Musicians and Artists: Stravinsky and Matisse

 by Maureen Buja  

The Nightingale Collaboration

Even though they were contemporaries, Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954) are rarely regarded together. In 1925, however, the two collaborated on a project for the Ballets Russes on a ballet version of Stravinsky’s first opera, The Nightingale, which was given its premiere in Paris on 26 May 1914. The discrepancy between the first act, written in 1908 and still very much by a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, and the second and third acts, written in 1913 and 1914, was a problem.

Pablo Picasso: Igor Stravinsky, 1920 (Paris: Picasso Museum)

Sabine Devieilhe as The Nightingale, 2023 (Paris: Théâtre des Champs-Elysées)

The story comes from Hans Christian Andersen, where a Chinese Emperor is given a live nightingale, which has a song so sweet that hearers weep with its beauty. Emissaries from Japan give the Emperor a mechanical nightingale that delights him. The real nightingale returns to the forest, insulted. Death comes for the Emperor, and the nightingale returns and charms Death. In return for singing for Death, he must return to the Emperor his crown, sword, and standard. Death agrees, and the Emperor comes back to life. The Emperor discards his mechanical bird, and the live bird agrees to sing nightly for the Emperor.

The poème symphonique called Chant du Rossignol also dates from 1914 as a way for Stravinsky to respond to some of Diaghilev’s criticism of the opera. Stravinsky dumped the 1908 first act material and only used the music from Acts II and III for a piece in four movements.

Without the context of opera, the Chinese elements in the work, including pentatonic scales and other exoticisms, would be difficult for the audience to understand. When the poème symphonique received its premiere on 6 December 1919, with Ernst Ansermet leading the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. It was heavily criticised for its dissonance.

Still attempting to rescue the work, Stravinsky turned it into a ballet, written in the early months of 1917 but not staged until after WWI.

The ballet received its premiere on 2 February 1920 with choreography by Leonid Massine and designed by Henri Matisse.

Henri Matisse (seated) and Léonide Massine shown with the mechanical nightingale, 1920

Matisse’s drawings for the production put the Chinese elements to the fore.

Matisse: Costumes for the dancers

Matisse: Costumes for the dancers and the Emperor (Gallica: btv1b7002923m)

Warrior’s costume (Gallica: btv1b7002916g)

Serge Leonovich Grigoriev (1883–1968) was the regisseur of the Ballets Russes from 1909 through the 1920s, and then, after the disbanding of the company with Diaghilev’s death in 1929, joined Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russe in 1932, remaining with that company until 1948. The position of regisseur is critical to any company – functions as not only the director and the stage manager but also the choreographic reference point, and company memory. His phenomenal memory is what made Diaghilev’s ballets live on through the decades.

The Library of Congress holds Serge Leonovich Grigoriev’s photo album with examples of sets and costumes for Pulcinella, Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur, Petrouchka, Zéphire et Flore, Mavra, Le Renard, Les Biches, Les Fâcheux, and Barabau and photographs of Pulcinella, Le Chant du Rossignol, and Les Matelots.

Although they are in black and white, we can get a feeling for Matisse’s designs. Dancing the role of the Nightingale was Tamara Platonovna Karsavina, one of the leading ballerinas in the Russian Imperial Ballet, who was frequently invited to dance with Diaghilev’s company. Her most famous role was that of The Firebird in Stravinsky’s ballet for Diaghilev.

Image 7 (Library of Congress, Serge Grigoriev’s photo album/scrapbook, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/ihas.200156317)

Image 8 (Library of Congress, Serge Grigoriev’s photo album/scrapbook, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/ihas.200156317)

Image 9 (Library of Congress, Serge Grigoriev’s photo album/scrapbook, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/ihas.200156317)

Image 10 with Tamara Karsavina as The Nightingale (Library of Congress, Serge Grigoriev’s photo album/scrapbook, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/ihas.200156317)

Image 11 with Tamara Karsavina (Library of Congress, Serge Grigoriev’s photo album/scrapbook, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/ihas.200156317)

Image 12 (Library of Congress, Serge Grigoriev’s photo album/scrapbook, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/ihas.200156317)

There is one photograph of the stage with Matisse’s decorations and costumes.

Henri Manuel: Photograph of the stage, designs by Matisse, 1920 (Gallica: btv1b7002909b)

The dilemma for Stravinsky was that he thought the music was best heard in the concert hall, where it receives a focused hearing, rather than on the ballet stage, where the dancers also compete for attention.

