Chapter 28: Modernism Is France I. Introduction A. Introduction 1. At the same time as the Austro-Germans were seeking new musical legacies, composers in France were moving in a different direction. 2. As with the Germans, the French movement was influenced by rapidly changing styles and innovations. a. The French were interested in moving away from Wagnerian rhetoric and emphasized immediate physical sensation. b. The argument was essentially (German) frivolous versus (French) pretentious, although this simplifies the situation. B. Wagnerian Hommages and Exorcisms 1. Wagner’s music was popular in France in the late nineteenth century. a. Several composers, such as Chabrier, intentionally adopted aspects of his style. b. Others, such as Fauré, deliberately spoofed the German composer. 2. Musical satire was often aimed at Wagner, reminding the listener that Wagner’s music is only music. 3. Several French composers sought to neutralize German excesses (maximalism). C. Getting Rid of the Glue: Erik Satie 1. Satie, the original hippie, wrote three sarabandes in 1887. a. Satie lived a Bohemian life in Montmartre where he was a pianist at a local night club. b. He was known as the “laziest” student at the Paris Conservatoire, a counterculture composer who liked to annoy his professors. 2. Proclaiming himself an anti-Wagnerite was popular, and choosing to write in an “old” style was also popular in the 1880s and 1890s. 3. Satie’s sarabandes, however, were different, particularly in their use of harmony. “Consonant” seventh and ninth chords became a sign of French style. a. Wagner had employed such sounds, but always resolved them. b. The French established them as consonances. 4. By making these chords consonant, Satie removed the harmonic glue. If dissonance did not have to move to resolution, what did? II. Debussy A. Claude Debussy’s Early Years 1. Satie’s use of harmony was influential. a. Composed in 1887, these weren’t published until 1911, so it took some time for them to circulate. 2. Debussy’s early works appeared before Satie’s most famous work (the three Gymnopédies). 3. Even though their lives intersected in several ways, Debussy differed significantly from Satie. a. Debussy worked assiduously at the conservatory and finished with distinction.

b. He worked for Tchaikovsky’s patron, Nadezhda von Meck, which resulted in an interest in Russian music. c. He won the Prix de Rome in 1884 and studied in Italy. d. He went to Bayreuth and heard Wagner’s music. e. He heard other music at World Exhibitions. 4. When he returned from his travels, Debussy was somewhat of a rebel. 5. He believed in musical pleasure over rules and tradition. a. Nonetheless, he controlled his experiment with new sounds. b. Ultimately, in his 1894 Sarabande, he created an atmosphere of sound where what once was labeled “dissonant” and in need of resolution no longer needed to be so. B. Voiles: Sails and/or Veils 1. Debussy’s “Voiles” (1909) demonstrates his harmonic idiom. a. His preludes derive from Chopin’s. b. The titles appear at the end, as if a suggestion. c. “Voiles” can mean either “veils” or “masks” or “sails” or “sailboats.” 2. The whole-scale serves as an organizing factor through most of the work. a. As such, everything exists in equal proportion—without tension. b. A sense of unfolding is not predetermined by harmonic expectation. c. A pentatonic scale within the work provides structure and contrast. C. Impressionism and Symbolism 1. Aspects of “Voiles” correspond to painting techniques: the use of color (timbres) and blurry harmony. 2. These adjectives are associated with Impressionism, a school of French painting beginning in the 1880s. a. Artists associated with this style include Monet and non-French artists such as Turner and Whistler. b. The label was initially derogatory. 3. Debussy disliked being called Impressionist. a. The lack of empathy in his art connected him further with the visual arts. 4. The absence of a harmonic push forward can be likened to an artwork that extends in space rather than unfolds in time. 5. Debussy’s “Voiles” can also be compared to the French poetry movement known as Symbolism, associated with Baudelaire. a. Dating earlier than the Impressionist painters, Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857) is seen as the beginning of Symbolism. b. The words represent symbols that have a hidden meaning, one that opens new meanings to those who understand—but that are revealed beyond the senses. D. Pelléas et Mélisande 1. Symbolism was a main factor in several of Debussy’s most important pieces. 2. His first famous work, Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune (1894), was based on a poem by Mallarmé, leader of the Symbolists after Baudelaire. 3. His only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, was based on a drama by Maeterlinck, the leader of the Symbolist movement after Mallarmé.

