Classical Culture: Notes from a musicophile (2)
Continued from a previous post.
Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, La Mer, Debussy: “The Fanfare”
Simple thing, this brass fanfare. Brilliant, but obtrusive, he cut it out and the wound healed slowly: a scar. Music has its injuries, too.
“Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea” uses more thematic material than I dare quantify. It reuses rhythmic and melodic motifs from the opening movement without restraint. A carefree breeze tries to chat with the erudite ocean, but their conversation isn’t very productive; the depths can only speak in riddles. My strongest memory of performing La Mer is that in this movement’s most intimate moment, during which the flautist and I were to play the solo line, an ambulance drove by. Its siren passed gently over the metaphorical water in a way that I think Debussy would have approved of. My other memory of the performance is that we didn’t play the fanfare.
In Debussy’s original score, somewhere between rehearsal marks 59 and 60, one of the main “sea” themes is paralyzed amidst a tremolo, and through the taut canvas of sound pierces a jarring, staccato fanfare from the brass. They repeat it in a clever turn of phrase, and then the canvas, as if weakened by the punctures, gives way, and the music returns to the sea for the piece’s finale. Debussy, evidently not happy with these eight bars, gutted them in the work’s second edition, removing the fanfare. The taut, blank canvas is left to occupy two phrases’ worth of time.
Some conductors still perform the original version; this naturally leads to conflict. To summarize the discussion, to this day no one knows why Debussy made the edit. He once made an off-hand remark that the phrases sounded like another composer’s music, but no scholar takes that as a serious indication of his reasoning.
I like to imagine Debussy agonizing over the edit. The musical idea itself is, to borrow from chess terminology, a brilliancy. Its simplicity and structure bring to mind Dickinson’s lines, “Because I could not stop for Death…” The line is a musical period, the musical equivalent of ABAB, and the bars are in common time, the musical equivalent of iambic tetrameter. Yet the fanfare, as executed, lies asymmetrically in the meter — ruining the ABAB pattern — which it must because the fanfare is so out of place in the music that a seamless joining of it with the rest of the piece was only achieved by displacing the second B closer to the next measure. So on the one hand, a brilliancy, but on the other hand, a burlesque interruption in an otherwise sublime portrait. Kill your darlings indeed.
Recordings to compare: Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Münch (with fanfare); Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti (with fanfare); Cleveland Orchestra, Pierre Boulez (without fanfare); Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle (without fanfare).
Metamorphosen, Strauss: “The E Natural”
To hear the raw, undiluted trauma and grief of bombed-out cities manifested in a concert hall, performed without a moment’s rest, was the most exhausting half-hour of my life. Yes, I have run long distances and played sports all day and been wiped out. Strauss’s Metamorphosen is different. The need for resolution — harmonic, melodic, anything — becomes psychological.
I had known, roughly, what I was getting into. I had listened to the piece beforehand, and been impressed by the depths of sound that Strauss draws from only twenty-three string players. (The score calls for twenty-three exactly.) When I arrived, and it turned out that we were to hear the version for string septet, recently arranged by an R. Leopold, I lowered my bar and prepared for a lighter experience. Ha. The recordings had been nothing. The septet was entrancing and mesmerizing and emotional. When the ensemble came to the end of the piece, where the bass and two celli quote Beethoven’s funeral march, and the piece is, for the first time, decidedly in the key of C minor, I was inundated with relief.
But then — and honestly, in this moment, my mouth opened and stayed open — in the final moments of the piece, an E-natural sounded, pellucid, in the first violin. The key of C minor is defined by E-flat, the note below an E-natural. Its essence is E-flat. But there was the E-natural nonetheless, and it was absolutely heart-wrenching. The E-flat returns for the final three chords of the piece, leaving the listener to wonder if the E-natural was ever truly there. A false hope amidst the ruins of a nation. I was floored, as well as confused and intrigued. The recordings I had heard had no E-natural at the end.
I checked the score on IMSLP with my phone. No E-naturals. I listened to recordings the whole way home. No E-naturals. Finally, it clicked: the septet arrangement. I learned that Strauss had begun the work as a septet, and expanded it to twenty-three players as it developed. The score for the septet version was completed in 1945 but lost until 1990. Rudolf Leopold’s version combines elements of the discovered score with the final version, meaning the two pieces are mostly indistinguishable — except for the ending. (Yes, the tempo markings are different in the final edition, andante changed to adagio ma non troppo, and the ritenutos are moved around by a few bars. Small beans compared to an E-natural.)
The unusual dominant harmony at the septet’s ending, the one that contains the E-natural, is actually the same harmonic gesture as at the end of “Pictures at an Exhibition”: the minor iii chord. When used in a major key, the chord both retains elements of the traditional dominant and anticipates elements of the following final chord, creating a wonderful mixture of tensions in the harmony. But when used in a minor key…let’s not talk about hexatonicism. Strauss is a master, and we’ll leave it at that.
Recordings to compare: Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Stephen Mercurio (full version); Staatskapelle Dresden, Christian Thielemann (full version); Gringolts Quartet and others, 15th anniversary compilation album by Profil (septet); Hyperion Ensemble, Erwin Schulhoff (septet).
