If Rothko was arguably the most Romantic of the modernists, Chopin was certainly the most Classical of the Romantics. Not just because in their form Chopin’s works are always polished and perfectly shaped, but also because he rejected titles for his compositions – those nametags on the baggage of individualism that Schumann and Liszt culled from poets and from their own inner thoughts, first-name secrets whispered into the ears of the audience. Chopin’s titles are mere husks – abstract words revealing little except the length and outline of the work to be played: pencil drawings that the melodies and harmonies would colour in.
Two Slavs in the West, at two seminal artistic moments … changing people’s ideas, creating inimitable masterpieces. Rothko had as deep a love for music as for art, and, according to his son Christopher, Mozart was a particular favourite. Chopin too loved Mozart above all others, and the first work to show his prowess to the world was his op. 2 Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. After hearing it for the first time, Schumann declared, ‘Hut ab, ihr Herren, ein Genie!’ – ‘Hats off, gentlemen; a genius.’ I wonder if Mr Lock of St James Street would have concurred.
The reflection above was written as a (tongue-in-cheek) experimental justification for using a photograph on a CD cover of myself wearing a bowler hat standing in front of a Mark Rothko painting.
Debussy: piano music without hammers
When I strike a note on the piano, more is heard than that note alone. The other strings vibrate with sympathetic overtones forming a halo over every tone – a veritable choir of angels. Claude Debussy is perhaps the first composer to write with those pianistic overtones specifically in mind, to harness them consciously as part of his creative process. Although it was the orchestral work Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune that Pierre Boulez described as ‘the beginning of modern music’, it was at the piano where Debussy’s revolutionary new approach to form and timbre was developed.
With Pagodes, the first piece of his triptych Estampes (1903), we hear something totally fresh. Debussy had heard Javanese gamelan music at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in the summer of 1889 and had written with great admiration about its complexity and sophistication, but his use of its tonal colour (loosely, the pentatonic scale – the five black notes of a piano) is not so much a translation of a foreign text as it is a poem written in a newly learned, fully absorbed language.
Composers, especially in France, had regularly utilised exoticism in their works (Saint-Saëns and Bizet spring to mind) but it remained a decorative detail, a picture postcard, a costume. With Debussy the absorption has gone to the marrow. It is a transfusion of blood, flowing in the very fingers that conjure up these new sounds at this old instrument.
Igor Stravinsky commented that he ‘was struck by the way in which the extraordinary qualities of this pianism had directed the thought of Debussy the composer’. Debussy’s discovery of new sounds at the piano is directly related to the physiology of hands on keyboard. It is impossible to conceive of most of Debussy’s piano music being written at a desk, or outdoors (despite his frequent use of en plein air titles). No, this is music made as moulded by playing, as dough is folded with yeast to create bread. As the fingers reach the keys, sound and touch seem to fuse into one. The keyboard has ceased to be a mere function for hammers to strike strings. It has become a precious horizontal artefact to caress. This is music of the piano as much as for the piano. The poet Léon-Paul Fargue wrote that Debussy ‘would start by brushing the keys, prodding the odd one here and there, making a pass over them and then he would sink into velvet’. ‘He gave the impression of delivering the piano of its song,’ Fargue added, ‘like a mother of her child.’
When he played in public, Debussy preferred to keep the lid of the instrument down, and, apparently, at home he would cover the top of his upright piano with cloths to muffle the sound. ‘One must forget that the piano has hammers,’ he said. Although it requires a superlative technique to play Debussy well, his widow, Emma Bardac, made an interesting observation: ‘Many pianists should bear in mind that if they play Claude’s music and someone tells them how wonderful their technique is, then they are not playing Debussy.’
The American pianist Jerome Lowenthal told me he was backstage in Paris in the 1950s when he overheard an old lady speaking to the pianist at the end of a concert.
‘My father said that people always play L’Île joyeuse too quickly.’
‘Oh,’ replied the pianist, ‘and who is your father?’
‘Claude Debussy.’
