Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was Claude Debussy’s first masterpiece and, in many ways, can be seen as the first masterpiece of 20th-century music — even though it predates the new century by six years.

It is at times difficult to comprehend how a mere 10 minutes of music for small orchestra can serve as a cornerstone for so much that came after. But whenever we hear this music, its magic is immediately apparent, as it was indeed to its first audience in 1894. It is even harder to realize that these few pages, with their mysteriously improvisatory air, took Debussy two years of patient toil to put together. He was still relatively unknown in Paris and had not written anything close to the visionary step into the unknown that the Prelude represents.

In a sense, Debussy was simply writing a symphonic poem on a literary text. But Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) was no conventional narrative poem, and it left no scope for the direct matching of music and words. In the note given out at the first performance, Debussy explained: “The music of the Prelude is a very free illustration of ... Mallarmé’s fine poem. It is not meant to be a synthesis of it but rather a series of settings across which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon.”

Many symphonic poems merely evoke a tableau or a mood, but Debussy not only avoided any precision of character and action, he allowed his music to develop freely. From the very first bar, the music evolves without clear-cut notions of thematic balance or tonal precision. The famous opening flute solo sounds like an improvisation, not a theme, and its musical key is far from clear. Each time this melody comes back, its shape and its harmonic background are different, like a continuous variation.

Once the flute solo has run its course, the clarinet, over a sharp horn chord, moves into a different atmosphere, laden with the whole-tone scales that Debussy had already marked as his own. When the oboe takes melodic charge, the warmth of the music grows from within.

The middle section, over oscillating string chords, betrays the faun’s unmistakable passion, and the flute returns transfigured for the creature’s languid intoxication in the forest heat, interrupted by impulsive little movements and sudden charges of feeling. The closing pages have an epic dimension, as if a curtain is being closed on a whole world of poetic mystery.

The orchestration throughout is extraordinarily delicate, with divided strings (Debussy’s preferred string sound), solo violin and solo cello for added sweetness, and two harps. No heavy brass is needed, nor timpani. The only percussion is a pair of small antique cymbals, whose spare notes sparkle like light in the forest.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.

In the 1920s, French composer Maurice Ravel set out to write a piano concerto for himself. For many years, he had preferred to play relatively easy pieces in his public appearances as a concert pianist, since he was all too conscious that his playing technique was not up to the challenge of the more demanding works he’d created.

But, as he began creating the new work for piano and orchestra, he was inspired to compose a concerto of proper difficulty. And he convinced himself that he could develop the required technique with diligent practice. Thus, his long composition hours were interspersed with hours devoted to practicing scales and études by Czerny and Chopin in what was ultimately a fruitless attempt, at the age of 55, to perfect his piano skills.

It was only once the G-major Concerto was finished, late in 1931, with a premiere barely weeks away, that Ravel abandoned his soloist’s aspirations and turned to Marguerite Long, who had premiered his Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1917, to give the first performance instead. The composer instead resigned himself to the conductor’s baton.

But from where did the musical ideas for Ravel’s concerto come? Writer and composer Gustave Samazeuilh recounted that in 1911, he and Ravel spent a holiday in the Basque region of Spain (where both had roots) and that Ravel sketched a “Basque Concerto” for piano and orchestra. Without the right idea for a central linking movement, Ravel abandoned the work only to bring parts of it back to life 20 years later with the G-major Concerto. Meanwhile, livelier themes emerged from Ravel’s preoccupation with the brilliant percussive qualities of the piano itself and languorous melodies emerge from his admiration for the new language of jazz.

The sound of this concerto bears striking differences from that of its sibling, the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, well beyond the doubling of fingers on the keyboard. In the G-major Concerto, Ravel concentrated the soloistic activity to the upper reaches of the keyboard. He also utilized a smaller orchestra, more an ensemble of soloists than the grand tutti of a full orchestra, which may account for Ravel’s assertion that he composed the G-major Concerto in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns, two composers of impeccably Classical pedigree.

The three movements are accordingly laid out in a Classical plan, with two fast movements embracing a slow middle one. The first movement offers both quick and slow sections, the latter being the occasion for some virtuosic melodic flights for solo instruments — notably the bassoon, harp, and horn — while the piano is often required to be sweet in one hand and more directed in the other at the same time. (The blues scales often associated with the music of Gershwin, whom Ravel had met in 1924, is much in evidence.)

Ravel cryptically spoke of writing the slow middle movement “one bar at a time.” He also referred to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet as a basis (which is scarcely less mysterious, aside from the fact that melody-with-accompaniment is prominent in both works). The music itself is pure, both in the simplicity of the piano style and the absence of chromaticism. There is also a constant suggestion of “wrong” notes (in the manner of Satie), the wrongness in Ravel’s case being supremely calculated and proving to be exactly right. Simplicity gives way to complexity, and the melody returns in the English horn as the piano’s exquisite tracery continues to the end.

The last movement is an unstoppable cascade, with the orchestra tested to the limit, not just the soloist. The movement is neatly framed, with its opening clustered discords returning as a signing-off at the end.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.

