Like other composers of his day, Maurice Ravel felt all too keenly the challenge to his national identity that World War I presented. Dissatisfied with “mere” military service, he sought musical means to plant his personal and artistic roots firmly into French soil. By 1914 he had already established a notable reputation as a composer, with a brilliant String Quartet, orchestral works (the Rapsodie espagnole, Ma mère l’oye, Daphnis et Chloé), and revolutionary piano pieces (Jeux d’eau, Miroirs, Gaspard de la nuit). At the beginning of the war he volunteered for service, risking his already fragile health to become a driver for the transport corps. But a composer he remained; despite his contribution to the battlefield, he still sought a means of asserting his “Frenchness” musically. Le tombeau de Couperin became this means, for several reasons.
The concept of the tombeau, or “homage-piece,” dates back many centuries. French composers of the 17th century commonly wrote sets of chamber or keyboard pieces—which they called tombeaux (literally “tombs”) or occasionally apothéoses—to pay musical tribute to a dead colleague. In Le tombeau de Couperin, six piano pieces composed from 1914 to 1917, Ravel indulged not only his increasing Neoclassical tendencies, but also his nationalistic reverence of the supreme artistry of one of France’s most prominent sons. In the Parnassus of musical deities of the Baroque, François Couperin le grand (the great)—as he was called to distinguish him from the other members of his musically gifted family—joins the elite of J. S. Bach, Handel, Rameau, Vivaldi, and Alessandro Scarlatti. He is perhaps the least well appreciated of all these luminaries, and many concertgoers know his name solely through Ravel’s title.
Couperin himself (1668–1733) wrote sets of homage-pieces, too, including apothéoses for two early Baroque masters, Jean-Baptiste Lully and Arcangelo Corelli. Ravel’s set of pieces thus paid tribute not only to a French master, but also to a distinctly French tradition of musical tribute. At the same time, the work took on another dimension related specifically to the war: Each of the six piano movements is dedicated to a friend or colleague lost on the battlefield. (In the composer’s original piano manuscript, he has drawn a small picture of a funeral urn.) Thus the tombeau was not just for Couperin: Ravel paid tribute to a great Frenchman and simultaneously expressed his grief over fallen comrades.
Pianist Marguerite Long, who later was to play the premiere of the composer’s G-Major Piano Concerto, presented the first performances of the piano version of the Tombeau in Paris on April 11, 1919. As he often did with his keyboard works, Ravel created orchestrations of four of the six, which were performed in Paris in February 1920 and made into a very popular ballet by the Swedish Ballet the same year.
The first piece of the orchestral suite, a Prélude featuring effervescent and ornate wind solos, alludes clearly to the harpsichord works of Rameau and Couperin. The Forlane is derived from a typically quirky 6/8 dance of northern Italian origin. The Menuet draws upon a dance type familiar to most through the middle movements of Classical-period symphonies; it features a piquantly spiced central Trio that contains distinctly 20th-century instrumental colors. The suite’s final dance is the vigorous Rigaudon, juxtaposed with a more pastoral section of vivid contrast.
—Paul J. Horsley
One might expect the historic premiere of Florence Price’s First Symphony by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 to have won her a modicum of access to that orchestra and others for her later compositions—but that was not the case. Her First Symphony remained unpublished until 2008, her Second Symphony is missing, and her Fourth Symphony (1945) went unperformed in her lifetime and unpublished until 2020. How could the work of such a brilliant and significant symphonist remain so obscure for so long?
Florence Price’s letters answer that question plainly. She repeatedly tried to persuade conductor Serge Koussevitzky (1874–1951) to program her music—in vain. One of her letters to him, dated July 5, 1943, describes the difficulties she faced outright:
To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.
Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content;—until you shall have examined some of my work? … As to the handicap of race … I should like to be judged on merit alone—the great trouble having been to get conductors, who know nothing of my work … to even consent to examine a score.
Fortunately, Price’s Third Symphony did not go entirely unheard in her lifetime: It was performed by Valter Poole and the Michigan WPA Symphony Orchestra on November 6 and 8, 1940. Those performances were a success, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reported enthusiastically on the work in her syndicated newspaper column, My Day. However, that was not enough to rescue the piece from the oblivion to which the “handicaps” of its composer’s race and sex doomed it. It was not heard again in her lifetime and remained unperformed until 2001 and unpublished until 2008. Only now is it beginning to be heard in concert halls with any regularity.
Nevertheless, Price’s Third Symphony towers over its surviving predecessor in originality and maturity of conception—and the composer’s correspondence shows that she understood its significance fully. In a 1940 letter she stated that it was “Negroid in character and expression” but hastened to clarify that it did not merely replicate the African American tradition as it was represented in her First Symphony. The later work, she said, was “a cross section of present-day Negro life and thought with its heritage of that which is past, paralleled or influenced by concepts of the present day” (emphasis added)—a reference to the Third Symphony’s cultivation of dissonant passages, jarring percussion, and other Modernist expressive devices that were absent from the First Symphony but central to 20th-century music in general, and to much of Price’s later music.