Debussy’s piano music is perfectly conceived for the instrument. But it isn’t just that it fits beautifully under the hand or sounds wonderful as the vibrations leave the soundboard and enter the ear. To play the opening of Reflets dans l’eau (from Images I) feels as if the composer has transplanted his fingerprints onto the pads of your digits. The way the chords are placed on the keys (flat-fingered on the black notes) is not so much a vision of reflections – of trees, clouds or water lilies; it is as if each three-padded triad is an actual laying of a flower onto the water’s surface. Later on in the piece, as the waters become more agitated, the cascading arpeggios are like liquid running through the fingers, all shimmer and sparkle.
In Poissons d’or (from Images II), the opening motive, a darting duplet of double thirds, is like trying to grasp a fish’s flip as it slips out of the finger’s grasp. In the central section, the slinky tune slithers with grace notes as the hand has literally to slide off the key as if off the scales of a freshly caught trout. In the first piece of this set, Cloches à travers les feuilles, the fingers are required to tap the keys (pedal held down, fingers pulled up) as if mallets against a bell.
No other composer feels to me more improvised, more free-flowing. But then the player is conscious of a contradiction as the score is studied more closely. Music that sounds created in the moment is loaded with instructions on how to achieve this effect. The first bar of Cloches à travers les feuilles is a case in point. It is marked pianissimo and contains just eight notes, each of which carries a staccato dot, but the first is also coupled with a strong-accented semibreve, the fifth has an additional dash, all the notes are covered with a slur and, as if that were not enough, Debussy instructs the pianist to play ‘doucement sonore’.
Children’s Corner might be like so many toys in his daughter’s nursery, but the workmanship behind every join and seam is of the highest fastidiousness. All of his pieces sound spontaneous, but every stitch (every dot, dash, hairpin or slur) is specific. This is not mood music, pretty sounds assembled at a dilettante’s whim. Behind the bells and the water and all the poetic imagery is an abstract musical mind of the utmost intellectual rigour – an architect of genius, despite the small scale of the buildings.
If most of his piano music has a feel of improvisation about it, the two books of Préludes celebrate this in a special way. Until well into the twentieth century, a pianist would rarely begin in concert to play a piece cold. A few chords, an arpeggio or two, served as a warm-up as well as giving the audience a moment to settle down. This was known as ‘preluding’, and Liszt spoke of it as a technique to be learned by any aspiring pianist. Debussy’s Préludes are perfectly crafted jewels, conveying more in their few minutes’ duration than many an opera, yet they can also seem as intangible as mist – with titles, tacked on with ellipses at the end of each piece, like mere trails of perfume in the air. Voiles, the second from Book I, is ‘sails’ or ‘veils’, but somehow the confusion of term doesn’t matter. We have been pushed away from the shore and the resulting imaginative journey is more important than any destination. Modernism indeed!
Debussy began piano lessons at the age of seven in Cannes as an evacuee from Paris at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, and he died during the final year of World War I, unable to have a public funeral because of the aerial bombing of Paris. The circumstances of his life, framed by his country’s enmity with Germany, seem an apt symbol for his music’s
rejection of a kind of German aesthetic. His instinct to stay clear of classical structures, his elevation and celebration of small, ephemeral forms and his delight in the atmosphere of beautiful chords for their own sake, with no desire to find a specific function for them, was an audacious challenge to some more self-consciously serious German intellectual fashions of the time. Indeed, the Golliwog’s Cakewalk (from Children’s Corner) is a direct hit, with its cheerful celebration of popular culture and the cheeky quote from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde followed by the minstrel’s scoffing sniggers.
When assessing a composer’s place in history, there’s always the question as to whether the tendency is backwards or forwards. Despite the opinion of Elliott Carter that Debussy ‘settled the technical direction of contemporary music’, and despite the impossibility of the existence of the piano music of modernists such as Olivier Messiaen or György Ligeti without him, I think the secret to playing Debussy’s music lies in its Chopinist roots – he edited the Polish composer’s works for Durand – and in his ties to his older, old-fashioned compatriots Massenet, Delibes and others.
