Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique"
September 7, 8 & 9, 2007
Click on the  to hear the musical examples.
Maurice Ravel
1875-1937 |
La valse
Maurice Ravel
Around the time of the outbreak of World War I, Maurice Ravel started work on a symphonic poem which he tentatively called Vienna. In light of the spreading hostilities he refrained from working on the project and did not return to it until 1919 at the urging of the impresario Sergey Diaghilev, giving it the title La valse.
Ravel is said to have appraised La valse as “a fantastic and fatefully inescapable whirlpool.” On the score he added the stage direction “An Imperial Court, about 1855,” a period when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was at its most reactionary. All through the 19th century it fought a rearguard action to maintain its integrity against nationalist movements from within and encroachment by its neighbors from without. But in Vienna, the capital, one would have seen little of that instability on the surface. For those at the Habsburg court, the well-to-do and the upper class of civil service, it was a time of glitter and joie de vivre, the most brilliant and prosperous period of the monarchy. With the hindsight of 1919, Ravel had a clear picture of the decaying empire’s future.
La valse premiered as an orchestral work in 1920 to great success. But Diaghilev was unhappy with it and never staged it. It was finally staged in Paris in 1928 in the style of an elegant festive ball in the Paris of the Second Empire. Finally, in 1951, Balanchine gave it the choreographic interpretation that expressed the “inescapable whirlpool.”
La valse opens with a pulsating heartbeat deep in the basses, contrabassoon and timpani, faintly delineating the waltz meter. The score follows closely the Ravel's scenic directive: “Clouds whirl about. Occasionally they part to allow a glimpse of waltzing couples. As the clouds lift, one can see a gigantic hall, filled by a crowd of moving dancers. The stage gradually brightens and the glow of the chandeliers breaks out fortissimo.” Like a proper Viennese waltz, the score progresses through a variety of themes, but as the dance becomes wilder and wilder, the melodies become engulfed in an increasingly dissonant whirlwind, and the dancers lose control. They are swept into a whirling vortex, finally cut off as if by a bolt of lightning.
In 1921 Ravel transcribed La valse for two pianos and there have been numerous transcriptions for piano solo since.
Piano Concerto in G Major
Maurice Ravel
In the annals of classical composers, Maurice Ravel was in a lucky minority. Born into a cultured middle-class family, he is one of the few composers whose parents encouraged his professional musical ambitions from the start. From the age of seven, Ravel’s father provided him with the best private musical instruction; at twelve, he went on to the preparatory school for the Paris Conservatoire, graduating into the regular course of study at fourteen. In a surprisingly single-minded manner, the youthful Ravel marched to his own drummer in terms of his musical language. He could not – or would not – conform to the rigorous, and by then dated, traditions of the Conservatoire and was repeatedly beaten out for the composition prizes awarded to composers who have now pretty much lapsed into oblivion.
Maurice Ravel was a good pianist and much of his large output for the piano was written for his own use. Liking both the very old and the very new, he frequently patterned the framework of his music after courtly dance forms from the Renaissance or the Baroque, in such works as the Menuet antique or Le tombeau de Couperin, while at the same time he was also one of the earliest classical composers to utilize the jazz idiom in his compositions, especially in his Violin Sonata and his two Piano Concertos.
The Piano Concerto in G was composed at the same time as the Piano Concerto for the left hand, commissioned by one-armed Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein. In 1929, at the time of its conception, Ravel had originally intended the G Major Concerto for his own use. But by the time he finished in 1931, his health was not up to the physical rigors of practicing and the premiere was given by French pianist Marguerite Long with the composer conducting. The two recorded it soon after the premiere in January 1932, a performance reissued on CD.
Because of the light-hearted and witty mood of the Concerto, especially when compared to the seriousness of its left-handed companion, Ravel originally wanted to call the concerto a “Divertissement.” It opens with a crack of the whip, or slapstick, followed by a perky tune on the piccolo which is in turn taken over by a trumpet solo, all the time accompanied by gossamer arpeggios on the piano. In an exaggeration of the convention of a contrasting second theme, Ravel switches into a languid blues style making use of a short jazz refrain first for the clarinet, which he appends as a cadence figure throughout the movement as solos for the various wind and brass instruments. While the piano, with its jazzy, syncopated rhythm, is clearly the dominant instrument, Ravel provides abundant solo opportunities for the orchestral instruments.
