Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994)
Symphony No.3
Lutosławski’s career, like all artists working in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, was affected by the regime under which he lived. During the War, when Poland was occupied by the Nazis, he survived by playing piano duets in Warsaw cafés with his friend and fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik. After the war was over, Poland became a communist state under the influence of Stalin’s Russia, and Lutosławski found his First Symphony, completed in 1947, proscribed as “formalist” (the standard soviet term for any art that the authorities did not like for any reason). Like many other composers, he diverted his energies into writing folk-derived music.
After 1956 the regime became slightly less oppressive. The creation of the “Warsaw Autumn” festival of contemporary music enabled many Polish composers to hear and take on the influence of the Western avant-garde for the first time. For Lutosławski, who was old enough to remember the relative freedoms of the 1920s and 30s, it was an opportunity to resume the exploration of paths that had been closed to him. He began to explore the use of chance procedures in his music. Unlike John Cage, the western doyenne of chance in music, Lutosławski’s use of chance procedures is very strict and limited: by freeing the players in an orchestra to play independently he is able to produce complex textures that would be unplayable if notated exactly. In contrast to Cage, the outcome is remarkably predictable and consistent in any performance. At the same time he experimented with dense twelve-note harmonies, using all the notes of the western scale (and occasionally extending to the use of quarter-tones). His Second Symphony of 1967 employs all these ideas in a masterpiece of orchestration.
Lutosławski began to contemplate a third symphony as early as 1974, when during a visit to the USA he received a request from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a new work. He became unsatisfied with the sketches he made, and the plan stalled. In 1977 he made another attempt but once again rejected his own efforts. Finally in 1981 he began yet again, and this time work proceeded better: the Third Symphony was completed in 1983, and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir Georg Solti that year.
The symphony’s long gestation means that it occupies a transitional place in Lutosławski’s career. During the course of the 1970s he began to refine his style, writing thinner, more lucid textures and increasingly overly melodic lines. The third symphony owes a lot of its character to the contrast between Lutosławski’s older and later styles. Its structure follows a pattern often used by Lutosławski in which the whole divides into two distinct sections. The first is episodic. A dramatic four-note gesture in the brass, inescapably reminiscent of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, opens the work and sets the woodwind into a flurry of activity. This abruptly peters out, and the brass effectively have to begin the symphony again. A series of episodes follow, which tend to be static and inconclusive; they peter out into woodwind refrains before the opening motif is reasserted. It is as though the orchestra is trying to work out how to respond to the opening gesture.
The second part is a more sustained attempt to find an answer, and is characterised by the alternation of fast, virtuosic passages with slower ones in which a long melody can be heard emerging. The fast ideas are initially dominant. A complex web of counterpoint builds towards a climax, but at the point when a decisive culmination appears to be imminent everything collapses. Out of this failure the melodic idea grows anew, in what Alex Ross describes as “a kind of magnificence without triumph”. Finally everything breaks free in a fast coda, before converging in a decisive final gesture that brings everything full circle.
The early eighties, the period during which Lutosławski worked most intensively on the Third Symphony, was a turbulent and pivotal moment in Polish history. The increasing friction between the communist government and the increasingly open dissent expressed most notably through the trade union Solidarity led in 1981 to the imposition of martial law. Thousands of activists were imprisoned and strikes were broken by military force. Even after the state of emergency was lifted, Poland remained a repressed country. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties did it finally become a free democracy, with Solidarity’s president, Lech Wałęsa, elected as president in 1990.
Lutosławski was always at pains to stress that his music was pure sound and not intended to portray any specific extramusical concern. But, while rejecting speculation in early reviews of the symphony that it portrayed in some manner events in Poland, he qualified his position:
“If we agree that music can mean anything extra-musical, it nevertheless remains ambiguous meaning. But man has a single soul and whatever he experiences in life, must have some influence on him. If man has a single psyche, then the world of sounds, despite its autonomy, is still a function of that psyche. So I would limit myself to stating that if the last movement of the Symphony makes the impression it makes and keeps the listener in suspense, it is certainly not by chance. I would admittedly feel honoured if I managed to express something connected not only to my personal experience but also to that of other people.”
Debussy: La mer
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
La Mer
“Perhaps you don’t know that I was really destined for the wonderful life of a sailor and it was only chance which diverted me. I have nevertheless retained a sincere passion for [the sea],” wrote Debussy in 1903 to the conductor Andre Messager announcing that he was working on three “symphonic sketches”. Messager had recently played an important part in Debussy’s career by conducting the first performances of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande the previous year. This had been a huge success, and firmly established Debussy at the vanguard of the younger generation of French composers. Having been determined not to follow any established school himself, he found himself set as the leader of a movement, as “Debussyism” became the fashion, both as a term of enthusiasm and abuse.
Ironically, much of La mer was composed almost as far from the sea as it it possible to get in France; he began work on it while on holiday in Burgundy. As the composer explained to Messager, “I have an endless store of memories of the sea and, to my mind, they are worth more than the reality, whose beauty weighs down thought too heavily.” He completed it by the sea, but rather than the kind of sunny European vista one might expect, the scene before him as he finished the score was the seafront at Eastbourne. Debussy described Eastbourne to his publisher as “a charming, peaceful spot. The sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness.”