Time for Love: Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony

by Maureen Buja 

by Maureen Buja  

In his exuberant post-WWII work, the Turangalîla Symphony, French composer Olivier Messiaen took the commission proposed by Serge Koussevitsky to heart: ‘compose the work as you like, in any style and length, with the instrumentation you would like, and I impose no time limit for you to deliver the work.’ Commissioned in 1945, the work started on 17 July 1946 and was completed and orchestrated by 29 November 1948. It was given its premiere on 2 December 1949 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leonard Bernstein.

Olivier Messiaen

The work, some 75 minutes in length over 10 movements, was considered by Messiaen as ‘one of my richest works in terms of findings, it is also the most melodic, the warmest, the most dynamic and the most coloured’.

The title of the work combines two Sanskrit words, as explained by Messiaen: ‘Lîla literally means play, but play in the sense of divine action on the cosmos, the play of creation, of destruction and reconstruction, the play of life and death. Lîla is also Love. Turanga is Time, the time which runs like a galloping horse, time which slips like sand through the hourglass. Turanga is movement and rhythm. Turangalîla then signifies at one and the same time, a love song, a hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death.’

Andris Nelsons leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a performance that brings together Yuja Wang as piano soloist and Cécile Lartigau as ondes Martenot soloist. Each soloist has their work cut out for them. Wang tackles the part with verve, and Lartigau, as one of the rare ondes Martenot soloists, brings her skills to a tremendous high.

Yuja Wang (photo by Kirk Edwards)

Yuja Wang with Andris Nelsons and BSO, 2024

Cécile Lartigau, 2022 (Photo by Martin Kubik)

The ondes Martenot was a French electro-acoustic instrument that consists of a keyboard and a speaker (palme). The keyboard can be played in two ways: either as a regular keyboard or via a metal ring worn on the finger that moves on a wire. A drawer on the instrument permits control of dynamics and timbre.

The ring method of playing the ondes Martenot, with the left hand controlling dynamics and timbre (photo by 30rKs56MaE)

The piano solo part calls for a virtuoso pianist, and in Yuja Wang’s playing, this performance comes to life. At times, simply adding colour to massive movements in the brass and, at other times, carrying her own melodies and ideas, Wang takes control of the work in a way that unifies this large rambling work.

Messiaen organises the work around 4 musical themes that return: the Statue Theme (heard in the trombones in the first movement), the Flower Theme (played by the clarinets pianissimo, also in the first movement). The Love Theme doesn’t appear until the 6th movement, first in hushed strings. The last theme is chord-based and abstract and appears in the background as a unifying sound.

In the sixth movement, both present and future Messiaen seem to be present: we have the Love Theme presented and then expanded by the strings and ondes Martenot, and then the piano presents a stylised bird song. Bird song will become important to Messiaen’s later works, although later he tries to present it as it sounds, rather than stylising it as he does here. In Messiaen’s vision of this movement, ‘The two lovers are enclosed in love’s sleep. A landscape comes out from them…’.

Olivier Messiaen: Turangalîla-Symphonie – VI. Jardin du sommeil d’amour. Très modéré, très tendre

In later movements, the lovers take a love potion and become trapped in a passion that seems to drive them to the infinite. By the end of the work, in a glorious drive to the end, a massive F sharp major chord signals that ‘glory and joy are without end’.

Yuja Wang’s technical brilliance, in view for so many years, comes to the fore here, even in a work where the stage has to be shared with another keyboardist. It’s not a work that many have attempted, given both the demands of Messiaen’s writing and the lack of primary position for the pianist, but Wang brings something more to the proceedings. She matches the electro-acoustic sounds of the ondes Martenot with a degree of virtuosity that brings the piano part into greater prominence than in many other performances. The joy of Messiaen’s paean to love, celebrating its joy and passion, and even in those times when love sweeps all before it, comes to full fruition in this recording.

Messiaen: Turangalîla Symphony

Yuja Wang, piano;
Cécile Lartigau, ondes Martenot;
Boston Symphony Orchestra;
Andris Nelsons, cond.

Deutsche Grammophon 515785000
Release date: 18 July 2025 (previous digital-only release, December 2024)

Official Website

Pure Imagination and Happiness: Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse

by Maureen Buja  

Where is your happy place? Debussy’s 1904 work L’isle Joyeuse seems to kidnap us, fly us through the air, and deposit us in a world of warm breezes, blue skies, perhaps a fluffy cloud or two, and, of course, surrounded by all our friends.

