This is an edited version of the talk I gave at the Wigmore Hall last Saturday, introducing a programme that consisted of the Debussy Violin Sonata and both of Prokofiev's, plus Pärt's Fratres, gloriously played by Alina Ibragimova and Steven Osborne. Enjoy...
Did anyone see
Benvenuto Cellini the other night at ENO? Well, I hope that by the time we’ve
finished here, you might want to – because this is going to have quite a lot to
do with Berlioz. Alina
and Steven’s programme focuses chiefly on Debussy and Prokofiev, but I thought
it would be interesting to look at the inter-influences between Russian and
French music over the decades, indeed nearly a century, before their sonatas were
written. I’d like offer you a kind of treasure-trail – a long-distance game of musical
ping-pong between these cultures. We’ll look as far back as 1830 and follow
the path forward to the points at which Debussy and Prokofiev each breaks away to
write violin sonatas that represent them at their most pure, distilled and independent.
By embedding both of them in this background, looking at their musical roots, I
hope we can gain extra appreciation of and perspective upon their branches.
Let’s turn the
clock back, first, by nearly 90 years. In 1830, a new piece exploded onto the
consciousness of the French music-loving public: the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique. Even today it seems quite extraordinary to
realize it was composed so early - only three years after Beethoven died, and
two after Schubert. Berlioz really is phenomenal. If you go to hear Cellini,
which dates from 1838, you’ll hear vocal and choral writing that is almost
impossibly ambitious, and harmonies that would have been startling even in
Wagner. Along comes this visionary, larger-than-life composer, with the sheer
scale of his thinking, the dazzling range of his orchestration, the imagination
to make music nearly as powerful a narrative force as literature and the courage
to dare everything – which is what Benvenuto Cellini is really about.
Much of Parisian
musical society, though, didn’t know what on earth to make of Berlioz. All his life he
struggled for appreciation at home. Musicians elsewhere, though, were listening with
more open ears – notably, in Russia. Berlioz toured there several times, to
great acclaim, his last trip taking place close to the end of his life, and it
was on that occasion that he met Tchaikovsky.
In Russia, Mikhail
Glinka was the forerunner of a group of composers who were eager to build on
his achievements: they are known as The Five: Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Cui,
Borodin and Mussorgsky. But slightly aside from them stood Tchaikovsky – a
colossus in his own right, the most westernized of the Russians and the closest
to the world of ballet, in which guise so much Russian influence soon came to
the west. Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker offer exquisite orchestration
and remarkable sound pictures that were certainly affected by his colleagues,
especially Rimsky, but that travelled particularly well.
Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest Tchaikovsky summed up Pyotr’s
attitude to Berlioz like this:
“Whilst
he bowed down before the significance of Berlioz in contemporary music and gave
him his due as a great reformer, chiefly in the sphere of orchestration, Pyotr
Ilyich did not feel any enthusiasm for his music…But, although he displayed a
sober attitude, free of any blind enthralment, towards Berlioz's works, he felt
otherwise about Berlioz's personality during his visit to Moscow. In the eyes of the young composer the latter was above all,
as he himself says, the embodiment of 'selfless hard work and ardent love of
art'. Moreover, he was an old man worn down by the years and by illness,
persecuted by Fate and by people, and for Pyotr Ilyich it was gratifying to be
able to comfort him and warm his heart even just for a moment with a fiery
manifestation of sympathy. Finally, in the person of Berlioz there stood before
him the first great composer whose acquaintance he had had occasion to make,
and the feeling of piety which as a young artist he understandably felt for his
great colleague could not leave him indifferent. Like everyone who seriously
loved music in Russia, he received Berlioz enthusiastically and all his life
retained fond memories of his meeting with him.”
A lot of the
issues in Russian and French music in the mid to late 19th century are
really about a quest for national identity. It’s interesting to note those
words about Berlioz being the first great composer Tchaikovsky had met. Russia,
having not really had a national identity in classical music, had been
importing some, the process started by Peter the Great. But it was down to
Glinka’s successors to create their musical nationalism by adding to the mix sounds
from the folk music of Russia and its surrounding nations and ethnic groups,
making these part and parcel of their compositions. Before that, great
composers were there not.
France,
ironically, was also slow on the uptake. Its 19th-century musical
establishment was seriously, appallingly stuffy, despite Paris being an
artistic capital second only to Vienna - home to Chopin and Liszt, besides such
operatic wonders as Meyerbeer, who may not have been the greatest thing ever,
but was enormously influential, not least on Wagner. Yet these composers were
respectively Polish, Hungarian and German. There was little by way of a French
national language in music that could be clearly identified. The lyrical
concision of melody that characterized Gounod, for instance, or the sparkle of
Saint-Saens, is traceable mainly to influences like Beethoven, Schubert and
Mendelssohn.
