FRENCH IMPRESSIONS

February 27, 2020 | Bohemian National Hall

Grace Park, violin
Gilles Vonsattel, piano
The Calidore String Quartet

Illustrated talk by Samuel Adams

Debussy — Violin Sonata in G minor
Chausson — Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, Op.21

PROGRAM NOTES

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Sonata for violin and piano

Allegro vivo

Intermède: Fantasque et léger

Finale: Très animé

Having fallen deeply under the spell of Richard Wagner as a young composer, the older Debussy increasingly took steps to distance himself not just from the intoxicating Meister of Bayreuth, who had bewitched the world with his dreamlike erotic masterpiece Tristan and Isolde, but from German music in general. He turned increasingly to the French Classical masters of the eighteenth century, especially Couperin and Rameau, whom he seems to have seen as representing an ideal aristocratic world of art for art’s sake – before Romanticism and revolution destroyed it forever. Encouraged by the publisher Jacques Durand, he announced his intention to write a set of six sonatas for varied instrumental combinations. Durand remembered it as follows:

‘After his famous String Quartet, Debussy had not written any more chamber music. Then, at the Concerts Durand, he heard again the Septet with trumpet by Saint-Saëns and his sympathy for this means of musical expression was reawoken. He admitted the fact to me and I warmly encouraged him to follow his inclination. And that is how the idea of the six sonatas for various instruments came about.’

The last sonata was to combine all twelve instruments, plus double bass, to create a mini-chamber orchestra. But it was not to be: Debussy only got as far as composing the first three sonatas before the cancer against which he’d been struggling for several years finally claimed him. The Violin Sonata was the last of the set to be completed (in 1917) – in fact, it turned out to be his last major composition.

For many years after Debussy’s death a strange received idea prevailed, according to which his last works – the sonatas, the solo piano Études, the ballet Jeux – showed a desperately sad falling-off of his creative powers. Weakened by his illness, it was said, and further dispirited by the fate of his country in World War One, his imagination had lost its spark. But then, in the second half of the century, a substantial reappraisal began, and now the three sonatas – especially the Violin and Cello sonatas – are some of Debussy’s most frequently performed instrumental works.

Brief though it is (a typical performance lasts well under a quarter of an hour), the Violin Sonata is a remarkably rich and varied work. The first movement may be marked Allegro vivo (literally ‘lively, vivacious’), but it is elegance, poise, and sweetly inflected melancholy that quietly command the stage. A beautiful long fluid melody in G minor for the violin sings above a deceptively simple, largely chordal piano accompaniment, which recalls the idealized vision of Ancient Greek ritual dance in Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane, composed thirteen years earlier. There are moments of liveliness, even passion, amid the tender lyricism, but if there is personal sadness behind this music, it has been transformed, objectified, as in the music of the French Classicists Debussy so much admired.

The Intermède however is a complete surprise. Debussy originally subtitled the Sérénade middle movement of his Cello Sonata ‘Pierrot faché avec la lune’ – ‘Pierrot angry with the moon’. The title might do even better for the Violin Sonata’s strange second movement, except that the anger seems more bitter, petulant, at times stinging – nowhere more so than in the bizarre upward swipe of the opening theme. The mood is always changing, nothing seems stable, and the light, almost blasé ending may strike some listeners as highly ironic. But the finale does seem determined to put on a brave face. The first movement’s melancholic opening minor-key theme is recalled, then tossed aside – à la Beethoven one might say, though Debussy would probably have winced at the comparison. The ending, in the purest G major, does seem truly joyous: in art, if not in life, there was the possibility of satisfaction, even happiness.

Ernest Chausson (1855–1899)

Concerto for violin, piano and string quartet

Décidé – Animé

Sicilienne

Grave

Très animé

Like Debussy, Chausson fell under the spell of Wagner as a young man – a visit to the Holy of Holies, the Festspielhausat Bayreuth, in 1882, the year before the Meister’s death, was decisive. Unlike Debussy though, Chausson didn’t so much react against Wagner as seek to find a way of channelling his heady, dangerously seductive influence into a style of utterance that was both more personal and more Gallic. It helped that his own personality was so different, so much less extrovert than that of Wagner. Despite the advantage of a sizeable personal fortune, which should in theory have given him more time to compose, Chausson was far from prolific. Writing was always a struggle for him, and he had to fight against a strongly self-critical inner voice. It was a fight that he didn’t always win, and even when he did, it was rare for him to voice approval of what he had created. ‘Another failure!’ he is said to have remarked on completing the Concerto for violin, piano and string quartet in 1891, and even the work’s triumphant success at its premiere in Brussels the following year doesn’t seem to have done a lot for his self-confidence. In fact the evidence is that most of Chausson’s adult life was dogged by depression. His death at the dreadfully early age of 44 – whilst out cycling he ran into a brick wall at speed and died instantly – could well have been an accident, but some of those who knew him wondered it if was intentional. Even if not, serious accident-proneness has long been regarded by specialists as a danger-sign amongst depressives.

When it came to finding a distinctively French voice, particularly in large-scale works, the leading light for Chausson was the Belgian-born, naturalized French composer César Franck. In his Symphony (1886–8), String Quartet (1889) and, still more impressively, in his Piano Quintet (1878–9), Franck had forged an intensely expressive chromatic style of harmonic writing that came close to Wagner in sensuous immediacy, but which was balanced by a Bach-like formal control – as an outstanding organist Franck knew his Bach well. It was Franck above all who gave French composers the courage to tackle large-scale chamber and orchestral forms without feeling they had to defer to German models: radical as it is in many ways, Debussy’s String Quartet (1893) owes a lot to Franck’s technique of bringing back leading motifs throughout the movements: his so-called ‘cyclicism’. Not only the soundworld of Chausson’s Concerto, but also its strange title, suggest the influence of Franck’s dark, unsettling Piano Quintet. At times the relationship between the piano and strings in Franck’s masterpiece is close and intimate, as in true chamber music, but at others (the opening for example) it’s more like what you might expect in a Romantic concerto. The ‘genre’ of Chausson’s Concerto is similarly fluid: is the violinist ‘the’ soloist? Is the piano sometimes an equal partner, or does it really belong with the string quartet, forming a kind of mini orchestra?

Such ambiguity is typical of the Concerto as a whole. The stark opening idea, and the hymn-like string passage that follows, seem to be trying to strike an ‘objective’ note, as though Chausson is keen to dissociate himself from the overheated excesses of Wagner, and to some degree also his idol Franck. So too does the lilting quasi-Baroque formality of the following Sicilienne. 

But the richly expressive, acutely sensitive, yet somehow at the same time self-concealing lyricism of the song-cycle Poème de l’amour et de la mer, begun the same year as that memorable first visit to Bayreuth, keeps breaking through. And when we come to the Grave third movement, we seem to come closest to the painfully troubled heart of Ernest Chausson. Although there are some impassioned moments, for much of the movement piano and solo violin sing together, alone, the piano’s restless, brooding chromatic accompanying figure determining the mood right through to the last chord. Dancing triple-time rhythms dominate the finale, which at times seems bright and positive, at others troubled by darker reflections. Which is the ‘real’ face and which the mask? As with Chausson himself, so much about this music remains equivocal, teasingly elusive. But if it is ultimately an enigma, it’s a very beautiful and alluring one.

Program notes by Stephen Johnson © 2020