From Orchestra to Piano: Debussy’s La Mer

by Maureen Buja

With its full title, La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre (The sea, three symphonic sketches for orchestra), we can understand what Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was trying to show in his 1905 orchestral work.

I. De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From dawn to midday on the sea)
II. Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves)
III. Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the wind and the sea)

The three sections let us know that Debussy is capturing different aspects of the sea. The three great influences on his work at the time, Impressionism, Symbolism, and Japonism, all played a role in this work. If we look at the first edition of the work, the cover makes the Japan connection clear as it shows a detail from Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Mount Fuji and all the boats in the water have been removed.

The cover for the full score, published by Durand et Fils in 1905, recoloured the wave from its original blue to ‘various shades of green, blue, tan, and beige.’

First edition cover

The work was given its orchestral premiere in October 1905 by the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by Camille Chevillard. Early reception of the piece was poor, with audiences expecting rather more of the sea than the ‘agitated water in a saucer’ that the critics reported. It was only later, in 1908, that the work was a success. As conducted by the composer, it was felt that the 1908 concert presented the ‘first real performance of the piece’.

André Caplet, a long standing friend of Debussy’s made a two-piano arrangement of the work, which is used by the duet on this recording. It was published the same year as the premiere.

André Caplet and Debussy

As recorded by the piano duet team of Vaness Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia, the use of the two keyboards to replace the orchestra gives us a different kind of work. We’re on the top of the waves, rather than in the darker waters that the orchestral version can take us into.

Vanessa Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia (Photo by William Beaucardet)

The two performers are well aware of the different ways in which they play the piano and see value in the fact that their ‘respective touches, while not necessarily similar, go together very well (VW)’. They take up the challenge of Debussy’s orchestral timbres and how it requires a certain finesse, fluidity, and shimmer to complete the early 20th-century sound on the piano. Latchoumia quotes Debussy: ‘It was Debussy who encouraged pianists to look for a mellow sound that would make you forget the instrument has hammers. I think that sums up the way we should approach French music’.

The pianists deliberately chose to use André Caplet’s version of La mer for 2 pianos rather than Debussy’s version for 1 piano 4 hands. Even Debussy thought Caplet’s version was better than his!

Wagner and Latchoumia’s recording presents the best of French music at the turn of the century with the trio of Debussy, Satie, and Ravel, but in works that are often more famililar in the orchestra versions. Ravel’s La Valse, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune are given in their piano transcriptions. Works so familiar heard in a new guise can be so rewarding.

Debussy, Ravel, Satie: Piano Twins
Vanessa Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia
La Dolce Volta LDV 120

Official Website

An Introspective Journey: Vanessa Wagner’s Miniatures

by Maureen Buja  

The idea of the piano miniature has largely faded from the scene, but in the 19th century, particularly fuelled by the rise in home ownership of pianos, composers by the score wrote little consequential pieces for their audience.

Vanessa Wagner

French pianist Vanessa Wagner (b. 1973) has taken piano miniatures by four different composers and used them to weave a world of the imagination.

Wagner opens with Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, Op. 37a, written for a monthly musical magazine based in St Petersburg, Nouvellist. The editor, Nikolay Matveyevich Bernard, commissioned Tchaikovsky for 12 character pieces, one for each month. Bernard gave Tchaikovsky the titles and all through 1876, the pieces appeared. In January we are by the fireside, in May are the White Nights, and we’re riding in a troika in November.

Nikolai Dmitrievich Kuznetsov: Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1893

Next follows selections from Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. This collection of 66 short pieces for piano was published in 10 volumes from 1867 to 1901. She chooses two of the best-known pieces, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen and Butterfly, and supplements them with Little Bird and other works, closing her Grieg section with Grandmother’s Minuet.

Hjalmer Peterssen: Edvard Grieg, 1891

Selections from the rarely heard Six Impromptus, op. 5, by Jean Sibelius, bring us a side of Sibelius we aren’t as familiar with. Sibelius’ orchestral works are what made him famous, but Wagner finds these little piano pieces to be ‘absolutely sublime’.