Although those giving only a cursory look at Debussy’s biography pin this work to his elopement with Emma Bardac to the isle of Jersey (after sending his wife back to her parents in Normandy), but the work was written over a year earlier. Debussy, in writing to a performer who sought help on how to approach his music, suggested that he think of the world of the imagined faraway land, such as Watteau’s L’embarquement pour Cythère.

Watteau: L’embarquement pour Cythère, 1717 (Louvre Museum)

The picture is a blend of happiness and sadness: the three pairs of lovers shown in the right foreground, or rather the same couple in three aspects of love: New Love, Familiar Love, and the look back with regret at how it all started. This same mix of joy and regret is in Debussy’s work as well. There’s a ‘smiling ambiguity’ that besets both the painting and the music.

Debussy opens with trills and a cadenza, but it is not that which sets the key: the use of the whole-tone scale has an earlier precedent from its use in the ‘darker moments in Pelléas et Mélisande’.

The work progresses from a small, localised trill to a final gesture, much in the manner of Liszt, that encompasses the whole keyboard. It’s pure imagination and happiness, yet with a bit of a twinge.

Claude Debussy: L’Isle Joyeuse

Odette Gartenlaub

This recording was made in 1961 by the French pianist Odette Gartenlaub. She had studied at the Paris Conservatoire with the leading composers of her time, including Olivier Messiaen, Henri Busser, Noël Gallon and Darius Milhaud. She won the Prix de Rome in 1948 after having to leave the conservatoire in 1941 when the German occupiers banned all Jews from the institution. In 1959, she was a professor of piano at the Conservatoire. Her work at the Conservatoire embraced the new ideas of music practice over music theory.

Performed by

Odette Gartenlaub

Recorded in 1961

Official Website

Iberomania: Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole

by Maureen Buja

We’ve noted many times the fascination the northern Europeans had with southern Europe: musical trips to Greece, Italy, and Spain seemed to be de rigeur in the 19th century if you were Scandinavian, German, or French.

French composer Édouard Lalo (1823-1892) was born in Lille; his father had been a member of Napoleon’s army. His fascination with Spain culminated in his Symphonie espagnole, Op. 21, which really isn’t a symphony, but is now considered a violin concerto. The use of Spanish motifs set the tone for the northern fascination with Spain, with Bizet’s Carmen, which had its premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris only a month after Lalo’s work.

Pierre Petit: Édouard Lalo, 1965 (Gallica: btv1b8421663h)

The work was written for the Spanish virtuoso violinist Pablo Sarasate and received its premiere in Paris on 7 December 1875.

Its five-movement structure and its symphony name caused many early 20th-century performers to drop the middle-movement Intermezzo and convert the work to a more standard 4-movement symphonic form. We’ll ignore the fact that most concertos only have 3 movements!

The fascination with Spain was part of a general fascination in Europe (northern Europe in particular) with exoticism – the sounds of India and the Middle East sparked composers’ imagination just as much as the wild Gypsy sound coming from Naples and Madrid. The Moorish occupation of Spain gave it a unique architecture, unique gardens, and access to an outdoor life unknown in the frozen north. Iberomania freed the more conservative northerners to write music full of life and sound, mysterious evening assignations, and to imagine beautiful women hidden behind their veils and mantillas, remaining visible but always inaccessible.

The first movement opens passionately, with strong statements in the orchestra followed by the violin. The singing first theme gives way to a ‘sultrier’ second theme. Sharp changes in dynamics emphasize the emotions of the movement. The violin skitters through unusual melodic passagework, but always with an emphasis on the excessive, be it of scalar movements or of emotion.

Édouard Lalo: Symphonie espagnole, Op. 21 – I. Allegro non troppo

This recording, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under George Szell, was made in 1945 with Ruth Posselt as violin soloist.

Ruth Posselt

American violinist Ruth Posselt (1911–2007) was a frequent performer with the Boston Symphony and performed the premieres of several American violin concertos, including those by Vernon Duke (as Vladimir Dukelsky), Edward Burlingame Hill, Samuel Barber, and Aaron Copland. In 1941, she gave the New York premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Violin Concerto. She appeared with all the major symphony orchestras in the US and, from her debut at Carnegie Hall at age 11 to her last concert in the 1970s, she was a leading violinist of her time. Her career wasn’t just in the US; she also had a substantial European following, first with her recitals in the 1930s and then with her appearances as a concert artist. Her 1934–1935 tour of the Soviet Union was the first by an American woman violinist. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s long-time conductor Serge Koussevitzky declared her to be one of the ‘greatest violinists of our time’.

