Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is considered by many to be the greatest French composer in the history of Music. Intensely proud of his French heritage, he defined his musical credo with these words: “The primary aim of French music is to give pleasure…The musical genius of France is something like a dream in the senses…Music must be freed of all scientific apparatus. Music must seek humbly to give pleasure; great beauty is perhaps possible within these limits.” It was a credo he never abandoned, despite the many ways in which he freed musical thought (Harold C. Schonberg has described him as “the revolutionary who set 20th Century music on its way”).Just three years before his death, Debussy began work on the first of what he envisioned as a set of six sonatas for various instruments. He lived to complete only three. Last year’s Rush Hour Concerts included the first (for ‘cello and piano) and third (for violin and piano) - and today we have the second sonata, this one scored for flute, viola (originally envisioned as for oboe), and harp. When it was finished, Debussy found himself describing it as “so melancholy that I can’t say whether one should laugh or cry. Perhaps both?” Nonetheless, it has an airy, open quality, with the flute setting the momentum and fluidity of its three short movements which are so interlocked that the work has been described as a “sonata in a single piece, a triptych of a single whole.”
It’s interesting to note the proposed instrumentation for the other three envisioned sonatas. No. 4 was to be for oboe, horn, and harpsichord; No. 5 for clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, and piano; No. 6 for piano and instrumental ensemble. The violin and piano sonata was not only the last work Debussy composed, its première marked the last time he appeared in public as a pianist.
Debussy’s friend Pierre Louÿs once asked the composer to write 200 bars (!) of music to be played at a wedding at the church of Saint-Philippe, to which Debussy replied, “I don’t know whether it will be strictly nuptial; the trouble is that I’ve been living in sin with Music for too long.” And it was Debussy who once observed, “There is nothing more musical than a sunset.”
Pièce for solo flute, by Jacques Ibert (1890-1962), is in the line of other notable French composers’ works in that form: Debussy’s Syrinx (1913/1927), Edgar Varèse’s Denisty 21.5 (1936), as well as the French-Swiss composer Arthur Honegger’s Danse de la chèvre (1919). The Ibert is a pastoral piece, the song of a shepherd, alone in the hills. It is marked a piacere (“at pleasure”), suggesting the performer should let its melodies and virtuoso effects flow simply.
The usual summation of Ibert’s music describes it as graceful, witty, and evocative, but there is certainly music of weight as well. His most often heard works are Escales (Ports of Call) (1922) and Divertissement (1930), both for orchestra, and his Trois pieces brèves for wind quintet (also 1930). He wrote music in many forms: operas, ballets, choral, orchestral, piano, vocal, and chamber music, as well as a good deal of incidental radio and film music. The latter includes music for Orson Welles’ film of Macbeth (1948), and the circus scene in Gene Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance (1952).
Ibert suggested a wonderfully idealized aim of opera composition. He wrote, “I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist. The result of this union would be not the fortuitous result of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of a single thought.”
The Swan is, very possibly, the best-known music of Charles Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). It is a lovely, flowing piece, originally written for solo ‘cello with two-piano accompaniment, and it certainly effectively suggests the smooth, majestic movement of a graceful swan on the water. It comes from The Carnival of the Animals (1886), which Saint-Saëns whimsically subtitled a ‘grand zoological fantasy’, a delightful work originally for chamber orchestra which includes a number of musical puns within its melodic descriptions of members of the animal kingdom.
Saint-Saëns once said he wrote music “as easily and naturally as an apple tree produces apples.” He composed a very large number of works, doing so up to the last of his 86 years. If much of his music nowadays often is considered dated, there is no denying the endurance of works such as his opera Samson and Delilah, the so-called “Organ Symphony”, his first ‘cello concerto, third violin concerto, and two shorter works for violin and orchestra, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso and Havanaise.
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