The Nutcracker & Sorcerer’s Apprentice Program notes

L’apprenti sorcier [The Sorcerer’s Apprentice]

Paul Dukas

Born 1 October, 1865 in Paris, France | Died 17 May, 1935 in Paris, France

World premiere: May 18, 1897 in Paris

Dukas was a prominent music critic as well as a composer
Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas were close friends
He taught himself music theory and began composing at age 14
His students at the Paris Conservatory included Maurice Duruflé and Olivier Messiaen

Like Johannes Brahms, Paul Dukas was a perfectionist. His high standards for craftsmanship prompted him to destroy many of his own compositions. Consequently, few of us are acquainted with any of his music besides The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The French consider his masterpiece to be the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (“Ariane and Bluebeard,” 1907); Dukas also composed a fine Piano Sonata that is rarely heard.

Dukas and Disney: the Mickey Mouse factor

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is inextricably associated with the image of Mickey Mouse, frantically sloshing buckets of water in an ineffectual attempt to prevent flooding in his master’s workshop. The scene is captured in immortal animation in Walt Disney’s original Fantasia.

Dukas’ symphonic scherzo actually has its origins in a poem by Goethe. The story is well-known. In his master’s absence, the apprentice incants a spell that causes a broom to fetch water for him, sparing the apprentice that task. But he forgets the magic formula to stop the broom. Panicked, he hacks the broom in two, aghast when the broom clones itself into two brooms fetching water. As the house approaches flood stage, the sorcerer returns and invokes the correct magic to restore order amidst the soggy shambles of his workshop.

Dukas the orchestral wizard

A master of orchestration, Dukas matched the finest achievements of the 19th century in this 12-minute work. Every detail of Goethe’s poem is present, artfully illustrated in brilliant orchestral color. With careful manipulation of a basic variation form, he uses odd, three-measure phrase lengths and mysterious, magical sound effects to bring the tale to life, instilling a child’s delight in all of us. When the piece was premiered in May 1897, it was an instant success.

Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, timpani, harp, glockenspiel, bass drum, cymbals, triangle and strings.

Prelude to L’après-midi d’un faune

Claude Debussy

Born 22 August, 1862 in St-Germain-en-Laye, France | Died 25 March, 1918 in Paris

World Premiere: December 22, 1894 in Paris

Debussy is generally categorized as an Impressionist composer
Literate and well-educated, he composed dozens of songs setting poetry by France’s symbolist poets
For the most part, Debussy avoided traditional forms like symphony, sonata and concerto
Far-Eastern music, particularly Javanese gamelan, fascinated him
Mood and expressivity are more important in his music than motivic development or traditional harmony

“L’après-midi d’un faune” (“Afternoon of a Faun”) is a poem by the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). Debussy’s orchestral piece, though often mistakenly referred to by the name of the poem, is actually a prelude to the poem. The composer intended his music to be “a very free illustration and in no way a synthesis of the poem.”

Written between 1865 and 1876, Mallarmé’s poem is subtitled “Eclogue.” He conceived it for the stage, intending that it be recited by an actor as a monologue. One of its early titles was “Monologue d’un faune.” In it, a faun dreams about the conquest of nymphs on a languorous summer afternoon.

Debussy was a highly literate musician and an excellent writer. By 1890, he had become a member of Mallarmé’s inner circle. The subtle eroticism of Mallarmé’s symbolist imagery in “L’après-midi d’un faune” inspired him to plan an ambitious musical triptych as incidental music. When the piece was announced in March 1894, it consisted of a Prélude, Interludes et Paraphrase Finale. Debussy either abandoned the later movements or compressed his ideas into the single ten-minute work that has survived. In that form, it received its first performance in December 1894, two years after he began work on it.

