Lahav Shani and Martha Argerich: Debussy, Prokofiev and Pictures at an Exhibition

About the Work

Claude Debussy was 32 when the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) was first played, at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique in Paris on 22 December 1894. The Swiss conductor Gustave Doret was in charge. By one report the horns were appalling and the rest of the orchestra not much better, but the audience insisted on hearing the piece again on the spot. It was Debussy’s first real public success, and it has never left the repertoire.

The starting point was a poem. Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune, first printed in 1876, is the monologue of a faun, half man and half goat, who plays his pipes in the heat of the afternoon and recalls his pursuit of nymphs, never sure whether it happened or whether he dreamed it. Debussy knew Mallarmé and began work in 1892, at first with a larger plan: the piece was announced as a “Prélude, Interludes et Paraphrase finale”, perhaps to go with a reading or staging of the poem. Only the prelude was completed, in October 1894.

Debussy was careful not to claim too much. His own note calls the music “a very free illustration” of the poem, a succession of scenes through which the faun’s desires and dreams pass in the heat of the afternoon, until he gives up the pursuit and falls asleep. Mallarmé had been uneasy about anyone setting music beside his verse. After the concert he wrote to the composer that the piece presented no dissonance with his text and went further than it “into nostalgia and into light”.

Its later reputation is larger still. Pierre Boulez dated the beginning of modern music from this score, saying that the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music. In 1912 Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed it and danced the faun for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, in a production that caused a scandal.

What to Listen For

The piece begins with a flute, alone and unaccompanied, sliding lazily down and back up again. The phrase does not settle in any key, and when it stops nothing answers it for a moment but a sweep of the harp and a soft call from the horns. That opening sets the terms. The flute melody returns again and again, each time over different harmony, so that the same tune seems to be seen in changing light.

Notice what is missing from the orchestra: there are no trumpets, no trombones and no drums. The colour comes from the woodwinds, with a third flute and a cor anglais, from four horns, two harps and strings. In the middle of the piece comes a broad, warm melody in D-flat major, the one moment of full-throated lyricism, and the closest the music comes to a climax.

Then the flute theme comes back, slower each time. At the very end listen for the tiny bell-like notes of the antique cymbals, two small tuned discs, as the faun’s melody is heard a last time and the music dissolves.

About the Work

Sergei Prokofiev wrote five piano concertos, and the Third is the one that pianists and audiences have taken most to heart. He completed it in the summer of 1921 on the coast of France, but it was assembled from ideas he had been storing for years. The theme of the slow movement dates from 1913, and he had returned to the sketches in 1916 and 1917, around the time of his “Classical” Symphony. Like that symphony, the concerto combines clear, almost eighteenth-century outlines with harmony and rhythm that could only belong to the twentieth.

Prokofiev had left Russia in 1918, after the revolution, and was trying to make a career in the United States as a composer and pianist. He wrote the concerto for himself to play. The first performance was in Chicago on 16 December 1921, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock; the same city was staging the premiere of his opera The Love for Three Oranges that month. Shortly beforehand he wrote to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky: “My Third Concerto has turned out to be devilishly difficult. I’m nervous, and I’m practicing hard, three hours a day.”

Success was not immediate. New York, where he played the piece a month later, was cool, and he went back to Europe in 1922 discouraged. It was a performance in Paris that year, with Koussevitzky conducting, that established the concerto, and it has been a repertoire piece ever since. In 1932 Prokofiev recorded it in London with the London Symphony Orchestra, the only recording of him playing one of his own concertos.

What to Listen For

I. Andante, Allegro. A solo clarinet opens the concerto with a quiet, long-breathed lyrical melody. The strings break into a run, the tempo jumps, and the piano bursts in with a bright, hammering theme. A second idea is spikier and more sardonic. Midway the clarinet melody comes back, now sung out by the whole orchestra, before the scurrying resumes and carries the movement to its finish.

II. Tema con variazioni. The woodwinds present a theme with the gait of an old court dance, a little prim and a little wistful. Five variations follow, and they travel a long way from it. The piano begins the first with a long trill and a run up the keyboard; the second gallops; later ones are by turns stormy and dreamlike. At the end the orchestra plays the theme as it was, while the piano, in Prokofiev’s words, adds “delicate chordal embroidery”.

III. Allegro ma non troppo. Prokofiev described the finale as an argument between piano and orchestra. Bassoons and plucked strings propose a dry little theme; the piano interrupts and will not agree on the key. In the middle the tempo slackens and the woodwinds introduce a broad, slow melody, to which the piano at first replies with sarcasm. The tune then swells into the most openly romantic passage of the concerto. The opening theme returns for a long, accelerating coda that is among the most demanding stretches of piano writing in the repertoire, and the argument is settled in a blaze of C major.

About the Work

In August 1873 the Russian architect and painter Viktor Hartmann died suddenly at the age of 39. He had been a close friend of Modest Mussorgsky, and the loss hit the composer hard. Early the following year the critic Vladimir Stasov helped to organise a memorial exhibition of more than 400 of Hartmann’s works at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg: not grand oil paintings for the most part, but architectural drawings, stage and costume designs, travel sketches and designs for household objects. Mussorgsky went, and in June 1874 he wrote, very quickly, a set of piano pieces in which he pictures himself walking through the show.

Ten of the pieces describe pictures. Between them comes a recurring “Promenade”, the music of the visitor moving from one exhibit to the next, which changes mood according to what he has just seen. The cycle is dedicated to Stasov, whose descriptions are now the main record of what the pictures showed, since many of them are lost.

The work was not printed until 1886, five years after his death, in an edition by his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. For decades it remained little known. The version that made it famous is the one heard in these concerts. Maurice Ravel orchestrated the cycle in 1922 for the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who introduced it in Paris that October and kept exclusive rights to it for some years. Ravel was not the first to orchestrate the Pictures and was far from the last, but his version is the one that has lasted. He left out one of the Promenades, the one before “Limoges”; otherwise he follows Mussorgsky closely.

What to Listen For

Promenade. A solo trumpet, answered by the brass choir. The tune keeps changing its metre, like someone walking at an uneven pace.

Gnomus. A design for a toy or nutcracker in the shape of a gnome with crooked legs: lurching, stop-start music.

The Old Castle. A troubadour sings before a medieval castle. Ravel gives the song to an alto saxophone, over a bass note that never moves.

Tuileries. Children squabbling in the Paris gardens, in quick woodwind chatter.

Bydło. A Polish ox-cart on huge wheels. In Ravel’s version the heavy, trudging melody begins quietly, swells as the cart passes and fades into the distance.

Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks. A costume design for a ballet in which children danced in eggshells. High woodwinds peck and cluck.

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle. Two portraits, one of a rich man and one of a poor man. The first voice is weighty and self-assured, the second high, stammering and pleading, and then the two are heard together.

Limoges, the Market. Market women quarrelling at top speed. The music runs straight into the next picture.

Catacombs. Hartmann drew himself examining the Paris catacombs by lantern light. Stark brass chords are followed by “With the Dead in a Dead Language”, in which the Promenade theme returns, hushed, over shivering strings.

The Hut on Fowl’s Legs. A clock in the form of the hut of the witch Baba Yaga. Mussorgsky adds her flight in a mortar, in ferocious, driving music.

The Great Gate of Kiev. Hartmann’s design for a city gate in the old Russian style, with a cupola shaped like a helmet. A broad hymn alternates with quiet chant-like passages, the Promenade is heard once more among the sounds of bells, and the main theme returns, slower and grander each time, to close the work.