Concert 4



Claude Debussy
1862-1918

Claude Debussy
Children's Corner

Like most composers, Claude Debussy battled continuously to make ends meet and satisfy his publisher. He churned out songs, piano pieces and orchestral works for public consumption, but the Children’s Corner (original title in English) was a private, intimate piano work, written in 1906-08 for his little daughter Claude-Emma, known as Chouchou. He dedicated it to her with “...her father’s loving apologies for what follows.” Debussy was influenced by the intimate style of Modest Musorgsky’s song cycle The Nursery, responding to its intuitive art: “It is like the art of an inquiring savage, discovering music step by step, dictated only by his feelings.”

While the titles are childish, the music is not for a child to play. The first piece, Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Mount Parnassus) refers humorously to the piano finger exercises of Muzio Clementi, here heard in the scalar accompaniment.

The second, Jimbo’s Lullaby describes the gentle elephant of children’s stories.

The third, Serenade for the Doll, was the first piece to be written and refers to the first doll in his daughter’s crib.

Both the second and third pieces explore the pentatonic mode.

The fourth, The Snow is Dancing, can be considered the musical equivalent of the pointillist paintings of Seurat and other impressionist painters in Paris.

The fifth, The Little Shepherd, starts with the imitation of a free, unaccompanied tune on a shepherd’s pipe (oboe),

gradually acquiring complex harmonies, then returning to its simple form. The sixth, Golliwog’s Cakewalk, is one of the first harbingers of the jazz mania that was to overtake Europe.

The little motivic refrain that introduces the second part of the piece is a parody on the opening phrase of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

There was intense anti-Wagner sentiment in France, partly on aesthetic grounds but also for political reasons, the bitter Franco-Prussian War of 1870. French composers loved to write takeoffs on Wagner, especially to popular dances; the most famous are one by Gabriel Fauré, a quadrille based on the Ring and by Emanuel Chabrier another quadrille on Tristan. While Wagner’s unresolved chord progression stretched the limits of tonal harmony, Debussy was expanding the repertory of modal melodies beyond the standard major and minor, a factor quite apparent in this sophisticated children’s piece.

In 1910 the composer André Caplet orchestrated Children’s Corner, but Debussy had misgivings about “...it being so sumptuously dressed. I even wonder whether it will know how to behave in this new guise.” But the orchestral version caught on and has remained popular.



Igor Stravinsky
1882-1971

Igor Stravinsky
The Firebird Suite

“He is a man on the eve of fame,” said Sergey Diaghilev, impresario of the famed Ballets Russes in Paris, during the rehearsals for Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird.

In 1909 Stravinsky, viewed as a budding composer just coming out from under the tutelage of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, got what can be called his big break, thanks to the laziness of the composer Anatoly Lyadov. Early in the year Diaghilev had written Lyadov: “I am sending you a proposal. I need a ballet and a Russian one, since there is no such thing. There is Russian opera, Russian dance, Russian rhythm – but no Russian ballet. And that is precisely what I need to perform in May of the coming year in the Paris Grand Opera and in the huge Royal Drury Lane Theater in London…The libretto is ready…It was dreamed up by us all collectively. It is The Firebird – a ballet in one act and perhaps two scenes.” When Diaghilev heard that after three months Lyadov had only progressed so far as to buy the lined paper, he withdrew the commission and offered it to Aleksander Glazunov and Nikolay Tcherepnin, who both turned him down. In desperation he turned to the unknown Stravinsky.

Stravinsky finished the score in May 1910, in time for the premiere on June 25. It was an instant success and has remained Stravinsky's most frequently performed work. Its romantic tone, lush orchestral colors, imaginative use of instruments and exciting rhythms outdid even Stravinsky’s teacher, the Russian master of orchestration. It required an immense orchestra and the first suite Stravinsky extracted from the ballet in 1911 strained symphony orchestras’ resources. In order to make it more accessible, he assembled in 1919 a suite for the concert hall, modifying the orchestration to conform to the resources of a modest orchestra. He re-orchestrated the suite in 1945, adding some of the music omitted from the original ballet while retaining the reduced orchestration.

The ballet, taking its plot from bits of numerous Russian folk tales, tells the story of the heroic prince, the Tsarevich Ivan who, while wandering in an enchanted forest,

encounters the magic firebird as it picks golden fruit from a silver tree.

