In 1850, the composer Charles Gounod offered the 9-year-old Pierre-Auguste Renoir a place in the choir of the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris. It's impossible to imagine how the history of art might have been different if Pierre-Auguste hadn't quit his musical training; but it's just as difficult to imagine the history of French Impressionist painting, literature or music without the fertilising influence of the other two arts.
Matisse and Henri Duparc both drew inspiration from Baudelaire, while Ravel's idol Emmanuel Chabrier was one of Manet's earliest patrons. Degas, Mallarmé, Rodin and Renoir mixed with Paul Dukas and Henri Duparc at the soirées that Ernest Chausson held at his elegant home on the Boulevard de Courcelles. Degas's many paintings of musicians and dancers at the Paris Opera, meanwhile, are the work of a painter who knew the world of music intimately.
Renoir and Degas painted the operatic world of Gounod, Meyerbeer and Bizet. Music's response to Impressionism came a generation later, with Debussy, Ravel, and the composers featured in this concert. But all were part of a shared cultural impulse: one that embraced the exotic, the immediate and the sensuous; that prompted painters to create Nocturnes and Etudes, and composers to write Images and Miroirs. Ravel, Chausson, Dukas and Duparc would all, surely, have agreed with Renoir's artistic credo: a work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself and carry you away.
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937): Rapsodie espagnole (15')
1 Prélude à la nuit
Maurice Ravel was born in St Jean-de-Luz, on the Franco-Spanish border; his mother was Basque, and had met Ravel's father in Madrid. So Ravel considered himself half-Basque – and maybe that's the reason why his "Spanish" music feels closer to the real thing than any other French composer's. Take Manuel de Falla's word for it: "[The Rapsodie] surprised me by its genuinely Spanish character … this 'Spanishness' is not achieved merely by drawing upon popular or folk songs but by using the rhythms, melodies and ornamental figures of our 'popular' music – none of which has altered in any way the natural style of the composer."
It's true. If Rapsodie espagnole (1908) sounds unmistakably Spanish, it's equally unmistakably Ravel. That's not surprising – it grew out of a short Habanera for piano that Ravel had written in 1895, inspired by his mother's singing. No one in Spain bothered much with habaneras in the 1890s, but Mme Ravel, exiled to Paris, didn't know that; and for Ravel, this tiny piece symbolised his very personal relationship to Spanish music.
The Habanera, delicately orchestrated, became the third movement of the Rapsodie. But first comes a haunting "Prelude to the Night'" - four notes stealing eerily through the perfumes and zephyrs of a Spanish summer night - and a short but feisty 'Malagueña' in which a strutting trumpet serenades over a pulsing dance-rhythm. And to finish, Ravel lets fly with a 'Feria' (Festival). Glinting flutes and harp set up the rhythm of a jota, strings scurry, the xylophone rattles, and Ravel explodes his whole, massive orchestra as the Rapsodie sweeps to a close in exuberant, gloriously splashy celebration.
Ernest Chausson (1855–99): Poème pour violon, Op. 25 (16')
Simone Lamsma, violin
"Muzzio bade the Malay bring his Indian violin. It was like those of to-day, but instead of four strings it had only three, the upper part of it was covered with a bluish snake-skin, and the slender bow of reed was in the form of a half-moon, and on its extreme end glittered a pointed diamond.
… When Muzzio began the last song … it flowed out, exquisitely twisting and coiling like the snake that covered the violin-top; and such fire, such triumphant bliss glowed and burned in this melody that Fabio and Valeria felt wrung to the heart and tears came into their eyes …"
Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev's story The Song of Triumphant Love is a tale of exotic wonders, of forbidden passion, and a strange love-song more powerful than murder. Turgenev frequented the same Parisian salons as the young composer Ernest Chausson; and while Chausson may not have known Turgenev personally, he certainly knew of the Russian's love-affair with the famous soprano Pauline Viardot, of the jealous emotions it aroused, and the strange, snake-headed African violin that hung in M. Viardot's study.
But when in 1896, at the request of the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, Chausson wrote this ravishing Poème inspired by The Song of Triumphant Love, he was under the spell of an even sweeter and more enchanting poison. 'The red spectre of Wagner', he confessed, 'will not let go of me … I leaf through his pages, trying to find hidden vices – and I find them.' Wagner seeps through every page of the Poème; it's like a yearning, doomed love scene from one of his operas with – instead of a soprano – the gleaming song of Ysaÿe's violin. Yet its subtle perfumes, sultry climaxes and lush, surging climaxes are all unmistakably Gallic – and they're all Chausson's own. It's hard to be objective about such exquisitely crafted decadence.
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937): Une barque sur l'océan (7')
In the small harbour opposite Ravel's birthplace in St-Jean-de-Luz, blue fishing boats bob at their orange buoys. Ravel was intensely alive to nuances of colour and light; even on the distinctly landlocked Lake Geneva, he couldn't help but note how 'the colours are intense and paradoxical with illusory shadings. And then the boats with their shining sails …' His piano suite Miroirs (1905) was meant, as the name implies, to reflect distinct visual impressions.
