During the early decades of the last century, French composers discovered a wealth of new musical possibilities that greatly enriched their expressive palette. Their novel harmonies opened up far wider tonal horizons than previous generations of composers had known. Their rhythms attained unprecedented fluidity. And their handling of
orchestral color and texture achieved new degrees of sophistication. French composers most often applied these resources to music inspired by particular stories or ideas, or by aspects of nature. The result was a flowering of composition, especially orchestral composition, which made Paris the world’s music capital during the early decades
of the 20th century.

Claude Debussy
La Mer

Music inspired by the sea forms a distinct part of the orchestral literature. This genus includes the concerto by Vivaldi titled “La tempesta di mare” (“The Storm at Sea”), the evocation of rough sailing in Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A Sea Symphony.” But the most ambitious, and most famous, musical seascape is Claude Debussy’s orchestral masterpiece La Mer, begun in 1903 and completed two years later.
The sea was a natural subject for Debussy the tone painter. The composer carried, he once said, “an endless store of memories” of the ocean gleaned from childhood sojourns on the Mediterranean and later visits to the Brittany coast. The movement of the waves, the play of sunlight on the water, the vast expanse of sea and sky surely would have impressed someone of Debussy’s manifest sensitivity to nature’s colors and rhythms.
The composer’s description of La Mer’s three movements as “sketches” is an understatement that belies the essentially symphonic nature of this work. Each of its three movements is carefully executed on a large scale, and the important thematic cross-references that occur within movements, and between the first and third movements, reveal a unified, over-arching conception.
The first movement features pentatonic melodies and other musical references
to the Far East, and it is telling in this regard that Debussy chose a quintessentially Japanese image, Hokusai’s famous print “The Wave,” to appear on the cover of the first edition of the score. Moreover, the rising-and-falling contours of Debussy’s melodies frequently suggest the shape or movement of waves. (A notable example is the cello theme that appears midway through the first movement.) There follows a dance-like second movement, whereas the third is, for Debussy, surprisingly violent. Together these “sketches” form a convincing triptych that remains the foremost
musical depiction of the sea and a composition of remarkable originality.

Maurice Ravel
Valses nobles et sentimentales

Despite his thoroughly French musical outlook, Maurice Ravel had special fondness for the Viennese waltz. As early as 1906 he had made sketches for a large symphonic waltz to be called Wien (“Vienna”), which he described to a friend as “a sort of
homage to the memory of the great Strauss, not Richard, the other—Johann.” This work eventually became the choreographic poem La Valse. Before completing it, however, Ravel began another work inspired by the Viennese waltz. This was Valses nobles et sentimentales, composed in 1911 as a piano solo. Early the next year Ravel transcribed the music for orchestra, and it is in this form that Valses nobles et sentimentales is now best known.
Ravel stated that Valses nobles et sentimentales was inspired not by the waltzes of Strauss but by the dance music of an earlier Viennese musician, Franz Schubert. If Ravel’s own highly personal style overwhelms practically any trace of that composer, the work nevertheless attests his fascination with an idealized notion of Viennese gaiety and elegance.
The eight waltzes that comprise Valses nobles et sentimentales, although distinct
in character and instrumental color, flow smoothly from one to the next in a
continuous movement. Ravel quickly defines the extremes of brilliancy and subtlety they cover, opening with music of splashy exuberance but following this immediately with a piece that is quite restrained in tone. Each of the eight dances shows Ravel’s rich harmonic palette and refined use of orchestral color. Moreover, their harmonies include not only the gauzy Impressionist tendencies of some of his early works but more sharp-edged, modern sonorities. Significantly, the composer recalled seeking in this work “a style that is simpler and clearer, in which the harmony is harder and the lines of the music are made evident.” In this composition, then, we see Ravel moving purposefully toward his mature harmonic idiom.

