OSJ Proms at the Ashmolean

Wednesday 14th March at 7.30 PM

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Grieg: Two Elegiac Melodies

Grieg: Incidental music to Peer Gynt-Solveig's song

and death of Ase's

Debussy: Ariettes Oubliees

Debussy: Dances Sacre Et Profane

Grieg: Holberg suite

Debussy: Ariettes oubliées

Paul Verlaine’s “Romances sans paroles” is a collection of poems

written in 1874 during the vagabond period of his life which he

shared with the poet Jean-Arthur Rimaud. Symbolism influences the

greater part of his work and is obvious here for the first time. Words

become music, become tones and colours in the finest nuances and

shades. In January 1885 Debussy began to write music for two of the

poems after having been inspired by the musical quality of Verlaine’s

poetry.

After winning the “Grand Prix de Rome” for his cantata “L’Enfant

prodigue”, the young composer went to Rome only days later, where

he was to remain for three years in the Villa Medici.

The separation from Madame Vasnier for whom he had written

nearly all of his songs and the absence from his beloved city Paris

were hard to bear. It is probable that the last four songs of the

collection, written between 1885 and 1888, were to be a present for

Madame Vanier when he returned.

The songs were originally published individually in 1888 under the

title “Ariettes”. Debussy sent Mme Vasnier a copy of the first

publication with a handwritten dedication. However he made a final

dedication in the second publication which appeared as a complete

collection in 1903 in a revised form and titled “Ariettes oubliées”. On

this occasion the recipient of the dedication was the soprano Miss

Mary Garden, who had taken the role of Mélisande in the premiere

of Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”.

For the first time Ariettes oubliées adhered closely to the format of

the poetry. There is no longer a repetition of texts found in the early

Vasnier songs. The melismatic style gives way almost completely to a

composing in which every syllable is represented by a note. Even the

formal structure of Debussy’s songs adheres in its construction and

content to each of the poems. This creates in “Il pleure dans mon

coeur”, for example, a remarkable imbalance of the individual parts

due to the thought processes in the text. Quite often Debussy

focuses on important parts of the text by using recitative techniques

(“Quoi! nulle trahison?”), or by voicing a whole sentence on a single

tone (at the beginning of “Spleen”).

Debussy lets music serve the word and through this he is able to

achieve a musical analogy to Verlaine’s postulate.

Debussy: Danses sacrée et profane

Claude Achille Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye, France in

1862 and died in Paris in 1918. He composed this work in 1904, and

it was first performed in Paris under the direction of Edouard

Colonne the same year. The score calls for solo harp and strings.

*****

In 1903 the venerable Pleyel company, makers of pianos and harps,

introduced a new kind of harp. This instrument was a departure

from the standard harps of the day, and in order to promote it Pleyel

commissioned Debussy to compose music playable on the new

instrument.

Debussy responded with his Danses sacrée et profane, a coupling of

two short works featuring harp and string orchestra. The Danse

sacrée is ethereal and atmospheric; the mood is solemn, but not in

the least “churchy.” The violin line is the movement’s center of

attention, and much more of a standard melody than we usually

hear from Debussy.

The Danse profane follows without pause, the repeated harp notes

of the Danse sacrée becoming the rhythmic pulse for the Danse

profane’s waltz. This movement is more extroverted than the

previous but the two are obviously close relatives. Here the harp is

less didactic and more inclined to the sensuous.

Unfortunately for Pleyel, their new harp did not succeed in the

marketplace. But to the delight of harpists and music lovers

everywhere, its introduction did inspire this unique and ingratiating

work.

Grieg: Holberg Suite for String Orchestra Opus 40

Praeludium

Sarabande

Gavotte

Musette

Air

Rigaudon

In 1884, Grieg was one of several Scandinavian composers who were

commissioned to write a commemorative piece for the celebration

of the bicentennial of the birth of “the Molière of the North”, the

Norwegian writer Ludvig Baron Holberg (1684-1754). Grieg called his

set of short piano pieces 'From Holberg’s Time'. Holberg was a

contemporary of Bach and Handel, so Grieg chose to cast his tribute

in the form of a Baroque period keyboard suite.

The work was well received when the composer played it at the

Bergen Holberg celebration in December 1884; so well, in fact, that a

few months later he transcribed the music for string orchestra. Grieg

cast the movements of his charming suite in the musical forms of the

18th century, but filled them with the spirit of his own time and

style. A vivacious Praeludium, a miniature sonata-form movement, is

followed by a series of dances: a touching Sarabande; a perky

Gavotte, which is linked to a Musette built above a mock-bagpipe

drone; a solemn Air, modeled on the Air on the G String from Bach’s

Third Orchestral Suite; and a lively closing Rigaudon.

Eduard Hanslick, the powerful critic who disliked almost all the new

music of his time except that of Brahms, aptly described the Grieg

suite when he wrote that it was “a refined, well conceived work, less

exotic than the compositions of the Norwegians often are. The

antique style is cleverly reproduced, yet it is filled with modern

spirit.” The suite remains one of the most frequently performed

works for string orchestras.

