Fables, a Lost Spring, and a Mermaid’s Tale

About the Work

Les Animaux modèles (The Model Animals) was Poulenc’s third and final ballet, composed between 1940 and 1942, that is, in defeated, occupied France. Its scenario, devised by the composer himself, brings to the stage six fables of Jean de La Fontaine, transposed to a country estate in rural Burgundy: the action runs from daybreak, as the estate wakes, to the midday meal that gathers everyone together. Poulenc completed the piano score in September 1941 and the orchestration between October 1941 and June 1942.

The premiere took place at the Paris Opéra on 8 August 1942, with choreography by Serge Lifar (who also danced) and Roger Désormière conducting. The circumstances gave the work a hidden edge: with German officers sitting in the audience of the occupied capital, Poulenc smuggled into his score the melody of the old revanchist song ‘Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine’ (‘You shall not have Alsace and Lorraine’), a gesture of quiet defiance that the occupiers failed to notice. Arthur Honegger, reviewing the score, remarked that the many influences audible in it had been so completely assimilated that the result was simply ‘Poulenc’.

The composer later extracted the six-movement orchestral suite heard tonight: Le petit jour (Daybreak), Le lion amoureux (The Lion in Love), L’homme entre deux âges et ses deux maîtresses (The Middle-Aged Man and His Two Mistresses), La mort et le bûcheron (Death and the Woodcutter), Les deux coqs (The Two Roosters), and Le repas de midi (The Midday Meal).

What to Listen For

The suite is a portrait gallery, and each panel has its own colour. Le petit jour is dawn music: soft, luminous scoring for a large orchestra used with chamber-music delicacy as the estate stirs to life. Le lion amoureux gives us La Fontaine’s lion who falls in love and lets his claws be clipped and his teeth be filed for the sake of a shepherdess: the music is grandly passionate, and all the funnier (and sadder) for taking the lion’s ardour seriously. L’homme entre deux âges is a comedy of vanity: a man between two ages courts two mistresses, one young, one older, and each plucks out the hairs that displease her (the young one the grey, the older one the dark) until he is bald; Poulenc gives the scene a suave, mock-elegant gallantry.

La mort et le bûcheron is the emotional centre of the suite, and the place to hear Poulenc’s other face. An exhausted woodcutter calls for Death; when Death actually appears, he hastily explains that he only wanted help lifting his load. The music here is grave and processional, with a darkness that has more to do with the France of 1940 than with La Fontaine’s world. Les deux coqs is the showpiece: two roosters battle over a hen in brilliant, strutting combat music. Listen for the orchestral crowing and the swagger of the victor (whose pride, in the fable, promptly costs him everything). Le repas de midi rounds the day off with the warmth of a shared table, recalling music from the dawn scene as the frame closes. Throughout, listen for the Poulenc trademarks: razor-sharp wind writing, sudden swerves between music-hall cheek and genuine tenderness, and melodies that sound as if they had always existed.

About the Work

Printemps (Spring) is young Debussy, and a work with one of the odder histories in his catalogue. He composed it in 1887, at the age of twenty-four, as one of the obligatory ‘envois’ (proof-of-work submissions) required of Prix de Rome laureates during their residence at the Villa Medici. His stated aim was to depict not a postcard spring but ‘the slow and laborious birth of beings and things in nature’ (gestation first, blossoming after) without leaning on any literary programme.

The Académie des Beaux-Arts was not pleased. Its official report rebuked the young composer for indulging in ‘vague impressionism’, ‘one of the most dangerous enemies of truth in works of art.’ It is the earliest known association of the word ‘impressionism’ with Debussy’s music, and the label, intended as a reprimand, would follow Debussy for the rest of his life, much to his annoyance.

The original version was scored for orchestra with wordless chorus, but that manuscript was lost, and only a reduction for chorus and piano four hands survived. The work therefore had to wait a quarter of a century: between 1909 and 1912 the composer and conductor Henri Büsser reorchestrated Printemps from that reduction, working under Debussy’s supervision, folding the former choral lines into the instrumental fabric and retaining a prominent part for piano four hands inside the orchestra. This version, the one performed tonight, was premiered at the Salle Gaveau in Paris on 18 April 1913, conducted by Rhené-Baton.

