MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose) Suite (1908-10; orchestrated in 1911)
The Mother Goose Suite began life as a set of duets for piano four-hands, subtitled “cinq pièces enfantines” (“five children’s pieces”), composed between 1908 and 1910. Ravel wrote it for Mimi and Jean Godebski, aged 10 and 8, children of Ravel’s friends, who were patrons of the arts and whose home was a gathering place for the creative minds of the time, including Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Erik Satie, and Igor Stravinsky. But, because the pieces proved just a little too difficult for those kids, the work was premiered by Jeanne Leleu and Geneviève Durony, ages 11 and 14. In 1911 Ravel orchestrated the suite, and that is the version usually performed today (though the composer later expanded the suite into a ballet score with new sections). Ravel wrote to one of the young pianists after the first performance: “When you will be a great virtuoso, and I either an old fogey, covered with honors, or else completely forgotten, you will perhaps have pleasant memories of having given an artist the very rare joy of hearing a work of his, of a rather special nature, interpreted exactly as it should be. Thank you a thousand times for your child-like and sensitive performance.” The movements were inspired by fairytales of, among others, the French writer Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and collected under the name Mother Goose, the teller of the tales. (The American Mother Goose is an entirely different collection with a different author.) Here are capsule descriptions of the five movements:
1. A mere 20 measures long, Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty depicts the princess’s preparations for her 100-year-long sleep. Courtiers are dancing the pavane, a stately 16th century dance.
2. Tom Thumb (aka: Hop ‘o my Thumb) tells the story of a woodcutter’s starving children, abandoned in the forest. Clever little Tom Thumb scatters bread crumbs to mark the way home, but they are eaten by birds. All’s well that ends well, however. Listen for Tom’s theme in the oboe, and the birds’ twittering and trilling in flute and piccolo.
3. Laideronette (Ugly Little Girl), Empress of the Pagodas. A wicked witch’s evil spell transformed a princess into an ugly child. Living hidden away in a castle, one day she meets a green serpent, a prince also bewitched. Together they visit the land of the Pagodas, the serpent’s empire, inhabited by tiny people made of diamonds, rubies, gold, emeralds, pearls, and porcelain. After the serpent and Laideronette are magically returned to their former beauty, they marry, and she becomes Empress of all the Pagodas. Listen for sparkling orientalisms (represented by the pentatonic scale—notes represented by the black keys of the piano), when the little natives play walnut and almond shells, which Ravel scores for wood block, glockenspiel, and xylophone.
4. Conversations of Beauty and the Beast. Listen for Beauty’s music—a clarinet intoning a waltz; Beast is a growling contrabassoon playing some really low notes. But when Beauty declares her love for the Beast, their music is magically joined, and he is returned to handsome princehood.
5. The Fairy Garden brings the Suite to a close, as Prince Charming awakens the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. An ecstatic climax tells the listener that they “lived happily ever after.”
Small of stature, Ravel seemed to feel more comfortable being around children, their toys, and their games. (Later this season, audiences get another opportunity to experience Ravel’s special insight into the world of children: the Philharmonic performs his opera L’enfant et les sortilèges). In these orchestral jewels, Ravel said, he wanted “to evoke the poetry of childhood,” and listeners will hear how beautifully they reflect the world of a child’s imagination.
SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981)
Violin Concerto, Op. 14 (1939)
A performer’s public dissatisfaction with a commissioned or dedicated composition is rare in the classical music world, but it isn’t unheard of. There was Niccolò Paganini who thought his viola part in Berlioz’s Harold in Italy wasn’t flashy enough; incredible to us today, Leopold Auer dismissed Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as “unplayable”; and there was Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, whose intended soloist did not embrace it. Soap magnate and Curtis Institute trustee Samuel Fels (as in Fels Naptha soap) commissioned Barber to write a violin concerto for his adopted son, the Odessa-born Iso Briselli, who lived with the Fels family and happened to be Barber’s fellow student at Curtis. The composer worked on the Concerto in 1939 and presented two-thirds of it to Briselli, who seemed pleased enough. But when Barber delivered the finale a year later, the artist felt it didn’t mesh well with the two previous movements and wanted him to try again. Barber declined. Details about what ultimately happened vary. Barber supposedly returned the $1,000 advance, but did not change the concerto. Though Briselli did not premiere the concerto—that fell to Albert Spalding and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy in 1941—he did perform it privately, and composer and violinist remained friends. Ironically, the concerto’s last movement is still controversial, but that has not kept it from being one of the most frequently performed of the 20th century. The work begins gorgeously without orchestral introduction—with the violin immediately stepping into the spotlight—and establishes a soaring, lyrical serenity. A lush middle movement opens with an extended oboe solo and includes passages of melancholy and darkness. But the mood does change in the final Presto in moto perpetuo (perpetual motion), whose angularity and shifting accents demand extraordinary virtuosity.
BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945)
The Wooden Prince (1914-1917)
When Béla Bartók read Béla Balázs’s story of The Wooden Prince in a literary magazine, he was immediately drawn to it as a potential ballet scenario. The adult fairy tale revolves around a Princess, a Prince, a Forest Fairy, and a puppet version of the Prince (i.e., the Wooden Prince) with whom the Princess has a temporary infatuation. And since the course of true love never did run smooth, the Forest Fairy places obstacles along that course. As the Prince pursues the Princess, a darkly menacing forest and the waves of a stream rage against him. Unable to cross the stream, he creates a puppet replica of himself out of his staff, cloak, locks of hair, and his crown. Apparently persuaded by the illusion, the Princess rejects the flesh-and-blood Prince. The Forest Fairy brings the Wooden Prince to life, and he dances with the Princess. When she realizes her mistake, she tries to win the real Prince through a seductive dance, but he will have nothing to do with her. When she tears her clothes and hair he is finally moved by her despair. Nature is restored to its former state when the Forest Fairy withdraws, and Prince and Princess no doubt live happily ever after. Leaving psychology aside, Bartók depicts the Prince and the puppet with two versions of the same music: the Prince’s is lyrical and the puppet’s is grotesque. Reflecting her various emotional states, the Princess’s music runs the gamut from cruel to kind to sensuous. Highlights of the score include rumblings in the depths of the orchestra presaging the dark forces of nature, the ominous sounds of the forest, the scintillating, gleaming flute and harp sonorities of the waters, and the love music inspired by the beautiful Hungarian folk song “Fly, Peacock, Fly.”
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DAVID ROBERTSON, conductor, born in 1958 in Santa Monica, California
