Les Élémens

Program notes

About the Work

Jean-Féry Rebel was past seventy, with a long career as a violinist at the French court behind him, when he wrote the most startling piece of his life. ‘Les Élémens’ belongs to a kind of work he is credited with inventing, the ‘simphonie de danse’: a suite of orchestral dances for the stars of the Paris Opéra to perform on its own, outside any opera. The dances came first and were performed in September 1737. Rebel then added an introduction, ‘Le Cahos’ (his spelling), which was played by the orchestra of the Académie Royale de Musique, without dancers, in March 1738. The orchestra’s announcement gives the date 1721 for the ballet; the sources consulted here agree on 1737 and 1738.

The subject is the creation of the world out of the four elements, and Rebel explained in a preface exactly what he had done. Chaos, he wrote, is ‘that confusion which reigned among the Elements’ before they took their places in the order of nature, and to depict a confusion of harmony he ‘risked beginning with all the notes sounding together’. The piece accordingly opens with every note of the D minor scale played at once, a dense, grinding discord that may be the first such cluster of notes ever written down for an orchestra. The Paris audience of 1738 seems not to have been repelled: a report in the Mercure de France called the movement one of the finest pieces of its sort.

Each element has its own music, which Rebel also spelled out. Earth is in the bass, in tied notes played with a shudder. Water is in the flutes, in lines that rise and fall. Air is given to the piccolos, in long held notes ending in trills, and fire to the violins, in quick, brilliant runs. The chaos comes round seven times, and each time the elements struggle a little less, until the music settles at last on a plain chord of D major.

What to Listen For

The opening needs no pointing out. The chord is hammered, then repeated faster and faster, and breaks off into silence. After it, listen for the four elements emerging one at a time: the heavy, trembling bass, the liquid flutes, the high piccolo trills, and the violins flickering like flames. They collide, the discord returns, and bit by bit the harmony clears.

Once order is established the rest is a suite of French dances, elegant and far more conventional, though the elements are still its subject. A stately Loure presents earth and water, with the bass and the flutes continuing as before. The Chaconne, a dance over a repeating pattern, belongs to fire and gives the violins their head. In the Ramage (the word means birdsong) and the Rossignols that follows, flutes and violins twitter in imitation of nightingales: this is air. A second Loure brings in hunting calls, two lively Tambourins imitate the pipe and drum of Provence, and after a gentle Sicilienne and an air for Love the suite ends with a brilliant Caprice.