Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Chamber Music Series Programme Notes Online Stephen Hough piano Saturday 9 June 2018 7.30pm St George s Hall Concert Room sponsored by Investec CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) Clair de lune Moonlight from Suite bergamasque Debussy s Clair de lune (Moonlight) was described by a onceprominent critic as tea-shop music a statement which is forgivable only if its author was thinking of a tea shop with a clientele acquainted with the work of Paul Verlaine (1884-96), one of the most musical of French poets, and the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), one of the most poetic of French artists. Both are celebrated in some of the greatest of Debussy s vocal, piano and orchestral music. It is true that the first (1890) version of Clair de lune had a title referring to a different Verlaine poem. But in changing its title on the delayed publication of the piece in Suite bergamasque in 1905 he must have realised how well he had re-created in sound Verlaine s poetic description in Clair de lune of Watteau s choice landscape and its masked inhabitants playing the lute and dancing, almost sad in their fantastic disguises. He had twice set it as a song. In its present form Clair de lune, Debussy s first piece of impressionism a term he didn t like but there is no other word for it is a little masterpiece of suggestion. From the first glimmer of moonlight, in the muted minor third in the left hand repeated an octave higher in the right, its harmonies
remain so equivocal that it is not until the low D flat in the left hand in the ninth bar that it reveals its tonality. Metre is similarly evasive, the fluid rhythms in gentle disagreement with each other. The subtle art of it, as in so much of Debussy s later music, is to allow the listener to project his or her own impressions onto it. At least, the structure, in ternary form with an expressive and more animated middle section like of many Chopin nocturnes Debussy so much admired is clear enough. CLAUDE DEBUSSY Images: Book 2 Cloches à travers les feuilles / Bells though the leaves Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut / And the moon sets over the temple that was Poissons d or / Goldfish Images was a significant title for Debussy. He first applied it to a set of three piano pieces in 1894 he withheld and they remained unpublished until nearly 60 years after his death under the title Images oubliées (Forgotten Images) in 1977. In 1905, having in the meantime discovered a whole new vocabulary for translating visual impressions into piano music, he returned to the idea in his first book of Images, which he did not hesitate to send to his publisher as soon as he completed it. It was only in 1907, however, in the second book of Images that he finally achieved what he had envisioned thirteen years earlier. The kind of scene Debussy had in mind in the second set of piano Images was not one that a painter could set down canvas but one with sounds or at least movements associated with it. That is why he found such fruitful inspiration in a friend s account of an ancient custom on All Saints Day in the Jura according to which between vespers and the mass for the dead, church bells ring from village to village through forests turning gold in the silence of the evening. There is more to Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells though the leaves) than just that the composer s
memory of the sonorities and pentatonic harmonies of the Javanese gamelan above all but it is at least a start in interpreting the poetry of the intricately interwoven whole-tone lines, each with its own rhythmic pattern, and the delicate metallic colouring of the piece. Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the moon sets over the temple that was) a title chosen because the composer liked its oriental associations and its alexandrine rhythm is even further from the painter s canvas. The building is no longer there, after all. It emerges only as the light of the moon, represented by the bright dissonances of the opening bars, descends on the scene, evoking the shape of the temple in parallel harmonies and its music in suggestions of vocal chant and percussive melody. Poissons d or (Goldfish) is said to have been inspired by a decorative Japanese panel in black and gold lacquer that hung on Debussy s wall. Dedicated to Ricardo Viñes, who gave the first performance of the complete work in Paris in February 1908, it is a virtuoso piece which, not long before its quiet ending, develops far more turbulent movement than anything suggested by the two goldfish depicted on the panel. ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856) Fantasie in C major, Op.17 Durchaus fantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen / To be played fantastically and passionately throughout Mässig. Durchaus energisch / Moderate. Energetic throughout Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten / Slowly sustained. To be kept quiet throughout The Fantasie in C major has its origins, according to the composer, in the sad year of 1836. That was when Friedrich Wieck, carrying on like a madman according to Schumann, forbade all communication between his 16-year-old daughter and a young composer who, as far as he could see, had many