Maurice Ravel
La Valse, poème chorégraphique

As already mentioned, Ravel began work in 1906 on a symphonic poem conceived as a salute to Johann Strauss, Vienna’s “Waltz King.” More than a dozen years passed before he at last finished this composition, in the early weeks of 1920. Ravel now called his work La Valse, but not only the title had changed. For in addition to
celebrating Viennese gaiety and elegance, as in Valses nobles et sentimentales, the piece suggested something darker, more troubling.
The music’s first stirrings are tentative, little more than a rustling in the low strings. Gradually there appear bright melodic figures, fragments of waltz themes that coalesce into a succession of brilliantly orchestrated episodes. At length, an initial climax brings back the low murmurings that opened the work. But this return to the music’s point of departure signals a change in character. Melodies begin to crowd each other indecorously, strange tonal dislocations appear, and the music begins to assume the character of a danse macabre. Growing increasingly frenzied, it at last reaches a disturbing climax marked by angry growls and trills.
Ravel described La Valse as an “apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which was linked in my mind with an impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny leading to death.” This extraordinary conception surely was not part of Ravel’s initial idea for the work. But the years between his initial sketches and the finished score had seen the collapse of Austria’s Hapsburg Empire and the pleasure-loving aristocracies of other nations in a war that left the youth of Europe gassed and bleeding in trenches across France and Germany. The innocence of Old Vienna was gone forever. A new age of anxiety had dawned, and Ravel’s waltz, in its subtle manner, proclaimed its
arrival as surely as the most stridently modern works of its day.

Albert Roussel
Suite No. 2 from Bacchus et Ariane, op. 43Although not the youngest composer represented on this recording, Albert Roussel came late to music as a profession and matured in his art only after World War I. Like many French composers of his generation, Roussel initially sought to impart musical impressions of romantic scenes or poetic ideas, and we find such titles as “Poem of the Forest” and “For a Spring Festival” among his early orchestral works. But by 1920 he had abandoned Impressionism and any hint of lingering Romanticism. His harmonic vocabulary became more stringent, his rhythms more athletically modern, his
inspiration drawn from classical myths instead of romantic nature scenes.
The major dramatic work of Roussel’s maturity is the ballet Bacchus et Ariane. It recounts the Greek legend of Ariadne, daughter of the Cretan King Minos. Having helped the hero Theseus kill the Minotaur and escape from the Labyrinth, Ariadne has sailed with him and landed on the deserted isle of Naxos. There she encounters a mysterious figure that envelops her in his cloak, causing her to fall unconscious. When Theseus rushes to her defense, the stranger reveals himself as the god Dionysus—
or to use his Latin (and French) name, Bacchus. The deity orders Theseus and his companions to depart the island, then lays Ariadne on a bed in the rock.
Ariadne awakes, thinking herself alone. Rushing to the edge of a cliff, she sees the sail of Theseus’ departing ship on the horizon and despairs at her lover’s desertion. But when she tries to throw herself into the waves below, she falls into the arms of Bacchus.
Together they join in an enchanted dance until their lips meet in an ecstatic kiss. Now the island comes alive with satyrs and maenads. After Ariadne has sipped wine from a golden chalice and joined in a frenzied dance, Bacchus leads her to the highest peak on Naxos and crowns her with a diadem of stars plucked from the heavens.
Suite No. 2 from Bacchus et Ariane corresponds to the second of the ballet’s
two acts. It begins with a glimpse of the heroine alone, her divinely induced sleep suggested by a sinuous melody given out by solo viola and violin. Other details of the story—Ariadne’s leap from the precipice (cascading scale and glissando figures), the dance with Bacchus, his divine kiss (a richly harmonized passage featuring strings and horn), the resulting “Dionysian Enchantment,” and more—are vividly suggested. The suite’s conclusion begins with a dance by Ariadne. She is joined by Bacchus, the music’s driving rhythms now suggesting hedonistic abandon. In the finale, the pair
is joined by the maenads and satyrs, and the scene escalates into a general bacchanale.

Paul Schiavo © 2007

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