The Prélude is atmospheric, an evocation of the poem’s lyrical spirit rather than a narrative representation. Debussy’s music has two principal themes. The first, stated by the flute, is sinuous, lyrical, and sensual. The second, which belongs primarily to the other winds, is more concrete. Throughout the Prélude, Debussy’s effect is fragmentary. No real development of the themes occurs. With muted strings and horns, he captures the shimmering beauty of the summer’s day. No brasses other than mellow French horns mar the subtle delicacy of the orchestration, whose rainbow of pastels beguiles our ears so seductively.

Instrumentation: three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, four horns, two harps and strings.

Shéhérazade Songs

Maurice Ravel

Born 7 March, 1875 in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrenées, France | Died 28 December, 1937 in Paris

World premiere: May 27, 1899 in Paris

Ravel’s father was the inventor of a “Whirlwind of Death” circus machine
During World War I, Ravel drove a truck at the Verdun front
A spiffy dresser, he was meticulous about his personal appearance
His masterful orchestration of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition earned him substantial income

Isn’t Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov? With the solo role for the concertmaster?

If you’re scratching your head wondering how Rimsky-Korsakov found his way onto this program, you’re not so far off as it might initially seem. Maurice Ravel was a great admirer of the Russian composer and his 1888 symphonic suite, Scheherazade, based on the 1001 Arabian nights. So entranced was he by the Rimsky score and the exoticism of the Eastern subject matter that he began work on a Shéhérazade opera in the 1890s. That project never progressed beyond an overture completed in 1898.

Within two years, Ravel had become a member of a group of young men meeting weekly in the Montmartre home of Paul Sordes, a painter and amateur musician. They shared an aesthetic that admired Chinese art; the poets Mallarmé, Verlaine and Valéry; the painters Van Gogh, Cézanne and Whistler; and composers ranging from Couperin and Chopin to Debussy and the Russian Five. Other members of this circle included the composer Florent Schmitt, pianist Ricardo Viñes, critic Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi, writer Léon-Paul Fargue, designer Emile Seguy and the poet Léon Leclère, who published verse using the Wagnerian pseudonym Tristan Klingsor. The group became known as Les Apaches, which translates loosely to ‘the hooligans.’ Their weekly meetings included musical performances, poetry readings and discussion of all aspects of art and the arts. Les Apaches continued to convene until the First World War. The meetings and the shifting membership exerted a major influence on Ravel.

In 1903, the poet Tristan Klingsor completed a collection of 100 poems entitled Shéhérazade. a conscious borrowing from the Rimsky-Korsakov work. The poems, in unrhymed free verse, focused on the exotic magnetism of Oriental culture and lore. Ravel devoured the anthology, and specifically requested that Klingsor read several of the poems aloud at a meeting of Les Apaches. Klingsor was a painter and musician as well as a poet. He had become convinced that a poet must study music in order to fully understand nuances of rhythm, and his verse bore a strong rhythmic undercurrent. While he was pleased that Ravel was interested in setting his texts, he was perplexed by the composer’s choices — ‘Asie,’ ‘La Flûte Enchantée,’ and ‘L’indifférent’ — all poems that Klingsor deemed less well-suited to music. He found Ravel’s settings even more puzzling, with rhythmic emphases different from those in Klingsor’s declamation. Yet when Alfred Cortot conducted Jane Hatto in the première, the prominent composer Vincent d’Indy proclaimed these songs to be Ravel’s finest work to date.

More than at any other time in his career, Ravel was intensely interested in Debussy’s music while composing the Shéhérazade songs in 1903. He acknowledged his indebtedness in his autobiographical sketch, also citing “the profound fascination which the Orient has exerted upon me since childhood.”

The songs themselves are at once odd and mesmerizing. ‘Asie’ is a long poem, and even Ravel’s syllabic, recitative-like setting cannot prevent it from being a long movement. At nine and a half minutes, it is longer than the other two songs combined. Klingsor’s text unveils a panorama of exotic images that stimulate Ravel’s musical imagination. He uses two principal orchestral themes, one for oboe, the other for a duo of clarinets. Brief orchestral interludes separate sections of text, allowing for transition in both textual imagery and musical material. The climax occurs at the couplet:

I’d like to see them who die for love
and them who die for hatred.

