3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher

Un poco indeciso

Andante sostenuto

Vivace

Dutilleux’s three Strophes for solo cello have Sacher’s name written all over them. They originated in 1976 on the initiative of Mstislav Rostropovich who invited twelve major composers each to write a piece in tribute to Paul Sacher, the most generous and most discriminating of twentieth-century patrons of music, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. They were all to be written for unaccompanied cello and they were all to be based on material derived from the name of Sacher - which (by international convention) translates in musical terms into E flat, A, C, B, E, D. Most of those pieces have disappeared without trace but some, including Boulez’s Messagesquisse and Lutoslawski’s Sacher Variations, have since had an eventful career of one kind or another.

The difference between the losers and the winners among the Sacher tributes is that the latter, far from ending up as dry exercises in serialism, took on an inner life of their own. Henri Dutilleux, a senior representative of the generation of French composers before Boulez, developed such an interest in the Sacher theme that he returned to it six years later. Preserving the distinctive sound of the original tribute, which he had secured by means of having the cellist tune the G string down to F sharp and the C string down to B flat, he added a thoughtful slow movement and a kind of moto perpetuo finale.

Of the three Strophes, as Dutilleux now called them (presumably because the recurring theme acts as a kind of rhyme) the first is much the most resourceful in exploiting the variety of colour available to a virtuoso cellist. It is also the most complex in construction. It opens on a quietly repeated E flat and only gradually assembles the six-note series before introducing a prominently percussive version of the theme - tapped by the wood of the bow on the strings or strummed with a guitar-like pizzicato - in a fantastically scored central section. Just before the end of the movement, at the beginning of a tiny coda, Dutilleux introduces a whispered quotation from the fugue of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, which is surely the greatest of the many distinguished scores commissioned by Paul Sacher for his orchestras in Basle and Zurich.

In the Andante sostenuto the theme is confined largely to brooding in the extended lower register, though not without escaping into a briefly airborne ascent into high harmonics in the middle of the movement. The Vivace, which is based on a backwards version of the Sacher theme, is a study in restless virtuoso activity leading - by way of a melodiously inspired central episode drawn in a sustained line in the top register of the instrument - to a double stopped version of the percussive theme from the first movement.

The three Strophes were first performed by Mstislav Rostropovich in Basle on Paul Sacher’s 76th birthday in 1982. Sacher died seventeen years and several important commissions later at the age of 93.

Gerald Larner© 2001