Saint-Saëns’s posthumous fame rests largely on the “Organ” Symphony, the opera Samson et Dalila, and the Carnival of the Animals suite. But he cut a towering figure in late–19th-century French musical life. His celebrated rivalry with Jules Massenet had less to do with art, for they spoke essentially the same musical language, than with politics. Despite his penchant for plush harmonies and lissome melodic lines, Saint-Saëns was an aesthetic conservative who distanced himself from the innovations of Debussy and his fellow impressionists. “Music,” he insisted, “is something besides a source of sensuous pleasure and keen emotion, and this resource, precious as it is, is only a chance corner in the wide realm of musical art. He who does not get absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music.”
Saint-Saëns was just setting foot on his long career path when the Tarantelle for flute, clarinet, and piano had its premiere in 1857. The expatriate Rossini, long retired from the opera stage but still a giant on the Parisian music scene, invited the 22-year-old Frenchman to perform the short piece as part of one of his fashionable musical soirées. According to Saint-Saëns, Rossini impishly announced the Tarantelle as his own work, only to reveal the composer’s true identity after it was encored. “Such a combination of kindness and finesse says more about this great man than many an essay,” Saint-Saëns recalled later. It’s easy to see why listeners were so easily hoodwinked: Saint-Saëns’s music has the zest and easygoing melodic charm that characterize Rossini’s style. With its propulsive ostinato rhythms and interlacing solo lines, the Tarantelle (which Saint-Saëns orchestrated in 1879) reflects its humble origins as an Italian folk dance born of the frenzied dancing that was believed to counteract a tarantula’s bite.
Composed in the summer of 1915, the Cello Sonata in D Minor was the first of six projected sonatas for various combinations of instruments, only three of which Debussy lived to complete. The work marked the composer’s emergence from a prolonged fallow period, exacerbated by the inexorable onslaught of cancer, during which he had felt unable to produce any music of substance. “I’ve almost had to relearn it,” he exclaimed of his atrophied compositional prowess. “It was like a rediscovery, and it’s seemed to me more beautiful than ever!” The sonata’s freshness and spontaneity may also owe something to the restorative atmosphere of the Normandy coast, where Debussy had sought refuge from wartime Paris. The Cello Sonata was followed by the Sonata for Flute, Violin, and Harp, which harkened back to the Suite bergamasque, and the Sonata for Violin and Piano. On the title pages of all three works, Debussy patriotically inscribed himself musicien français (“French musician”).
Cast in three short movements of more or less equal length and weight, the D-Minor Sonata exemplifies the “clarity of expression” and “precision and compactness of form” that Debussy saw as the hallmarks of the classic French style. The music is predominantly spare and delicate, almost neoclassical in its transparency. Despite the piano’s grandiloquent opening, it is the cello’s graceful arabesques and tenderly swooning melody that set the tone for the Prologue. The Sérénade is fantastical and rhapsodic in character, with crisp staccato accents; quirky, free-flowing rhythmic patterns; and subtle chromatic harmonies. The movement comes to rest on a quietly sustained A, then pivots without pausing for breath into the buoyant, lighthearted Finale.
The subtext of André Caplet’s “fantastical tale” for harp and strings is “The Masque of the Red Death,” a short story—painfully relevant in our virus-stricken times—by that master of Gothic terror, Edgar Allan Poe. Though no words are sung in the piece, the intense theatricality of the music has inspired a tradition of incorporating narration of excerpts from Poe’s story into performances, as will be done today.
European composers had discovered Poe long before Caplet wrote Conte fantastique in the early 1920s; among the works inspired by his writings are Debussy’s unfinished opera, La chute de la maison Usher, Rachmaninoff’s cantata The Bells, and Florent Schmitt’s symphonic poem The Haunted Palace. Composers as diverse as John Philip Sousa, Olivier Messiaen, and Philip Glass would later fall under Poe’s spell. As the literary historian Jack Sullivan observes, the author of “The Masque of the Red Death” asserted that prose should aspire to the condition of music, declaring, “It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains that great end for which, when inspired by the poetic sentiment, it struggles—the creation of supernal Beauty ... We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.”
