SCHUMANN & RAVEL: MOTHER GOOSE

Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant
Petit Poucet
Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes
Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête
Le jardin féerique

Originally composed as ‘five children’s pieces’ in 1910, Ravel’s Mother Goose was orchestrated by the composer the following year, and expanded into a ballet (with the addition of a prelude and a dance). The pieces are mostly based on familiar fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, The Green Serpent (in which Laidronette is one of the princesses), and Beauty and the Beast. The final ‘Enchanted Garden’ doesn’t appear to be based on a traditional tale. Ravel is at his most colourful and inventive in these exquisite miniatures which lend themselves to imaginative arrangement.

© Nigel Simeone 2015

Allegro
Andante sostenuto
Allegro vivace

The composer of three symphonies and an impressive body of chamber music as well as an extensive catalogue of works for piano (her own instrument), Louise Farrenc has thankfully been rediscovered after a century of neglect. Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont, she came from an artistic family and was encouraged to develop her gifts as a pianist and composer. She studied the piano with Moscheles and Hummel, and her composition teacher was Anton Reicha. In 1821 she married the flautist Aristide Farrenc who subsequently established a publishing business. After a successful career as a travelling virtuoso, Louise Farrenc was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842, a post she held for thirty years. The Sextet for piano and wind quintet was written in 1851–2, immediately after the successful premiere of her Nonet for strings and wind (in which Joseph Joachim was one of the performers).

The first movement – the longest of the three – opens with a dramatic theme, decorated by elaborate piano writing, while the second theme is more lyrical. Broadly-conceived, this movement ends in grand style. The main theme of the slow movement is introduced by the wind alone before the being taken up by the piano, then by the whole ensemble with several short wind solos. The finale begins with an urgent and uneasy theme on the piano which gives way to a delicate second idea. But dramatic intensity is maintained throughout the movement, right up to the turbulent ending.

© Nigel Simeone

Duruflé was an exceptionally self-critical composer, leaving a very small output. He was even disparaging about the music allowed to be published, including pieces that enjoyed considerable success. He is best remembered for his organ music, and for choral works such as the Requiem and the Four Motets based on Gregorian chants. There are two purely instrumental pieces: the Trois Danses for orchestra (which Duruflé also arranged for two pianos and for solo piano), and the present Prélude, Récitatif et Variations, written in 1928 and dedicated to the memory of the great Parisian music publisher, Jacques Durand (1865–1928) who had published most of the major works of Debussy and Ravel as well as Saint-Saëns, Roussel and others. Scored for the unusual ensemble of flute, viola and piano, Duruflé’s ‘Prélude’ opens with a brooding piano introduction (notable for some beautiful harmonies) over which the viola introduces a song-like theme. The flute enters with a tender, plaintive melody as the texture becomes lighter and the tempo starts to ease forwards, soon engaging in a duet with the viola over an increasingly animated piano accompaniment. The music reaches an imposing climax before subsiding into the ‘Récitatif’, marked ‘Lent et triste’. An unaccompanied viola recitative leads to the final Variations. These begin with the theme played by the flute, followed by a rhapsodic set of variations full of imaginative instrumental colours and ending with a sense of joyous abandon. 

Nigel Simeone 2024

1. Allegro brillante
2. In modo d’una Marcia
3. Scherzo: Molto vivace
4. Allegro ma non troppo

Immediately after finishing his three string quartets, Schumann turned to a genre that was much rarer at the time: a quintet for piano and strings. His first sketch, dated 23–28 September 1842, is an outline of the complete work, and it has several surprises. Two are particularly startling. The first is that Schumann originally intended the quintet to be in five movements – with an Adagio between that March and the Scherzo. The second is that there is no hint of the fugal coda using themes from the first and last movements that crowns the finale. (Less important but no less surprising is the location of this manuscript. It was given by Schumann to his French friend Jean-Joseph Bonaventure Laurens and for more than a century it has been one of the treasures of the Municipal Library at Carpentras in the South of France). By 12 October 1842, Schumann had completed the work in its final four-movement form, and dedicated it to his wife Clara. Despite the apparent speed, the work cost Schumann a great deal of effort and left him exhausted – he wrote in his diary that ‘I spent most of the month pretty much without sleep. The music had kept me overly agitated.’

The first performance was given privately at Schumann’s house a few weeks later, on 29 November – by which time Schumann had not only recovered his strength but had found the time to compose a companion masterpiece: the Piano Quartet Op. 47 (dated 26 November 1842). A second private performance was scheduled in December, but Clara fell ill. Mendelssohn stepped in and the story goes that he sight-read the piano part. He also made a few suggestions about revisions, which Schumann duly made in time for the first public performance, on 8 January 1843, with Clara at the piano. One early enthusiast was Wagner, who wrote to Schumann in February 1843: he ‘liked the Quintet very much: I asked your lovely wife to play it twice. I still vividly recall the first two movements in particular … I see where you are headed and assure you that I want to head there too – it is our only salvation: Beauty!’

An extraordinary anecdote about Schumann’s Piano Quintet involves several giants of nineteenth-century musical life in June 1848. Liszt was passing through Dresden and announced that he would like to pay a surprise visit to the Schumanns and to hear the Piano Quintet. At very short notice, Clara rounded up four string players for the evening and all was ready at 7 p.m. Liszt eventually showed up two hours late, with Wagner in tow. Liszt’s biographer Alan Walker has described what followed as ‘a dreadful scene’: Liszt dismissed the quintet: ‘No, no, my dear Schumann. This is not the real thing at all; it’s just provincial music.’ During the dinner that followed, the atmosphere worsened still further when Liszt made some disparaging remarks about Mendelssohn (who had died the previous November). Schumann exploded and stormed out of the room. Liszt made his apologies and left, and Clara wrote in her diary that ‘I have done with him forever’. Liszt’s recollection tallies with Clara’s: he remembered ‘a very agitated evening’. The dedication of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor to Schumann in 1854 is usually thought to be a reciprocal gesture for Schumann’s dedication of the Fantasy Op. 17 in 1836, but perhaps it was also a peace offering to a musician he always held in high regard. If that was the intention, it didn’t work: by the time the first edition of the Sonata appeared in July 1854, Schumann himself was in a lunatic asylum, and Clara resented having the thank Liszt for a work she thought ‘dreadful’. There’s a bittersweet irony to this story: in 1839, a composer friend urged Schumann to try his hand at ‘some chamber music: trios, quintets or septets’. That friend was Franz Liszt.

Nigel Simeone 2010