From an early age, Ravel was marked to succeed Debussy as the poet laureate of French music. The two men shared a poetic sensibility and a fondness for sensuous, impressionistic timbres and textures. But while Debussy—who proudly styled himself as a “musicien français”—cast loose from the moorings of traditional forms and harmonies, Ravel remained a classicist at heart. Many of his works pay homage to composers and styles of the past, even as they incorporate ultramodern harmonies and compositional styles.
Ravel put the finishing touches on the piano version of Le tombeau de Couperin in 1917, shortly after his discharge from the French army, and orchestrated it two years later. In the Baroque tradition of the tombeau, or musical memorial, he dedicated the six original movements to the memory of fallen comrades. (His orchestral suite omits the second-movement Fugue and the final Toccata, in which the writing is especially idiomatic for the keyboard.) Inspired by the forms and procedures of Baroque music, his music anticipates the neoclassical style that flourished in the 1920s. Although a dance by François Couperin provided the initial impetus for the work, Ravel wrote that “the tribute is directed not so much to the individual figure of Couperin as to the whole of French music of the 18th century.”
Ravel’s tribute is as much a matter of spirit as of form. In both its orchestral and piano guises, the Tombeau evokes the clarity and elegance of French Baroque dances and other music with impeccable 20th-century flair. The prevailing E-minor tonality of the opening Prélude is spiced with pungent chromatic harmonies that sound all the more colorful in Ravel’s masterful orchestration. The quick, slightly lumpy Forlane plays decidedly fast and loose with its 18th-century courtly prototype. Ravel sounds an elegiac chord in the slow, dreamy Menuet before bringing the abridged suite to a close with a snappy Rigaudon.
—Harry Haskell
The soloist is the narrator of the story. We listen to her, telling us of encounters that fan out like folds of skin.
Ears of the Book, footnote of a paragraph.
Shu-er, a word used in ancient Chinese bookbinding that in literal translation means the ear of the bookmark where titles of each section would be notated.
Rather than dividing the piece into movements or sections, I saw Polaroids of scenes. Each Polaroid is a snapshot in an emotive mosaic. As in our daily life, these Polaroids appear unexpectedly in the streets, on our kitchen counters, in our key-holder bowls, and scattered around deep corners of our living space. We see moments frozen in time, and our memories relive them, yet again, for us. Our lives are made of intertwined threads that are never broken.
The work begins with whiffs of the Nanyin, a Fujianese opera style (from southern China). It is my own footnote of a sonic state with which I resonate. These sonic moments ebb and flow quickly with the orchestra and morph into other lands before taking their own shapes. An interjection, a migration to somewhere else.
Thank you to Wu Man for giving me inspiration on the pipa. More importantly, together we attempted to work against the grain of the pipa, finding new territories for this instrument to venture into. And so, we decided together, for the Chinese title, the Ears of the Book could also mean listening to the stories of the frozen Polaroids that are yet to be told.
—Du Yun
After cutting his musical teeth in German opera houses as a precocious teenager, Weill scored his first big popular success in 1928 with The Threepenny Opera, transplanting the trenchant social satire of John Gay’s 18th-century The Beggar’s Opera to the fertile soil of Weimar Germany. The equally acerbic Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny soon cemented his reputation as a leading light of Germany’s avant-garde cabaret and musical theater scene. These and other stage works, including the hybrid “American operas” that Weill composed after immigrating to the United States in 1935, eclipsed the relatively few concert works dating from his student and apprentice years. A case in point is the first of his two symphonies, written in early 1921, shortly before he took his place in Ferruccio Busoni’s prestigious master class at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Although Weill’s classmates heard a two-piano version of the symphony that fall, the full orchestral score wasn’t premiered until 1958.