personal failings and no prospects. You can understand the Fantasie only if you go back to the unhappy summer of 1836 when we were separated, said Robert to Clara after the work was published in 1839. Clara would have had no difficulty in understanding the import of the main theme of the first movement: the phrase of five adjacent notes in descending order, proclaimed here in loud octaves over an impulsive left hand in the opening bars, they both knew as a melodic symbol for Clara herself. She would probably also have associated that phrase with the motto, from Schlegel s poem Die Gebüsche, that stands at the head of the score: Durch alle Töne tönet Im bunten Erdentraum Ein leiser Ton gezogen Für den, der heimlich lauschet. Through all the sounds In life s colourful dream Runs one soft sound For him who quietly listens. She might have noted too, incorporated into the first subject, a veiled allusion to the melodic phrase which goes with the words Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder ( Accept, then, these songs ) at the end of Beethoven s An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). And if she had missed it at this point she would certainly have recognised the direct quotation of the same phrase in the Adagio closing bars. So the symbolism of the first movement the most passionate thing I have ever written, a deep lament for you, as Robert told Clara is clear enough. What is not clear, unless this movement was originally intended as a separate piece, is why Schumann interpolated a virtually self-contained ballade just before the recapitulation of an otherwise fairly normal sonata-form
construction. As it is, the slow episode in C minor headed Im Legendenton ( in legendary tone ) which has its own main theme, although it alludes to both the Beethoven phrase and the tender second subject of the first section adds the dimension the movement would need if it were to stand alone. It was probably only towards the end of 1836 that Schumann conceived the idea of extending the Fantasie into what he now thought of as a Grand Sonata in an inspired response to an appeal for funds (initiated by Liszt, the eventual dedicatee of the work) for the construction of a Beethoven monument in Bonn. To the first movement which he had always thought of as Ruins he added a Triumphal Arch and a Starry Sky titles which are significant even though, like the Grand Sonata description, he eventually dropped them. Triumphal Arch is a monumentally virtuoso march in the same key as Beethoven s Eroica. It seems to have little to do with the foregoing until, in the slower middle section, the tender second subject of the first movement is recalled in rhythmic syncopations in A flat major: Clara, imagining Robert returning home as the triumphant hero, recognised herself here standing among the maidens and crowning you my dear warrior and companion. Starry Sky is an intimate nocturne, veering between Beethoven and Chopin in style and dreaming of two themes one the descending Clara phrase from the first movement, the other a more virile rising theme which are united in the course of a daringly spontaneous, essentially poetic construction. CLAUDE DEBUSSY La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune The Terrace for Audiences of the Moonlight from Préludes, Book 2 The moonlight observed in La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune, is not the same as that evoked in Clair de lune in Suite Bergamasque 20 years earlier. That was Watteau s essentially
18th-century French moonlight illuminating a fête galante as seen by Paul Verlaine. This, although there is little or no exoticism in the music, is Indian moonlight not seen but imagined. Inspired by a (deliberate?) misreading of a report in a newspaper which, in detailing the arrangements for the coronation of George V as Emperor of India, actually referred to a terrace for audiences in the moonlight and not of the moonlight it seems to be a meditation on the intriguingly fanciful idea of on an audience gathered to contemplate the moon. Certainly, it is based on a phrase from the nursery song Au clair de la lune which is introduced in the opening bar and a variant of which becomes the theme of the translucent waltz that occupies the middle section. It is surely the most beautiful of Debussy s nocturnes. CLAUDE DEBUSSY Images: Book 1 Reflets dans l eau / Reflections in the Water Hommage à Rameau / Homage to Rameau Mouvement / Movement Reflets dans l eau (Reflections in the Water) is different from the other movements in this first book of Images in that, like all three movements in the second book, it is inspired by a visual impression. Even without the title, any of Debussy s contemporaries familiar with his songs and Ravel s piano music up to that time, would have recognised its watery setting in the rippling right-hand arpeggios in the opening bars. Given the title, the first reflection is surely the three-note theme held in the left hand just under the surface. A change in the wind or in the light, signalled by a cadenza rising on a chain of minor thirds, reveals a different reflection, a quietly expressive melody in dotted rhythms in the left hand. The opening image is restored to be displaced this time by a rising whole-tone scale and an increasingly vivid view of the second reflection in a variety of different shapes. A coda gently reviews both themes and secures an ending even more tranquil than the beginning.
