Trois valses romantiques

arranged for piano duet by Alfred Cortot (1877-1962)

Presto impetuoso

Moderato

Animato

Whatever their differences, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel were united in their admiration and affection for the music of Emmanuel Chabrier. Fauré was probably too near him in age to be much influenced by him - unless it was in the liberation of his harmonies from round the middle of the 1890s - but Debussy and Ravel both owed much to his example. A largely self-taught composer but a passionate and brilliant musician with vast creative energy and no academic inhibitions, Chabrier was a formative (and clearly traceable factor) in the development of both of them.

Debussy and Ravel were particularly enthusiastic, as it happens, about the Trois Valses romantiques for two pianos. Debussy and Paul Vidal played them to Liszt in Rome in 1886 and Ravel and Ricardo Viñes played them to Chabrier himself in Paris in 1892. Among other distinguished admirers of the work were Vincent d’Indy, who had to learn how to drop all expressive constraints when playing it with the composer, Francis Poulenc, who described it as “one of the most perfect” things he ever, and Alfred Cortot, whose arrangement for piano duet (1899) is being performed on this occasion. Felix Mottl’s well-meaning orchestral version (1900) is now all but forgotten.

Effortlessly spontaneous though the best of Chabrier’s music seems to be, he was actually a very slow and painstaking composer. The first two of the Trois Valses romantiques were written comparatively quickly, a few months before he gave up his day job as a legal expert at the Ministère de l’Intérieur in 1880, but the third gave him so much trouble that it took him three years to complete it. He thought it was the best of the three, however, and the most “romantic” as well as the most developed. Certainly, the first and shortest of them (to which he gave the unofficial and unpublished title “La Cocotte”) has little time for amorous dalliance - just the occasional two-note sigh amid wildly animated choreographic activity. The second waltz (“La grosse allemande”) is rather different. Except in the explosive introduction, which recurs throughout the piece, and the lively middle section, it is as melodious as Chopin and as tender as Fauré at his most confiding. The dissolution of the main theme, just before the closing recall of the introductory explosion, is an extraordinary pre-Ravel inspiration.

The one waltz which neither ends nor begins with a bang is the third (“La belle juive”), which is also the most wilfully mercurial, the most personal and, both structurally and harmonically, the most adventurous of the three. While it is interesting to note the anticipations of Ravel and Debussy - of Ma mère l’Oye not long after the beginning and of Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune at the end - music of such exuberance, melodic abundance and textural ingenuity needs no external justification.