Composer’s Pianos: Halévy and Bizet

By Maureen Buja

Alex Cobbe’s piano collection at Hatchlands Park has one massive square piano that was immensely practical to its two composer owners.

How do composers compose? We’re familiar with the images from movies, the composer with one hand on the keyboard and the other, pencil poised, over the music paper. In this picture of Cole Porter, we can see the advantage of being left-handed!

Cole Porter, composing at the piano

Nonetheless, composers with means and connections could have their needs accommodated. The French composer Fromental Halévy commissioned the French piano maker Roller to make him a piano that combined the keyboard with a desk. The top of his square piano has three leather-covered sections, as was common for desks at the time, placed at a height convenient for writing. Notice that the keyboard slides back into the instrument when not needed. Notice also the handles on the side of the case to help when moving the heavy instrument / piece of furniture around.

Composing Table Piano, 1855

Halévy (1799- 1862) had a successful late career as an opera composer, but all of his works, including his most famous, La Juive, have fallen out of the repertoire.

Fromental Halévy

Upon Halévy’s death in 1862, his daughter, Geneviève, brought the piano to her husband, the composer Georges Bizet. Bizet had been a student of Halévy’s at the Paris Conservatoire. The piano remained in the Halévy family’s possession until its current owner purchased it.

Geneviève Bizet (Jules-Élie Delaunay)

When Bizet received this piano, he was only 24 and all of his major works, including The Pearl Fishers (1863), La jolie fille de Perth (1866), and, most importantly, Carmen (1873-74) all lay ahead of him to be composed on this instrument.

Georges Bizet

The Lure of Light Music

by Maureen Buja, Interlude

Sometimes you get tired of the details, tired of the intricate formal structure, and you just long for a piece of simple music. This is where Light Music plays a role. Starting in the 18th century, light music was the contrast to absolute music. Here was music that was simple and that, as one writer put it, satisfied all the Ts: Tunes, Tonality, Triads, and the Tonic. No complicated excursions to far keys, but rather an emphasis on the melodies and the rhythms.

A work such as a movement from Richard Rodney Bennett’s The Aviary, gives us a key to the genre: simple, melodic, and engaging. 

Malcolm Arnold’s sets of English Dances, created at the invitation of his publisher who wanted a response to Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances. Jollity mixes with melancholy here, and at the same time, is capable of brash brass statements, as in No. 4 of the first set of English Dances. When the BBC used this as the theme for a radio program, people phoned in to find out about that intriguing piece they’d just heard.

Saffron Blaze: Castle Combe, Cotswold

Folk dances figure largely in this genre, not only for their emphasis on melody and rhythm but also because they have a local familiarity, even when they’re new to the listener. Philip Lane’s Suite of Cotswold Dances, which takes its name from a second of central-southwest England, carries the designation of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. 

Many of the great British composers of Light Music had careers in the film and television business and so much of the familiarity we have with their music comes not from the concert stage but the glowing screens in our living rooms, such as the music of Geoffrey Burgon. The name may be unfamiliar, but the melodies aren’t. The music for the BBC series Brideshead Revisited is an excellent example of the evocation of an England of the past in a 1981 piece of music.

Brideshead Revisited , Jeremy Irons (Chales Ryder), Antony Andrews (Sebastian Flyte), and Diana Quick (Julia Flyte), 1981

A similar theme was used for the Miss Marple films in the 1960s, and reused for the television series in 1985 with Joan Hickson. The composer, Ron Goodwin, is probably better known for his film scores for movies such as Where Eagles Dare, Force 10 from Navarone, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, Of Human Bondage, and Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

Joan Hickson as Miss Marple

Eric Coates made his name with his Knightsbridge march, but it was By the Sleepy Lagoon, written in 1930, that gave him long-lasting fame. This slow waltz for orchestra was discovered and lyrics were set to it (with the composer’s permission) it became a popular music hit for Glenn Miller, trumpeter Harry James, and singer Diana Shore. It also has been the theme for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1942.

Eric Coates

Another side of light music is humour. For the 1956 Hoffhung Music Festival, Malcolm Arnold wrote A Grand Grand Festival Overture, but the 4 soloists are not on the typical musical instruments but perform on 3 vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher.

Gerard Hoffnung: The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra

Gordon Jacob made free with the music of Rossini in his 1960 overture The Barber of Seville Goes to the Devil.

The heyday of Light Music really happened in the mid-20th century. It was such a popular subgenre of classical music that the BBC even had an entire radio channel, the BBC Light Programme, for this music that ran from 1945 to 1967, whereupon it was replaced with BBC Radio 2 (older pop music) and BBC Radio 1 (current pop music). Ease of access seems to have fallen to the self-importance of modern music but it’s all still fun to listen to!