Daniel Nyblin: Jean Sibelius, ca 1898–1900

Yakov Yanenko: Mikhail Glinka, 1840

The recording closes with Glinka’s nocturne entitled La Séparation. Just as little known as the Sibelius Impromptus, the Glinka work brings an end to Wagner’s fantasy narrative. She says, ‘It depicts the loneliness that can result from the quest for an unattainable, fantasy love, …and is a favourite theme of Romanticism. Glinka’s piece seemed to me to be the end of the story I had imagined for myself. It was a gentle, sensuous conclusion to a journey tinged with tenderness, sadness and hope, like the cycle of the seasons’. She ties Glinka’s melancholic work back to the opening piece by Tchaikovsky and makes it a fitting end.

One writer comments on the collection that ‘she follows the paths less travelled and takes us to places where we might not have expected her to go’. By connecting these works, she takes us from the miniature worlds of Tchaikovsky and Grieg, which were very much influenced by the Songs Without Words by Mendelssohn, and takes us into the more introspective works by Sibelius and Glinka. It’s a lovely journey and is a recording that, in addition to impressing you with its skill, leaves you at the end in a pensive mood, reflecting on the journey taken and the one that now lies ahead.

Everlasting Seasons: Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Sibelius, Glinka

La Dolce Volta: LDV 126
Release Date: 4 October 2024

Official Website

Fast and Furious: Gounod’s Faust Ballets

 by Maureen Buja 

The story of Faust has captured composers’ imaginations for centuries. There was a historical figure, Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480–1540), who made the original deal with the devil at the crossroads when he exchanged his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. The idea of a ‘Faustian’ pact always carries with it the idea of sacrificing good (or the spiritual) for the evils of power, knowledge, and material gain. In preferring human knowledge over divine knowledge, Faust is damned from the beginning. From 16th-century puppet plays to Goethe’s tragic figure in the 19th century, Faust is always the symbol for ‘what if’ or ‘going to the dark side’.

The French composer Charles Gounod (1818–1893) met Faust in 1859. His opera, first given at the Théâtre Lyrique as an opéra comique, i.e., an opera with dialogue, in 1859, evolved over the next decade to have recitatives added (Strasbourg 1860), scenes removed (La Scala, 1862), and dances added (Paris Opéra, 1869). In working with Goethe’s text, Gounod slimmed down the number of characters and conflated them to better serve as opera. Opera moves more slowly than a play, so refining is always necessary.

Bayard & Bertall: Charles Gounod, 1860

The addition of ballet music was required for performance at the Paris Opéra. At first, Gounod didn’t want to write it and asked his student, Camille Saint-Saëns, to do it. Saint-Saëns, appalled at the request, went straight to Gounod to change his mind. Gounod finally agreed and created a score that more often had a life separate from the opera.

The ballet section was inserted into the first scene of the final act for the Paris Opéra performance, and that final addition made the former opéra comique a grand opera. It became the most frequently performed opera in Paris.

Charles-Antoine Cambon and Victor Coindre: The palace of Méphistophélès, Faust, 1859 (Paris: Bibliothéque national)

At the start of the last act, Méphistophélès and Faust are in the Harz Mountains on Walpurgis Night. An ‘orgiastic ballet’ becomes the focus for the revelry and concludes with Phrynes’s Dance. Phryne was an (in)famous Greek courtesan from the 4th century who was very wealthy. Put on trial for impiety, for profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries, she was acquitted when the jury saw her bare breasts.

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Phryne before the Areopagus, ca 1861 (Hamburger Kunsthalle)

Other dances in the ballet are by Nubian slaves, Cleopatra, and Trojan Women, all strong and well-known ideals of women that would appeal to Faust. It’s Phryne’s Dance that closes the ballet sequence.

This 1958 recording was made by the Orchestre de l’Association des Concerts Colonne, led by Pierre Dervaux. The Colonne Orchestra was founded in 1873 by the violinist and conductor, Édouard Colonne. Colonne wanted an orchestra that could play contemporary music (Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Charpentier, Fauré, d’Indy, Debussy, Ravel, Widor, Enescu, Dukas, Chabrier, and the like), as well as the big German composers such as Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Pierre Dervaux

Pierre Dervaux (1917–1992) was President and Chief conductor of the Colonne orchestra from 1958 to 1992, starting his career as principal conductor of the Opéra-Comique (1947–53), and the Opéra de Paris (1956–72). He led many of France’s finest orchestras, including the Concerts Pasdeloup (1949–55) and was Musical Director of the Orchestre des Pays de Loire (1971–79) as well as holding similar posts at the Quebec Symphony Orchestra (1968–75), and the Nice Philharmonic (1979–82). He taught at the École Normale de Musique de Paris (1964–86) and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal (1965–72).

