussed it further, they agreed that though dancing would be important, the piece would be better as a sung operetta.
By the time war ended, Ravel had started sketching musical ideas. But in 1920 he had a further breakdown and abandoned work. The following year, in search of peace and calm, he bought a beautiful little house in a small town about an hour southwest of Paris. Here he began work again. And as he did so, the style of his music began to change.
In these post-war years, to earn a living, Ravel began touring as a conductor and pianist, especially to the United States. America was a revelation to him, and especially American music. He visited jazz clubs in Harlem and Chicago. He went to musicals and to the cinema. And he listened to dance music. This was when he met Gershwin, whose music he adored, and Harry T. Burleigh, the great musician who years earlier had introduced Dvořák to the ‘spirituals’ which inspired the New World Symphony. Burleigh presented Ravel with a signed copy of one of his volumes of arrangements (including Deep River and other well-known songs) which Ravel kept beside his piano and used to play from as he composed L’enfant et les sortilèges, perhaps the most ‘American’ of all his compositions.
The title of this opera is difficult to translate. ‘L’enfant’ is easy; it means ‘the child’. But ‘sortilèges’ are not just ‘magical spells’, but also the things that are bewitched by those magical spells… which in the case of this opera, means furniture, ornaments, toys, books, animals, and all the plants and creatures in the garden. In other words, everything around the child is turned into magic.
Colette’s story, which she originally wrote for her 6-year-old, concerns a small boy who refuses to do his homework and is punished by his mother. Enraged, he trashes his room in revenge, scattering furniture and books, pulling the tail of his pet squirrel, and tearing the pendulum out of the ancestral grandfather clock.
As his rage dies down, all the objects he has spoiled start to come to life around him.
First to appear are a pottery shepherdess (which the child has thrown on the floor and broken) and an armchair (which he has cut with a knife). Together with other items of furniture, they sing about what the boy has done to them.
The grandfather clock appears, chiming madly as it no longer has a pendulum to regulate it.
Next – one of the most ‘American’ numbers in the show – we meet a black Wedgwood teapot and a Chinese porcelain teacup, with a bluesy number (half ragtime, half foxtrot), followed by a sudden operatic outburst of flames from the fire in the chimney.
Calm is restored with a procession of shepherds and shepherdesses from a paper wall-hanging which the child has torn to shreds, and a romantic encounter with a beautiful fairy-tale princess whom he had cruelly ripped out of his favorite story book.
After a brief but terrifying attack by the unfinished arithmetic exercises from his math book, the child follows his pet black cat out into shadows of the evening garden, where the moon shines bright in the sky and the magic takes a darker form. The trees, the frogs in the pond, the bats in the starlit sky and the insects (moths and dragonflies) all accuse the child of having tortured and mistreated them.
As they turn on him to punish him, he notices a baby squirrel, wounded on the ground. Filled with pity (for the first time in his young life), he tries to help it before calling out for his mother and then fainting. Moved by his remorse, the creatures of the garden echo his cry for his mother, who – in the very last bar of the opera – comes out through the French windows, as her child awakes.
In this performance, specially created for San Diego, the many characters portrayed by the singers in this story will be reflected in animated illustrations projected on to the beautiful new walls of Jacobs Music Center. Music, words and images will become a single thing.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ravel, and our production of L’enfant et les sortilèges is this orchestra’s homage to the man who created one of the most beautiful depictions of childhood in all of music.
-Program Note by Gerard McBurney
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