Weill’s single-movement First Symphony is a yeasty blend of late-Romantic grandiloquence and fidgety, Schoenbergian expressionism. It’s as if the 21-year-old composer, not quite ready to embrace the lean, ironic, cabaret-influenced style of his maturity, was still bent on decanting the malaise of the zeitgeist into bottles laid down before World War I. The brash, dissonant opening chords conjure a postapocalyptic bleakness that percolates throughout the symphony, alongside passages of chamber-music–like delicacy. The third of the work’s four sections, marked Andante religioso, evokes the subtitle of a play by the socialist poet Johannes R. Becher from which Weill apparently drew inspiration: Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers: A People’s Awakening to God. Although Becher later repressed his religious beliefs—in the 1950s he penned the text of East Germany’s national anthem and served as the GDR’s minister for culture—Weill, a cantor’s son, would proclaim his Jewish heritage in works like The Eternal Road, a historical epic of the Jewish people, and the Holocaust-themed pageant We Will Never Die.
Describing the impact of experiencing Weill and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and in particular the song “Pirate Jenny,” Bob Dylan wrote in his memoir Chronicles that “each phrase comes at you from a 10-foot drop, scuttles across the road and then another comes like a punch on the chin.”
After hearing “Pirate Jenny,” Dylan analyzed the song at length to try to understand its power: “It was the form, the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. It also has the ideal chorus for the lyrics. I wanted to figure out how to manipulate and control this particular structure and form.”
And it was shortly thereafter in the early 1960s when Dylan wrote “When the Ship Comes In.” The song was heard live for the first time, with singer-songwriter Joan Baez joining Dylan, at the historic March on Washington in August 1963, and it was recorded later that year on his iconic album, The Times They Are a-Changin’. Versatile songwriter, violinist, composer-arranger, and producer Christin Courtin contributes this arrangement.
—Colin Jacobsen
“I have never acknowledged the difference between serious music and light music. There is only good music and bad music.” —Kurt Weill
“Alabama Song,” alongside the tunes “Mack the Knife” and “September Song,” may contend for most popular song in the Weill canon. The German American composer took inspiration from the popular music of his time, such as foxtrots and jazz, to create the stylistic collage that defines his music, in a response to the notion that opera had become out of touch with the larger public.
Weill wrote, “Art should belong to the people … It should be ‘popular’ in the highest sense of the word. Only by making this our aim can we create an American art, as opposed to the art of the old countries.”
These sentiments all have their own Brechtian irony, as the sophistication of Weill’s craft included critiquing the popular culture that he was also borrowing from. “Alabama Song,” originally written for the “Songspiel” Mahagonny (1927), which grew into the larger opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), has been interpreted as both a critique of American society and the Weimar Republic. The song was first performed and popularized by Weill’s wife and creative muse, the singer Lotte Lenya. While The Rite of Spring might have caused the most famous riot in classical music history, Mahagonny’s first performances were often convulsed by Nazi sympathizers who engaged in booing, shouting, hissing, and even hand-to-hand combat that left one leftist dead.
Later in the 20th century, the American band The Doors made their own psychedelic version of “Alabama Song” that seemed so authentic to their sound that many believed they had penned it. Another notable popular version was released by David Bowie, who identified strongly with Berlin of the late 1970s and who had a great interest in Weill and Brecht’s music and stagecraft, even appearing in the Brecht play Baal in the early 1980s.
Christina Courtin, violinist with The Knights and a versatile singer-songwriter, composer-arranger, and producer, contributes the arrangement for this evening’s performance.
—Colin Jacobsen
Chico Buarque (Francisco Buarque de Hollanda) is one of Brazil’s most beloved songwriters, who came of age at a similar time as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, when the military dictatorship was cracking down on the social and political commentary embedded in their songs. “Geni e o Zepelim” comes from Buarque’s Ópera do Malandro, a stinging critique of the hypocrisy of society in the tradition of Brecht and Weill, specifically drawing inspiration from The Threepenny Opera. In the opera, the character Geni is an impoverished, cross-dressing prostitute who lives in a village where the people despise her and value her only as a “whipping post.”
One day, a shiny zeppelin appears and the captain plans to destroy the whole city, with “its horrors and inequity.” But he sees Geni and changes his mind, offering to spare the city if she will sleep with him. Geni reluctantly does so after much imploring by the citizens, and the zeppelin and its crew float away. What is her reward? The vicious mob once again hurls stones at her. Apparently, the song’s enduring power has made the phrase “throw stones at Geni” (“joga pedra na Geni”) an anthem for those who are unjustly persecuted for “moral” offenses.
—Colin Jacobsen