Grieg: Incidental music to Peer Gynt—Solveig's song and death of

Ase's

Grieg composed for Peer Gynt in its original context, incorporating

not only the vocal numbers of his score but also the pertinent lines of

Henrik Ibsen's text.

It was not as a play, but in the form of a dramatic poem, that Ibsen

originally published his Peer Gynt in 1867. Seven years later, when he

adapted the work for the stage, he invited Grieg to compose music

for the first production. Grieg, by then 30 years old, had not only

become a celebrity with the success of his Piano Concerto in 1869,

but had shown an aptitude for the theater in the incidental music he

composed in 1872 for Bjornstjerne Bjornson's Sigurd Jorsalfar. He

had been working on an opera with Bjornson (Olav Trygvason) when

he received Ibsen's request in January 1874, but by then both

composer and librettist had lost interest in the project, leaving Grieg

free to take on the new one.

At first Grieg considered Ibsen's play "most unmusical," and showed

little enthusiasm for what he regarded as its excessive satirizing of the

foibles of the national character, but he did take it on, and what he

and Ibsen produced together achieved the status of something like a

national epic. Grieg, of course, chose the "nationalist" course early in

his creative life, mining folk material for use in his chamber music and

concert works. Ibsen (1828-1906) was not only Norway's most

celebrated writer, but perhaps the greatest dramatist of his time.

While his plays A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler and Ghosts have

Norwegian settings, it was in Peer Gynt that he turned to folklore

himself: the drama is based in large part on folk tales from Norway's

Gudbrandsal region, and the title character was modeled in large part

on the exploits of an actual person whose exploits some thirty years

before Ibsen's birth were known to the playwright and his

compatriots. In this work, the last he wrote in verse, Ibsen set out to

focus on specifically Norwegian characteristics, some of them

decidedly unattractive. He had little tolerance for smugness or

arrogance, in any form or from any source.

Although the music Grieg composed for Peer Gynt represents one of

the most successful ventures in the abundant category of "incidental

music," having long since taken its place among the most beloved

items in the concert repertory as well, he and Ibsen constituted a

classic "odd couple" as collaborators. Ibsen had his own ideas about

the sort of music his play ought to have, and he suggested that Grieg

incorporate in his score a vast tone poem quoting national airs of the

various countries visited by Peer Gynt in his wanderings. Grieg

ignored that particular idea, and responded with brief numbers which

enhanced the drama rather than interrupting it; he provided songs

for some of the individual characters, some numbers with chorus, and

"melodrama" (music accompanying spoken words) as well as the

remarkably evocative orchestral vignettes. The assignment proved to

be more effortful than he could have foreseen, as he reported to

several friends and associates during his 18 months of work on it.

The premiere took place in Oslo (known then as Christiania) on

February 24, 1876, and Grieg was not present; he remarked to a

colleague that he had been compelled to set his ideals aside because

of the "weak orchestra, and to emphasize crowd-pleasing stage

effects," and therefore preferred not to attend. Nonetheless, the

premiere, which took five full hours, was enormously successful, and

Grieg's music was conspicuously credited in the newspaper reviews.

The composer finally did attend a performance on November 12,

nearly nine months after the premiere, and he reported that he "had

the honor of being rapturously acclaimed both in the middle of the

piece (after Solveig's Song) and at the end, when I had to leave my

seat in the stalls and appear on the stage."

Ibsen was less enthusiastic than the critics; he felt that Grieg had

"prettified" his play. Grieg, on the other hand, expressed

embarrassment over certain facets of his success in meeting Ibsen on

his own terms, describing the music he wrote for "the Hall of the

Mountain King" as "something . . . I literally cannot bear to hear, it so

reeks of cow-turds and super-Norwegianism and ‘to-yourself-

enoughness!'" Posterity, of course, has been both more generous and

more accurate in its judgment of both playwright and composer, and

Grieg himself was content not only to continue adding to his score,

but to take parts of it—including the very section he described so

negatively—into the concert hall. The two concert suites he extracted

from the stage music—Suite No. 1, Op. 46, in 1888; No. 2, Op. 55, in

1891—were to become his most frequently performed works after

the famous Piano Concerto. The play itself has never been out of

repertory in Northern Europe. By 1913 it had become so popular that

in Berlin two theaters presented it at the same time, and both

productions ran more than three years. Just after World War II Peer

Gynt became a mainstay of Britain's Old Vic company, which included

the play in its American tour, with Ralph Richardson in the title role.

Over the years other composers have written music for Peer Gynt--

most notably Grieg's latter-day compatriot Harald Saeverud, for a

1948 production in modern Norwegian rather than Ibsen's original

"Dano-Norwegian"--and as recently as 1987 Alfred Schnittke

composed an entirely new score for John Neumeier's full-evening

ballet "freely based on Ibsen's play, but the title stubbornly preserves

its connection with Grieg, even more strongly, among great numbers

of people, than with Ibsen himself.

Further details of all our forthcoming events can be found at:

ww.osj.org.uk