The seductively understated sounds of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) make it an unlikely candidate for a revolutionary landmark in the history of music, but that is exactly what it is. Begun in 1891 and premiered in 1894 at the Société Nationale in Paris, it announced, in its own quiet way, a new concept of harmony, rhythm, melody, orchestration, and musical emotion in which all these elements take on an endlessly shifting ambiguity without resolution.
In the words of Pierre Boulez, whose own music came under the “mysterious and spellbinding” Debussy spell, “the flute of the Faun breathes a new air into musical art: Here it is not so much the art of development that is upset, but the concept of form itself, freed from all the impersonal constraint of a preordained scheme, lending wings to a lithe and mobile expressiveness … This score has a potential of youthfulness that defies exhaustion or decrepitude; and just as modern poetry is firmly rooted in certain poems by Baudelaire, one is justified in saying that modern music awakes with the premiere of L’après-midi d’un faune.”
As for the programmatic aspects of the work, Debussy himself has made clear in prose as limpidly precise as his music that Mallarmé’s 1876 poem provided only a context for free-association, not a text to be realistically rendered: “The music of this prelude is a very free illustration of the beautiful poem of Stéphane Mallarmé. It makes no pretensions whatever to being a synthesis of the poem. It projects, rather, a changing background for the dreams and desires of the Faun in the heat of that summer afternoon, as, weary from pursuing the frightened Nymphs and Naiads, he falls into a wine-drugged sleep, free at last to enjoy every bounty that he had craved of Nature.”
“Not only Ravel’s best work, but also one of the most beautiful products of French music.” That’s how Stravinsky, a man not easily given to generous proclamations, described Daphnis et Chloé. In this “choreographic symphony,” Ravel accomplished something close to ideal: a work huge in conception and scope yet constructed with the same miniaturist perfection of detail—what Virgil Thomson called a “crystalline lucidity in every phrase”—characteristic of his smaller works.
The ballet was commissioned in 1909 by Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes (the same remarkable troupe that a few weeks earlier unveiled a ballet version of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and later produced Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps) with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the role of Daphnis and Pierre Monteux conducting. The scenario by Michel Fokine was based on the ancient Greek romance by Longus, replete with nymphs, satyrs, pirates, wars, and idealized rustics. In addition to these formulaic elements, Longus’s tale features a notorious description of the growing passion between the two foundlings Daphnis and Chloe, as well as some rather bizarre plot touches. (Daphnis, at one point, finds a large sum of money under a dead dolphin.)
Relations between participants in the ballet were stormy from the beginning. Ravel disliked Fokine’s “feeble” scenario, and efforts at reaching a compromise were hindered by a mutual language barrier. “Fokine doesn’t know a word of French at all,” Ravel complained, “and all I know of Russian is how to swear.”
There was conflict on all sides. Diaghilev wanted to produce the work the following season, but Ravel—a painstakingly meticulous worker—took three years to complete the music. (The final “Danse générale,” which goes by in a brilliant flash, took nearly a year by itself.) At one point, after numerous frantic letters from Diaghilev, Ravel threatened to quit and turn the final scene over to his friend Louis Aubert for completion. (Aubert, fortunately, refused.) To make matters worse, Diaghilev, Nijinksy, and Fokine quarreled bitterly over various aspects of the production right up to opening night, and the dancers and singers complained about Ravel’s difficult music. Ravel was so dismayed by all this that he severed all relations with the Ballets Russes after the 1912 premiere, even though his music (if not the production) was well received.
As demonstrated by Stravinsky’s Firebird, Diaghilev encouraged big orchestras, and for Daphnis et Chloé, Ravel utilized a particularly spectacular one, including a huge percussion section. One could endlessly cite orchestral marvels in the score—the liquid flute and horn solos, the ecstatic pointillism of the woodwind figurations in the celebrated daybreak scene (“Lever du jour”), the spine-tingling brass riffs in the “Danse générale,” the almost unbearable tension and release in the final chord—but the list would go on forever. Every note in the piece sounds to perfection, as if composed from inside the orchestra.
Eschewing the traditional “musical numbers” ballet sequence, Ravel created what he called a “choreographic symphony in three parts”: a piece “constructed symphonically on a very strict tonal plan, with a number of themes whose development assure the homogeneity of the work.” The resulting tension between voluptuous sound and strict planning creates the seductive and overpowering illusion of Daphnis, the illusion of spontaneity that is at the heart of much great art.
