Czech Philharmonic • Stéphane Denève

Albert Roussel (1869‒1937) was dealt good cards to begin with, but fate would soon give them a thorough shuffling: born in northern France near the Belgian border in the city Tourcoing to the wealthy family of an industrialist, he was orphaned at age seven. His grandfather, the town’s mayor, took him in, but died as well four years later. The youthful Albert soon had to go out on his own. He left for Paris to study at the private Catholic school Collège Stanislas, where his education included the fundamentals of music. Reading a novel by Jules Verne inspired him to become a sailor, so in 1887 he was admitted to the Naval Academy, then he served in the French navy until 1894. As a young man, he saw the world on voyages that took him to Tunis and to far-away Indochina. Music finally won out over adventure, however, and the 25-year-old began learning the art’s mysteries later than other composers. He studied at the Schola Cantorum in Paris under Vincent dʼIndy, and he himself soon began teaching others, including Erik Satie and Edgar Varèse. As a former officer, Roussel returned to the military service during the First World War, driving an ambulance, among other things. After demobilisation, he taught composition privately to pupils including the Czech musicians Hans Krása, Jaroslav Křička, and Bohuslav Martinů.

In this country, at least, Roussel is a bit of a forgotten composer. His works are not performed frequently, and that is undoubtedly a pity because his music is beautiful, formally sophisticated, and brilliantly orchestrated. At home on the coast of Normandy, he composed the ballet Bacchus and Ariadne (French: Bacchus et Ariane) based on a scenario by Abel Hermant (1930). Commissioned by the National Ballet, the work was premiered on 22 May 1931 at the Paris Opera with sets by Giorgio de Chirico. Roussel subsequently took music from the ballet to create two orchestral suites, each corresponding to one act. The Second Suite, played more frequently, was premiered in February 1934. The colourful score contains descriptions of the action: After a dreamy introduction, Ariadne awakens on the island Naxos, looks around in amazement, and tries to find Theseus and his companions. Grasping that she has been abandoned, in despair she attempts to end her life by leaping into the waves from a cliff above the sea, but she instead falls into the arms of Bacchus. The following dance of Bacchus ends with a kiss. Enchanted, Ariadne dances at first alone, then with Bacchus, whose wife she is to become. A wild bacchanal climaxes with Ariadne’s coronation. Although the music surges ahead without interruption, even without the dancing it is so eloquent that one easily senses what is happening just by listening.

Maurice Ravel (1875‒1937) was born six years later than Roussel at the opposite end of France, on the border with Spain. His father and mother were of Swiss and Basque origins respectively, but he grew up in Paris. His frequent Spanish and other exotic inspirations never overshadow his deep roots in French musical culture. The First World War left a deep mark on Ravel. He volunteered for military service as an aviator, but he was instead sent to Verdun as a lorry driver for the army. Nonetheless, he encountered the cruelty of war, especially through the fates of his friends. He dealt with the horrors of the conflict by, among other things, composing the six-movement piano cycle Le tombeau de Couperin (1914–1917), with individual pieces dedicated to friends who had fallen in battle.

Of course, after every war, there are also those who survive the hell at the front only to be scarred for life. One such person was Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961), who commissioned Ravel to write his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. As the son of a wealthy entrepreneur, Wittgenstein had opportunities beyond the dreams of most other people. He was the next-to-last of the nine children of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein (Poldi Steel in the Czech town Kladno was named for his mother), and his baby brother Ludwig became one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers. The children grew up surrounded by luxury, but also by the arts. They had encounters with the many famous persons who were friends of the family; little Paul played piano four-hands with Richard Strauss, Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of his sister, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler were among the visitors to the Red Salon of the Wittgenstein family. In 1910, Paul began taking lessons from the famed pianist Theodor Leschetizky, and he gave his public debut on 1 December 1913 in the Great Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein. Half a year later, however, Franz Ferdinand dʼEste set out on the fateful journey to Sarajevo in a Gräf & Stift automobile (with a crankshaft made in Kladno by Poldi Steel), and the world of bourgeois salons came to an end in the trenches, as Europe danced its last waltzes…

