five pieces from The Tempest Suite No.1, Op.109, No.2 — Jean Sibelius

The Oak

Humoresque

Caliban’s Song

Canon

The Storm

Sibelius enjoyed working for the theatre and, over the course of forty years or so, wrote incidental music for no fewer than twelve productions. Although, naturally enough, most of the plays were by Scandinavian playwrights, the two which inspired the best scores were by Maeterlinck and Shakespeare respectively. This is partly because Pelléas et Mélisande and The Tempest are better literature than most of the plays Sibelius worked on but more because the poetic content of each one suited him particularly well at the point in his development when the commission came his way - Pelléas in 1905, when he was involved with the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony, The Tempest in 1925 when he was also working on Tapiola.

The correspondence between Sibelius at the age of sixty and Prospero at the end of The Tempest is almost uncanny. While the composer had probably not made a conscious decision that he would undertake no more major work after Tapiola, Pospero’s resolution to renounce his art

…this rough magic

I here abjure. And when I have required

Some heavenly music - which even now I do -

To work mine end…

…I’ll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.

might well have got him thinking. Certainly, he wrote nothing of consequence after Tapiola even though he had another thirty years to live.

Among other reasons why Sibelius’s score for The Tempest is so successful is the fact that it was commissioned by the Royal Danish Theatre which, as the home of Danish Opera, had a large orchestra and a chorus at its disposal. It was evidently well funded too since the production, which opened in Copenhagen in March 1926, included as many as thirty-five vocal and orchestral pieces of incidental music. They are not all of the same standard and not all of them are suitable for performance in the concert hall but the most appropriate of them, eighteen in all, are included in two orchestral suites compiled by the composer himself in 1927.

As the first and last items in tonight’s selection confirm, the bleaker aspects of the play stimulated the most authentic musical responses, as one might expect where the composer of Tapiola is concerned. The Oak Tree title refers to the cloven tree (actually a pine, according to Shakespeare) in which “the foul witch” Sycorax imprisoned her spirit servant Ariel. Her “unmitigable rage” is surely represented by the screaming dissonances at the beginning, Ariel’s solitary confinement by the desolate flute solo that follows. Humoresque, on the other hand, is an engaging comedy piece, mainly for clarinets and pizzicato strings, designed to accompany the entry of Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban. Caliban’s Song, originally a baritone solo, is an amusing study in the grotesque with more than a hint of exotic caricature. Not exactly canonic, Canon is an ingeniously scored scherzo associated with Caliban’s plotting with Stephano and Trinculo.

The great inspiration of the work is The Storm, originally written as the prelude to the play but shortened and adapted by Sibelius to make a climactic ending to the first suite. With no defined theme, no identifiable tonality, only a rising and falling figure on agitated strings, with rumbling timpani and chillingly irrational wind interventions, all rising in intensity on a sustained crescendo, it is pure texture and colour. There is nothing more defiantly unconventional in any score by Sibelius and no more vivid storm music by any composer.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Alborada del gracioso

Ravel’s passion for the music of Spain was in the first place inherited from his mother who, though a Basque rather than a Spaniard, spent much of her early life in Spain and spoke fluent Spanish. Compounded by several other formative experiences – his attachment to the Basque country where he was born, his friendship with the Spanish pianist and fellow-student Ricardo Viñes, his boyhood enthusiasm for Chabrier’s España and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol – it became an essential and life-long element in his creative identity. It expressed itself first in one of the earliest of all his compositions, a Sérénade grotesque for piano written in 1893 when he was still a piano student at the Paris Conservatoire. Although it was to remain unpublished during his lifetime, it is a remarkably prophetic work, a parody serenade with Spanish-dance outer sections, aggressively strummed as though by a whole band of guitars, and a sentimental love song in the middle.