These descriptions do not just reveal Price’s ideas about the music of this ambitious work. Even more, they reveal that she understood that it signaled a new stage in her development as a composer and paved the way for some of the most important and startlingly original compositions of her entire career.
The Third Symphony is cast in four movements, all pitting Black and Modernist elements against each other. The first movement foregrounds 20th-century styles from the outset, beginning with an unsettled slow introduction (Andante) and moving from there to a turbulent and dissonant main theme (Allegro); only with the lush and expansive second theme, entrusted first to the solo trombone, do the flavors of Black vernacular styles come to the foreground. Those flavors launch the tranquil, Andante ma non troppo second movement, but the serene beauty of its opening section is repeatedly interrupted by unsettled whole-tone material that reminds us that this is, after all, music of the 20th century, not the 19th.
The third movement is an African American Juba dance (Allegro), but it also includes a blues-influenced theme that introduces a new facet of Black vernacular styles into the symphony. And the Scherzo: Finale is a kaleidoscopic exploration of orchestral virtuosity and swirling colors. Although Black stylistic influences make themselves felt here, on the whole the turbulence and harmonic adventure of mid–20th-century classical music predominate. Time and again the restlessness promises to subside, and time and again the barely established calm is broken—until finally Price abandons any attempt to resolve the conflict between the two. The symphony’s close is a tour de force of swirling, chaotic abandon punctuated by dissonance and chromaticism, and its final bars are a fury of roaring percussion and chordal interjections that finally manage to reclaim the work from turbulence and discord—the conflicting and discordant forces of the musical world, and the Black condition, given eloquent voice in this symphony.
—John Michael Cooper
The life and career of Clara Wieck-Schumann fascinate for several reasons: She represents one of the richest cases for understanding both the life of a prodigy guided by an ambitious parent (as with Mozart, her father was a noted musician) and the limited and limiting opportunities available to women musicians in 19th-century Europe. She was, moreover, the central figure in the lives of two of Romanticism’s leading composers—for more than 20 years the object of Robert Schumann’s deep love and devotion, and then for a much longer period an inspiration to Johannes Brahms.
Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, was a respected piano teacher who wrote a how-to book on musicianship. He had many talented students—that is what first brought the 18-year-old Robert Schumann to his door—but most prized was his own daughter. Her gifts were recognized early and widely; while still a teenager, she was compared with Franz Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg, her chief, and older, virtuoso competitors. Robert initially played the role of unofficial older brother (he was nine years her senior) when he came to Leipzig to study with Wieck and lived with the family. He had other things—reading, music, drinking, and more age-appropriate romances—on his mind.
Robert’s infatuation with Clara, and hers with him, took some time to blossom, but eventually caused Wieck enough concern to throw him out of the house. Thus began secret meetings and unpleasant legal proceedings; the young lovers had to wait until the day before Clara’s 21st birthday to wed. Wieck eventually reconciled with his two greatest students and watched as they began to have their own children.
Clara Wieck gave up many things when she wed Robert. For most of their married life, she was the more famous figure; he was better known as a critic—a brilliant one—than as a composer. Their partnership was extraordinary and is extraordinarily documented. Not only did they maintain an extensive correspondence and keep personal journals, but they also entered into various joint ventures, including compositions and a shared “marriage diary” in which to record their feelings. While Clara continued to concertize, including long and arduous tours, she was also almost always pregnant; the couple had eight children between 1841 and 1854.
All of Clara’s compositions date from the early part of her long and distinguished career, when she was the celebrated Clara Wieck, not yet Clara Schumann. Her first pieces tended toward being the flashy fare that was expected from virtuoso performers. She began writing her ambitious Piano Concerto, Op. 7, in late 1832 or early 1833 at age 14 and premiered the piece with Felix Mendelssohn conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in November 1835. It is her only surviving orchestral composition. The few works she wrote after her marriage tended to be occasional pieces, usually birthday and Christmas gifts, although in 1846 she produced her magnificent Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17. Following Robert’s death, when she was 37, she only wrote one minor piece, a march. Her intense musical activities continued as she went on performing, teaching, tending to her husband’s legacy, and being Brahms’s principal adviser.
