HENRI DUPARC Born in Paris, January 21, 1848 ; died in Mont-de-Marsan, France, February 12, 1933

Lamento (c. 1883-5)

Henri Duparc wrote his first song, Chanson triste, at 20 – but just 18 years later, he gave up composing altogether.  Plagued by what some have described as a neuropsychological condition, Duparc developed a painful aversion to his own music.  Yet he lived to 85, remaining intellectually active, immersed in literature, painting, and music until near-total blindness overtook him late in life.  Duparc’s musical legacy is slender: just 13 songs, four more he rejected, and a handful of unpublished works.  Yet within this miniature catalog lies an outsize reputation.  His mélodies, written between 1868 and 1884, are among the finest in the French repertory – beautifully shaped, emotionally refined, and remarkably attuned to the spirit of the poetry they set.

Lamento sets a three-stanza poem by 19^th century poet and writer Théophile Gautier.  Tinged with melancholy and colored by modal harmonies, it is a song of dignified grief and quiet intensity.  Duparc dedicated it to Gabriel Fauré, whose blend of stylistic freedom and deep respect for tradition closely mirrored his own artistic ideals.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY Born in St Germain-en-Laye, France, August 22, 1862; died in Paris, March 25, 1918

Sonata for cello and piano, L. 135 (1915)

World War I was a dark time for Claude Debussy.  In his early fifties, now battling cancer, he was anxious about family members at the front.  For a full year, he couldn’t compose.  Then, in the summer of 1915, while staying in the seaside village of Pourville, he began once more to 'think in music' and composed 'like a madman’.  “I have finished Douze Études for piano, a cello sonata, and another sonata for flute, viola, and harp, in the ancient, flexible mold, with none of the grandiloquence of modern sonatas,” he wrote.  “There are going to be six of them for different groups of instruments.”

Only three of Debussy’s projected six sonatas were completed.  Each turns away from the Austro-German Romanticism he found increasingly repellent during wartime.  Instead, Debussy looked to the elegance and clarity of the 18^th century French harpsichord virtuosos, feeling their legacy as his own.  To underline the break from tradition – and with clear patriotic intent – he signed each score “Claude Debussy, Musicien Français.”  

Nowhere is this return to roots more evident than in the Cello Sonata, written quickly over a few days in late July and early August 1915.  The Prologue begins in somber tones but grows steadily in nobility and eloquence.  Its mood is improvisatory, driven by a flexible and unpredictable meter.   The Sérénade, marked “fantastic and light,” flits with quicksilver invention, eschewing conventional (Germanic) development.  The finale begins without break, opening with the fiery bravura and passion of the Spanish corrida style.  But not for long, as the mercurial changes of mood and image soon bring back the stately neo-baroque world of the opening.  Debussy told his publisher he was especially pleased with this sonata, admiring its “proportions and almost classical structure, in the best sense of the word.”

MAURICE RAVEL Born in Ciboure, France, March 7, 1875; died in Paris, December 28, 1937

Sonata in A minor, Op. posth., M.12 (1897)

Pavane pour une infante défunte, M. 19 (1899)

Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera, M. 51 (1907/26)

Ravel wrote four sonatas, and this single movement is the earliest of them.  He wrote it in 1897 while a composition student at the Paris Conservatoire, then filed it away.  It was first published in 1975, his centennial year, as a Sonate posthume.  A decade or so ago, however, a musical autograph by Ravel, came up for auction, referring to the single movement as an ‘unfinished sonata.’  So, this infrequently performed but attractive and already distinctively Ravel-like 11-page fragment could best be viewed as the opening movement of an incomplete violin sonata.  A published cello transcription was made by Christian Proske in 2012. 

The sonata’s brief, lyrical and rhythmically elusive theme, first heard on solo cello, foreshadows that of the later Piano Trio (1914) and leads into a movement that falls within the traditional sonata opening movement structure, complete with exposition repeat.  Ravel creates an impressive ebb and flow in its music, savoring chromatic and modal harmonies along the way, including a string of parallel chords in the piano in the manner of Delius, the English composer who had been living in Paris for the past decade and whom he had befriended.  By emphasizing the lyrical, singing quality of the string instrument, (marked bien chanté at one point), and keeping the piano part generally lean and transparent, Ravel’s finely crafted, sensuous writing for both instruments shows little anxiety over what he would later identify as “two fundamentally incompatible instruments.” 

