Alderley Edge Symphony Orchestra 16 November 2019

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Georges Bizet (1838-1875): L'Arlésienne – Excerpts from Suites 1 and 2 (1872/1879)

1. Suite 1 – Overture, Minuet, Carillon

2. Suite 2 – Menuetto, Farandole

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Bizet’s short life is almost solely remembered for his operas Carmen and The Pearl Fishers, though his catalogue also includes some interesting, lesser-played curiosities including the symphony in C and L'Arlésienne. Although his precocious talents attracted the attentions of Gounod, Liszt and Berlioz at the Paris Conservatoire, he struggled to attain popular or critical success. A set of incidental music to Alphonse Daudet’s play L'Arlésienne was suggested to him by the impresario Léon Carvalho as a project to follow the disappointing premiere of The Pearl Fishers. The play is a melodrama about two peasant boys, Fédéri and his severely disabled brother Janet, and the former’s affections for a girl from Arles, in Provence (hence the title), though the girl doesn’t actually appear in the play. After falling for L'Arlésienne, who is already the mistress of another man, Fédéri resolves to settle for a girl nominated by his mother. On his wedding day, however, he meets his original beloved’s husband and throws himself from a balcony, through which act his disabled brother is immediately relieved of his affliction.

 

The play has not survived with any real success, its author recalling that "It was a glittering flop with the loveliest music in the world”, though the incidental music Bizet wrote for it has proved more popular. After the play failed, Bizet shrewdly salvaged a popular suite from its 27 musical numbers in 1872, rehashing them for symphony orchestra rather than pit band. In the first suite, we first hear the Prélude, featuring the March of the Kings, which the composer derived from a Provençal Christmas tune attributed to Jean-Baptiste Lully (he who died of foot injuries sustained while conducting). A graceful Minuet follows, taken from link music between Acts 2 and 3, and then an Adagietto. The Carillon is an expansion of the Act 3 Entr’acte. Four years after Bizet’s death, a second suite was arranged by Ernest Guiraud, a friend of the composer and teacher of Debussy. This consists of a Pastorale (the prelude to Act 2), an Intermezzo, another Minuet (not actually from L'Arlésienne but recycled from the opera La jolie fille de Perth), and a Farandole from Act 3 (a return of the earlier Provençal folktune, now combined with another similar melody, the March of the Three Kings).

 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) – Variations on a Rococo Theme Op. 33 (1877)

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Long before Prokofiev thought of writing a (neo)classical symphony modelled on the formality and poise of Haydn and Mozart, Tchaikovsky wrote his Rococo variations in 1877 on the heels of his large scale, high-intensity tone poem, Francesca da Rimini. In opting to dust off the powdered wig and write a piece firmly rooted in the elaborate late Baroque style of the late 1730s, he used his music as a form of escapism from the depression which plagued him at the time. It was written in the light, inconsequential style of a Mozartian divertimento for a reduced orchestra stripped back of its percussion, trumpets and trombones. Tchaikovsky was greatly assisted, much to his chagrin, by the work’s dedicatee, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, his cello professor colleague at the Moscow Conservatory. Fitzenhagen’s ‘revisions and corrections’ to the solo part and adjustment of the sequence of variations became the norm in performance practice of the immediately popular work, despite Tchaikovsky’s indignation.

 

Thought the 18-minute piece has the outward appearance of a nostalgic, sentimental pastiche, the theme itself is purely the composer’s own, and the brief codettas transitions between variations are harmonically quite contemporary. The soloist is also given uncommonly long contributions with very scarce pause, making it a demanding part despite its apparent simplicity. There is an abundance of charm and good humour, though, and when taken as was intended – as a casual diversion – it has much to commend it.

 

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) – Symphonie Fantastique (Épisode de la vie d'un artiste) Op. 14 (1830)

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1. Rêveries – Passions

2. Un bal

3. Scène aux champs

4. Marche au supplice

5. Songe d'une nuit du sabbat

  

This year’s 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death has provided ample opportunity to discover, rediscover and enjoy the unfailingly individual, frequently genius and often bizarre works of Hector Berlioz. His works have enjoyed an excellent year in the concert hall, with abundant performances of Symphonie Fantastique (including a performance from memory at The Proms), the equally gleefully diabolical Damnation du Faust and the brilliantly ludicrous Grande Messe des Morts, scored for quadruple woodwind, 12 horns, 8 trumpets/cornets, 4 tubas, 16 timpani, 10 pairs of cymbals, 4 tam-tams and the small matter of four offstage brass bands and a vast choir.