The latter two songs are simpler in structure, and similar to each other in that they both use material in a quasi-cyclic fashion, restating at the close music we hear at the beginning. ‘La flûte enchantée’ features an obbligato role for its eponymous orchestral star. It is in every way more localized, more intimate, than its predecessor, and irresistibly lovely. The mixed metaphor of the flute’s sound approximating the kiss of the singer’s lover introduces a sensual, erotic element that increases in the final song, ‘L’indifférent.’ Surely the most enigmatic of the set, this song has long been thought to be a rare clue to Ravel’s own sexuality.

In a memoir written in 1933, the music critic (and former Apache) Michel Calvocoressi wrote:

Many people alleged that the care he took to exclude from his music all that might resemble a direct expression of emotion was one of the signs of . . . artificiality. Once, in a reply to a question of mine, he said that if he himself had to point out, in his music, passages in which the direct expression of emotion, far from being excluded, had been deliberately attempted, he would begin by selecting the opening of ‘Asie’ in Shéhérazade, then ‘L’indifférent’ in the same set of songs. . . .

Ravel is said to have preferred that a man’s voice sing the Shéhérazade songs. Although they are almost exclusively performed by women today, it is worth remembering that the poet Klingsor was male, and an openly homosexual one at that. Ravel’s music is discreetly and unapologetically erotic, allowing us to abandon ourselves to the sheer beauty of sound.

Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets in A, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, celesta, two harps, soprano solo and strings.

**Excerpts from The Nutcracker Suites, Op. 71a and Op.71b**

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Born 7 May, 1840 in Votkinsk, Viatka district, Russia | Died 6 November, 1893 in St. Petersburg, Russia

World premiere: December 18, 1892 in St. Petersburg, Russia

Tchaikovsky was the greatest 19^th-century ballet composer
Shakespeare fascinated him; he wrote works based on The Tempest, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet
Initially, he planned to become a civil servant
His symphonies and concertos synthesize Western forms with Russian musical content

The Nutcracker is a Christmas season staple, in addition to being one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular scores. Composed in 1891 and 1892, it was Tchaikovsky’s final ballet, conceived to capitalize on the enormous success of Sleeping Beauty in 1890. For his scenario, he drew on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story Nußknacker und Mausekönig [The Nutcracker and the Mouse King], which he read in Russian translation.

Hoffmann’s story is an appealing mixture of reality, fantasy and dream sequence. Tchaikovsky was quick to grasp its suitability for the ballet stage, enlisting the assistance of the legendary dancer and choreographer Marius Petipa, his collaborator on Sleeping Beauty. Petipa planned the entire production, but his declining health prevented him from realizing it; the actual choreography is credited to his assistance Lev Ivanov. Many other choreographers have since turned their hand to this immortal ballet, including Frederic Ashton, George Balanchine, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The Nutcracker has become the most frequently performed ballet in the literature.

The story actually takes place on Christmas Eve, which makes Tchaikovsky’s score singularly appropriate to the holiday season. Tchaikovsky’s music requires little introduction; however, the delicacy and sure technique of his orchestration remain miraculous in spite of their familiarity. Listen with delight to the opening wind and brass fanfare in the March, answered by violins in dotted rhythms and pizzicato runs in the cellos and basses. Tchaikovsky’s Trepak is part 4 of a Divertissement in Act II, each segment of which is a national dance. This vigorous Russian dance will The sprightly flute trio in the familiar Danse des Mirlitons is a choreographic and musical pun; mirlitons refer both to a children’s toy flute (rather like a kazoo) and to an elegant French pastry shaped like a tube. In Tchaikovsky’s hands, this movement transforms into a pastoral dance. Mère Gigogne et les polichinelles (Mother Ginger and her Clowns) is adapted from the children’s tale “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” Tchaikovsky makes it a three-part dance, switching from march tempo to a waltz for the middle section. Harp figures prominently in the Grand pas de deux for the Sugarplum Fairy and Prince Orgeat – but the luscious theme introduced by the cellos in this Adagio is one of Tchaikovsky’s crowning glories, building to symphonic grandeur in a spine-tingling climax.