a. The dramatic plot resembles Tristan und Isolde in an obvious way. b. Maeterlinck’s drama proceeds with extreme passivity, rather than action, and insists on humanity over verismo. c. Debussy struggled over the moment when Golaud kills Pelléas, not wanting to use typical chord progressions to depict the death. d. He ultimately refers musically to the Tristan chord, but his are not harmonically active—they do not “progress.” Rather, they linger, without direction. 4. Debussy threw out Wagner’s harmonic glue, allowing more options for harmonic movement. III. Fauré and Ravel A. “Essentially French”: Fauré and Mélodie 1. Fauré, an older contemporary of Debussy, was attracted to Symbolist poetry as well, and set many poems to music. 2. His settings are known as mélodie, a genre of art song. 3. Fauré set many poems by Verlaine. a. The poems evoked a sense of the “ancient” and old-style forms. b. Fauré used chromaticism as other post-Wagnerians, but he cast it in a pseudoMedieval style that gave his music a “brand-old” freshness (similar to that to which Verlaine aspired). 4. Fauré’s Requiem dates from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and is typically French. a. Restraint is the order of the day—there is no Dies irae (the most dramatic part of the Requiem). b. It evokes monophonic chant without incorporating it. c. It is focused on heaven, not hell. 1) The final movement vividly demonstrates the emphasis on heaven (In paradisum), which is not typically part of the funeral service but the graveside one. 2) The musical representation of desire is suppressed in lieu of heavenly bliss, typified by the undulating harp. B. Maurice Ravel 1. The remaining Impressionist composer was Ravel. a. His music was more popular than Debussy’s, eventually, thanks to the Bolero (1928). 2. Influenced by Russian music and study with Fauré, Ravel’s music is particularly colorful and sensual (as demonstrated in his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, 1922). 3. Ravel capitalized on an exoticism borne of a French father and Basque mother (Pyrenees). a. Several of his works demonstrate his use of exoticism, including the Rapsodie espagnole (1908), which features octatonic scales and inventive orchestral writing. 1) Like other “Spanish” pieces by non-Spanish composers, its exoticism is superficial.

IV. Others A. New Possibilities for Women 1. Women artists, in any medium, fought against a variety of prejudices. 2. A few noteworthy women were able to succeed in spite of almost unbeatable odds. 3. France allowed opportunities much earlier than other European countries (including the United States). a. Women were allowed to compete for the Prix de Rome beginning in 1903. b. Four women won it in the first decade they were eligible. 1) These include Lili Boulanger (1913). a) Lili’s early works contained aspects of Wagner, but she found her own style. b) Unfortunately, she died early and did not have an opportunity to develop further. c) Her later works resemble those of Fauré. 2) Her sister, Nadia, was an influential teacher in the twentieth century, although she never placed first. B. Ballet: A Missing Genre 1. The history of European music does not frequently deal with ballet. 2. The genre is prominent in France, where it can be regarded as a “wordless opera.” a. Recitative was done as pantomime. b. Actual dances were parallel to arias. 3. Adolphe Adam was a successful Romantic ballet composer. His most famous work was Giselle (1841). 4. Another popular composer was Léo Delibes; he composed Coppélia and Sylvia. 5. Later in the nineteenth century, ballet lost credibility as a “serious” compositional product, but it remained a serious art in Russia. a. The Kirov saw a number of outstanding choreographers. 6. Tchaikovsky rescued the ballet as a serious musical composition. a. Among his masterpieces are Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker. b. He raised ballet to a level of prestige that would be sought as a counterpart to German serious works in the early twentieth century. C. Ballet Finds Its Theorist 1. Alexandre Benois appreciated Tchaikovsky’s music but associated it with oldfashioned elitist ideals. 2. In the early twentieth century, Russian ballet did not reflect current trends in Russia— those reflected by novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. a. It was seen as outdated and dependent on old-fashioned ideas of beautiful. 3. Benois and Sergey Diaghilev (1872–1929) looked to a new artistic movement: Mir iskusstva. a. Between the two of them, ballet was seen as music-theater’s emancipation from the spoken word. 4. Diaghilev may have been the world’s greatest impresario. a. He began a yearly Russian season in Paris in 1906.