Performed by

Ruth Posselt
George Szell
Orchestre Symphonique de Boston

Recorded in 1945

Official Website

In Memory of the Past: Goethe’s ‘Erster Verlust’

by Maureen Buja

Erster Verlust	First Loss
Ach wer bringt die schönen Tage,	Ah, who can bring back the beautiful days,
Jene Tage der ersten Liebe,	Those days of first love,
Ach wer bringt nur eine Stunde	Ah, who can bring back even one hour
Jener holden Zeit zurück!	Of that lovely time!
Einsam nähr’ ich meine Wunde	Lonely, I nurse my wound
Und mit stets erneuter Klage	And with ever-renewed lament
Traur’ ich um’s verlorne Glück.	I mourn for lost happiness.
Ach, wer bringt die schönen Tage,	Ah, who can bring back the beautiful days,
Jene holde Zeit zurück!	That lovely time!

Joseph Karl Stieler: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at age 79, 1828 (Neue Pinakothek)

Johann von Goethe (1749–1832)’s poem entitled ‘Erster Verlust’ (First loss) was first written in 1785 for his Singspiel Die ungleichen Hausgenossen (The Unequal Housemates), intended to be an aria for the Baroness, in Act II. The play was never completed, sidetracked, perhaps, by Goethe’s plans for his upcoming Italy trip. Luckily, he salvaged the poem (and two others) and included them in his Schriften of 1789. For the Schriften printing, Goethe wrote stanzas 2 and 3 anew.

Because of its small size and simple expression, the poems became a favourite of many composers, with some 50 setting it to music. We will look at the song and its setting over the century from 1813 through 1919. In this 8-line poem, Goethe expresses that painful memory of what was lost when one’s first love is no longer your love. There’s no idea of death, but rather hints of decisions made, time lost, and a mourning for the past.

Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832) was one of Goethe’s favourite composers and became the poet’s musical advisor. He was a detailed chronicler of musical events of his time, and his letters are a prime source of information about significant events, such as the famed 1812 meeting of Beethoven and Goethe. Organised by Bettina Brentano, the two men met in the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz. As expected, they did not agree with each other’s self-assessment: Beethoven thought the poet too loving of the court atmosphere, and Goethe thought the composer had ‘an absolutely uncontrolled personality’. Goethe was 63 years old and Beethoven a mere 42.

Zelter wrote over 200 lieder, 75 of them to texts by Goethe. He detailed his thoughts on lieder writing in a letter to the composer Carl Loewe: the text must take priority, the strophic song is to be preferred to ‘absolute through-composing’, and the accompaniment must stay in the background.

Goethe, for his part, had his musical demands, the primary of which was that the music should support the poet’s words. This led Zelter to write music that was plain and strophic, even when the textual manner was more emotional. The music serves the poet’s words, and we can understand why Goethe was so taken with him. Famously, Goethe preferred Zelter’s setting of the poem Erlkönig, rather than the more dramatic setting by Schubert that is so well known today.

The song was published in 1813 as part of Zelter’s collection of 48 sämmtliche Lieder, Balladen und Romanzen; the four-volume collection was in its second edition by 1816.

Carl Begas: Carl Friedrich Zelter, 1827 (Sing-Akademie zu Berlin)

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) picked up the text in 1815 and made it part of his Op. 5 collection, setting it in a precise and concise manner, and reserving his emotion for the last word of the 2nd stanza, ‘Wunde’ (wound). The minor-key setting is full of wistful memory and desire.

Wilhelm August Reider: Franz Schubert, 1875 after a 1825 watercolour (Vienna Museum)

Bohemian composer Václav Jan Křtitel Tomášek (1774–1850) led the musical world of Prague in the first half of the 19th century. He was the central point of the Mozart cult in Prague, and his fame spread through his lieder and piano compositions. Of his 63 lieder, 41 are settings of Goethe, and Goethe made a point of telling Tomášek in 1822 how much he approved of Tomášek’s work.

Tomášek met the 73-year-old poet in the Bohemian town now called Cheb, and after discussing music, poetry and minerals (Goethe had a famous rock collection), the poet encouraged the composer to play for him. Goethe gave him a book of poetry, and the 48-year-old composer played his music from memory. It was after Mignon’s Sehnsucht that the poet exclaimed, ‘you have understood the poem’, and then went on to say that he could not ‘understand how both Beethoven and Spohr could so entirely misinterpret it and treat it as though it were an aria and not a Lied.’