Debussy might have stretched harmony and form into new shapes, but it seems to me that it is in a Parisian café, a Gauloise in hand and coffee at his side, that we glimpse something essential about his spirit. For all his sophistication, he could never resist the lilt and leer of a corny cabaret song, not just overtly, as in La Plus que lente (1910), but tucked away inside more experimental pieces such as Les collines d’Anacapri (Préludes I), Reflets dans l’eau (Images I) and Poissons d’or (Images II). He never left behind completely the romantic sentimentality of early piano pieces such as Clair de lune and the Deux Arabesques.
Although his taste for popular styles found expression in ragtime takeoffs such as Minstrels and the Golliwog’s Cakewalk, it was his more serious music that was later to have an immense influence on jazz composers, from Gershwin to Bill Evans to Keith Jarrett to Fred Hersch. And not just because of a shared sense of improvisation. The repeated patterns, the piling up of sonorities, and the way Debussy would crack open a chord, finding creativity in the colour of its vibrations, found its way into their very DNA.
If the ghost of this Parisian ended up haunting every American jazz bar, it found its way east, too. Debussy might have discovered his own pianistic voice after hearing the gamelan, but by the end of the twentieth century the inspiration had reversed direction and his impact on Asian piano music is incalculable. From Toru Takemitsu to American minimalists to New Age Muzak … all owe Debussy virtual royalties.
Debussy and Ravel: chalk and cheese
It is sometimes said, ‘Oh, that pianist is wonderful in Debussy and Ravel.’ This is strange. Not that someone can’t play both composers beautifully, but that it’s presumed there’s a necessary connection between the sensibility or skills required. Yes, they were both French, lived at the same time, shared the same publisher (Durand) and wrote music that could be termed ‘impressionist’. (Monet’s painting Impression: soleil levant has carried much diverse baggage on its shoulders.) But in soul, and thus in interpretation, the two composers are completely different animals.
Leaving aside detailed musical comparisons, let’s just look through the keyhole into their bathrooms and bedrooms to glimpse some clues. Ravel’s keen razor shaving clean the lines of his thin face; Debussy’s wayward beard, carelessly trimmed, hiding loose folds of flesh underneath. The sharp parting of Ravel’s hair versus Debussy’s bush ruffled out of sleep. Ravel’s tie selected then knotted with a keen eye versus Debussy’s cravat twisted around a day-old shirt. Both men smoked cigarettes but whereas I can almost smell the nicotine fingers of Debussy in the photographs, I imagine Ravel’s Gitanes to be masked by a rose-scented pomade, with not a speck of ash outside the ashtray. And sex: Debussy’s tumbling, voluptuous celebration of it; Ravel’s repressed desire suffocating inside his immaculately tailored suits, his fastidiousness repelling intimacy – the love that dare not tweak his mane.
Ravel has been described as a Swiss watchmaker for his precision and the clear intent of every dot, every line, every slur; whereas Debussy could never be mistaken as a time-keeper. Many of his pieces could lose their bar lines or time signatures without losing their way. You always see the individual drops of rain in Ravel’s mists, whereas Debussy invites us to look at the garden beyond, a blur through the moisture.
Pigeonholes are to be avoided in music, and to presume that a pianist will be equally at home in these two very different composers is dangerous. They are two French birds that simply do not sing on the same branch.
The three faces of Francis Poulenc
A reliable, reputable source told me once of an occasional routine of Poulenc when staying in Paris. In the late afternoon he would leave his apartment and go to the park where he would have a lustful tumble behind a bush with a willing soldier. He would then cross the park into the shadows of the Catholic church where he would slip into a dark confessional. After being absolved of his sins, and less than an hour after first leaving his home, he would return to a sumptuous supper, all ready to be served along with a decanted bottle of fine red Bordeaux.