The composition of La mer coincided with a turbulent period in Debussy’s life. He had married a model, Lilly Texier, in 1899, but the marriage soon soured, and four years later he began an affair with Emma Moyse-Bardac, the mother of one of his pupils and wife of a prominent Paris banker. When in 1904 he left Lilly and absconded to Jersey with Emma, a scandal broke which was reported with glee by the French press. Matters worsened when Lilly subsequently attempted suicide, an act that Le Figaro suggested was the result of another affair on Debussy’s part. As a result of all this Debussy lost the support of a number of prominent patrons, as well as providing fuel to those who already felt an antipathy to him and his music. This partly explains the poor reception given to La mer at its premiere in 1905. It did not help that the performance itself was entirely inadequate and poorly prepared, and the result was that La mer was a resounding failure.
The criticism from his enemies came as no surprise. What hurt Debussy more was the negative reaction of some commenters whom he regarded as allies: the critic Pierre Lalo (son of the composer Edward Lalo) wrote, “For the first time listening to a picturesque work of Debussy’s, I had the impression of confronting not nature, but a reproduction of nature...The sea I do not hear, I do not see, and I do not feel.” Wounded, Debussy responded, “I love the sea and I’ve listened to it with the passionate respect it deserves. If I’ve been inaccurate in taking down what it dictated to me, that is no concern of yours or mine. You must admit, not all ears hear the same way. The heart of the matter is that you love and defend traditions which, for me, no longer exist or, at least, exist only as representative of an epoch in which they were not all as fin and valuable as people make out, and the dust of the past is not always to be respected.”
By 1908, Debussy had married Emma and the scandal had died down enough that the second performance of La mer in Paris, this time with the composer himself making his debut as a conductor, was a great success; even Lalo was now convinced. In the light of his experience conducting Debussy made a number of revisions to the score The following year he accepted an offer from Gabriel Fauré to join the advisory board of the Paris Conservatoire. His journey from avant-garde provocateur to the heart of the French musical establishment was complete.
Satie famously lampooned the title of the opening movement, “From dawn to noon on the sea” with the comment that he “particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven”. However, Debussy’s aim in all three movements is not to create a literal aural impression of the sea, let alone any particular point in the day, but rather to evoke the emotional and psychological reaction to a natural force (“the invisible sentiments of nature”). It is remarkable how little he falls back on the clichés of portraying the sea in music (and those ideas that seem like cliché to us are generally so because of the composers since who have imitated him). The three movements each present a different fact of the sea: the opening reflects the transformation effected by light, as the music proceeds from the darkness before dawn to the glory of full daylight. The second movement presents a playful image of the waves, which contrasts sharply with the violence of the storm of the finale.
La Mer
- De l'aube à midi sur la mer [from dawn to noon on the sea]
- Jeux de vagues [Play of the Waves]
- Dialogue du vent et de la mer [Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea]
“Perhaps you don’t know that I was really destined for the wonderful life of a sailor and it was only chance which diverted me. I have nevertheless retained a sincere passion for [the sea],” wrote Debussy in 1903 to the conductor Andre Messager announcing that he was working on three “symphonic sketches”. Messager had recently played an important part in Debussy’s career by conducting the first performances of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande the previous year. This had been a huge success, and firmly established Debussy at the vanguard of the younger generation of French composers. Having been determined not to follow any established school himself, he found himself set as the leader of a movement, as “Debussyism” became the fashion, both as a term of enthusiasm and abuse.
Ironically, much of La mer was composed almost as far from the sea as it it possible to get in France; he began work on it while on holiday in Burgundy. As the composer explained to Messager, “I have an endless store of memories of the sea and, to my mind, they are worth more than the reality, whose beauty weighs down thought too heavily.” He completed it by the sea, but rather than the kind of sunny European vista one might expect, the scene before him as he finished the score was the seafront at Eastbourne. Debussy described Eastbourne to his publisher as “a charming, peaceful spot. The sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness.”
The composition of La mer coincided with a turbulent period in Debussy’s life. He had married a model, Lilly Texier, in 1899, but the marriage soon soured, and four years later he began an affair with Emma Moyse-Bardac, the mother of one of his pupils and wife of a prominent Paris banker. When in 1904 he left Lilly and absconded to Jersey with Emma, a scandal broke which was reported with glee by the French press. Matters worsened when Lilly subsequently attempted suicide, an act that Le Figaro suggested was the result of another affair on Debussy’s part. As a result of all this Debussy lost the support of a number of prominent patrons, as well as providing fuel to those who already felt an antipathy to him and his music. This partly explains the poor reception given to La mer at its premiere in 1905. It did not help that the performance itself was entirely inadequate and poorly prepared, and the result was that La mer was a resounding failure.