Caplet is chiefly remembered today as Debussy’s favorite orchestrator, but in his sadly truncated lifetime, he was highly regarded as a composer, particularly for his many vocal works. Published in 1924, a few months before he died, Conte fantastique elaborated upon an unpublished “symphonic study” written before World War I. For Caplet, the ultimately lethal poison gas that he had ingested on the battlefield as a soldier in the French army undoubtedly recalled the devastating plague that stalks the helpless characters in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Like Poe, Caplet excelled at psychological drama. The opening section of his work depicts a morbid Schoenbergian landscape, as existentially bleak as any episode from Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Even the glittering gaiety of Prince Prospero’s masked ball is haunted by the grim specter of death. By the time the harpist tolls the 12 chimes of midnight, signaling the fateful arrival of the masked figure of the Red Death, Caplet and Poe have the listener in thrall.
At once radical and traditionalist, Debussy rebelled against the French Wagner cult and the ponderous academic style of establishment composers like Saint-Saëns and d’Indy. At the same time, he urged his compatriots to return to the “pure French tradition” that he admired in the music of 18th-century composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. Debussy first made his mark in the early 1890s with a series of boldly unconventional and quintessentially Gallic works—the String Quartet, La damoiselle élue, and Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Over the next quarter-century, he produced the opera Pelléas et Mélisande and the great piano and orchestral pieces that came to define musical impressionism in the popular mind.
In 1904, around the time he wrote his sumptuous tone poem La mer, Debussy accepted an invitation from the Pleyel Company, a leading French manufacturer of harps and pianos, to write a piece advertising their recently invented chromatic harp. (A year later, Erard, Pleyel’s principal competitor, would commission Ravel to compose a similar showpiece for their new double-action pedal harp.) Although Debussy’s entry in the battle of the harps has stood the test of time, Pleyel’s instrument had significant limitations that impeded its success in the marketplace. As a result, the Danse sacrée et danse profane (Sacred Dance and Secular Dance) is almost always played on a pedal harp. In place of swirling glissandi (which the chromatic harp, with its two ranks of cross-strung strings, effectively ruled out), Debussy’s score features intricate chromatic figurations, couched in whole-tone scales and free-floating, faintly archaic harmonies. The ritualistic solemnity of the Danse sacrée contrasts with the waltzlike lilt of the Danse profane.
Poulenc’s sensibility was a quirky blend of simplicity and sophistication, of graceful lyricism and piquant, often acerbic harmonies. Early in his career, he allied himself with the circle of irreverently anti-Romantic composers known as “Les Six,” who drew inspiration from sources as diverse as industrial machinery and African American jazz. After attending a performance of the zanily eclectic ballet Parade, with a score by Erik Satie, Poulenc exclaimed that for the first time “the music hall was invading Art with a capital A.” In the last decades of his life, however, Poulenc reconnected with the Catholic faith of his childhood. In works like Litanies à la Vierge noire, for women’s chorus, and the opera Dialogues des Carmélites, his music took on a more overtly religious tone, prompting one critic to describe him as part monk and part rascal.
The latter side of Poulenc’s Janus-like persona stands front and center in Le bal masqué (The Masked Ball), a high-spirited “secular cantata” written in 1932 for a musical costume party sponsored by Marie-Laure de Noailles, a noted patron of avant-garde composers, writers, artists, and filmmakers. She and Poulenc shared an affinity for the surreal and often whimsically absurdist poetry of Max Jacob. In Le bal masqué, Jacob’s quasi-nonsensical poetic fantasies alternate with varicolored instrumental interludes that feature starring roles for piano and violin. Poulenc’s music is equally notable for its flippant insouciance and impeccable prosody. (A note in the score directs the singer to perform the music “with a mixture of violence ... and charm,” while letting Jacob’s “ironic intentions” speak for themselves.) Brisk motor rhythms and chromatic ostinato figures consort with folklike tunes and dances, including a frenetic polka and sultry tango in the Finale. What it all adds up to is anyone’s guess; for his part, Poulenc wrote that at the end “the audience should be stupefied and exhilarated as though they’d just got off a merry-go-round.”
—Harry Haskell