After Wagner’s
operas exploded onto the scene, the noxious combination of his overwhelming
musical personality plus France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led to seismic
upheavals. In 1872 Saint-Saens, with a group of younger composers including
Fauré, Chausson and Duparc, formed the Societé Nationale de Musique with the
express intention of creating a uniquely French style of music, independent
from German influence.
Now, if you are
not going to let yourself be influenced by German music, but you do find
examples from overseas more interesting than what your own country has been
turning up, what are you going to do? You aren’t going to look at Italy, where
opera dominated even more. You aren’t going to look at England, because there’s
nothing much to look at. You’re going to look at Russia. Where there is, by
now, plenty. Not least thanks to the influence of Berlioz. And you may be
French, drawing on Russian influence, but you may not even realize that what
you are actually drawing on is a French composer’s influence on Russia!
Here’s one little
progression to illustrate this bit of ping-pong. Ravel admired
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. When he was writing Daphnis and Chloe, he got
stuck over the final Danse générale and eventually he put the score of Scheherazade’s final
movement on his piano, and said he ‘humbly tried to write something similar’.
Here’s Rimsky,
then Ravel. And when you hear them both, try remembering, too, Berlioz’s
rumbunctious Witches Sabbath from the Symphonie fantastique.
The chief point of
confluence here was of course Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. And it
was Mikhail Fokine’s exotic and sexy choreography for Scheherazade which brought
that piece to everyone’s ears in Paris, including Ravel’s. The influx began in 1906,
when Diaghilev held an exhibition of Russian art in Paris, creating a
fascination there with all matters Russian. Two years later he put on Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov starring Feodor Chaliapin and then in 1909 he held a ballet
season in which the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, music by Borodin,
created a sensation. The colour, energy, vitality and exoticism of ballet as
gesamtkunstwerk, with the soaring standard of all its elements, dance, choreography,
music and design – all this made a vast impact. Thereafter Diaghilev’s
commissions included Ravel’s Daphnis as well as Stravinsky’s first three
ballets, The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. I don’t need to tell
you what happened in 1913 when they premiered the last of those.
Diaghilev is what
Debussy and Prokofiev had in common. Debussy was, of course, at the height of
his powers and enormously famous by the time Diaghilev came to Paris. He had
less to gain from the connection than his younger compatriot, Ravel, and much
less to gain than the youthful Prokofiev. But we still benefit from his limited
association because his commission – after an initial approach in 1909 that came
to nothing - was the ballet score Jeux, in 1912, in which a tennis match leads
its two couples into games of a very different kind.
Its choreographer,
Nijinsky, also choreographed Debussy’s Prélude à l’apres-midi d’un faune in
1912, ending with an erotic gesture that caused a huge scandal. Debussy himself
steered clear of both ballet and scandal. And he didn’t much like Nijinsky’s
approach to Jeux. Here’s how he described him: “Nijinsky’s perverse genius
applied itself to a special branch of mathematics!” he wrote. “The man adds up
demisemiquavers with his feet, checks the result with his arms and then,
suddenly struck with paralysis all down one side, glares at the music as it
goes past. I gather it’s called the stylisation of gesture. It’s awful!”
In 1913 Prokofiev,
then aged 22, travelled to London and Paris for the first time and made contact
with Diaghilev. The impresario nurtured the young composer by commissioning a
ballet score entitled Ala and Lolli; but when Prokofiev handed it over in 1915 Diaghilev
rejected it as “unRussian”. This seems a little perverse, since it was always
going to be modelled on influences from the Scythian culture of central Asia. Parts
of it eventually morphed into the Scythian Suite. But then Diaghilev asked
Prokofiev for another score, this time Chout. And as Prokofiev was still quite
inexperienced with ballet, the choreographer Leonid Massine and Diaghilev
himself guided him closely through the process. The result, premiered in 1921,
was a major success – Ravel called it ‘a work of genius’ - and it was followed later
by The Prodigal Son, which was choreographed by George Balanchine in Paris in 1929.
These paved the way for Prokofiev’s Soviet ballets – Romeo and Juliet and
Cinderella, among his best-loved works to this day. There was a further ballet
for Diaghilev, too, entitled Le pas acier, or The Steel Step, supposedly
portraying the industrialisation of the Soviet Union.
This plentiful
experience in ballet music was, I think, a lasting influence on Prokofiev,
whose fairy-tale feel for colour, elan, rhythm and musical storytelling never
left him. The Second Violin Sonata is more or less contemporaneous with
Cinderella, and, I think, audibly so. More about that piece in a minute.