Instrumentation: three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, glockenspiel, cymbals, castanets, harp and strings.

La mer

Claude Debussy

Born 22 August, 1862 in St-Germain-en-Laye, France | Died 25 March, 1918 in Paris

World premiere: October 15, 1905 in Paris

La mer is one of many musical works inspired by oceans and seas
As a young man, Debussy spent summers working for Tchaikovsky’s patroness Nadezhda von Meck
Much of his music was inspired by poetry, paintings and literature
At his death, he had begun two operas based on works by Edgar Allan Poe

In a letter to his friend André Messager written in 1903, Debussy alludes to the fact that his father intended him to be a sailor. While that did not come to pass, Debussy harbored a lifelong fascination for the sea. His biographer Marcel Dietschy has noted that:

The sky and the sea thrilled Debussy; their immensity, their restless majesty held for him something implicitly unique and mysterious.

La mer is Debussy’s paean to the sea. These three movements embody that most mercurial of natural wonders, the endlessly changing undulations of large bodies of water. In its evocation of the play of light upon water and wave upon wave, it is the quintessential impressionist work in music.

Literature and the visual arts fuse forces in music

Few figures in music have been better qualified to cross-pollinate among the various arts. Debussy was highly cultured and well-read. He likely had several literary works in mind while working on La mer, including Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, with its vivid, sometimes violent descriptions of the ocean.

In the visual arts, Debussy’s grounding was equally strong. He was well acquainted with both Western and Eastern art, and held strong opinions about both. He considered Joseph Mallard William Turner (1775-1851) to be “the finest creator of mystery in art,” an observation the more striking since Turner’s reputation in France was ascendant at the same time Debussy’s own musical expertise was developing.

Among Japanese artists, his favorites were Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), the outstanding printmakers of the 19th century who exerted a powerful influence on Degas, van Gogh, and Gauguin. So struck was Debussy by the power of Hokusai’s landscapes that he requested a segment from the Japanese master’s “The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa,” from Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji, be reproduced on the cover of La mer‘s full score. The association with Debussy’s music has contributed to that painting’s remarkable fame.

La mer consists of three movements that Debussy called “symphonic sketches.” They are, of course, more ambitious in scale than mere sketches: full symphonic movements, though not in the sense of an 18th- or 19th-century symphony. We are provided no programme per se beyond the movement titles, which translate to “From Dawn ’til Noon on the Sea,” “Play of the Waves” and “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea.” Debussy eschews the kind of melody that one hums. While his score is filled with melodic fragments, it is the sweep of orchestral detail bringing the infinite variety of the water to musical life that holds our attention. Felicitous orchestral touches abound, but the parts for harp and muted brass, especially in the second movement, reward careful listening.

Mixed reception for a new piece of music

At the time of the premiere, Debussy was embroiled in an affair with the singer Emma Bardac, who eventually became his second wife. His first wife, Lili Texier, had recently attempted suicide. These events precipitated a scandal that led to some negative reviews when La mer was premiered in October 1905. Another factor affecting its reception was contemporary arts criticism in France. At the time, the connection between color and sound was a fashionable critical idea. The premiere coincided with the first salon exhibition of the controversial painters who became known as the Fauves (“wild beasts”): Matisse, Rouault, and Derain. An anonymous program note published at the premiere made a strong connection between those artists’ bold colors and Debussy’s music.

It is true that La mer is a multi-sensory work, merging musical and visual ideas. In fact, as shimmering and understated as this lovely score sounds to our 21^st-century ears, La mer uses a flashy orchestra by Debussyan standards. Generally, he favored a more understated palette, most evident in La mer‘s middle movement. The surging climax in the finale is almost flamboyant in comparison.

Instrumentation: two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, tam-tam, two harps, and strings.