He traps the bird but, as a token of goodwill, frees it. As a reward, the bird gives Ivan a flaming magic feather. At dawn Ivan finds himself in a park near the castle of the evil magician Kashchey. Thirteen beautiful maidens, captives of Kashchey, come out of the castle to play in the garden

but one of them in particular, the beautiful Tsarevna, captures Ivan’s heart.

As the sun rises, the maidens have to return to their prison and the Tsarevna warns Ivan not to come near the castle lest he fall under the magician’s spell as well. In spite of the warning, Ivan follows and opens the gate of the castle. With a huge crash Kashchey and his retinue of monsters erupt from the castle in a wild dance, whose drive and clashing harmonies foreshadow The Rite of Spring.

With the help of the magic feather Ivan calls the Firebird who overcomes Kashchey and tames the monsters by lulling them to sleep.

In the end the captives are freed from the spell and Tsarevich Ivan and the Tsarevna are married in a grand ceremony culminating in an apotheosis of the Firebird.



Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23

It is ironic that Tchaikovsky’s two most popular works, the First Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto, were initially rejected by the greatest virtuosi of his country as unplayable fiascos.

“...Utterly worthless, absolutely unplayable. Certain passages are so commonplace and awkward they could not be improved, and the piece as a whole was bad, trivial, vulgar.” This was the verdict of Nikolay Rubinstein, first director of the Moscow Conservatory and one of Tchaikovsky’s mentors, on hearing the composer play his new Piano Concerto on Christmas Eve 1874. The tirade raised Tchaikovsky’s hackles, and he refused to change a single note (although in later editions he made some minor modifications). But with Rubinstein’s negative opinion, he had little chance of mounting a respectable performance – or unbiased reception – in Russia. What has come to the most popular piano concerto by Russia’s most popular composer was premiered in Boston on October 25 1875, with a pick-up orchestra and famed pianist Hans von Bülow, where it was a smashing success.

It is worth remembering that the First Piano Concerto came relatively early in Tchaikovsky's career. Rubenstein, the founder of the Moscow Conservatory, had served both as a mentor and first employer to the young composer. Moreover, Tchaikovsky's well-known bouts of depression and sense of alienation because of his homosexuality exacerbated his self-doubts about the quality of his music. It was a personal triumph, therefore, that he managed to withstand Rubinstein's vicious assault.

Although the majestic introduction has become so well known as to be recognizable even to people unfamiliar with classical music, it was revolutionary for its time. It remains unlike any standard introduction in the orchestral repertory, replete with a fully developed theme and a cadenza. The four horns in unison play a four-note phrase that prefigures the opening theme, followed by the rest of the orchestra playing a series of chords which shift the key from B-flat minor to the relative major key, D-flat.

The piano enters with crashing chords that span more than six octaves and serve as the accompaniment of the introductory theme on the strings.

Introduced by a soft chordal transition, the exposition begins with a rhythmic figure that shifts the accent as the theme proper commences.

The melody is one Tchaikovsky allegedly heard a blind beggar sing at a country fair, but this theme too is hardly touched on again. As if the composer were searching for just the right melody to express his emotions, a sighing second theme in the winds

and yet a third is added by the strings.

The development concerns itself largely with these two final themes, including wide mood swings that show off the pianist’s technical virtuosity. At one point Tchaikovsky combines the melody of the second theme in the horns with rhythm of principal theme in the upper winds.

The long cadenza is unusually restrained, a fine vehicle for highlighting the pianist’s control of pianissimo.

The second movement opens with a gentle theme on the flute, accompanied by muted strings;

the theme is then taken up by the piano with just a single note change. Instead of maintaining the tempo for the middle section of the slow movement, Tchaikovsky quixotically launches into a tonally ambiguous (Lisztian, in fact) cadenza of pianistic pyrotechnics

as a lead-in to a melody based on a popular cabaret song of the time.

In the rondo finale Tchaikovsky again uses a folk tune in triple meter, but with the accent always on the second beat.

The violins introduce a second, broad lyrical theme for contrast, echoed in the piano.

As momentum towards the climax builds, the violins sneak in a hint of the main theme of the first movement.

In place of a formal solo cadenza, an excited coda with lavish pianistic flourishes concludes the Concerto.

It is probably fair to ask why this Concerto is such a popular competition piece. In keeping with the composer’s tumultuous emotional life, it requires of the performer a mastery of just about every artistic and technical resource: rapid passages in octaves, abrupt changes in mood, delicate passages of arpeggiated filigree, giant buildups of harmonic and emotional tension, whispered legato pianissimos. Is it any wonder Rubinstein overreacted?