If Debussy and
Prokofiev’s paths crossed in Paris during those years when Prokofiev was the
enthusiastic young blood and Debussy the grand master near the end of his life,
there’s precious little sign of it. Still, even if Debussy didn’t know
Prokofiev, Prokofiev certainly knew Debussy’s music – and according to his
son’s reminiscences, one of his favourite works was the Prélude à l’après-midi
d’un faune.
Debussy had other
Russian connections – and vital formative ones they were. In 1880, in his late
teens, he found an interesting summer job with Tchaikovsky’s legendary patroness,
Nadezhda von Meck.
Here’s her first
impression of him, a letter of 10 July 1880: “Two days ago a young pianist
arrived from Paris where he has just graduated from the Conservatoire with the
first prize. I engaged him for the summer to give lessons to the children,
accompany Julia’s singing and play four hands with me. This young man plays
well, his technique is brilliant, but he lacks any personal expression. He is
yet too young, says he is twenty but looks 16…”
She described
Debussy to Tchaikovsky as her “little Frenchman”. Indeed, she became very fond
of him and while he stayed with the family they played through duet versions of
several big Tchaikovsky pieces. She told Tchaikovsky that Debussy was enchanted
with his music. He made arrangements for duet of some of the national dances
from Swan Lake, including the Spanish dance; his very first publication,
apparently, was a Tchaikovsky arrangement that came out in Russia; and when he
went home he took with him scores for Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and the
opera The Maid of Orleans. He was young, intelligent and impressionable and soaked
up music like the proverbial sponge.
Here is Romeo and Juliet…listen to the horn at around 8:54 to 9:56
And here is the Debussy. Listen to the woodwind around 5:50...
If that's a coincidence, I'll eat my hat...
Tchaikovsky was
not so impressed with young Debussy, though, assessing the little Frenchman’s
Danse bohemienne and declaring to von Meck that the form was “bungled”.
Now Tchaikovsky may
not have been in thrall to Berlioz, but he was far from immune to him. He once
said: “It
is Berlioz who must be considered the true founder of programme music, for
every composition of his not only bears a specific title, but is furnished with
a detailed explanation, a copy of which is supposed to be in the listener's
hands during the performance.” I doubt we’d have had his Romeo and Juliet
overture without Berlioz’s example.
Other French music
had made a big impact on him, especially Bizet’s Carmen – the Fate motif proved
a particular inspiration – and I think some crucial influences from Berlioz
aren’t difficult to detect. We’re all too familiar with the applause that often
follows the third movement of the Pathetique symphony, that rather brash and
hollow march, which creates an expectation that it’s the end, when it’s not.
The precedent for a supposedly triumphal march followed by something terrifyingly
different was set in no uncertain terms by the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique,
where the march to the scaffold is mock-triumphal and followed by the witches' sabbath. Tchaikovsky was apparently not an enthusiast over the Symphonie
fantastique – he much preferred La Damnation de Faust. But the precedent was
there and if there is any doubting the bleak, grotesque impact of Tchaikovsky’s
march and the tragedy that follows it, just look at what Berlioz was doing with
his and the flavour is somewhat enhanced.
So there again, there’s
the progression - Berlioz to Tchaikovsky to Debussy. But by the time we reach
Debussy’s musical maturity, issues of musical nationalism are becoming stronger
than ever before, in new, less cross-fertilised ways.
The trouble with
musical nationalism is that it can be symptomatic of other kinds of nationalism
on the rise around it. It has a way of finishing in wars. Both Debussy and
Prokofiev were to go through considerable traumas as a result of the wars during
in their respective lifetimes; their lives, their thinking and their music were
deeply affected.
Debussy was only a
child at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and he was fortunate thereafter to
spend most of his life in peaceful times; but when the First World War broke
out he was no longer in good health. It was around then that he began to suffer
from the cancer that would eventually kill him in 1918, even as Paris was under
bombardment.
He was ten years
old when Saint-Saens was forming the Societé Nationale de Musique in the
aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, and if later on writing music that
was essentially French and that escaped Wagnerism became a preoccupation with
Debussy, it was musically rather than politically inspired. But the First World
War changed all that.
When Debussy composed
what turned out to be his final completed works, the three instrumental sonatas
– though originally he intended six – his outlook was close indeed to the
manifesto of the original Societe Nationale. He was trying to create pure
instrumental music that was free of influence from outside and that possessed instead
what he felt to be characteristically French qualities. But to do so he now had
to look back a very long way - beyond Wagner, beyond Tchaikovsky, beyond
Berlioz and even beyond Mozart, turning to the French baroque, notably
composers such as Rameau, Couperin and Leclair.
He wrote to his
publisher, Jacques Durand, in August 1915: “I want to work – not so much for
myself, as to provide a proof, however small, that 30 million Boches can’t
destroy French thought, even when they’ve tried undermining it first before
obliterating it.” Later he reflected in another letter: “What about French
music? Where are our old harpsichordists who produced real music in abundance?
They held the secret of that graceful profundity, that emotion without
epilepsy, which we shy away from like ungrateful children…”
In his Violin
Sonata he captures that quality to perfection. Here’s some of it.
And so Debussy may
have begun his career under the shadow of Tchaikovsky and Wagner – but he
finished it by breaking free of all external impacts, for the same nationalist
reasons that at one time attracted composers to borrow from one another’s
traditions. On the manuscript of his sonatas he signed himself simply "Claude
Debussy, musician français".
Composers’ chamber
music works often reveal their musical thinking at its most private – think,
for instance, of Brahms’s clarinet quintet, or Shostakovich’s string quartets.
I reckon Debussy is no exception – and Prokofiev, too, finding the intimacy in
his chamber music to express everything he could not put into larger public
works in the era of Stalin.
Interestingly
enough, it seems that Prokofiev probably performed the Debussy Violin Sonata himself, on
tour in a duo with the violinist Robert Soetens in 1935.
There’s one more
influence from France which contributed to bringing Prokofiev’s Second Violin
Sonata into being. This piece dates from 1942, it was the first of the pair to
be completed – and it’s not really a violin sonata at all. It was originally
written for flute and piano and was apparently inspired – in memory – by the great French
flautist Georges Barrère.
Barrère was one of a powerful line of great French flautists, who also included Paul
Taffanel and Philippe Gaubert, and would later extend to Marcel Moyse, Jean-Philippe Rampal. The
French repertoire is replete with works conceived for them, including pieces
like Fauré’s Fantaisie, Poulenc’s Flute Sonata, Ibert’s Flute Concerto,
Debussy’s Syrinx, the big solo in Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe and of course the
opening of Debussy’s L’Après-midi – which we’ve also noted was a favourite
of Prokofiev’s. Moyse was another particularly significant example: a friend of Ravel and Enescu and creator of a method of flute playing that’s used by student flautists all over the world, he played under the batons of both Rimsky-Korsakov and of Prokofiev himself. He once declared: “I long ago observed that the real beauty of the sound comes from the generosity of the heart.”
In
Russia the flute tradition was less developed than it was in France. The great
violinist David Oistrakh spotted the likely lack of demand for this sonata and suggested
Prokofiev should rework it for violin. Prokofiev embraced the opportunity and
the result was every bit as successful as Oistrakh had hoped. Here he is, playing it, with pianist Vladimir Yampolsky.
But our next
criss-crossing of France and Russia is more physical...and concerns why Prokofiev, having left
Revolutionary Russia for France, eventually decided to go back again.
He was not
a political animal. He appears to have been rather single-minded about his
music; he was also something of a dandy, loving to wear good suits, yellow
shoes and plenty of aftershave. But it is ironic that a man preoccupied only
with art, love and his adopted religion of Christian Science should have been
caught up in seismic political events that changed the face of the planet, and
it was inevitable that from time to time their impact would find some
expression in his music.
Prokofiev escaped
the 1917 revolution in Russia and spent the next decade abroad. He was in the
US for around four years, he spent a year in Bavaria writing his opera The
Fiery Angel, but the rest of the time he was in France, where, among other
things, he worked with Diaghilev. In 1927 he went back to Russia for the first
time, encouraged by friends who told him that his music was popular there and
he would be greeted with enthusiasm. He found it a very different country from
the one he’d left, but he was indeed welcomed back with considerable triumph. That
acclaim haunted him thereafter.
Several factors
conspired to create the mindset that returned Prokofiev for good to the USSR in,
of all times, the mid 1930s. First, after Diaghilev died in 1929, his ballets
dropped out of the repertoire and he was left short of a vital commissioning
patron. Besides, he was homesick. In a 1933 interview, he said:
“Foreign air does
not suit my inspiration, because I am Russian, and that is to say the least
suited of men to be an exile, to remain myself in a psychological climate that
isn’t of my race. My compatriots and I carry our country about with us. Not all
of it, to be sure, but a little bit, just enough for it to be faintly painful
at first, then increasingly so, until at last it breaks us down altogether.”
There could have been warning signs. In 1929, trying to get his ballet Le pas d’acier staged at the Bolshoi, Prokofiev faced tough questioning from the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, who challenged him over living abroad and whether a factory in the piece was a capitalist one or soviet. Perhaps it’s a measure of the composer’s ignorance of what had been going on in the USSR that he was furious and declared “That concerns politics, not music, so therefore I won’t answer.” The ballet was rejected.
The next issue was purely musical. His personal leanings towards traditional forms, clarity of expression
and a more traditional outlook than was being taken by contemporary composers
in France at the time, let alone in Vienna, made him feel that the USSR might be
the place for him. Desiring to create melodic music that large numbers of
people could and would enjoy, Prokofiev felt his outlook was perhaps not so far off the
official line. He once declared that he wanted to create music that would
appeal to people in the Soviet Union discovering music for the first time,
aiming to invent ‘a new simplicity’. The Soviet authorities were only too happy
to encourage him – his return would be a massive PR coup. He spent much of 1935
there working on his ballet Romeo and Juliet, but in 1936 he was permitted to
leave again for a tour, so he was away when Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of
Mtsensk was denounced in the newspaper Pravda, apparently for tickling "the
perverted tastes of the bourgeoisie".
Prokofiev himself
was attacked for his artistic outlook at this time - but he wasn’t there, knew nothing about it and wasn’t
told the full story when he return. So instead of getting out while the going
was good, he wrote Peter and the Wolf, enjoyed a huge triumph and settled
happily in a nice apartment with his wife and family, just in time for Stalin’s
‘terror’. Fortunately he remained unscathed, though he incurred plenty of jealousy. Then
he wrote an enormous cantata for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution - only
for it to be rejected out of hand.
He made his last
foreign tour in 1938 and was offered a very nice contract in Hollywood to write
film music. He turned it down: his sons were still in Moscow and he had to
go home to them.
It was in the winter
of 1938 that he began to write sketches for his first violin sonata. He had
been working on film music with Sergei Eisenstein for Alexander Nevsky and was
surrounded by the terrible purges of the Terror. Between 1936 and 38 about 7
million Russians were arrested, some half a million public figures were shot
and hundreds of thousands more sent to the gulags. By the winter of 1940 Prokofiev found himself having to write celebrations of Stalin’s glorious society even while
some of his closest friends were arrested, tortured and killed.
When Germany
invaded Russia in 1941, Prokofiev was evacuated with a number of other artistic
figures, together with his mistress, the poet Mira Mendelson, for whom he had left his
wife. They went first to the Caucuses, then to Tblisi in Georgia, and he took
his violin sonata in progress with him.
The Violin Sonata No.1 is much less famous than its
sibling no.2, but it is by far the more personal. It’s an almost unremittingly
dark piece and near the close of the first movement and again at the end of the
entire piece there’s an eerie scalic effect which he described as suggestive of
a wind blowing through a graveyard. Here is a complete recording by Oistrakh with the pianist Lev Oborin.
Prokofiev’s
health was never the same again after the war. He was chronically ill for his last
eight years and died in 1953 on the self-same day as Stalin. The first and
third movements of his Violin Sonata No.1 were played at his funeral.
Think
how much the world had changed. Debussy lived only long enough to trumpet his
nationalist colours at the end of his life, but Prokofiev, born a prodigy with
a pushy mother into the world of Tsars, Tchaikovsky and The Five, started off
living the hopeful life of a composer who believed that politics and music could
be separate, and paid the price by ending up in the wrong place at the wrong
time even though he’d had the chance not to.
You could see him as a hero who
stood by his inner convictions and followed his heart. You could see him as an
impossibly naïve and blinkered artist, hoist on his own petard. You could
forgive him everything, as he lacked the luxury of hindsight. Or you could see
in him the tragic story of one who devoted a wealth of talent to ideals that were
to prove doomed and deadly. The story, perhaps, of Russia
itself.
Now, one
person from tonight’s programme has been missing and it’s Arvo Pärt and his
piece Fratres. I apologise for sidelining him in favour of the Debussy and
Prokofiev narratives – and I am sure that Fratres will be familiar since there
can be few contemporary pieces that have been conscripted so often for film and
TV. But there is one little footnote to add that ties it to our other pieces.
Diaghilev was largely responsible for turning ballet into a gesamtkunstwerk,
with Debussy as occasional prop and Prokofiev as musical heir apparent. Last week I went to Covent Garden to see a brand-new ballet entitled Connectome, with
amazing designs by Es Devlin, fine choreography by Alastair Marriott and
dancing by today’s greatest ballerina, Natalia Osipova. It really was a
gesamtkunstwerk. And the music was four pieces by Arvo Pärt – beginning with
Fratres. Do see it if you can.
