Elgar’s Cello Concerto, a work of striking depth and intimacy, is a telling contrast to his splashier Violin Concerto, composed a decade earlier when he was at the peak of his popularity. The latter is quintessential Elgar—colorful, expansive, and full of virtuoso display—whereas the Cello Concerto is tightly organized and more equally balanced between soloist and orchestra. Emotionally, as well, it is a more attenuated work, and its initial audience, conditioned by early Elgar, was not prepared for his late manner. Composed in 1919 and premiered by the composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra with Felix Salmond as soloist, it had the misfortune to appear on the same program as Scriabin’s spectacularly colorful The Poem of Ecstasy, which was better rehearsed and greatly preferred by the audience.
Elgar’s ebullient romanticism and “pomp and circumstance” march music were dissipated by poor health and the tragedy of World War I, as his art turned increasingly inward toward a more intimate aesthetic. This late style recalls the final works of Brahms, which convey a sunset view of life. Elgar himself called the Cello Concerto “a man’s attitude to life.”
Throughout the concerto, Elgar exploits the capacity of the cello for deep, soulful sonorities. The work opens and closes with a mournful cello solo that can only be imagined on that instrument. An insistence on pensive overtures and postludes emphasizes the work’s melancholy. The opening movement is overshadowed by a dirge-like melody that first appears in the introduction, then reappears climatically for full orchestra after a wistful woodwind theme. Similarly, the spry main theme of the finale is gradually sabotaged by a series of passionate, yearning modulations that lead to a return of the dark material that opens the concerto. Not surprisingly, the slow movement—a characteristically tender Elgar Adagio—is the spiritual center. Only in the delicate little scherzo in the second movement—once the music struggles out of the shadow of the movement’s somber introduction—does the work take on any real brightness, as the cello flits about in its upper register like a lone firefly in the twilight.
Composed in 2020, this symphony is an orchestral rendering of music from Thomas Adès’s third opera The Exterminating Angel. Based on Luis Buñuel’s classic surrealist movie from 1962, in which a collection of society characters finds itself inexplicably trapped together at a post-opera party, it premiered at the 2016 Salzburg Festival, and has since traveled to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; The Metropolitan Opera; and the Royal Danish Opera, Copenhagen.
In the symphony’s opening movement, Entrances, the guests arrive for dinner; in an early sign that they are leaving “reality” behind, they arrive twice. Then comes the ferocious and obsessive March that bridges the opera’s first two acts, the music for their first night under the spell of the Exterminating Angel. The third movement is a Berceuse that draws on some of the work’s most exquisite and memorable music—one of the yearning, melancholy duets between the doomed lovers Beatriz and Eduardo: “Fold your body into mine / Hide yourself within its hand.”
Adès describes composing Waltzes—the symphony’s final and most extensive movement—as like “joining together the bits of a broken porcelain object.” Unlike the other movements that draw on fairly complete passages from the opera, here the waltz fragments that surface throughout the score are brought together to create something wholly original. “What interests me about the waltz is the seductiveness of this music” remarked Adès in an interview before the opera’s premiere. “I often feel that the waltzes by Johann Strauss are saying ‘Why don’t you stay a little longer? Don’t worry about what’s going on outside.’ So in the context of this opera the waltz becomes very dangerous, potentially fatal.”
—Faber Music
As a student, Debussy was once investigated by authorities at the Paris Conservatoire for attempting to radicalize his fellow music students. When asked by a pedantic registrar what “rules” he followed in his “dissonant” harmonies, he replied with “mon plaisir” (“my pleasure”). This concise manifesto was entirely characteristic of a man who, in the words of Aaron Copland, was the “first composer of our time to make his ear the sole judge of what was good harmonically.”
Debussy’s revolution in harmony, color, and form was launched in earnest with La mer—a work that earned him the requisite outraged reviews for a major musical innovator. In 1907, The New York Times described La mer as “persistently ugly,” and the Post asked, “Does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy would not write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff if he could invent a melody?”
These fulminations indicate that Debussy indeed inaugurated a new musical grammar in which endlessly shifting textures, rhythms, and colors became themes. Like the sea itself—always a favorite subject for impressionist artists because of its great instability—this series of “symphonic sketches,” as Debussy modestly called them, are in a constant state of flux, often with several musical events operating simultaneously on separate rhythmic and dynamic levels.
This fluidity reaches its greatest extreme in the second movement, “Play of the Waves.” In the words of Pierre Boulez, Debussy is farthest here “from the conventions generally inherent in symphonic discourse … The ‘inventions’ deduce themselves from each other, according to a course which avoids returns and symmetries.” One can detect symmetries in the work as a whole, but they are subtle. Thematic snatches from the first two movements, for example, spill over into the third, where they are tossed and dispersed by the dialogue of wind and sea, the movement’s subject.
La mer is by no means Debussy’s only musical contemplation of the sea. He had already composed “Sirens”—the third of his orchestral Nocturnes, with its seductive, wordless chorus—and was soon to write “The Sunken Cathedral,” a piano prelude full of ghostly menace. Only in La mer, however, did he capture the full elemental power of the sea and convert it into a new kind of music that itself seems a force of nature.
In La mer, Debussy set out to sketch all aspects of the sea without compromise, its monotonous stillness as well as its sudden turbulence. Yet despite its naturalistic accuracy, the seascape in La mer is ultimately an inner one, as Debussy was keenly aware. The sight of the sea, he confessed, overwhelmed him to such an extent that he had to get well away from it before he could compose. What he drew from it when he finally got to writing was the “endless store of memories” it released.
Debussy describes here a psychological process that holds for a great deal of “pictorial” music. As Jacques Barzun pointed out in a speech for the Library of Congress, no neat distinction exists between “program” and “absolute” music: “Titles and programs do not make music literary or pictorial … The verbalizing merely reports an association of the mood, place, or reading matter that the composer chose for his work … The ways in which he reproduces his intuition, his successive moods, are necessarily technical ways, and in that sense ‘purely’ musical, ‘intramusical’ par excellence.”
—Jack Sullivan