Page 223 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

Between January and April 1828, the year of his death, Schubert wrote this last Fantasy that seems to answer his first composition which bears the same title. But this time we are in the presence of a kind of testament. It is a farewell to numerous characters and to all the things Schubert loved.
Schubert died at 31. He began this piece in January of 1828, finished it in March, performed it in May, wrote the Schwanengesang in May and the B-flat Sonata in September, and died in November. He wrote it for Karoline Esterházy, with whom he had first fallen in love when she was eleven. (Shades of Schumann.) As she grew up, Karoline began to notice his awkward silences. She asked him if he would dedicate a piece to her. “What would be the use?” he said. “All that I do is dedicated to you.” But he dedicated this to her, and no doubt played it with her frequently. So in a way it is a very complex love song, which begins and ends with
a theme of unrequited passion (plus an extremely brief and muted Viennese coda: there is no dancing tonight).
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918) Petite suite for Piano Four Hands
For those who want to know about the creative background of this gorgeous music, read on.
But the greatest pleasure lies in simply listening to its rapturous melodies, which transcend their provenance. This is one of the most endearing and enduring of all piano duets. It is Monet in music.
En bateau: Both parts, for the treble and bass pianists, are evenly matched. As the melodies sway between the pianists, the “accompaniment” remains musically compelling, so the entire range of the piano is consistently taken up with an immense palette of lush harmonies, like a garden overgrown with vines and spring blossoms.
Both En bateau and Cortège are poems from Paul Verlaine’s second book of poems, Fêtes galantes (1869). Verlaine was the prototype of the French poet of the late 1800s. A complete failure, a social and sexual outcast, he was abhorred by decent society, and none of his books sold. But at a certain point he became immensely celebrated for everything that had ruined him. No one wanted to know him; he died, at age 52, in pov- erty, in the home of a courtesan. But 3,000 people attended his funeral.
Verlaine’s poems are closely rhymed (Il pleure dans mon
coeur . . .) and notorious for putting sound before sense, so that their music often eludes an English translation. Their inner music lends itself to outer melody (although such literal equivalents are hard to translate effectively into sounds).
Debussy wrote to the composer Ernest Chausson about the difficulty of translating non-essential ornamentation into music:
One would gain more, it seems to me . . . by
finding the perfect design for an idea and only going as far as necessary with ornamentation. . . . Look at the scarcity of symbol concealed in some of Mallarmé’s last sonnets, where nevertheless the artful skill is taken to its outer limits, and look at Bach, where everything works fantastically toward highlighting the main idea, where the lightness of the inner parts never absorbs the principal theme. . .
Debussy in fact wanted to escape the rigid structures of the past, such as sonata form, regular rhythms, and harmonies based on outmoded conventions, such as the circle of fifths. As with late Beethoven, if Debussy wanted to go from
A to G, he ignored the steps in between and just went there directly. Rather than having well-defined keys that modulate gradually to other well-defined keys, Debussy blurred everything together, as people’s motives are never apparent, as the sounds of cities aren’t in one key at a time.
2018 Summer Season 223