The criticism from his enemies came as no surprise. What hurt Debussy more was the negative reaction of some commenters whom he regarded as allies: the critic Pierre Lalo (son of the composer Edward Lalo) wrote, “For the first time listening to a picturesque work of Debussy’s, I had the impression of confronting not nature, but a reproduction of nature...The sea I do not hear, I do not see, and I do not feel.” Wounded, Debussy responded, “I love the sea and I’ve listened to it with the passionate respect it deserves. If I’ve been inaccurate in taking down what it dictated to me, that is no concern of yours or mine. You must admit, not all ears hear the same way. The heart of the matter is that you love and defend traditions which, for me, no longer exist or, at least, exist only as representative of an epoch in which they were not all as fin and valuable as people make out, and the dust of the past is not always to be respected.”
By 1908, Debussy had married Emma and the scandal had died down enough that the second performance of La mer in Paris, this time with the composer himself making his debut as a conductor, was a great success; even Lalo was now convinced. In the light of his experience conducting Debussy made a number of revisions to the score The following year he accepted an offer from Gabriel Fauré to join the advisory board of the Paris Conservatoire. His journey from avant-garde provocateur to the heart of the French musical establishment was complete.
Satie famously lampooned the title of the opening movement, “From dawn to noon on the sea” with the comment that he “particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven”. However, Debussy’s aim in all three movements is not to create a literal aural impression of the sea, let alone any particular point in the day, but rather to evoke the emotional and psychological reaction to a natural force (“the invisible sentiments of nature”). It is remarkable how little he falls back on the clichés of portraying the sea in music (and those ideas that seem like cliché to us are generally so because of the composers since who have imitated him). The three movements each present a different fact of the sea: the opening reflects the transformation effected by light, as the music proceeds from the darkness before dawn to the glory of full daylight. The second movement presents a playful image of the waves, which contrasts sharply with the violence of the storm of the finale.
Rachmaninoff: The Isle of the Dead
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
The Isle of the Dead, Op.29
Arnold Böcklin’s painting (or rather paintings; he produced five versions of the image in all between 1880 and 1886) 'The Isle of the Dead' was in the early twentieth century an exceptionally popular artwork in central Europe. In his 1934 novel Despair Nabokov observes that prints of it were to be found “in every Berlin home.” The painting depicts a looming rocky islet in a vast expanse of water. Arriving at the shore is a boat steered by an oarsman, with a figure dressed in white standing in the boat accompanied by an object generally taken to be a coffin.
The title of the painting is not Böcklin’s own, but was coined by an art dealer from a phrase used by Böcklin in a letter to the commissioner of the painting, Alexander Günther. The oarsman is generally assumed to be Charon, in Greek mythology the guide who takes the dea across the River Styx to the Underworld.
Rachmaninoff encountered the painting in Paris in 1907, and was inspired by it to begin a new orchestral work, which he completed in Dresden in 1909. The image he saw in Paris was not any of the originals however, but a black-and -white print. Rachmaninoff later declared that had he seen it in colour he would probably not have composed the music.
Rachmaninoff was at this time at the height of his powers, having recently completed his Second Symphony, and The Isle if the Dead is one of his finest works. The gently rocking rhythm that opens and drives the music through much of its course invokes the pull of the oars in the water, over which fragments of the 'Dies Irae' plainchant that obsessed Rachmaninoff throughout his career float. These two element and a variety . A lighter central section perhaps suggests a reminiscence of the life the figure in the boat has departed, and the tension between this and the tolling of the 'Dies Irae' leads to a dramatic climax, before the boatman sets his oars to the water again, and the isle fades into the mist.
The Isle of the Dead, Op.29
Arnold Böcklin’s painting (or rather paintings; he produced five versions of the image in all between 1880 and 1886) 'The Isle of the Dead' was in the early twentieth century an exceptionally popular artwork in central Europe. In his 1934 novel Despair Nabokov observes that prints of it were to be found “in every Berlin home.” The painting depicts a looming rocky islet in a vast expanse of water. Arriving at the shore is a boat steered by an oarsman, with a figure dressed in white standing in the boat accompanied by an object generally taken to be a coffin.
The title of the painting is not Böcklin’s own, but was coined by an art dealer from a phrase used by Böcklin in a letter to the commissioner of the painting, Alexander Günther. The oarsman is generally assumed to be Charon, in Greek mythology the guide who takes the dea across the River Styx to the Underworld.
Rachmaninoff encountered the painting in Paris in 1907, and was inspired by it to begin a new orchestral work, which he completed in Dresden in 1909. The image he saw in Paris was not any of the originals however, but a black-and -white print. Rachmaninoff later declared that had he seen it in colour he would probably not have composed the music.
Rachmaninoff was at this time at the height of his powers, having recently completed his Second Symphony, and The Isle if the Dead is one of his finest works. The gently rocking rhythm that opens and drives the music through much of its course invokes the pull of the oars in the water, over which fragments of the 'Dies Irae' plainchant that obsessed Rachmaninoff throughout his career float. These two element and a variety . A lighter central section perhaps suggests a reminiscence of the life the figure in the boat has departed, and the tension between this and the tolling of the 'Dies Irae' leads to a dramatic climax, before the boatman sets his oars to the water again, and the isle fades into the mist.
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