Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Jeux (poème dansé-ballet) for Orchestra
Achille‑Claude Debussy was born at St. Germain‑en‑Laye on August 22, 1862, and died in Paris on March 25, 1918. He composed his “danced poem” entitled Jeux (“Games”) during the late summer of 1912. It was first performed, with Nijinsky’s choreography, by the Ballets Russes in Paris on May 15, 1913. The score calls for two piccolos, two flutes, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons, sarrusophone (replaced here by contrabassoon), four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, tambourine, triangle, cymbals, celesta, xylophone, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 17 minutes.

Serge Diaghilev, a successful impresario, knew the importance of publicity. A succès de scandale meant drawing public attention—and audiences—to the performances he presented. His first collaboration with Claude Debussy, a ballet version of the twenty-year-old score Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,” first danced in 1909, was controversial because of the profoundly erotic performance of Vaclav Nijinsky as the solo dancer of the sensuous score inspired by an erotic Mallarmé poem; the ensuing presss coverage helped business.
Jeux came probably in part from Diaghilev’s desire to have another piece by the composer who had contributed to the earlier notoriety. The basic idea for the ballet seems to have been Nijinsky’s. The scenario involved the erotic encounter of three young men, but Diaghilev knew that there was a difference between a succès de scandale and a scandal pure and simple; he was not prepared to risk the latter. Two of the young men were turned into girls. The rest of Nijinsky’s proposal was communicated to Debussy by telegram: it was to be a small-scale work with no corps de ballet, no pas de deux, variations, large ensembles: “Only boys and girls in flannels” and a game of tennis interrupted by an airplane crash!

Debussy’s response was categorical: “No, it’s idiotic and unmusical.” But when his fee was doubled, Debussy agreed to compose, once Nijinsky was persuaded to omit the airplane crash. Debussy quickly found himself drawn into the piece. He was caught up in the possibilities of Jeux (Games), considered both in the rapidly moments of tennis and in erotic games of flirtation, pursuit, resistance, and yielding. Both of these aspects of life involve constantly changing situations that range from the most banal to the most heart-stopping. Debussy wished to capture some of that sense of change and discontinuity. At the same time he insisted that there were connections in those diverse events, and he sought “to make something inorganic in appearance and yet well-ordered at its core.”

Those subtle links apparently evaded the audience at the first performance, where the work was poorly received. Indeed only decades later did Jeux begin to find its audience. From the very beginning Debussy seems to deny normal musical continuity; he juxtaposes extremes of tempo at the outset, the Très lent of the introduction suddenly yielding to the Scherzando, which is specifically identified as the basic tempo. Eventually we can sense that Jeux is fundamentally a fast waltz (perhaps it was the veiled seductive, erotic overtones of the Viennese waltz that suggested this genre to the composer) in which the interplay of the man and the two women unfolds: flirtation, jealousy, various regroupings of the couples in an amorous carousel. The breathless activity builds, just before the end, to a musical and choreographic climax: the orchestra grows to a fortissimo tutti as, for the first time (so the scenario tells us), “the young man, in a passionate gesture, brings together their three heads...and a triple kiss unites them in ecstasy.” But this climactic moment is fleeting. The trio is disturbed when another tennis ball suddenly falls at their feet. The music becomes vaguely threatening; the situation has changed, even while remaining the same. As for the three dancers, “surprised and frightened, they bound away and disappear into the depths of the nocturnal park.”

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major for Flute and Orchestra, K. 314/285d
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, on 27 January 1756 and died in Vienna on 5 December 1791. He composed his two flute concertos in Mannheim in early 1778 on commission from a Dutch merchant who played the flute; the dates of first performances are not known. Actually Concerto No. 2 was a transposed and adapted version of an oboe concerto that Mozart had already composed in Salzburg in the summer of 1777. In addition to the solo flute, the score calls for two oboes, two horns, and strings. Duration is about 21 minutes.

