Download PROGRAM NOTES by Paul Schiavo French

PROGRAM NOTES by Paul Schiavo
French Efflorescence
During the last decades of the 19th century, Paris came abreast of Vienna as the leading city of
European music. This development reflected the growing importance and vitality of French music
at this time. For more than a century, until about 1870, only one French composer, Hector
Berlioz, had created a body of work to rival the achievements of German and Austrian music
represented by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms and other musical creators only
slightly less accomplished. But just as French painting blossomed so remarkably in the work of
Degas, Monet, Renoir and other artists during the last third of the 19th century, French music
began its own efflorescence at around the same time.
This came not as a result of French composers challenging their Austro-German counterparts
directly. Instead of emulating the procedures and achievements of Beethoven, Brahms et al,
French musicians took to cultivating and accentuating what had always been most distinguished
in their art: vivid instrumental colors, sensuous harmonies and textures, supple rhythms that
mirror the cadence of their language, and clarity in matters of form and instrumentation. As a
result, French music became ... well, more French than ever during the waning years of the 19th
century. And innovations by French composers would help lead music into the new era of
modernism that dawned after 1900.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Danses sacrée et profane
BORN: August 22, 1862, in Saint Germaine-en-Laye, near Paris
DIED: March 25, 1918, in Paris
WORK COMPOSED: 1904
WORLD PREMIERE: November 6, 1904, in Paris. Lucille Wurmser-Delcourt was the harp soloist.
The works that make up the first half of our program represent not only two of the foremost
French composers but also two of music’s great innovators. The first, and better known, is Claude
Debussy. Because Debussy’s music is so beguiling, it is easy to overlook how daring it was a
century and more ago. No composer before Debussy, and few since, conceived rhythm, melody
and, especially, harmony in a manner so independent of the past.
Although Debussy composed nothing that can properly be called a concerto, he did leave several
small-scale works for solo instruments with orchestra. An early Fantaisie for piano and orchestra
was followed by his Première rapsodie, with clarinet as the solo instrument, and the work we
hear this evening, Danse sacrée et profane, for harp and strings.
Debussy wrote this “Sacred and Profane Dance” in 1904 on commission from the Pleyel firm of
instrument builders. The company had recently brought forth a newly designed harp and wanted
a composition to showcase its virtues. Although a simple display piece might have sufficed,
Debussy produced much more than that.
The two portions of Danse sacrée et profane are connected to form a single movement. In the
initial dance, Debussy conjures an atmosphere of ancient religiosity. The adjective “profane”
describing the second dance does not carry the pejorative meaning in French that it does in
English. Rather than impiety or desecration, it connotes a secular, earthly or sensual character —
in this case, that of popular Spanish culture, for this is one of several instances in which Debussy,
that quintessentially French composer, looked south to Spain for inspiration.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
In the opening section, chant-like phrases in the strings and glistening chords from the harp
define harmonies that suggest an almost medieval spirituality. A contrasting episode presents a
more mysterious and animated melody against an accompanying figure of four notes rising
repeatedly from the solo instrument. Following a brief recollection of the initial material, a
cascade of broken chords ends in a slow, rocking motif in the low register of the harp. Over this
appears the rhythmic theme of the danse profane. Its alluring off-beat lilt and more lush
harmonies impart a Spanish flavor, and this theme returns throughout the second dance
between passages of freer material.
Scored for solo harp and strings.
© 2015 Paul Schiavo