Tomášek’s setting is full of simple declarations, less full of melancholic regret than we find in other settings. There is still the emphasis on ‘Wunde’, but the setting of the first work of the first and last stanza’s first word, ‘Ach’ (Ah), that seems to carry the sharp despair.

Antonín Machek: Portrait of the Composer V. J. Tomášek, after 1816 (Prague: National Gallery)

Felix Mendelssohn’s setting in 1841, as part of his Op. 99 collection Sechs Gesänge, expands the setting enormously, setting the same lines multiple times. The impression of the setting is somehow of deeper regret. The contrasting music for the second verse again puts emphasis on the word ‘wound’. The song concludes with decoration on the word ‘holde’ (lovely), bringing the beloved back one more time.

Horace Vernet: Felix Mendelssohn, 1831

Austrian composer Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) set the poem in 1876, as part of his Op. 9 collection, which set the poetry of Lenau, Goethe, and V. Zuzner. Wolf started writing music to the texts of Goethe at age 15, starting with 3 songs for male chorus.

When he set Erster Verlust, he was following the model set for him already by Reichardt, Zelter, Tomášek and Mendelssohn. Although this early setting, created in 1875 when he was just 15, shows much skill, we’re still dealing with the composer’s juvenilia. It is nothing compared to the lieder where he would show his genius.

Hugo Wolf

Nicolai Medtner (1879–1951) published his op. 6 collection of 9 Goethe-Lieder between 1901and 1905. The majority of Medtner’s published songs are Russian, but Goethe was one of the most important German poets he set to music. Three of his Goethe collections resulted in him being awarded the Glinka Prize in 1909.

The lied was composed as a wedding present for his brother Emil and his bride Anna; however, the present had more than good wishes behind it. Nicolai had been forbidden marriage with Anna, and so his older brother Emil took his place; the marriage was never consummated. Eventually, Emil and Anna divorced, and then Nicolai and Anna were free to marry.

As a collection, it must be regarded as a wedding gift not to his brother but to his sweetheart, and a text such as Erster Verlust becomes particularly poignant. However, since his first lost love would eventually become his wife, this is one time when the story has a happy ending.

Nicolai Medtner

In his setting, Alban Berg (1885–1935) cuts off the last couplet of the poem, setting only the first two stanzas. The work was written in 1905 when he was just beginning as a composer. He worked with Arnold Schoenberg between 1904 and 1911 and was able to combine Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique with his own late-Romantic lyricism. He started with Schoenberg studying harmony, counterpoint, and music theory, and then, from 1907, composition. Even before studying with Schoenberg, he was a prolific composer, with some 80 lieder to his name. Schoenberg thought he was stuck in song, and over the years of study, made him work on his instrumental compositions.

Of all the Second Viennese School composers, he’s the one who has remained the most listenable. His operas remain in the repertoire.

The simplicity of this early song compared to what we know of his later works gives us true indication of what he learned from Schoenberg. Erster verlust was one of only three songs Berg wrote to a Goethe text, as he gradually started working with texts by more modern poets.

Alban Berg

Justus Hermann Wetzel (1879–1973) set Goethe’s text in 1919, as part of his Op. 3 Liederkreis collection. Over his long life, Wetzel composed over 600 songs of which fewer than 150 are still in the repertoire.

His style of clear melodic lines matched with an intense mood makes this song sound less like 1919 and more like 1819.

Erick Büttner: Justus Hermann Wetzel, 1930 (Berlin: Neue Natioanalgalerie)

Tracking the setting of this song for a century reveals an enormous amount about what composers read into the text and how tastes in lied writing circle around. Goethe’s insistence on the primacy of the text (as befitted him as the poet) could be seen as standing in the way of the composer’s need to create interpretations and filter for the material. Probably one of the most effective settings is Medtner’s, truly written for a lost love and given to the woman herself.

A composer takes his text and then decides what to emphasise (‘wunde’ or ‘Ach’) and how to place that emphasis. Realisation of the meaning of the text can happen in many ways. Not every composer wrote in a minor key, and not every composer read the poem the same way. A survey such as this gives us a deeper appreciation for the way certain composers (including Schubert) were able to find their way through such a seriously emotional path.