Mozart spent the entire winter of 1777‑1778 in the vigorously musical city of Mannheim, renowned for its orchestra comprising many of the best players in all of Europe. He was traveling with his mother, and the end goal of the journey was Paris, where Wolfgang hoped to find wealthy patrons eager to pay him for compositions and audiences just as eager to hear him play as they had earlier when he had visited as a child prodigy. But he dawdled in Mannheim, enjoying himself in more ways than just musical. He fell in love with an opera singer named Aloysia Weber and went so far as to write his father with the suggestion that they should marry and go to Italy, where Wolfgang would manage her career as a singer. This, of course, was not at all what Leopold had in mind for his son. He kept urging him to get on to Paris.

This context is important for understanding Wolfgang’s letters to his father at this time. It must be remembered that he was doing his best to defy paternal authority, though he was not prepared break off with his father entirely. Still, every letter he wrote was carefully slanted to explain his interests in the light that he deemed most favorable to his desires. In Mannheim he made the acquaintance of a wealthy Dutch merchant who played the flute. Mozart called him “DeJean” in his letters, but he didn’t speak Dutch (whereas he did speak French), so the spelling is almost certainly his phonetic transcription of DeJong. In December 1777 Mozart told his father that DeJong would pay him 200 florins for composing “three little, easy short concertos.” A composer of his extraordinary facility should have been able to dash off a commission like that in a few weeks at most, yet three months later he wrote to Leopold making excuses for not having finished the commission:  

 Here I do not have one hour of peace. I can only compose at night, and so cannot get up early. Besides, one is not disposed to work at all times. I could certainly scribble the whole day, but a piece of music goes out into the world, and, after all, I don’t want to feel ashamed for my name to be on it. And, as you know, I am quite inhibited when I have to compose for an instrument which I cannot endure.

This letter has caused some to assert that Mozart really disliked the flute—despite the evidence of brilliantly conceived parts for that instrument in many of his scores. But taken in context, it appears far more likely that the letter is a carefully crafted excuse to explain to Papa why on earth he had not finished the commission and left for Paris. He was not about to explain that he was spending precious time courting Aloysia Weber!
In the end, he composed one concerto (K.313) and adopted the subterfuge of rewriting and earlier work—an oboe concerto—as a second score for flute (K.314), but he never did complete the full commission—and DeJong paid him a lower fee accordingly.

It is true that the solo part was conceived first for oboe—the relatively low range of the instrument throughout the concerto indicates as much—and Mozart didn’t bother to change that. But he did more than simply copy the concerto over in a new key (the oboe concerto had been in C major, the flute concerto is in D). It is a reworking, with many changes in phrase endings and dynamics, as well as some revision of the melody and enrichment of the harmony. Yet Mozart didn’t have to change much, because the concerto was already—deservedly—a favorite. It is rather French in style, with cheerful outer movements that allow the soloist center stage, very much like an operatic singer during the big aria. The witty repartee of the opening movement includes gestures that could come straight out of a comic opera. The slow movement provides a serene contrast to the high spirits of the beginning and end, but the finale soon arrives with sparkling dance rhythms to close the concerto with a cheerful rondo.

JACQUES IBERT
Concerto for Flute and Orchestra
Jacques François Antoine Ibert was born in Paris on August 15, 1890, and died there on February 5, 1962. He composed his Flute Concerto in 1934 for Marcel Moyse, who premiered it the same year with an orchestra under the direction of Philippe Gaubert. In addition to the solo flute, the score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, plus one trumpet, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 18 minutes.

Few composers manage a high level of achievement in both artistic creation and organizational administration, but Jacques Ibert is one. His output includes seven operas (mostly comic), incidental music to plays and films (including Orson Welles’s Macbeth and Gene Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance), a number of popular orchestral works, including the Divertissement and Escales, a large number of chamber works, including a profound and moving wartime string quartet, and much else. But he was also an administrator, serving as director from 1937 to 1960 of the Académie de France in Rome (where winners of the Prix de Rome lived). He was open‑minded to new trends, accepted influences from many different sources, yet for each work he imposed tightly controlled restrictions on himself, convinced that inspiration was only the merest starting point of artistic creation; the rest came from discipline.