What to Listen For

Printemps is in two linked movements, and the seed of the whole work is sown in the first minute: a gently winding theme, first heard against shimmering figuration, that will be transformed throughout both movements, an early instance of the cyclic thinking Debussy absorbed from his teachers and soon made entirely his own.

The first movement (Très modéré) is the ‘slow and laborious birth’: the music gathers itself out of soft, hovering textures, the main theme surfacing and submerging, growing in warmth without ever quite arriving. Listen for the piano duet glinting inside the orchestra (a colour effect, not a concerto) and for harmonies that already point toward the Faune, still seven years away. The second movement is the blossoming: a dance of quickening rhythms that Debussy described as the joy of being born into new life. The cyclic theme returns transfigured, what was tentative now radiant, and the work ends in an uncomplicated burst of light that the mature, more elusive Debussy would never quite permit himself again. Heard between Poulenc’s fables and Zemlinsky’s mermaid, it is the afternoon’s hinge: French clarity warming into the sumptuous late-Romantic sea to come.

About the Work

Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid) is a forty-five-minute orchestral fantasy on Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’, and one of the most personal scores of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In April 1901 Zemlinsky began a love affair with his composition pupil Alma Schindler, the most magnetic young woman in musical Vienna. That November she met Gustav Mahler; she broke with Zemlinsky and married Mahler four months later. Zemlinsky began Die Seejungfrau in February 1902 and completed the orchestration in March 1903, and the work is widely heard as, in part, an expression of that heartbreak: Andersen’s tale of a creature who sacrifices everything (her voice, her world, her nature) for a love that is never returned could hardly have cut closer to home.

The premiere, on 25 January 1905, took place in this very building: at the Musikverein, with Zemlinsky conducting, in a legendary concert that also included the first performance of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande: teacher and pupil, side by side, each with a huge orchestral tone poem. Zemlinsky’s score was warmly received and had further performances in Berlin and Prague, yet the composer then withdrew it, and the work vanished for three quarters of a century. The manuscript itself was split: Zemlinsky gave the first movement away as a gift, and carried the other two with him when he fled Austria in 1938. Only in the early 1980s was it established that a manuscript in Vienna and another in Washington were parts of the same work. The modern revival came in 1984, and a 2013 critical edition by Antony Beaumont restored a passage Zemlinsky cut before the premiere: the mermaid’s visit to the sea-witch. Since its rediscovery, Die Seejungfrau has become one of Zemlinsky’s most frequently performed orchestral works.

What to Listen For

The fantasy is in three movements, and it helps to keep Andersen’s story in mind without expecting a bar-by-bar narration. At the premiere Zemlinsky offered no programme note, preferring the tale to be felt rather than read.

The first movement opens in the depths: low strings and winds conjure the dark, slow-breathing world of the sea floor. Against it, listen for a solo violin: the voice of the mermaid herself, lyrical, yearning, unmistakably human in a non-human world. The movement’s centrepiece is a magnificent orchestral storm and shipwreck, from which the mermaid rescues her drowning prince; the aftermath, as the waters calm, contains some of the most tender music Zemlinsky ever wrote.

The second movement (marked ‘very lively, rushing’) is the fantasy’s scherzo: glittering, dance-like, by turns seductive and sinister. This is the world of transformation: the sea-witch’s bargain, the mermaid’s voice traded for human legs, festivity at the prince’s court that she can watch but never fully join. The orchestration here is Zemlinsky at his most virtuosic, a Viennese contemporary’s answer to Strauss and early Schoenberg.

The finale (marked ‘very broad, with painful expression’) is the long farewell. The prince marries another; the mermaid, refusing to save herself by killing him, dissolves into foam at sunrise. Zemlinsky shapes this as a slow, grief-saturated transfiguration: themes from the earlier movements return purified, and the solo violin’s song is absorbed into a radiant, resigned final ascent. If the work is indeed his answer to losing Alma, this ending is its message: not rage, but renunciation. Listen, at the very close, for how the music does not so much end as evaporate, the mermaid becoming spray, spirit, air.