The Heart Symbol and Music

by Maureen Buja , Interlude

  

We don’t really think about what the heart symbol (♥) really means. We know it’s not the shape of a real heart, which is much more asymmetrical. It’s been discovered in jewelry dating back to 3,000 years BCE, and is very much like shape of a seed of a plant used as a contraceptive. It was in the Middle Ages, however, that the equation between the heart symbol and love was made. Starting in the 15th century and continuing today, hearts mean love.

When we see books in the shapes of hearts, then, what are we to think of them? In this anonymous late 15th century painting of St. Jerome and St. Catherine, she’s reading a book. The two saints are surrounded by their attributes: St. Jerome and his lion and St. Catherine and the shattered wheel (known as a Catherine Wheel) representing the unsuccessful torture of Catherine by Emperor Maxentius. In her hands, she holds a heart-shaped book.

Anonymous: St Jerome and St Catherine of Alexandria (c. 1480 – c. 1490) (Rijksmuseum)

Another image from the same time shows a young man holding a heart-shaped book. Here, it’s thought that the heart shape might be related to St. Augustine, whose attribute was a flaming heart.

Master of the View of Sainte Gudule: Young Man Holding a Book (ca. 1480)
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

When heart-shaped books are closed and held between the hands, they form, in the liturgical sense, the shape of praying hands.

The Chantilly Codex, held in the museum at the Château de Chantilly, France, has an unusual musical work that was added to the beginning of the book. The book dates from ca. 1350-1400 and contains 112 musical works, mostly by French composers. The added work was written by the composer Baude Cordier (ca. 1380-ca. 1440) and is written in the shape of a heart – the top curved lines are the top voice and underneath are the Tenor and Contratenor lines. Below, filling out the point of the heart, are additional lyrics. The text, ‘Belle, bonne, sage, plaisant..’. means ‘Beautiful, good, wise, and pleasing…’ and after giving her his songs, the first verse closes with : ‘…my heart I also give to you.’ It’s a song for the new year and he urges his lover to take them as her due.

Belle, bonne, sage, plaisant (Chantilly Codes)

The heart-shaped music is a play on the name of the composer, where ‘cor’ of ‘Cordier’ means ‘heart,’ in addition to being his gift to her.

An entire music book in the shape not of a single heart, but a double heart was created in the Chansonnier Cordiforme (Heart-shaped Songbook). This sumptuously decorated double-heart book was commissioned between 1470 and 1475 by Jean de Montchenu, the Bishop of Agen (1477) and then Vivier (1478-1497). The book is bound in red velvet. The 44 pieces of music come from both Italian and French sources. The music is bordered with elaborate gold-touched illustrations of animals, including cats, dogs, and birds, and flowers and plants. In this page of music, there’s a fantastic beast on the left, a monkey with a book at the bottom of the page, and an elongated bird at the top and on the right side.

Detail of Chansonnier Cordiforme, with Bedyngham’s O rosa bella
(Bibliothèque nationale de France)

As a double-heart book, the design is intended to represent two lovers who are sending message to each other in the songs. The songs seem to reflect both his and her points of view: he goes out one morning and encounters a shepherdess, when he asks if she could love him, she replies that she loves another who entertains her with his pretty flageolet (L’autre jour). In another song, she says she is a pure girl and complains that jealousy is bearing false witness against her but says that virtue will be her defense (Be lo sa Dio). He compares his lover to a goddess because she is so full of goodness that everyone should pay her homage (De tous biens plaine). Each side can speak its part and say, often in coded words, how they regard the other.

There are two striking illustrations in the book: in this image from the beginning of the book, Cupid in the sky shoots arrows at a young girl and to the left, Fortune stands on her ever-turning wheel.

Chansonnier Cordiforme, fol. 3v, with J’ay pris amours (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

On another page, 2 lovers walk in a room. In the margins, a cupid has his arrow at the ready and floral and fauna fill the other corners of the heart. Those are the only two full-page images in the book – the other pages are filled with music.

Chansonnier Cordiforme, fol. 23v, with Gentil Madonna (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The music in the book is given without composer’s names, but in the centuries since the book was created, the composers have gradually been identified and include the big names of the 15th century: Guillaume Dufay, Gilles Binchois, Johannes Ockeghem, Antoine Busnois and other smaller names: Hayne van Ghizeghem, Vincenet du Bruecquet, the theorist Johannes Tinctoris, and English composers such as Robert Morton and Johannes Bedyngham.

There are other heart-shaped books, but they’re very rare. One example is the 16th-century Danish Hjertebog (Heart book), that contains 83 love ballads in Danish.