Like his slightly younger contemporary Francis Poulenc, Ibert was never afraid to write music that was primarily intended to entertain. Ibert is one of the most French of all French composers (though like Poulenc, too, Ibert could write music of great depth of feeling.).
The first movement alternates brilliantly ornate passages with a quiet melodic theme for flute. The slow movement, in 3/4 time, is particularly sweet and gentle in character, while the finale, an Allegro scherzando, is a piquant and lively movement filled with running triplets for the solo instrument.

MAURICE RAVEL
La Valse, (poème choréographique) for Orchestra
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure near Saint‑Jean‑de‑Luz, Basses‑Pyrénées, on March 7, 1875, and died in Paris on December 28, 1937. La Valse was composed in 1919 and 1920, based on sketches made before the war for a symphonic poem with the intended title “Wien” (“Vienna”). Ravel and Alfredo Casella performed the two‑piano version of La Valse at a concert of Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances in November 1920. The orchestral version was given its premiere by Camille Chevillard and the Lamoureux Orchestra of Paris on December 12 that year. La Valse is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, side drum, bass drum, cymbals, castanets, tam‑tam, tambourine, crotales, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 12 minutes.

Ravel found it difficult to return to normal work after the ravages of the First World War. Quite aside from the long interruption in his compositional activity and the loss of many friends, he suffered from a recurring insomnia that plagued him for the rest of his life and contributed to the drastic reduction of new works. Before the war he had started sketching a symphonic poem intended as musical depiction of Vienna; naturally it was a foregone conclusion to cast the work as a grand orchestral waltz. Ravel had not yet visited the Austrian capital, but he “knew” Vienna through her composers, going back to Schubert and continuing with the Strauss family and many others, who had added a special Viennese lilt to the waltz.

The first sketches for Wien (the planned title) apparently date from 1907. Ravel began orchestrating it in 1914 but ceased after the outbreak of hostilities; he complained in his letters that the times were not suitable for a work entitled Vienna. After the war, he was slow to take up the composition again. Only a commission from Serge Diaghilev induced him to finish it, as a “choreographic poem” with the new title La Valse, intended for production by the Ballets Russes. When the score was finished, however, Diaghilev could see no balletic character in the music, for all its consistent exploitation of a dance meter, and he refused to produce the ballet after all. (This marked the end of good relations between the composer and the impresario.) La Valse was first heard in concert form; only in 1928 did Ida Rubenstein undertake a ballet production of the score, for which Ravel added a stage direction: “An Imperial Court, about 1855.” The score bears a brief scenic description:

Clouds whirl about. Occasionally they part to allow a glimpse of waltzing couples. As they gradually lift, one can discern a gigantic hall, filled by a crowd of dancers in motion. The stage gradually brightens. The glow of chandeliers breaks out fortissimo.

The hazy beginning of La Valse perfectly captures the vision of “clouds” that clear away to reveal the dancing couples. The piece grows in a long crescendo, interrupted and started again, finally carried to an energetic and irresistible climax whose violence hints at far more than a social dance.

Ravel’s date of 1855 for the mise-en-scène was significant. It marked roughly the halfway point in the century of Vienna’s domination by the waltz—the captivating, carefree, mind-numbing, seductive dance that filled the salons, the ballrooms, and the inns, while the whole of Austrian society was slowly crumbling under the reactionary absolutism of Emperor Franz Joseph, who was twenty-five in 1855 and reigned until the middle of the First World War. The social glitter of mindless whirling about concealed the volcano that was so soon to erupt. Ravel’s La Valse has the captivating rhythms in full measure, but the music rises to an expressionistic level of violence, hinting at the concealed rot of the society. Would La Valse have been different if composed before the horrors of the war? Who can tell? In any case, consciously or not, Ravel’s brilliantly orchestrated score captures the glitter and the violence of a society that, even as he was composing, had passed away.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

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