Paul Wittgenstein enlisted, and at the front in Galicia in the very first month of the war, he was shot in the elbow. His arm was amputated, but upon his return to Vienna, he was determined to continue his career as a pianist. Even before the war, Leschetizky had contributed to this surprising decision by telling Wittgenstein about piano etudes for the left hand: “It might be tempting God or the fates, but it’s a good exercise.” And before Paul’s departure for the front, he gave him his composition Andante and Finale, Op. 13, for the left hand, with the following dedication: “To the conqueror of strings, Paul Wittgenstein, in remembrance that the word ‘virtuoso’ springs from ‘virtue.’”

Less than four months after the amputation, Paul began to practice playing with his left hand, following Leschetizky’s method. He made arrangements of piano pieces for himself to play, and he commissioned new works from the leading composers of the day, including Richard Strauss, Britten, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Korngold, and Ravel, just to name the most famous ones. However, Paul’s bourgeois tastes were better aligned with lesser-known composers who wrote more traditional music. He was not interested in modernism, and the experimental aspects of new works that he commissioned tended to distress him. For example, he refused to play Prokofiev’s Fourth Piano Concerto in B flat major, Op. 53, saying he could not understand a single note of it. Not even Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand suited him entirely. Before the premiere in Vienna in January of 1932, he made several changes to the piano part and to the orchestration, greatly offending Ravel. After a sharp dispute, Wittgenstein finally found his way to the music, which was to become the most famous of his commissions, and he acknowledged Ravel’s prescience. The musical world that emerges from the initial dark and unsettling rumble of divided double basses, cellos, and contrabassoon is truly distinctive, breathtaking, and unsentimental. Perhaps there is just a bit of melancholy from time to time, as if the composer were to look back on the time before 1914, saying to himself: “No. That world is gone once and for all.”

Guillaume Connesson (*1970), one of France’s most frequently performed living composers, stands somewhat apart on today’s programme from the three composers with ties to the “long nineteenth century”. His source of inspiration for the composition Céléphaïs makes up for that, however: the American poet and author Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937), known especially for writing in the fantasy, science fiction, and horror genres, which he combined into then-fashionable “weird fiction”. A careful reader will surely notice that the year of his death again brings us back to Ariadne’s thread tying today’s programme together, the dark days of impending war, which almost no one in America saw coming. Besides Lovecraft, perhaps…

The short story Celephaïs (1920) tells the tale of an impoverished aristocrat who gradually shuts himself off from the world and escapes into his fantasies. Recalling the magical city of childhood dreams, he instantly knows “that it was none other than Celephaïs, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipped away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep.” He tries to return to the city, but he seldom succeeds. In order to extend his dreams, the only times when he can visit the city, he starts buying drugs, and he ends up on the street. His time has come, and a company of knights carries him off to Celephaïs, where time stops. And there, in the city he created, he becomes the eternal king and the supreme deity. Meanwhile, the tide tossed his body below the stone mansion of Trevor Towers, where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived.

Instead of retelling the story of Kuranes, Guillaume Connesson’s brilliant orchestral score from 2017 describes the beauty of the city Céléphaïs—its radiant hues, bronze gates, onyx-paved streets, a turquoise temple, a rose-crystal Palace of Seventy Delights, and seven processions of priests crowned with orchids.

The American composer George Gershwin (1898‒1937, born Jacob Gershowitz) came from the family of a merchant in Brooklyn, New York, where his parents had arrived from Russia seven years before his birth. In those days, the USA still served as a mecca for immigrants from all around the world, offering the opportunity for success through skill and hard work regardless of origin or social status. It was their son, however, who truly achieved the “American Dream”, becoming famous for many hit songs brought to life by star performers like Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Miles Davis. Successful song-and-dance revues on Broadway brought him financial security, but Gershwin also desired success in the concert hall, so in 1928 he composed the jazz-influenced orchestral work An American in Paris, inspired by Gershwin’s visit to that mecca of the arts of the 20th century. The lavish orchestration is enhanced by unusual instruments—Gershwin brought authentic Parisian taxi horns for the Carnegie Hall premiere!