Rhapsody for alto saxophone and orchestra

completed and orchestrated by Jean Roger-Ducasse (1873–1954)

Debussy was not very good at working to order, not very interested in composing virtuoso music and not very knowledgeable about the saxophone. So, really, when a rich American called Elisa Hall asked him to write a piece for saxophone and orchestra, he shouldn’t have agreed to do it. But, being short of money at the time, he did agree and, having no taste for the work, got on with other things instead. He was not to get away with it, however.

Mrs Hall had been advised to take up a wind instrument by her doctor husband to help her recover from the after-effects of a serious illness and, having chosen an instrument with not much of a repertoire, she was determined to enlarge it by commissioning scores from a variety of composers. In the summer of 1903, more than a year after she had paid him for it, she called on Debussy at his home in rue Cardinet in Paris to enquire about her saxophone piece. Naturally, since the fee had long been spent, he was embarrassed into making a start on it but, as he wrote to a friend, he had problems: “The saxophone is a reed animal whose habits I know nothing about. Does it like the romantic tenderness of the clarinet or the slightly vulgar irony of the sarrusophone?” Hearing her play another piece she had commissioned, Vincent d’Indy’s Chorale varié, in Paris in 1904 did nothing to inspire him. On the contrary. Although he was still worrying about the long-suffering “saxophone woman” in 1905, he never actually finished the work. He got as far as sending her a sketch in 1911 but that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. The score was completed only in 1919, after the composer’s death, by his old friend and colleague Jean Roger-Ducasse.

At one time Debussy thought of calling his saxophone piece Rhapsodie orientale or Rhapsodie mauresque. Although he later dropped the “oriental” or “Moorish” element from the title, he retained it in the music itself. It is hinted at in the atmospheric opening gesture on the strings and confirmed by the sinuously exotic line drawn by the saxophone on its first entry. It is there too when the tempo accelerates to Allegretto scherzando and, over an ostinato rhythm on tambourine and triangle, the oboe introduces a supple dance tune in a Lydian “gypsy” mode.

After a resumption of the opening material with its seductive saxophone line, Allegretto scherzando is adopted as the main tempo of the piece from now on and its 6/8 ostinato rhythms are sustained, in one form or another, almost to the end. As the ostinato is re-introduced by bassoons and clarinets, the Lydian dance tune is reassembled out of a series fragmentary melodic phrases. But as soon as it achieves its definitive form in an emphatic woodwind crescendo, it is replaced by an exuberant variant on the strings. Both themes are developed and new ones fashioned out of existing material until, at the first major climax of the piece, the once atmospheric opening gesture is recalled in a brass fortissimo. The rest is recapitulation of the two main themes, another climax, and a brief coda giving the saxophone one last virtuoso opportunity before the abrupt ending.