Performed by

Pierre Dervaux
Orchestre de l’Association des Concerts Colonne

Recorded in 1958

Official Website

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Finding a New Creative Path: Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto

by Maureen Buja  

When he finally arrived in Vienna as a permanent resident in 1795, Beethoven fit into an interesting hiatus in the city’s music life. Mozart‘s recent death left a place open for a daring piano virtuoso and composer. In his first 10 years in the city, Beethoven wrote 20 of his 32 piano sonatas and 3 of his piano concertos—who better to show off his skills than himself?

Joseph Willibrord Mähler: Ludwig van Beethoven, ca 1804–1805 (Vienna Museum)

Completed in 1803 and revised in 1804, Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto started with sketches as far back as 1796, and the first and second movements were completed around 1800. It was given its premiere with the composer at the keyboard on 5 April 1803 in a concert that included the Second Symphony and Christ on the Mount of Olives, his oratorio.

Beethoven was starting to have problems with his hearing as he approached this concerto, and this set him on his new creative path. Music, for him, became a dynamic process, rather than the filling in of architectural forms. One example of this can be seen in his 3rd Symphony, the Eroica, where the first theme isn’t as it is first stated but comes to define its form through the progress of the first movement.

The 3rd Piano Concerto falls between this new compositional method of the Eroica and his earlier Viennese style, when he was more concerned with establishing his name and credentials as a composer and performer.

If we look at just the first movement, we seem to be starting with a theme more intended for a symphonic movement, rather than a concerto movement. The orchestra gives the first statement of the theme, and Beethoven uses the orchestra to create motivic blocks that can be moved around as necessary. He plays with the different registers of the orchestra and inserts his ‘heavy beats on light places’ to play with the rhythms. His focus, however, is the soloist, and the piano is given a brilliant placement that foreshadows much of his later piano writing.

The repeat of the opening gives him the opportunity to play with the opening theme, but the following development is kept short. It’s the final section, with the Coda where the theme seems to really blossom and show its potential.

There’s so much in this work that gives us an indication of the unique way that Beethoven will progress – always challenging the norm, pressing forward with new ideas, and rethinking the usual to create the unusual. 

This recording was made in 1958, with Alexander Jenner as soloist under Kurt Richter leading the Symphony Orchestra of the Volksoper Vienna.

Alexander Jenner

Alexander Jenner (b. 1929) studied in Vienna and, upon graduation in 1949, was awarded the ‘Bösendorfer-Preisflügel’, a grand piano given to the best student of that year graduating from the Vienna State Academy of Music. In 1957, by unanimous jury vote, he was awarded first prize in the Rio de Janeiro Contest for Pianists. As a performer, in addition to the classics, he was active in the promotion of modern music, becoming the first Austrian pianist to perform George Gershwin’s two great piano works, the Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F in 1951; he also gave the premiere of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka for solo piano.

Kurt Dietmar Richter

Kurt Dietmar Richter was a German composer and conductor (1931–2019) who lived in Pilzen, Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. He received his musical training in Erfurt, where he fell under the influence of Paul Hindemith and, throughout his life, continued to promote modern music. In 1990, he founded the Berlin artist initiative die neue brücke.

Performed by

Alexander Jenner
Kurt Richter
Symphony Orchestra of the Volksoper Vienna

Recorded in 1958

Official Website

The Doomed City: Lalo’s Overture to Le Roi d’Ys

 by Maureen Buja  , Interlude

Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo (1823 –1892) started his musical career as a viola and violinist, studying at the Paris Conservatoire with François Antoine Habeneck, who had founded and led the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire from 1828. After graduation, Lalo taught strings in Paris and founded the Armingaud Quartet, in which he first played viola then second violin.

Pierre Petit: Édouard Lalo, ca 1865 (Gallica: btv1b8421663h)

His marriage in 1865 to contralto Julie Besnier de Maligny, led to his interest in writing operas and other works for the stage, most notably, Le Roi d’Ys. The opera had its premiere at the Opéra-Comique in the Salle du Châtelet in Paris in 1888.

The story, taken from old Breton legend, tells of Margared, daughter of Gradlon, the King of Ys. As part of a peace treaty, she’s engaged to Prince Karnac but she tells her sister Rozenn that she really loved Mylio, who sailed from Ys some years ago. In the middle of her wedding ceremony to Karnac, she hears that Mylio has returned and refuses to marry Karnac, who vows revenge at the humiliation.