 

Berlioz’s fascinating career began as a medical student in Paris, following his father into becoming a physician. He was a more than capable timpanist and percussionist before going onto study composition at the Paris Conservatoire, and was fond of overseeing premieres of his own works from the percussion section. Symphonie Fantastique went on to become his most successful work by far. In addition to the Fantastique, Berlioz wrote three other ‘symphonies’, though they are all some distance from the traditional understanding of that genre. Harold in Italy, Roméo et Juliette, and the Symphonie funebre et triomphale are remarkable pieces, though not quite of the same calibre as the Fantastique. Part of the reason for this could be that Symphonie Fantastique is an exquisitely personal work. It carries all the trademark dramatic flair, idiosyncratic scoring and rollicking ‘big tunes’ which characterise his music, but it was also the product of a period of painfully unrequited love for the composer. In 1827, he attended a performance of Hamlet in Paris, where he saw the 27-year-old Irish actress Harriet Smithson on stage and immediately fell in love with her. He was equally taken with Shakespeare’s drama, despite his very minimal English, writing that ‘Shakespeare, coming up on me unawares, struck me like a thunderbolt’. He went on to write a number of Shakespeare-inspired works. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Smithson ignored his many letters. When Berlioz heard rumours of her being in a relationship with her manager, he conceived the Symphonie Fantastique.

 

At its heart, the piece is an opium-fuelled hallucination about a young artist and his high-spirited love for a woman. From the outset, it was intended as ‘programme music’, describing a very specific story. The ‘indispensable’ programme provided by the composer is reproduced below. After a thrilling beginning to the relationship, characterised by a recurring musical theme (‘idée fixe’) the artist dreams that his love abandons him. He witnesses his own execution at the guillotine for her murder, and then sees his soul being tormented in the underworld. The piece was immediately successful at its 1830 premiere, though Berlioz revised it heavily in a last bid to gain the affections of Smithson two years later. She attended the first performance of the revised work, and finally returned the composer’s affections. The pair soon married (against all better advice – neither spoke much of the other’s language), though the relationship was a disaster and they separated in 1844. He continued to support her through her difficult later years, in which she succumbed to alcoholism and paralysis, until she died in 1854.

 

Berlioz’s ‘Indispensable’ guide to the Symphonie Fantastique

 

Part One: Reveries, Passions

The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted with that moral disease that a celebrated writer calls ‘the surge of passions,’ sees for the first time a woman who embodies all the charms of the ideal being of whom he has dreamed, and he falls hopelessly in love with her. Through a bizarre trick of fancy, the beloved image always appears in the mind's eye of the artist linked to a musical thought whose character, passionate but also noble and reticent, he finds similar to the one he attributes to his beloved.

 

The melodic image and its human model pursue him incessantly like a double idée fixe. This is the reason for the constant appearance, in every movement of the symphony, of the melody that begins the first allegro. The passage from this state of melancholic reverie, interrupted by a few fits of unmotivated joy, to one of delirious passion, with its movements of fury and jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolation—all this is the subject of the first movement.

 

Part Two: A Ball

The artist finds himself in the most varied situations—in the midst of the tumult of a festivity, in the peaceful contemplation of the beauties of nature. But wherever he is, in the city, in the country, the beloved image appears before him and troubles his soul.

 

Part Three: Scene in the Fields

Finding himself in the country one evening, he hears in the distance two shepherds piping a ranz des vaches in dialogue [between cor anglais and offstage oboe]. This pastoral duet, the scenery, the quiet rustling of the trees gently disturbed by the wind, certain hopes he has recently found reason to entertain—all these come together in giving his heart an unaccustomed calm, and in giving a brighter colour to his ideas. He reflects upon his isolation; he hopes that soon he will no longer be alone… But what if she were deceiving him! This mixture of hope and fear, these ideas of happiness disturbed by black presentiments, form the subject of the Adagio. At the end, one of the shepherds again takes up the ranz des vaches; the other [the oboe[ no longer replies…The distant sound of thunder…solitude…silence. [Thunder here is represented by four timpanists].

 

Part Four: March to the Scaffold

Having become certain that his love goes unrecognised, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a sleep accompanied by the most horrible visions. He dreams that he has killed the woman he had loved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold, and that he is witnessing his own execution. The procession moves forward to the sounds of a march that is now sombre and fierce, now brilliant and solemn, in which the muffled noise of heavy steps gives way without mediation to the most noisy clangour. At the end of the march, the first four measures of the idée fixe reappear like a last thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow [followed by the pizzicato plink-plonk of his head bouncing down the steps, before the crowds cheer his execution].

 

Part Five: Dream of a Witches' Sabbath

He sees himself at the sabbath, in the midst of a frightful assembly of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, all come together for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, outbursts of laughter, distant cries which other cries seem to answer. The beloved melody appears again, but it has lost its character of nobility and reticence; now it is no more than the tune of an ignoble dance, trivial and grotesque: it is she, come to join the sabbath…A roar of joy at her arrival…She takes part in the devilish orgy [with the morbid squeal of the E-flat clarinet]…Funeral knell [distant bells], burlesque parody of the Dies Irae, sabbath round-dance. The sabbath round and the Dies irae combine.