So we don’t have to worry too much about the exact meaning of Alborada del gracioso, another parody serenade in the Spanish idiom and one of the five piano pieces in Miroirs first performed by Ricardo Viñes in 1906. It clearly derives from the same concept as the Sérénade grotesque and, in spite of its poetic Spanish title, it is probably not based on any more specific kind of scenario. Ravel once confessed that he chose the title of the Pavane pour une Infante défunte because he liked the sound of it. The same could be true of Alborada del Gracioso, its appeal enhanced perhaps by the Basque associations of the alborada, the morning serenade of troubadour tradition, and by the comic pathos identified with the gracioso, the “fool” of classical Spanish theatre.

Obviously a more mature and more accomplished composition than the earlier piece, the Alborada del gracioso is more elegant in construction, more sharply focused in its harmonies, more precise in characterisation, and very much more evocative and authentic in its use of the Spanish idiom. It is clearly identifiable, in fact, as a brisk seguidilla in 6/8 interrupted, after a misleadingly final-sounding tonic chord of D major, by a slower copla in 3/4. The orchestral version - the guitar figuration of the seguidilla vigorously plucked on strings and harps, the castanet rhythms echoing throughout the orchestra, the caricature voice of the gracioso impersonated by a bassoon in its expressive top register - was a brilliant success in that at last, after twenty-five years, it realised the full dramatic potential of an idea first tried out in the Sérénade grotesque.

La Valse - poème choréographique

Another essential element in Ravel’s creative identity, apart from his passion for Spanish music, was his fascination with old dance forms - not least the pavane, which he so poetically evoked in the Pavane pour une Infante défunte and Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane in Mother Goose. The minuet was another preoccupation. His next student composition after the Sérénade grotesque was the Menuet antique and he retained an interest in the minuet at least until it was replaced in his affections by the waltz, which made a decorous first entry in the Beauty and the Beast episode in Mother Goose in 1908 and then shed its inhibitions in Valses nobles et sentimentales in 1912.

From as early as 1906 he had been thinking of writing a kind of Viennese waltz rhapsody for orchestra but it wasn’t until 1919 that he finally got to grips with it. The stimulus to complete the long-cherished project had come from Sergei Diaghilev who, against his better judgement perhaps, had commissioned the score for the Ballets Russes. Although the Russian impresario had no great faith in Ravel as a ballet composer - he never really appreciated the quality of Daphnis et Chloé which Ravel had written for him in 1912 - he was persuaded that music intended as a celebration of the Viennese waltz could scarcely fail to suit his purposes. When the composer first played it to him, however, at a private audition in Paris in April 1920, it turned out to be something rather different from what he was expecting.

Francis Poulenc, who was present on that unhappy occasion, recalled what happened as Ravel played through the piece: ‘I knew Diaghilev very well at that time. I saw his false teeth twitch, I saw his monocle twitch, I saw that he was very embarrassed and I saw that he didn’t like it and that he was going to say “No.” When Ravel had finished, Diaghilev said to him something which I thought was very true. He said, “Ravel, it’s a masterpiece, but it isn’t a ballet. It’s a portrait of a ballet, a painting of a ballet.”’

The problem was that, after a war in which he had served at the Front against the combined might of Germany and Austria, Ravel’s feelings about the Viennese waltz had inevitably changed. When he first conceived the work in 1906 he had thought of calling it Wien (“Vienna”) and, as he said at the time, it was to be “a grand waltz, a sort of homage to the memory of the great Strauss - not Richard, the other, Johann. You know how much I love those rhythms.” Thirteen years later he still loved the rhythms but he was also painfully aware of what Viennese waltz-time culture had in the meantime become.

Diaghilev was right. Ravel’s “choreographic poem” is indeed a masterpiece and it is true that is not so much a waltz as a painting of a waltz - except that it is two paintings, an impressionist and an expressionist side by side in the same frame. It is, as the composer said, “a kind of apotheosis of the waltz” but one inescapably linked in his mind with the image of “a fantastic and fateful whirlpool.”

