Vadim Repin, violin Nikolai Lugansky, piano   Repin bio Lugansky bio   Tuesday, November 11, 2008 Purchase tickets for Vadim Repin and Nikolai Lugansky

Program

PROGRAM NOTES

by Michael Steinberg

Sonata in G minor Claude Debussy
(Born St. Germain-en-Laye 1882; died Paris 1918)
The title page of the first edition of Debussy’s Sonata
for violin and piano reads:
SIX SONATES
pour divers instruments
Composées par
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Musicien Français
La Troisième pour Violon et Piano “Six Sonatas”—that was tempting providence, or, if you prefer a more rationalistic formulation, flying in the face of probability. The rectal cancer that was to bring Debussy a drawn-out and hideous death had already begun to manifest itself in 1915, when, after an interval of a couple of years, he resumed composing and planned his sonata project. He began writing like a madman, he said, and in quick succession composed two sonatas, one for cello and piano, another for flute, viola, and harp, as well as two of his most visionary works for keyboard, the two-piano suite En blanc et noir and the twelve Etudes. In the fall of 1916, when he found the beginning of the third sonata of the projected six, he was desperately ill and “suffering the tortures of the damned.” He was worse when he completed the work in the spring of 1917. He lingered on another year and, while he continued to cling to his long -cherished hope of writing an opera on Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and thought about another on As You Like It, the Violin Sonata turned out to be the last work he was able to complete. (No.4 in the series, for oboe, horn, and harpsichord, would have been the first major work in the twentieth-century harpsichord revival.) The shadow of death hangs about the sonata in other ways as well: The entire set was dedicated to the memory of Debussy’s late wife, Emma-Claude, and the Léon Vallas biography tells us that the composer intended these works “as a secret, fervent tribute to the youth of France mowed down by the scythe of war.” Appending “musicien français” to his name was also a war-inspired gesture, and Debussy’s urgent need to make the statement that French thought would not be destroyed fed his will to work in the face of ravaging illness. Debussy told his friend Robert Godet that he had persisted with the Vio lin Sonata “only to get rid of it and because I was spurred on by my dear publisher. You know how to read between the staves, so you’ll see the traces of that Imp of the Perverse who urges us on to choose the very idea we ought to have left alone. This sonata will be interesting from a documentary point of view and as an example of what an invalid can write in time of war.”

Debussy was at the piano both for the unofficial premiere at a hospital for soldiers blinded in the war and for the official one in Paris a few days later, on 5 May 1917. His partner both times was Gaston Poulet. About that time Debussy wrote to Gabriel Fauré, declining an invitation to take part in another concert, that he really could no longer play—there were too many keys and not enough fingers, and he forgot where the pedals were. A witness at the concert described him as being “the color of molten wax, or ashes.” All this is a gloomy introduction to a work that is far from gloomy. In another letter to Godet, Debussy wrote that “by one of those human con tradictions, [the sonata] is full of happiness and uproar. In future, don’t be taken in by works that seem to fly through the air; often, they’ve been wal lowing in the shadow of a gloomy brain.”

This one is the nearest to orthodox of Debussy’s three sonatas, though even here nineteenth- century manner and form have been left far behind. Nothing could be more ordinary than the first two chords if we take each as a separate component— one of G minor, another of C major—but juxtaposed as they are, they open a vista onto a harmonic landscape that is amazing. The brevity of the music strikes us, and so does the wittily aphoristic manner of proceeding from thought to thought. No less remarkable is the way in which the service of a variety of utterance running the
range from champagne effervescence to urgent,
richly shadowed passion.

The tempo of the first movement is quick and its measures are short, but Debussy phrases across the barlines with such flexibility and in such large and easy breaths that we lose all sense of meter. The intermezzo, which De bussy wants to sound “fantastical and light,” is the last of his many sere nades, now capricious, now languorous. The finale continues as a distant echo of this mood. The sounds of guitars and cicadas softly fill the air, but the song to which this is the accompaniment turns out to be the gently melancho ly theme of the first movement. Even as the first two chords foretold, there is constant conflict between major and minor. It is the bright major that finally wins out. To quote Debussy once more (and, given his illness, in a moment of remarkable black humor), “[The finale] goes through the most curious contortions before ending up with a simple idea which turns back on itself like a snake biting its own tail—an amusement whose charm I beg leave to doubt.”

Divertimento for Violin and Piano
Igor Stravinsky
(Born Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, 1882; died New York 1971)

In his old age, Stravinsky recalled being taken at the age of eleven to a gala performance of Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila at Saint Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theater. “Igor, look, there is Tchaikovsky,” said his mother suddenly. “I looked and saw a man with white hair, large shoulders, a corpulent back, and this image has remained in the retina of my memory all my life.” Stravinsky’s father, an excellent bass, was in the cast that night. He had taken part in the premieres of three of Tchaikovsky’s operas, Vakula the Smith (1876), The Maid of Orleans (1881), and The Sorceress (1887). Another Maryinsky event Stravinsky remembered as an occasion of “immense joy” was when the whole family had gone to see the first performance of The Sleeping Beauty in January 1890.

