Written for the San Francisco Symphony Great Performers Series. Portions of the Debussy and Chopin notes previously written for Tippet Rise Art Center. Not to be reprinted without permission.
- Olivier Messiaen: No. 15 and No. 10 from Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (1944)
- Alexander Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 8, Opus 66 (1913)
- Claude Debussy: L’Isle joyeuse (1904)
- Frédéric Chopin: Four Ballades (1835–42)
Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) composed his evening-length piano cycle Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus) in 1944 in occupied Paris. Between 1940–41 he had been a prisoner of war at the Stalag VIII-A camp near Dresden, and after his release was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatory, still under Vichy control. Vingt Regards resonates with his unmistakable harmonic sense—tonal, yet darting and transforming in unexpected ways—and it also reflects his devotion to Catholic mysticism. No. 15, The Kiss of the Infant Jesus, begins as a cool reflection and then grows into expansive cascades. No. 10, Contemplation of the Joyful Spirit, is a ferocious portrayal of jubilation. Messiaen wrote the suite for the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who would later become his second wife.
Alexander Scriabin’s (1872–1915) late works were written in preparation for the Mysterium, his never-completed multimedia ceremony intended to bring on the end of the world. The closest he came was the 1911 orchestral poem Prometheus, The Poem of Fire (recently performed here at Davies Symphony Hall by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the SF Symphony), but shortly thereafter he turned back to smaller canvases, writing a series of piano sonatas, Nos. 6–10. He completed the Piano Sonata No. 8 in 1913 and had it published, but it was only premiered posthumously in November 1915, in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), by his student Elena Beckman-Ščerbina. Set in one movement, it opens with a Lento introduction and then moves into an Allegro agitato filled with splashy chords and murky atmospheres.
Claude Debussy’s (1862–1918) L’Isle joyeuse was inspired by paintings: Jean-Antoine Watteau’s L’Embarquement pour Cythère (found in the Louvre), which depicts three couples and assorted partygoers on the island of Kythira (in mythology, the birthplace of Venus), as well as a series of landscapes and seascapes by J.M.W. Turner, which Debussy viewed at the National Gallery in London in 1903. Curiously, though he is often called a musical impressionist, Debussy’s taste in visual art leaned more toward the Rococo and Romantic. He would soon leave his wife, Lilly, for his mistress Emma Bardac, the wife of a banker. They eloped in Jersey (sometimes incorrectly identified as a the title inspiration for L’Isle joyeuse) before they finalized their divorces in 1905. The music, written around the time of this personal upheaval, suggests chaotic joy, coalescing and dissolving in raptures.
While Frédéric Chopin’s (1810–49) nocturnes sing, his waltzes dance, and his études and preludes work out more academic ideas, his Four Ballades have a literary bent. He was the first composer to title a piece “Ballade,” suggesting the medieval tradition of sung storytelling, as well as the Romantic genre of narrative poetry. In a conversation with Robert Schumann, Chopin mentioned that he had been particularly inspired by the work of the Polish poet and dramatist Adam Mickiewicz, though direct parallels between the Ballades and particular poems have generally been discounted.
Chopin wrote the Ballades sporadically between 1831–42, working first in Paris, and then sometimes in Mallorca and at Nohant, the country home of his partner, the novelist George Sand. Often there is something elusive about the melodic ideas: the magic is in their development, the drama in their juxtaposition. Themes and accompaniment blur into each other while harmonies and sonorities twist into blistering climaxes.