Like Le Sacre du printemps, Daphnis works as “absolute” music. (Indeed, it is most often heard in the concert hall.) Not taking any chances after his painful experience with the complete ballet, Ravel arranged two orchestral suites, one of which was stitched together even before the entire work was completed. The Second Suite opens with a huge orchestral crescendo—one of the most majestic in music—evoking daybreak. This section, featuring a long, rapturous melody spreading out from the cellos, is a definitive rejoinder to the claim that Ravel’s music is cold and overly technical. In the second tableau, Daphnis and Chloe mime the story of Pan and Syrinx, with Pan represented by a breathtaking flute cadenza. The couple then exchanges vows as the two main themes of the piece appear in ecstatic combination. As the gods bestow their blessing, the cast assembles for a final “Danse générale,” which concludes the piece on a physical high virtually unparalleled in music.
More than just a crowd-pleasing anthology of musical fairy tales, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade is a landmark in both classical and popular culture. Its mystery and magic resonate in the harmonies and colors of numerous modern composers, notably Ravel, who wrote his own Shéhérazade, and Stravinsky, whose Firebird pushed his mentor’s effects in daring new directions. Since first being played at Carnegie Hall in 1900, Scheherazade has provided tropes for everything from Broadway musicals to such Hollywood scores as Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia and John Williams’s music for the Indiana Jones films.
The sound of the modern orchestra owes a great deal to this 1888 work and the miniatures in its immediate orbit: Capriccio espagnol and the Russian Easter Festival Overture. (Important earlier pieces, such as the haunting Antar, were rarely performed in the West and thus made little impact.) Rimsky-Korsakov repealed the thick, square sound of the standard 19th-century orchestra, liberating the brass and percussion, inaugurating a new shimmer and transparency in the strings, and creating coloristic effects often inseparable from the themes. As with Debussy and Ravel, one can’t imagine the ideas without the orchestration, the music without the atmosphere.
Not surprisingly, Rimsky-Korsakov admired Berlioz, another largely self-taught innovator. It is possible to see Scheherazade as a Russian Symphonie fantastique, another work with fantastical references that is really about the wonders of a symphony orchestra. Like Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov was ambivalent about the piece’s “program,” though he certainly had a good one: Arabian Nights, which tells of a Sultan whose idea of keeping his women faithful was to marry them in the evening and behead them in the morning—until Scheherazade outlasted him by telling a fabulous story with a cliffhanger for 1,001 nights. Rimsky-Korsakov conceived of his piece as a riff on the tale—each movement is one of Scheherazade’s stories, and the finale recaps the themes from each one in a blazing apotheosis—but he never meant for the work to be a literal narrative.
He insisted that the musical “design” was the point of the piece, and that the basic motifs—the Sultan’s growling trombone, Scheherazade’s sensual violin, and the Kalendar Prince’s woodwind cadenzas—were not Wagnerian markers “linked unbrokenly” to specific characters. The Sultan’s sinister theme, for example, soon becomes associated with a heaving sea in the first movement’s tale of Sinbad the sailor, and the Kalendar Prince’s motif in the second becomes the shipwreck idea in the finale. (Before becoming a composer, Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer, and the sea haunts many of his works.) The movement titles, according to the composer, were meant as “hints to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy,” leaving an impression of “numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders.”
Recent commentators view Scheherazade as a mosaic in which themes repeat, contrast, and collide rather than develop in conventional sonata form. Rimsky-Korsakov himself regarded the work as a “kaleidoscope” of “virtuosity,” and indeed, the soaring strings in the opening movement, the Eastern-tinted bassoon and clarinet cadenzas in the second, the spine-tingling percussion in the third, and the massed fireworks in the finale created a new standard for brilliant color. This is a “concerto for orchestra” long before Bartók, in which practically everyone gets a difficult solo, and small chamber ensembles shine against massive tutti. What most rivets our attention are Scheherazade’s seductive violin solos—the “unifying thread” as the composer put it—introducing all movements but the third, and concluding the piece on a rapturous high over the Sultan’s now-subdued rumblings. Scheherazade sings some of the sexiest music ever conceived: No wonder the Sultan can’t bear to kill her.
Based on a free variation form, the piece often sounds spontaneous and improvised (it was written in less than a month) but is cunningly calculated. The sensuous melody for the Young Prince in the third movement, for example, is deftly balanced between the freewheeling cadenzas in the previous movement and the fragmented violence in the finale. Many composers would be tempted to showcase such a luscious tune early on, but Rimsky-Korsakov waits until the perfect moment.
The piece gradually accumulates more percussion as each movement unfolds, so there is always somewhere to go in the next crashing climax. Yet otherwise, the orchestra is not especially large—not much bigger than Brahms’s. Rimsky-Korsakov knew how to use each instrument to maximum effect, individually and in idiosyncratic combinations, and didn’t need to pile on extra players. Some of the best touches are astonishingly simple, such as the three harp chords that caress the Sultan’s violin solo, seductively setting up each narrative. The enchanter in the narrative is Scheherazade, but the real wizard is Rimsky-Korsakov.
—Jack Sullivan
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