Claude Debussy opened the door to a new century of innovation with his nuanced approach to musical texture in works such as his breakout Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and the subsequent three-part Nocturnes. The “nocturnal” aspect indicated by the title derives from Debussy’s inspiration by the French Symbolist poet Henri de Régnier — in particular, from his collection Trois Scènes au Crépuscule (Three Twilight Scenes).

At first, Debussy thought about writing the pieces as a sort of violin concerto, which he had sketched out by 1894, for the eminent virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe. However, before the music reached the public, Debussy recast Nocturnes, omitting the violin solo and, for the final panel, adding a wordless soprano and alto chorus.

Debussy famously bristled at the comparisons routinely made between his style and that of the Impressionist painters. He particularly objected to the one-size-fits-all application of the term by critics to all manner of artists. Yet Debussy was deeply sensitive to the visual arts. Describing his Nocturnes to Ysaÿe, he said, “It is an experiment with the various combinations of texture that can be made from one color — like a study in grays in the realm of painting.”

In the preface to his score, Debussy elaborated: “The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense. Therefore it is not meant to designate the usual form of a nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests.” Indeed, each movement of Debussy’s three-part work pursues a distinctive form and characteristic tone color. The first, Nuages (Clouds), presents “the slow motion of the clouds” in pastel shadings that drift against a plaintive figure from the English horn. Toward the end, flute and harp float amidst an atmosphere of languid lyricism.

Of the contrastingly extroverted Fêtes (Festivals), the composer wrote that this movement began as an impression of a village fair at night, through which passes a unit of the Garde Républicaine, on horseback and with a regimental band, lit by torchlight. Debussy further writes that the music “gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision), which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains resistantly the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm.”

In the third movement, Sirènes (Sirens), Debussy returns to the ambiguously floating sensibility of Nuages. The title refers to the mythic creatures of Homer’s Odyssey, the island nymphs whose beautiful singing — evoked by the wordless chorus — is fatal to passing sailors, causing them to cast themselves into the sea.

— Thomas May

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. A regular contributor to The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Gramophone, and Strings magazine, he is the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival.

Maurice Ravel possessed a particular gift for evoking what he called “the poetry of childhood.” Much as dance is a guiding thread through several of his most important compositions, themes involving childlike fantasy also recur consistently across his works.

Both aspects — childhood and dance — converge in his composition inspired by fairy tales from Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose). Ravel initially conceived this music as a piano duet for siblings Mimi and Jean Godebski. (Their parents, a Polish couple who held salons that attracted a remarkable array of Parisian artists, provided a kind of second home for the composer.) This version of Mother Goose emanates a beguiling intimacy and ravishing sense of color quite independent of the later orchestral version. Though written for the talented Godebski children, the kids weren’t up to the task of giving the work’s first public performance — they complained it would require too much practice — so it was premiered in 1910 by another pair of prodigies.

The following year, Ravel orchestrated these pieces, first as a suite, and later as the score for a ballet — with an altered order, added interludes, and a new opening sequence. For this, he concocted a scenario linking the famous fairy-tale stories drawn from Charles Perrault’s 1697 anthology as well versions by Baroness d’Aulnoy and Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. The orchestral work is more often performed, following the order of the piano duet’s five movements.

The suite opens with Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty, which ushers us along with the princess into a dream state with its brief, stately processional and meltingly beautiful writing for woodwinds. At the same time, the Pavane’s sustained wistfulness hints at the ambivalence of Ravel’s summoning of childhood — a poignant past recaptured by the knowing adult’s memory.

Tom Thumb recounts the episode in which the poor woodcutter’s son tries to plan a way out of the woods by dropping breadcrumbs, only to discover (like Hansel and Gretel) that birds have eaten them. Little Tom (portrayed by the oboe) wanders in confusion, trying to find the path, while Ravel’s vivid depiction of the birds near the end shows off his facility for conjuring nature.

Miniature people also figure in Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas. Here, a princess has been made the ugliest woman in the world by a witch’s spell (“laid” in French means ugly). She finds herself transported into a magical kingdom where her miniature subjects, robed in gems, serenade her with an orchestra whose instruments (the “pagodas” in Ravel’s sense) are made of nutshells. Nuanced touches from the percussion enhance Ravel’s enchanting use of pentatonic scales, characteristic of the orientalist exoticism that was in vogue in France.

In Conversations of Beauty and the Beast, Ravel details this unlikely love story in three parts: the appearance of Beauty (played by the clarinet) in a Satie-like waltz, the gruff pleas of the Beast (contrabassoon), and the mixture of both in a duet. A glissando from the harp signals the Beast’s transformation into a handsome prince (now represented by violin).

The concluding tale, The Enchanted Garden, does not seem to be based on any particular story. It is a celebration of the splendor of a miraculous garden, where the sun never goes down and everyone lives a blessed and happy life. The music is a single crescendo, from soft and low string sonorities to a much louder feast of sound, resplendent with harp, celesta, and glockenspiel. The suite ends with the triumphant sounds of happily-ever-after.

— adapted from a note by Thomas May

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. A regular contributor to The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Gramophone, and Strings magazine, he is the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival.