Maurice Ravel: "Boléro"

The orchestral work Boléro, by the French composer Maurice Ravel, is one of the few classical pieces having reached its very high level of popularity having not been conceived for the delight of a large audience on the occasion of a certain event. "Every moment Ravel's Boléro is being performed somewhere around the world", has stated the composer Lawrence Petitgirard. At the same time, the work is the masterpiece of the composer, in every sense of the word.

By the time Ravel wrote it, 1928, he was just over 50 years old and was at the height of his fame and worldwide recognition, with hundreds of pieces to his credit, which were heard throughout Europe and North America.

Just after returning from a tour of the Scandinavian countries, of England, of the United States and Canada, and while on holiday in Saint Jean de Luz (a town on the Atlantic coast), Ravel received a telegram from Ida Rubinstein. In it, the Russian dancer and businesswoman suggested the idea of a ballet for the Paris Opera, which ideally would not last more than 17 minutes.

Apparently, this somewhat rudimentary request (because of the time duration imposed) led him to conceive the simple idea of an "insistent" theme that was to be repeated twenty times without any development, just maintaining a constant reorchestration of the theme, a rather mad effort that could only be undertook by the undisputed master of the art of instrumentation that Maurice Ravel was.

Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937)

This idea of repetition and insistence transmuted into a sonorous and dynamic progression, always similar in its essence and at the same time different in its expression, that until now remains as the most persuasive "lesson of orchestration" that a musician has ever written.

Reduced to pure sound, Boléro seems like an orchestral plot without music, only a long and progressive crescendo but conceived with an unprecedented audacity: a simple motif divided into two parts, supported by an omnipresent and tirelessly repeated rhythm, with no changes, except for that one which Ravel did alternatively entrust to the snare drum (and then to the other instruments) following a simple instruction: where there were eighth notes now you make triplets, then return to the eighth notes and so on until the end of the piece.

Accelerating is not allowed. Never. The only change permitted is the sound intensity, from an almost inaudible pianissimo to the fortissimo final dissonant chord. The sound volume has to be grown in such a way that the audience does not realize that there has been a steady crescendo, all the while.

Boléro was first performed at the Paris Opéra on November 22, 1928, with a dance choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska.

Gustavo Dudamel conducts The Wiener Philharmoniker.

A brief listening guide:
After the opening rhythm on the snare drum (that continues unabated throughout the work), the piece proceeds as follows:
0:33 solo flute (in the instrument’s low range)
1:28 solo clarinet (also low in the range)
2:23 solo bassoon (high in its range)
3:18 solo E-flat clarinet (smaller and higher in pitch than the standard B-flat clarinet)
4:14 solo oboe d’amore
5:08 muted trumpet and flute (the flute floating like overtones parallel to the trumpet’s line)
6:03 solo tenor saxophone (an unusual inclusion in an orchestra, but Ravel liked jazz)
6:58 solo soprano saxophone (a small, straight, high-pitched saxophone)
8:15 French horn and celesta (the bell-like tones of the latter parallel to the horn’s line)
8:47 quartet composed of clarinet and three double-reeds (a combination organlike in timbre)
9:40 solo trombone (replete with sensuously sliding passages)
10:33 high woodwinds (growing more strident in tone)
11:24 The strings finally emerge from their background role to take the lead for the remaining variations. The crescendo continues to build; the drumbeat persists, becoming ever more prominent. Before long, trumpet accents are added, contributing to the intensity until, in the final moments, the full orchestra is tossed into the mix —trombones, cymbals, and all— bringing the piece to an exultant, if abrupt, conclusion.

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Claude Debussy: "Claire de Lune"

Nothing presaged that the child Achille-Claude Debussy, eventually an author of more than 800 works for orchestra, instrumental works and chamber music, was destined to music. His genealogy pointed to anything but art. Born in 1862 in a small town on the banks of the Seine, his great-grandfather had started a locksmith's workshop in Paris after marrying the daughter of a carpenter, and an uncle of him also handled the noble craftmanship of carpentry.

Claude's father, meanwhile, enrolled very young in the marine infantry and then tried his luck in a wide range of occupations. When the events of the Paris Commune unleashed in 1871, he also wanted to hold the sky in his hands and therefore joined the ranks of the rebels. The failed uprising ended with him being tried and sent to jail for a year. But it happened that the mother of another Communard prisoner became interested in the family of her son's fellow. A disciple of Chopin –according to herself–, she immediately noticed the musical disposition of little Claude.

Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)

Madame Mauté de Fleurville (that was the name of the so-called disciple of Chopin), prepared Claude Debussy for free to enter the Paris Conservatoire, what Claude finally made in 1872.
Eight years later, a great Russian lady, Nadezhda von Meck, a friend and patroness of Tchaikovsky, asked the Conservatory to provide a young pianist to give lessons to her children. The chosen one was young Claude. The following year, Mrs. von Meck invited him to join her on a trip to Moscow. The following summer, Claude was invited again, so his self-confidence surely did experience a huge leap. And then, he made the mistake.
With surprising boldness, Claude dared to ask Mrs. von Meck for the hand of her daughter Sonia. Mrs. von Meck listened to his request as she watched the garden through the windows. Then she turned his head and asked Claude if he would not mind going back to Paris on the next train.

Claire de Lune, from the Suite Bergamasque
The famous Claire de Lune by Debussy is one of the four pieces that make up the Suite Bergamasque, although the initial project of 1890 did not include it. In a much later revision, in 1905, Debussy replaced two of the four original pieces. Claire de Lune is one of these replacements and is the piece that, ultimately, made the entire suite popular.

The rendition is by the American pianist Thomas Labé.

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Gustav Mahler: An Adagietto for Alma

Painter Gustav Klimt, the author of the famous painting The Kiss, was one of the guests in the evening at the Zukerkandl family's home in Vienna on November 7, 1901. When he realized that the young woman he had been chasing all around Europe for six years –since she was sixteen– was also one of the guests, he got shocked, but overjoyed, as well. The young girl, a budding composer, was called Alma Schindler, was now 22 years old and was regarded, sure enough, the most beautiful woman in Vienna.

Alma Mahler (1879 - 1964)

Alma made her grand entrance shortly after 8 p.m. Gustav crossed the room in order to greet her but the other guests blocked his way because they rushed to receive the guest of honor who was also entering the room at that very moment. A second Gustav was joining the evening. He was Gustav Mahler, the giant, the composer and director of the Vienna State Opera.
Gustav, the painter, gave up that very evening.

Gustav Mahler was 41 years old at the time. He was single, and as the director of the Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, was at the height of his fame and international prestige. Gustav's fascination with Alma and vice versa was immediate. After two dates following that evening –Gustav invited her to a rehearsal and then to the performance of an opera by Gluck– the compose proposed to Alma with unusual words: "It is not easy to marry a man like me, and I must remain so". Alma didn't hesitate for long. Very shortly after, on March 9, 1902, they got married at a private ceremony.

Gustav Mahler, in 1899
(1860 - 1911)

But not everything had always been that simple for Mahler. Twenty years earlier, at the beginning of his career, Gustav had been hired to direct operetta in a small theater in Upper Austria, but the position was a tricky business, according to Alma herself, in his diary: "The father of  Zwerenz, the prima donna, appointed him conductor of the orchestra ... but in a very special sense ... His duties were to put the music on the music stands before each performance, remove dust from the piano and pick up the music again after each show, and while the intermissions he had to walk the little Mizzi Zwerenz in her stroller, around the theater".

It wasn't a glamorous start, of course. And Alma is possibly taking things a bit too far. What can not be denied is that it was by the hands of Alma –who sacrificed her own creative interest in favor of her husband's career– that Gustav Mahler advanced even more in his career reaching the peak a few years later, when he was hired to take charge of the New York Metropolitan Opera, for the 1907-1908 season.

Fifth Symphony - Adagietto
Nine symphonies composed Mahler, plus a tenth that remained unfinished. The same year of his union with Alma he began to compose the fifth symphony and finished it –it's a saying, for it was revised in many occasions for long years– in 1902 in his refuge of Maiernigg, next to a lake.
A work in five movements, the fourth one is probably which made it famous, the well-known Adagietto for harp and strings that Lucchino Visconti in his film Death in Venice, from 1971, raised almost to the category of a character by making it accompany a large part of the story.

Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No 2 - Yuja Wang

At 20, the young aristocrat Vasily Arkadyevich Rachmaninoff joined one of the most distinguished regiments of the Russian Imperial Guard. Nonetheless, that determination did not stop him from being always ready to have fun. The ebullient Vasily Arkadyevich did not take much time to squander the fortune he had accessed by advantageously marrying an heiress of vast lands. Shortly before leaving the family on the only property that had survived the waste, Vasili Arkadievich – who not by chance had written a polka as a young man – noticed that his son Sergei was sufficiently gifted to start formal musical studies.

In fact, little Sergei had shown his talent at four years accompanying the piano to his maternal grandfather in piano pieces for four hands. Three years later, a specially trained pianist girl from the St. Petersburg Conservatory would be in charge of accompanying the first steps of the future composer, who would finally receive, at his 20, his graduation diploma at the Moscow Conservatory, in 1893.

A young artist
Sergei Rachmaninoff got an early success. As a recent graduate from the Conservatory, he premiered an opera that immediately enjoyed the admiration and support of his countryman Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Four years later, and after a successful tour throughout Russia, Sergei thought he was in a position to address the composition of a symphony, his first symphony. A good idea with bad timing. In its premiere, the symphony was booed by the public and then beaten by critics.

Sergei Rachmaninoff, in 1909
(1873 - 1943) 

The depression
Rachmaninoff's disappointment was enormous. Seriously fearing for his psychic health, his friends put Sergei in the hands of a famous doctor who by means of autosuggestion and hypnotism managed to get him out of the psychic prostration. After a long treatment, only in 1900, Sergei felt like composing again and started working on his Piano Concerto No 2, anew, for he had already finished the first movement.

A borrowed theme
A well-known critic of the time relates that in those days Rachmaninoff listened to his faithful friend and fellow disciple Nikita Morozov, singing at the piano a beautiful theme of his own. Deeply moved by the beauty of the melody, Sergei confessed to his friend with a great deal of admiration: "Here is a theme of which I would have liked to be an author". Morozov, a lifelong friend, did not hesitate to respond: "Well! ... and if you like it so much, why do not you use it as if it were yours?"

Brimming with gratitude, Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff incorporated into the composition he was working on the theme that would finally make him famous. The melody of Morozov is the lyrical song that makes its entrance at minute 24:53 (third movement) of the Piano Concerto No. 2, in this rendering by the Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, accompanied by the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Lorenzo Viotti, in The Feldherrnhalle (Field Marshals' Hall), a monumental loggia on the Odeonsplatz, in Munich.

Piano Concerto No 2, in C minor, opus 18
Dedicated to Dr. Dahl (the doctor who took Sergei out of the depression), the work premiered with the composer as a soloist on 9 November 1901. It is in three movements:

00:00  Moderato
11:22  Adagio sostenuto
23:01  Allegro

 

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Saint Saëns: The Swan, from The Carnival of the Animals

When the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns was a baby just two months old, his father, an official in the Ministry of the Interior, died of consumption on the first anniversary of his marriage. This led the family to fear that Camille could have inherited the disease. It was not the case, though, over much of his lifetime, Camille endured a frail health and carried a weak physical constitution.

Quite the contrary, the author, born in 1835 –five years before Tchaikowski–, outlived the Russian maestro and other musicians of his time a number of years. He even reached to live in the first decades of the 20th century, dying in Algiers in 1921. He seems to us, therefore, an author of our times.

The Carnival of the Animals
Alongside this is the fact that some of his most famous works did not have a good reception at their premieres, and the audiences surrendered to their charms only in dates much later than their composition.
This is the case of the orchestral suite "The Carnival of the Animals", a sort of private joke that Saint-Saens wrote in 1886, in Vienna, on the return of an unfortunate tour that occurred to him to carry out in Germany right after he had spoken nasty things about Wagner and German music.

Written in order to forget the troubles of the tour, it is a kind of "zoological fantasy" divided into fourteen movements. Discouraged by the poor reception of the work, Saint-Saens forbade it to be performed while he was alive (with the exception of  "The Swan"), and it was not until 1922, a year after his death, that it was heard in its entirety by a larger and more numerous audience, reaching a celebrity that has not diminished since then.

The Swan
The fourteen movements make comic allusions to a large part of the music written by other composers of the time, including himself. The quotations are to Rossini, Berlioz, Offenbach, Mendelssohn and others, and the comedy comes fundamentally from both the unusual tempos the pieces are performed with or the instruments chosen for it. The movement entitled The Swan is the most serious and calm of the work, also, the most "romantic".

A staple of the cello repertoire, this is one of the most well-known movements of the suite, usually in the version for cello with solo piano which was the only publication of this work in Saint-Saëns's lifetime. More than twenty other arrangements of this movement have also been published, with solo instruments ranging from flute to alto saxophone.

The rendition is by the prominent cellist Yo-Yo Ma, born in France to Chinese parents.

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