Mylio, unfortunately, loves Rozenn, not Margared, and persuades Gradlon to grant him Rozenn’s hand in marriage. Jealous, Margared joins forces with Karnac to wreak their joint vengeance.

During Rozenn and Mylios’s wedding ceremony, Karnac, with the help of Margared, opens the sluice gates that protect the city of Ys from flooding and dooms the city. Mylio kills Karnac but it’s too late. Half the city’s population drowns as the waves overcome the city. Filled with remorse, Margared throws herself into the ocean as a sacrifice and the patron saint of the city, St Cornentin, calms the waves and saves the city.

Évariste Vital Luminais: Flight of King Gradlon (the King of Ys), 1884 (Musée des beaux-arts de Quimper)

The overture sets the scene for the tale of mistaken love, jealousy, and treachery and remains one of the most popular parts of the opera that still remains in repertoire.

Lalo’s operas were interesting and original but were criticised for being too progressive and for being ‘too Wagnerian’ in style. Although his stage works were popular during his life, they quickly fell out of repertoire. Lalo eventually turned towards chamber music and symphonic music for his repertoire. His Symphonie Espagnole remains in performance, as does his Cello Concerto in D minor.

Piero Coppola

This recording was made in 1930 with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pierro Coppola. Italian composer and conductor Coppola studied in Milan and conducted at La Scala. Hearing Debussy conduct in 1911 made him a life-long fan of Debussy and Ravel, and French music was how he made his name. Between 1923 and 1934, he was the artistic director of La Voix de son Maître, the French branch of The Gramophone Company.

La Voix de son Maître, and the dog Nipper

At La Voix de son Maître , he conducted the first recordings in the 1920s and 1930s of Debussy’s and Ravel’s works, including La mer and Boléro.

Performed by

Piero Coppola
London Symphony Orchestra

Recorded in 1930

Official Website

Variations on the Goldberg I

by Maureen Buja, Interlude

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) published his well-known Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, in 1741, in the 4th part of his Clavier-Übung (collection of keyboard music). Its creation story, as told by Bach’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818), wrote that Count Hermann Karl von Keyserling, president of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony in Dresden, had commissioned the work in 1738 for performance by his protégé, the young harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727–1756), to amuse him during his nights of insomnia.

Herman Karl von Keyserlingk

Count Keyserlingk discovered the extremely talented Goldberg when the boy was only age 10 and sponsored him to study with both Johann Sebastian Bach and his oldest son, Wilhelm Friedmann. According to Forkel, writing in 1802, ‘Count Keyserlingk was often ill and suffered from nights of insomnia. During such periods, Goldberg, who lived in his house, had to spend the nights in the next room to play for him. Once the Count told Bach that he would like for his Goldberg some harpsichord pieces of such a light and cheerful character that he, Keyserlingk, could be entertained a little during his sleepless nights. Bach thought that he could best fulfil this wish by writing variations…. The Count later called them only “his” variations. He could never get enough of them, and for a long time, whenever sleepless nights came, he always repeated: “Dear Goldberg, play me one of my variations”.’

Bach composed the work with the idea of Goldberg as the performer, but rumours to the contrary aside did not dedicate the work to either Goldberg or Keyserlingk. The Goldberg Variations takes its name from Goldberg as its first performer.

Goldberg was a talented performer from an early age, and after his study with W.F. and J.S. Bach, his own compositions showed their influence. As the young Goldberg took up the new galant style, his compositions also anticipated works by J.S.’s son, C.P.E. Bach. Goldberg died at the age of 29 of tuberculosis and was declared to be a great loss to the Dresden court. Being in close proximity to his teacher, J.S. Bach, who had been appointed ‘Royal Court Composer’ to the Dresden Court in 1736, Goldberg disparaged his own compositions, often tearing them up, but current reassessment of works such as his harpsichord concertos has done much to show him as an outstanding composer, albeit one who died too young.

The Goldberg Variations, as published in the Clavier-Übung IV, noted the quality of the work: ‘Keyboard exercise, consisting of an ARIA with diverse variations for harpsichord with two manuals. Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits…’.

J.S. Bach: Clavier-Übung IV, 1741, title page

As described on the title page, the work is a variation set, beginning with an original aria composed by Bach and followed by 30 variations. The aria first appears in 1725 in the Clavierbüchlein copied by Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, and opens with a chaconne bass in its first 8 bars. 