This explains why he took such immense care over his orchestration of the third 'Miroir', Une barque sur l'océan ('A boat on the ocean') – taking until 1926 to produce a version that satisfied him. The luxe, calme et volupté of a warm sea is unmistakable – though the sudden, blustery swell that menaces the central section will surprise no one familiar with the southern Bay of Biscay. Maurice Ravel liked to get things exactly right.
INTERVAL (20 minutes)
Henri Duparc (1848–1933): Mélodies (17')
Danielle de Niese, soprano
1 L'invitation au voyage
2 Chanson triste
3 La vie antérieure
"Do not write much - but let it be very good." César Franck's advice to his star pupil Henri Duparc could apply to any songwriter. When words already supply half the story, the composer's role is delicate - providing just enough extra colour and emotion to let the words blossom, but never overpowering them to the point where the poet might cry (like the writer Olivier in Richard Strauss's opera Capriccio) "Horror! I'm being set to music!" In Duparc's case, Franck's advice took on a tragic relevance. Paralysed by neurasthenia at the age of 37, Duparc never composed again, despite living to the age of 85. His life's work comprised just two exquisite orchestral works, and about a dozen of the most perfect songs in the French language. Duparc chose his poets with care; here, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, and Jean Lahor. But there's nothing decadent about his settings. As befits a disciple of Wagner, each song - from the languorous idyll of Phidylé, and the surging nostalgia of La vie antérieure to his masterpiece, the brooding, ecstatic L'invitation au voyage - is a tiny world of concentrated emotion.
Paul Dukas (1865–1935): La Péri (17')
Paris has always loved scandals, and between 1908 and 1913 Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes served them up on an annual basis. Diaghilev hired the greatest artists of his day to produce his dazzling spectacles: Bakst, Benoit and Paul Poiret were part of his creative team, and later collaborators would include Picasso, Matisse and Coco Chanel. His aim was to astonish, and in the years before 1914, that meant exoticism: the heady, richly-coloured thrills of the savage, the sensuous and the oriental.
Paul Dukas understood his brief when, in 1911, he wrote his score for the ballet La Péri. According to Persian myth, a Peri is a fallen angel; a beautiful, mystical being equally capable of great good or great evil. In the ballet, Iskender (Alexander the Great) travels to an enchanted garden at the ends of the earth to steal immortality – in the form of a bejewelled lotus – from a ravishing Peri. At first, he succeeds: whereupon the Peri turns the full force of her seductive power upon him to win it back.
Dukas rings up the curtain with a suitably barbaric fanfare, and then paints the garden in muted, glinting shades, before introducing Iskender (a poised fanfare) and the Peri (a languishing melody for cor anglais) and launching them on their long, gorgeous dance of love and death. He called his score a poème dansé, and unless you're forming your own mental images, it's not really complete. Léon Bakst had already designed some sumptuous (and revealing) costumes for the ballet when, in May 1911, after a row with the prima ballerina Natalia Trouhanova, Diaghilev dropped the production. Undaunted, she staged her own rival Concerts de Danse N. Trouhanowa the following year, and finally danced the role of the Peri – in direct competition with Diaghilev.
Paris relished the scandal; and only a few whispered the still juicier morsel that Trouhanova was rumoured to be Dukas's lover. Let the music have the last word on that …
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937): La valse (13')
"At the first, the scene is dimmed by a kind of swirling mist. Occasionally the clouds part, allowing glimpses of waltzing couples. The mists dissolve little by little, and the light grows brighter, revealing an immense ballroom filled with whirling dancers. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth on the fortissimo. (An Imperial court, about 1855.)"
That's what Ravel wrote on the first page of La valse. But it only takes us a few minutes into the work. What you saw on stage was supposed to do the rest, because La valse, (like La Péri), was a 'choreographic poem': a ballet score, written in 1919–20 for (but never staged by) Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Not that Ravel needed any encouragement to swing into waltz time. He made no secret of his love for the 'useless occupation of social dancing', and he'd sketched La valse as early as 1906 as "a grand waltz, a kind of homage to the memory of the great Strauss, not Richard, the other one – Johann".
"You know" he added, "how much I love those wonderful rhythms". He even gave those first sketches a title: Wien (Vienna). But that was 1906. This was 1919 – and that whole glittering world of grand waltzes, imperial balls and harmless luxury had just been swept from history in the most violent way imaginable. Ravel never put it into words, but he didn't need to. La valse (as Wien became) begins gorgeously enough – sighing, gliding, swooning seductively into the arms of the rhythm. It's hard to put a finger on the moment when we realise that the tempo is increasing, that the distant crashes and snarls are growing louder – and that things are starting to spin terrifyingly out of control. By then, it's already too late. We can only cling on for dear life as Ravel's dream-waltz, and the Impressionist world it symbolises, plunges headlong into an altogether harsher century.