Having first said that he chose the title Pavane for a dead princess simply because he liked the way it rolls off the tongue in French, Ravel later gave a more descriptive explanation of how one of his most popular pieces came by its memorable title.  “It’s an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court,” he said. 

The pavane, a slow, stately Renaissance dance popular among 16^th century composers, inspired Ravel’s conception of this piece.  Composed in 1899, it follows the tradition of his teacher Gabriel Fauré, whose own Pavane (1887) captures a similar blend of melancholy and refinement.  Originally written for solo piano, Ravel’s Pavane premièred at the Parisian salon of Princess Edmond de Polignac, a prominent patron and heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, to whom Ravel dedicated the piece.  His friend Ricardo Viñes gave the public première in 1902.  Later, Ravel orchestrated the piece, transforming it into a lush, enduring favourite and his first significant success, ensuring its place in the concert repertoire ever since.

Ravel came by his love of things Spanish authentically.  He was born in Ciboure in the Basses Pyrénées of south-western France to a Basque mother.  His earliest work that reflects his love of Spanish rhythms is a Habanera for piano, four-hands, subsequently reworked as the third movement of the Rapsodie espagnole.  The Vocalise-étude en forme  de habanera came a decade later, in 1907, initially as a vocal work for wordless voice and piano, then in transcriptions for many instruments – including one for cello by Paul Bazelaire in 1926. 

FRANCIS POULENC Born in Paris, France, January 7, 1899; died in Paris, January 30, 1963

Suite française d’après Claude Gervaise, FP80 (1935)

In his delightful Suite française, French composer Francis Poulenc turns to the dance music of 16^th century France, to the French composer, editor and arranger Claude Gervaise (fl. 1540–60).  Poulenc admitted in 1962 that the influential French teacher Nadia Boulanger suggested he turn to the dance collections of Gervaise when asked to write incidental music to Édouard Bourdet’s play la Reine Margot – a play set in the 16^th century revolving around Margaret of Valois, wife of the future King Henry IV of France. 

Poulenc then selected seven dances from Gervaise’s Le Livre de danseries, scoring them for a mixed woodwind and brass ensemble and, for period colour, harpsichord.  Poulenc produces both an idiosyncratic nod to neoclassicism and, simultaneously, an homage to Stravinsky who led the way when he adapted the music of Pergolesi and others in his Pulcinella (1919-20) – as we will soon hear.  An arrangement of Poulenc’s score for cello and piano by Cecylia Barczyk and Reynaldo Reyes was published in 1953.

The first of two bransles in the suite provides a crisp introduction, as the instruments answer one another, with Gervaise’s harmonies revoiced and spiced with an added seventh or ninth.  Like Stravinsky, Poulenc ensures that his own voice is heard.  The Pavane is solemnly sonorous, the military march brief and no-nonsense.  The mood changes are rapid as we move from dance to dance and scene to scene in Boudet’s 1935 play.  Harmonics from the cello color the plaintive Complainte which continues into a gracious second bransle, with its quirky ending.  A graceful Sicilienne leads to the concluding Carillon, which, as themes and sonorities are traded from one instrument to another, reprises the spirit and some of the musical material of the opening Bransle de Bourgogne.   

IGOR STRAVINSKY Born in Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], nr St Petersburg, June 5/17, 1882; died in New York, April 6, 1971

Suite italienne, from Pulcinella (1919-20/1932-3)

Wanting to repeat the success he’d recently enjoyed from a ballet re-working the music of Scarlatti, the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev introduced Stravinksy to the music of another 18^th century Italian composer, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Stravinsky warmed to the idea of a ballet, inspired by the music of Pergolesi, portraying the amorous adventures of Pulcinella (or Punch), the traditional hero of the Italian commedia dell’arte.  The resulting 18-number score was premièred in Paris in 1920 with décor and costumes by Picasso and choreography by Massine.  In his score, Stravinsky gives 18^th century harmonies new life.  He redesigns rhythms and structures and rebuilds chords in a way that would sound strange indeed to 18^th century ears.  (They would sound even stranger to Pergolesi’s ears since it is now known that only half the music selected for the ballet was his; the balance originated with other 18^th century Italians).  Stravinsky almost immediately extracted an eight-movement concert suite from the ballet. Two further suites followed, including today’s five-part Suite italienne, transcribed 1932-3 by the composer, with the assistance of cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. 

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