The variations that follow ‘are derived from the harmonic structure and the bass line of the aria and are grouped in threes, every third variation a canon at a higher numerical interval, with the final variation a quodlibet, a hotch-potch seemingly remote from the original aria, which follows in conclusion’.

When heard on harpsichord, the work has a slightly different feel than the more common modern piano recordings. The softness of the piano is replaced by the more brittle sound of the plucked harpsichord, which may explain why Goldberg was described as playing it from a room separate from that holding the insomniac Count. 

We will be looking at the other versions of this work, i.e., the Goldberg in the hands and sounds of other instruments. As a teaser for what will be coming next, here’s the first variation done not by a keyboard instrument but by a vocal group:

SLIXS – “Quer Bach” – Goldberg Variationen, BWV 988, Variation Nr. 1 

This performance is by the German group SLIXS, who describe themselves as an ‘a cappella band’, and who bring all sorts of modern styles to our Baroque familiar.

Widowhood and a Murder: Dvořák’s Holoubek

 by Maureen Buja, Interlude

 Antonín Dvořák  (1841–1904) loved the poetry of Karl Jaromir Erben, particularly his collection of Czech folk ballads, The Garland, published in 1853. Starting in 1896, once he’d finished his nine symphonies and his other major orchestral works, Dvořák used the ballads from The Garland as the basis for a series of ‘orchestral ballads’. He started with Vodník (‘The Water Goblin’, b195), Polednice (‘The Noon Witch’, b196), and Zlatý kolovrat (‘The Golden Spinning-Wheel’, b197) all at the same time, completing them just a few weeks later, and then started on Holoubek (‘The Wild Dove’, b198) a few months later, completing it in November 1896.

Antonín Dvořák, 1882

This development of the symphonic poem, all based on one literary source, was not unprecedented for Dvořák. Earlier works had literary elements, the most familiar perhaps being in his works written in America (the New World Symphony and the American Quartet).

The Garland, or, to give it its full name, The Garland of National Legends, was a cycle of 13 ballads. Holoubek, or The Dove (The Wood Dove, the Wood Pigeon) story starts in a graveyard. A widow mourns her recently departed husband and is seen by a passing youth (handsome, of course). After three days of resistance, she accedes to his demands and in a month they are married. The story then turns – she’s a widow because she gave her first husband a deadly potion so she could marry the handsome youth, and then at the end of the poem, after 3 years with her new husband, the sound of the dove, cooing in the oak tree over her first husband’s grave, drives her to suicide.

The tone poem opens with a funeral march, with a recurring march-beat of the funeral procession under the melodies. The flutes and violins bring in the young widow, but the following subject, on oboe and trumpets, belies the presented innocence. The widow’s tears, sarcastically presented in the flutes and violins, are another indication of her false heart. The handsome young man is signalled by a distant trumpet. The funeral march continues, but in a more spritely manner – perhaps the inconsolable widow is approachable after all!

The central section is the wedding of the widow and her new husband.

In the final section we return to the graveyard and the mournful call of the dove in the oak tree above the husband’s grave. Dvořák gives this an eery setting with harp and strings, wailing flutes, and a crying oboe. The widow / bride is driven to remorse and drowns herself, and the funeral march returns at the end. Although Erben’s poem ends with a pitiless description of her grave – no tombstone and her head laid only on a rock, buried in the middle of a field – Dvořák gives us an optimistic ending with a return of the dove’s song and the minor key turned to major one.

Antonín Dvořák: Holoubek, Op. 110, B. 198

Nikolai Ravinovich

This recording was made in 1954 with Nikolai Rabinovich conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra.

Nikolai Rabinovich (1908–1972) graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1931 and was appointed professor of conducting there in 1968. His students included Yuri Simonov, Neeme Järvi, Vladislav Chachin, Vitaliy Kutsenko, and Victor Yampolsky, all of whom had exemplary conducting careers.

The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, now the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, was founded in 1802 and started as the orchestra for the Court of Alexander III of Russia. Its period of greatest achievement occurred under the leadership of Yevgeny Mravinsky, who led it for 50 years (1938–1988). This saw its first tours to the west and the start of their studio recordings. Under Mravinsky, the orchestra recorded seven of Shostakovich’s symphonies.

Performed by

Nikolai Rabinovich
The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra

Recorded in 1954

Official Website

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