Debussy had included a sarabande in his suite Pour le piano in 1901. Inspired this time by his admiration for Rameau, he drew on the associations of the baroque sarabande once again for a central slow movement. In spite of its unadorned beginning in the Dorian mode, however, it is far from being a pastiche, the poised grace of its outer sections being offset by the harmonic complications, rhythmic displacements and melodic inversions of the middle section. Mouvement, its title clearly implies, is not a visual impression either. Even so, it is related by its keyboard figuration not only to the Toccata of Pour le piano but also to Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the Rain) in Estampes (Prints). By virtue of the mechanical drive of its outer sections, anticipating Prokofiev at one heavily syncopated point, and its spontaneously inspired middle section it surpasses both of them before it finally evaporates. LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827) Piano Sonata in F minor, Op.57 Appassionata Allegro assai più allegro / Very fast faster Andante con moto / At a walking pace, with movement Allegro ma non troppo presto / Fast but not too fast very fast Appassionata, like The Moonlight attached to another favourite Beethoven piano sonata, is a nickname that has stuck even though it has little to do with the composer himself. The invention of an ambitious Hamburg publisher, who applied it to a four-hand version of the work in 1838, it would have been discarded, or at least discredited, long ago if it were not so aptly applied to an essentially and inescapably impassioned inspiration. What the Appassionata Sonata is passionate about is its quest for the stability and serenity represented by the central Andante con moto in D flat major, a vision which is briefly glimpsed in the first movement but which entirely eludes the last.
Beethoven seems to have thought long and hard about how he should end the Appassionata (1804-05). The unhappy resolution was decided on a long country walk with a pupil, Ferdinand Ries, who remembered how he had hummed or sometimes even howled to himself the entire way. When Ries asked the composer what it was, he replied, A theme for the last Allegro of the sonata has occurred to me. On returning to his room, Ries goes on, he rushed to the piano without taking off his hat He stormed for at least an hour with the new finale. The opening Allegro assai is based largely on the theme which is presented in F minor but not, at this stage, in any particularly intense mood in the first few bars. But then, syncopated in heavy fortissimo chords and pursued by obsessive triplet rhythms, it takes on a violently unhappy aspect. Almost immediately the theme is turned upside down and clarified in a peaceful A flat major second subject, but not for long. The always agitated development section allows only brief glimpses of the second subject. In the recapitulation, however, it reappears in a serene D flat major in what must surely be a deliberate anticipation of the second movement. But again not for long. A quicker coda takes sweeps the second subject into yet another expression of F minor urgency. The ideal of D flat major stability is demonstrated in the Andante con moto by a characteristically imaginative use of classical variation conventions. The four variations are all in the same key, all in the same 2/4 metre, all in the same tempo, all in the same shape. While the duration of the notes becomes progressively shorter and the tessitura gradually higher, to create a foreground impression of movement and intensification in colour, the background remains static rather than dynamic and reassuringly the same. The slow movement ends, after a final reappearance of the original theme, on a loud dissonance, out of which the Allegro ma
non troppo explodes without so much as a pause. Beethoven was to adopt that device in several later works but never more effectively than here. The key is F minor and the activity escalates into a movement of sustained turbulence, with intermittent chromatic panic and a quick coda which excludes all hope of the once envisioned peace in a last expression of violence. Programme notes by Gerald Larner 2018