The impressionist first half of La Valse, as it emerges out of the darkness of the rumbling basses in the opening bars, corresponds quite happily with the scenario Ravel published in the score: Clouds whirl about. Occasionally they part to allow a glimpse of waltzing couples. As they gradually evaporate one can discern a gigantic hall filled by a crowd of dancers in motion. The glow of the chandeliers breaks out fortissimo. An Imperial Court about 1855. But half-way through, at the height of a brilliant episode of virtuoso figuration on trumpets and woodwind, the light is extinguished and the dark rumblings are heard again. The waltz is re-assembled out of the same material but in no orderly sequence and with increasing vehemence as the rhythmic and harmonic excesses characteristic of the genre are driven to extremes. The heavily percussive climax which finally explodes a once civilised scene - the last two bars shattering the waltz rhythm itself - is a direct expression of the trauma experienced by the composer in the preceding few years.

Rapsodie espagnole

Prélude à la nuit

Malaguena

Habanera

Feria

The next expression of Ravel’s passion for the music of Spain, after the Sérénade grotesque of 1893, was the Habanera for two pianos first performed, as one of two Sites auriculaire, by the composer with Ricardo Viñes in 1898. Ten years later, after he had further indulged himself in the Spanish idiom in the piano version of Alborada del gracioso, he incorporated the still unpublished Habanera in the Rapsodie espagnole - the first purely orchestral work of his maturity and in some ways his most inspired.

The poetic atmosphere of Prélude à la nuit (Prelude at night) is obtained by extraordinarily simple means. A gentle ostinato of four notes in descending order draws a veil over events which are only half perceived in the background - the merest hint of a dance rhythm on woodwind and pizzicato basses, a snatch of melody on clarinets, a passionate but still distant expression of nostalgia on divided strings. The scene is twice illuminated by cadenzas (one for clarinets, one for bassoons), echoing perhaps from the Capriccio espagnol, which Ravel had heard Rimsky-Korsakov himself conduct eighteen years earlier.

Although there is no example of the malaguena (a moderately lively dance in triple time) in Capriccio espagnol, there is one in Chabrier’s España - a favourite work by the composer who, Ravel once declared, influenced him more than any other. Ravel’s Malaguena is introduced by an ostinato strummed on lower strings with clarinets picking out another four-note phrase in descending order. The main theme is introduced by muted trumpets heightened by percussion colours, the somewhat sleepy reply of the violins only briefly delaying the action. Cut off at its height by an outburst of flamenco song on cor anglais, the dance is not taken up again: night falls in the shape of the four-note phrase from the Prélude à la nuit which is neatly integrated with the malaguena ostinato just before the end of the movement.

Chabrier also wrote an Habanera, which Ravel knew and which was clearly the inspiration for his own early Habanera for two pianos. Certainly, Ravel’s main theme, introduced by oboe and cor anglais over delicate rhythmic figuration on the strings, is not very different from Chabrier’s. But Ravel’s objective, as indicated by a line from Baudelaire at the head of the manuscript - “in the scented land caressed by the sun” – is more poetic than Chabrier’s. His treatment of the habanera rhythm, beginning with a syncopated variant on clarinets in the opening bars, is more sophisticated and his view of the dance is more elusive: it is observed mostly at an impressionist distance and is seen in full focus only on a subsidiary motif before it quietly evaporates at the end.

There is nothing elusive about the festive last movement which, like Chabrier’s España, is based on the vigorous triple-time jota native to Aragon in the north-east of the country. Anticipation is aroused by a delicately scored introduction, contrasting the bright colours of upper woodwind with muted harmonics and tremolandos on lower strings, and the main theme enters comparatively quietly on three muted trumpets. High spirits and dynamic energy are not restrained for long. As in Malagueña, however, the dance is cut off at its height by a soulful cor anglais solo, accompanied in this case by eerie glissandi on a double bass and two cellos, and night falls again in the shape of the four-note phrase from Prélude à la nuit. But this time the dance is taken up again, driven to a climax and, after a pause for breath, powered through an acceleration to a dazzlingly brilliant ending.