The graceful slow movement adagio was modeled, according to Ravel, on the Larghetto in Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. It opens with a long piano solo, an “unending melody” that is resolved only many bars into the orchestral part. Ironically, the seemingly easy and natural spinning out of the melody with its inherent tension born of delayed resolution belies the difficulties the composer had with it: Ravel said he pieced it together bar by bar.
The dazzling Presto finale is a virtuoso piece for the soloist, the drumming of repeated notes suggestive of a Baroque toccata. But this is no Baroque imitation, punctuated as it is by jazz riffs for solo winds and “blue notes.” The final cadence returns to the snappy opening bars of the movement.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893 |
Symphony No.6 in b minor, Op.74 ("Pathétique")
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
This Symphony was Tchaikovsky’s final completed work, premiered to a lukewarm reception on October 28, 1983 only nine days before the composer’s death from cholera. Although its emotional intensity and title, Pathétique, suggest that this was yet another manifestation of the composer’s periodic depression, or even a foreshadowing of his own death, the fact remains that Tchaikovsky was extremely pleased with this work from the moment he set to work on it. At the symphony’s second performance, as part of a memorial service for the composer, the audience seems to have suddenly perceived its significance, and it has remained a favorite ever since.
Tchaikovsky’s original conception was that the symphony should have a program, much like Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, but he refused to specify what the program was, wanting the listener to guess it. His early, and by now well-known, scenario for the program reads: “The ultimate essence of the plan…is LIFE. First movement–all impulsive passion, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short. (Finale DEATH – result of collapse). Second movement, love, third, disappointment, fourth ends dying away (also short).” The final version can be understood to conform to this program only in part, and then only in the first and fourth movements. That it bears little resemblance to the final version of the music is clear even at a first hearing.
Still intending to call his work a “program” symphony, Tchaikovsky accepted his brother Modest’s suggestion of the Russian patetichesky, which the publisher insisted on translating into French, still the language of the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia. The English reader, however, should be aware that the adjective pathétique actually means “highly emotional” and does not have the derogatory connotation of “pathetic.”
The Symphony opens with a low bassoon solo introducing the first theme in a ponderous and pessimistic adagio. The melody is then taken up in a nervous allegro and repeated by the successive sections of the orchestra. The emotional turmoil, however, is resolved in the second theme, among the most famous in the canon of memorable Tchaikovsky melodies. The theme was specifically meant to be a transformation of Don José’s “flower aria” from Carmen – giving a hint as to the composer’s emotional take on love.
The second movement is a “waltz” in 5/4 time, giving the impression of alternating bars of 3/4 and 2/4. Strangely enough, this meter works as a waltz, for despite its limping quality, one can imagine the alternating foreshortened 2/4 bars used for a lift or emotive pause, if the movement were actually to be used for dancing. It is a hybrid of a classical minuet and trio, or scherzo – with two themes and a series of repeats – and a ternary (ABA) song form customary for slow movements. The Trio (or B section), which proceeds with a constant timpani ostinato in the background, darkens the ballroom atmosphere.
Like the first movement, the third is best known for its second theme, a sprightly march, which follows a scurrying opening theme in rapid triplets, out of which one can already hear hints of the march theme. As in the second movement, however, the composer utilizes an unusual metrical structure, creating an ambiguity between duple and triple time by composing the march in 12/8 time. The movement, in G major, seems almost to begin backwards with a series of themes in the relative e minor that gradually lead into the march theme in the principal key.
The Finale can be interpreted as taking up the symphony’s original program. The opening theme, a series of short breathless, sighing motives, is a variation of the first theme of the opening movement and has the identical underlying harmony. A programmatic interpretation of the movement suggests anxious struggle – in the rising sequences – and resignation upon the approach of the nothingness of death. It is particularly noteworthy in the history of symphonic finales in both its lugubrious tempo and fatalistic pessimism.
Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2007
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