b. He brought in music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and others. c. In 1908 he produced Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov in Paris. d. In 1909 French critics complained that Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were not exotic enough—they didn’t portray a recognizable Russian style. 5. With the lessening of popularity for the Ballets Russes, Diagheliv commissioned a new work based on a Russian folk subject. V. Stravinsky A. Stravinsky’s The Firebird and Petrushka 1. Stravinsky agreed to Diaghilev’s request for a Russian folk subject. 2. The first of Stravinsky’s ballets was The Firebird. a. It was a team effort, involving choreographer and dancer. b. The subject comes from Russian folklore, or several folk tales. c. The composer used the folk-styled music for the human characters and octatonic scales for the supernatural ones. In doing so, he maximalized the work of RimskyKorsakov, as the Austro-Germans had done Wagner. 3. The Firebird also exists as a popular suite for orchestra, sans ballet. 4. As he composed The Firebird, Stravinsky had an idea that would develop into The Rite of Spring. He chose, however, to first write a comic piece: Petrushka. a. Diaghilev talked Stravinsky into making Petrushka a ballet. b. The music is a mixture of unrelated topics that the French believed was Russian. c. Again the human element is augmented with supernatural, in this case puppets that come to life. d. Ironically, only the puppets have individual personalities and emotions. 5. With the second tableau of Petrushka Stravinsky moved into a new realm— octatonicism became a tonality in its own right. 6. The Petrushka-chord (Ex. 28-9) illustrates outbursts of emotion among the characters. 7. Part of the success with Petrushka can be attributed to the magnificant dancing of Nijinsky. B. The Rite of Spring 1. The success of Petrushka turned Stravinsky back to the idea of a prehistory ballet, a somewhat common theme among artists of the period. 2. Some of the tableaux are based on historical documents that describe aspects of prehistorical worship practices. 3. Stravinsky sought maximal dissonance and sounded it through an extremely large orchestra, which he used to brilliant effect. a. The two greatest expressions of maximalism are the dances that conclude each part. 4. One of the most remarkable elements of the Rite is that of innovations in rhythm. a. Shifting lengths of measures, frequent changes of meter, and a general focus on rhythm hitherto unparalleled in European music have led scholars to describe Stravinsky as “emancipating rhythm.” b. One rhythmical aspect was static—the use of ostinato.

c. The other is the use of irregularly spaced downbeats. Such division of time is present in different cultures (Stravinsky may have known about it from Russian folklore), but it is not typical of European art music. d. These rhythmic innovations contribute to the “savagery” of the work. C. Reactions to Two Ballets 1. Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky’s Rite were premiered within two weeks of each other. 2. Debussy’s work was not so successful, or at least notorious, and disappeared from the stage until the mid-twentieth century. Its rehearsal numbers were more typical of the 1910s, as was the music. 3. Stravinsky’s work had more than the typical number of rehearsals—much more than Jeux. 4. The dress rehearsal of Rite went well, and a sense of drama surrounded the premiere. a. Tickets were double the normal price. b. Like the premiere of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, the audience expected one type of performance but got something entirely different. 5. The premiere itself is a thing of legend, although the details of exactly what happened are unclear. a. Laughter began as soon as the music did. b. There was so much noise from the audience that the music was inaudible at times. 6. The company (Ballet Russe) toured the work after five more Paris performances; it quickly became a popular concert piece. 7. The work has been described as Primitivism (appealing to savages/peasants/raw emotion and far removed from Romanticism)—and even Biologism (life is ultimately the sum of physicality). The latter challenged traditional religious beliefs. 8. With Stravinsky’s Rite being discussed in all the papers and elsewhere under such weighty consideration, Debussy’s Jeux dropped from such discussion altogether. a. The play in Debussy’s work is ostensibly a game of tennis, but a young man and two girls disappear together into the woods at the end. b. The potentially “risqué” situation is only suggested. 9. Debussy’s work is about trivial, everyday life—which is just as modern as Stravinsky’s neoprimitivism. 10. The music was also new, particularly in the way in which Debussy structured musical time. 11. Jeux was the last orchestral work by Debussy; Stravinsky (younger) lived another 60 years.