Clara’s original version of the concerto we hear today was a lively single-movement work, which is now the finale, such as Carl Maria von Weber and Ludwig Spohr (to whom she dedicated the piece) had successfully written. In November 1833, she wrote in her diary: “I have finished my concerto on the 22nd and Schumann now wants to orchestrate it so that I can play it at my concert.” Only this movement survives in manuscript, at the start of which Robert (himself at this point quite inexperienced as an orchestrator) wrote “Concertsatz by Clara, my instrumentation.” Clara went on to perform this several times before the premiere of the full three-movement concerto with Mendelssohn. It is unclear who orchestrated the first movement (the orchestra does not play in the second), but the instrumentation there is generally quite modest, usually scored just for strings, or entirely absent. Clara performed the concerto across Europe many times in the years to follow, fulfilling her hope that it would please audiences and be in demand.
The orchestra opens the concerto with a bold and regal statement (Allegro maestoso) before the piano enters with thundering ascending scales played in octaves. The music soon settles down for a piano solo of an improvisatory Chopinesque lyricism. (Chopin much admired Clara’s playing, and she was a strong advocate for his music.) The rising theme that opens the movement recurs in the following ones, lending the work a larger unity and serving as a model for Robert’s later, more famous Piano Concerto. The second-movement Romanze: Andante non troppo con grazia follows without pause and seems like a Mendelssohnian song without words. It is initially for piano alone until a solo cello joins for an extended duet. Robert and Brahms would later feature the solo cello in slow movements of their concertos.
Soft murmurings from the timpani provide a link to the sparkling Finale: Allegro non troppo, which begins with a trumpet fanfare. The movement is in triple meter and in the manner of a grand polonaise, perhaps another nod to Chopin. (Clara’s Op. 1 was a set of four polonaises in 1830.) The orchestra is more prominent in this movement but does not overshadow the piano. A fast coda in duple meter brings the concerto to a rousing conclusion.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Deeply moved by works of Debussy from the 1890s, Maurice Ravel began to find his own answers to the questions about harmony, color, and instrumental texture that the late–19th century had left unresolved. As a new century dawned, so did hopes of a “new music,” and this impulse found expression in the music of composers as diverse as Elgar and Schoenberg, Puccini and Debussy. At the beginning of the decade, Ravel’s music began to appear in print for the first time: The publisher Demets brought out elegiac pieces such as the Pavane pour une infante défunte and revolutionary works such as Jeux d’eau. Buoyed by these successes, in 1904 the composer wrote Miroirs, a remarkable set of “impressionistic” piano pieces that some would later compare to the paintings of Monet or Van Gogh. After this he was destined to join Debussy in writing a new chapter in the history of French music.
Three times Ravel had entered the competition for the Prix de Rome—1901, 1902, and 1903—and three times he had failed, achieving in his last year only Third Prize. Finally, he dropped out of the Paris Conservatory altogether, and instead became involved in “Les Apaches,” an informal, vaguely disreputable collection of Parisian aesthetes who met to discuss art, literature, painting, music, history, and any other topic that might arise. It was at meetings of Les Apaches that Ravel tried out some of his more daring new works, often for audiences that included such musicians as Manuel de Falla, M. D. Calvocoressi, and Florent Schmitt. Their unconventional tastes gave Ravel just the creative encouragement he needed to continue on the path that he had set for himself.
Ironically, despite early rejections by the musical establishment of his native country, as he matured Ravel found his iconoclastic tendencies becoming tempered by a growing reverence for the past—and especially the music of French masters. Eventually, in the 1930s, he would assimilate jazz as well, and its rhythms and harmonies would imbue his music with unique “popular” inflections that would give courage to later generations of composers compelled to lace their scores with elements of mass culture.
Composed in 1928 for Ida Rubinstein’s Parisian dance troupe, Boléro is one of the most subversive orchestral scores of the 20th century. Ravel said later that he wanted to write a piece that had “no form, properly speaking, and no modulation, or almost none—just rhythm and orchestra.” The ballet caused a stir at its premiere that November, and many decades later the music continues to draw a crowd. Each repetition of the bolero tune presents a new and intriguing combination of instruments, both in the melody and in the accompaniment. The initial strophes, for instance, explore the soloistic qualities of various wind instruments; the sixth combines muted trumpet and flute to produce a tone that sounds like neither. By the end, we are so entrenched in the key of C that the effect of the brief, shocking swerve into E major in the 18th and final strain is way out of proportion to its actual harmonic significance.
In 1979, the piece was used in Blake Edwards’s film 10, as the accompaniment to Dudley Moore’s bumbling lovemaking to bombshell Bo Derek—and for this reason it remains indelibly fixed in the mind, for many listeners, as a sexual metaphor. While such a blatant connection might indeed have been in the back of Ravel’s mind, it should not limit us to thinking about the piece only in these terms. Boléro is, in the composer’s straightforward and no-nonsense description, “a piece lasting 17 minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral effects without music—one long and very gradual crescendo.”
—Paul J. Horsley
Program notes © 2022. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association and/or John Michael Cooper.