Stravinsky’s music moved over the years far away from Tchaikovsky’s, particularly with respect to rhythm, but somehow his affection for this great figure among his Russian avatars remained quick and warm. He championed Tchaikovsky in an open letter to The Times when Diaghilev produced The Sleeping Beauty in London in 1921 and again in his Harvard lectures on The Poetics of Music in 1939/40. Twice he scored passages from The Sleeping Beauty: for Diaghilev, who wanted to include passages that existed only in piano reduction, and years later for Ballet Theatre in New York, which needed a small-orchestra version of the Bluebird pas de deux for wartime touring. He dedicated his opera Mavra to the memories of Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, and Glinka. He acknowledged the influence of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1, Winter Daydreams, on his own Symphony in C of 1938-40, while the older composer’s Symphony No. 2, the Little Russian, was the only large-scale work not by himself that he ever conducted.

But his most significant Tchaikovskian undertaking was the ballet Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss), based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ice Maiden and staged for the first time by Ida Rubinstein’s company at the Paris Opera on 27 November 1928. Alexandre Benois, who had been one of the designers with the Diaghilev company at the time of Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, and who was now acting as artistic adviser to Rubinstein, had the idea that Stravinsky might like to write something based on the music of Tchaikovsky, much as eight years earlier he had based Pulcinella on music by (or attributed to) Pergolesi. The thought appealed to Stravinsky at once, and part of the reason emerges from the “argument” and dedication in the printed score:

“Argument: A fairy marks a young man with her mysterious kiss while he is still a child. She withdraws him from his mother’s arms. She withdraws him from life on the day of his greatest happiness in order to possess him and to preserve this happiness for ever. She marks him once more with her kiss.

“Dedication: I dedicate this ballet to the memory of Peter Tchaikovsky by relating the Fairy to his Muse, and in this way the ballet becomes an allegory, the Muse having similarly branded Tchaikovsky with her fatal kiss, whose mysterious imprint made itself felt in all this great artist’s work.”

Stravinsky invented some of his own themes, was in a couple of instances unable to remember whether a passage was his or Tchaikovsky’s, and drew for certain on eleven of Tchaikovsky’s piano pieces and five of his songs. (Only one of these is truly familiar, the Goethe setting known as “None But the Lonely Heart,” which Stravinsky extends and transforms most wonderfully for the scene when the fairy, disguised as the boy’s bride, comes to carry him off. This passage is not part of the Divertimento.)

In 1932-33 and again the following year, Stravinsky undertook some recital tours with the young Polish-born violinist Samuel Dushkin, for whom and indeed with whose collaboration he had written his Violin Concerto in 1931. For those tours, Dushkin arranged a four-movement suite of music from Le Baiser de la fée, and that is the present Divertimento. Stravinsky later based the orchestral Divertimento from the ballet on the sequence Dushkin had worked out. This consists of most of the music of the ballet’s first two scenes, followed by the pas de deux for the boy and his bride.

Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47 (“Kreutzer”) Ludwig van Beethoven

(Born Bonn 1770; died Vienna 1827) Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, even if it is not played as much as it was fifty or 100 years ago, is still the most famous of all violin sonatas. Tolstoy took its title for one of those querulous, anti-sexual polemics of his later years, although in the midst of all the nagging he tells a compelling story of jealousy, reflecting some of the legend that surrounds the Sonata itself. In 1923, Janáček took it one step farther, writing a marvelous string quartet based on Tolstoy’s novella.

Beethoven composed the Kreutzer in the early spring of 1803 for a concert he was to give in Vienna that May with the Ethiopian-Polish violinist, George Auguste Polgreen Bridgetower. The autograph is lost, but is said to have been inscribed Sonata mulattica composta per il mulattico Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico—or something to that effect. The “great mulatto madman and composer” and the even greater madman and composer from the Rhineland introduced the sonata with huge success, even though there had been no time to copy the score properly, and Bridgetower/ Brischdauer had to read his part from Beethoven’s close to illegible manuscript. More, there had not been time to compose a finale, and Beethoven lifted the last movement from an earlier sonata in the same key, Opus 30, No. 1 (which subsequently got a new finale of its own). Then, the story goes, Beethoven quarreled with Bridgetower over a woman and in consequence withdrew his dedication, substituting for Bridgetower’s name that of the celebrated French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. (Kreutzer’s many etudes are still standard fare in the teaching and torment of violinists.) Beethoven’s choice of Kreutzer probably had to do with the entirely hardheaded, unromantic wish to shore up his professional good relations with musical eminences in France, and Kreutzer certainly was one of those. (Beethoven at one stage thought to offer a joint dedication to Kreutzer and Louis Adam, who was Kreutzer’s counterpart among French pianists.)1 There is no evidence that Kreutzer ever played the sonata that made his name famous.

The Kreutzer is the most brilliant of Beethoven’s sonatas with violin: the composer himself noted in his sketchbook that it was “written in a very concertante style, almost like a concerto.” The sonata is most often designated as being in A major, although this never feels quite right. (The first edition gives no key and the autograph, as I mentioned earlier, has vanished.) The slow introduction does indeed begin in A major, and, very arrestingly indeed, with the violin alone. When the piano enters in the fifth measure, it also does so with a chord of A major, but it immediately “corrects” this, and the remainder of this suspenseful Adagio is definitely oriented toward the darker mode. The main part of the movement, a fiery Presto, is set firmly in A minor, and it is one of Beethoven’s most impetuously dramatic and ardent achievements. After that, the work rather changes tone. The middle movement is a set of variations that are, except for the third one in F minor, primarily decorative and virtuosic. The finale is a swift and exciting tarantella, with some crucial moments set in the minor mode.

—Michael Steinberg copyright © Michael Steinberg 2000 Part of this material has previously appeared in somewhat different form in the program book of the San Francisco Symphony and is used by permission.

Back to Home