Theology and morality aside, this circle from indulgence to ‘Indulgence’ to indulgence gives us an insight into the three different styles of Poulenc’s music: the melancholy twists and turns of tunes sung wistfully over smoky, hazy harmonies (the sensual passion in the park); the pure and often strident Stravinskian tonality with its glinting major-seventh chords (the stained glass of the cloister); and the composer as bon viveur, the gleeful good humour of a naughty schoolboy stuffing himself with culinary delights (the feast of wine and rich food).
Poulenc’s stock has risen solidly over the years. He was dismissed in the 1920s as a lightweight, a musical prankster from a privileged background, but his music developed in emotional power as his inner life became more complex. The shock of losing his dear friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud in a horrific car crash in 1936 propelled him back to the Catholicism of his childhood, and he remained a practising if struggling Catholic until his death. His letters to another friend, the baritone Pierre Bernac, reveal his torture of heart and his depression, but also his spiritual engagement and excitement as he was writing his operatic masterpiece The Dialogues of the Carmelites.
French spirituality has always been full of extremes, from the rigour of seventeenth-century Jansenism to the ‘dangerous’ laxity of the Carmelite nun St Thérèse of Lisieux, who died a mere two years before Poulenc was born. She saw her method of ‘spiritual childhood’ as if taking a lift to heaven rather than an arduous climb up a steep staircase. I’m sure that Thérèse would have been shocked by the sequence of Poulenc’s nocturnal gratifications, but I think she might have been even more disturbed at any despair of forgiveness, or indeed at any inability to celebrate the blessing of good food and wine. True asceticism does not give up material goods because it despises them, but because ‘goods’ is precisely what they are.
My Mass and my tears of joy
My Missa Mirabilis and the M1 motorway will always have for me an unforgettable connection. In September 2006 I was staying at my mother’s house in Cheshire during a week of concerts with the Hallé Orchestra and Sir Mark Elder. I took the opportunity of the free days before the evening concerts to gather together a year’s worth of sketches I’d made for a Mass setting, commissioned by Martin Baker, Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral. It was an intense week of creation because I finished three of the movements in three of the days. They were stuffed into my briefcase, which sat on the floor next to me as I drove south after the final concert of the Manchester run.
When I reached Milton Keynes a lorry moved into the middle lane where I was cruising along at around 80 mph and I calmly moved over into the fast lane … at which point something terrifying happened. My car screeched out of control, swerving, spinning … then suddenly it was tumbling in somersaults across the three lanes. As it turned over four or five times many thoughts raced through m
y mind – one of which was that I would never get to hear the music I had written that week. Then, strangely, I realised that my car had stopped, on its side, with my door above me in the air, crumpled metal all around, and a strange smoky dust everywhere. I didn’t feel any injury, and I knew I wasn’t dead or unconscious … and then a ferocious survival instinct kicked in. I tried desperately to get out, but couldn’t reach the door. Then it opened, and the arm of the lorry driver who had caused the crash was reaching inside to help my climb to freedom. I rescued my bags later, especially anxious to wrench open the mangled passenger door to retrieve my briefcase with the three completed Mass movements. I eventually made my way home in a taxi – glass and filth in my hair, a drying trickle of blood on my forehead, and tears of a strange joy wet on my cheeks.
The central idea of this Mass setting, and its central movement, is the Credo – in some ways the most problematic text to set because of its length and the non-poetic nature of the words. Instead of setting it simply in a descriptive way, I wanted to explore aspects of the psychology that underlies the whole nature of belief and doubt. The Creed contains line after line of densely packed, carefully articulated theology – as watertight and restrictive as Nicea could make it. I, like most Catholics, have said these words quickly, without thinking fully of the depth (or daring) of what is being expressed. What does ‘believing’ in these pregnant clauses actually mean? When I stand and affirm that the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father and the Son’, what am I saying? And what about those who have ceased to believe and yet still rattle off blithely the bold print in the Missal after the sermon and before the offertory?
Rough Ideas Page 23
