The complete idiot's guide to classical music (41 page)

Indeed, Debussy often turned to poetry for inspiration, setting music to verses of Paul Verlaine, Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, and other literary icons, but it was his innovative use of exotic colors and startling nuances of phrase that made listeners experience what was happening in his music, rather than just hearing it.

 
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The French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans took that experiential idea one step further when he decided that instrumental colors added up to an =“organ of liqueurs.” The tone of the clarinet was like curacao, he announced, the flute was anisette, the lowly trombone brought forth images of whisky and gin, and if you want a glass of vodka, let the tuba blow!

Debussy’s first orchestral masterpiece, also suggested by a poem (by Stephane Mallarme) was “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune” (The Afternoon of a Faun). Right from its opening flute solo, the work appeals to us today as one of serenity and lustrous warmth, seducing rather than shocking, but it certainly rattled the early critics. One of them called it “nothing, expressed in musical terms,” while another suggested that “the suffering Faun seems to need a veterinary surgeon.” That, mind you, was before the music was used for a highly erotic ballet during which Vaslav Nijinsky, in a skin-tight costume, undulated his way to a realistic depiction of the Faun’s sexual longing and release. Even Debussy was a little shocked by that one.

Other orchestral works followed, then his only opera,
Pelleas et Melisande
(after the Maeterlinck play), and a whole series of piano works, from the technically challenging etudes to the charming and fun-filled
Children’s Corner
suite, dedicated to his daughter and titled in English since Claude-Emma (or Chochou for short) had a British nanny.

Debussy was always looking for something more than was being handed down to him. He didn’t want to follow older recipes, to use anyone else’s ingredients, and as a result his musical dishes were not to every taste. On the other hand, his distinct concepts of

structure, color, and harmonic shadings paved an important road, one of several bridges that enabled music to flow from 19th century romanticism into the mainstream of modern thought in the 20th century.

“L’Apres Midi d’ un Faun” is a good way to slide into Debussy’s shimmering world, and if you want waves, sail on with
La Mer
(The Sea). Other great portraits in sound are the
Images
and
Nocturnes
. For ensemble music on a more intimate plane, his early (and only) String Quartet is enormously appealing, as is his three-way Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp.

Debussy’s opera
Pelleas et Melisande
has long had a cult following, but it’s definitely an acquired taste, so you might find a better vocal introduction via some of his exquisite songs, or the cycle
Chansons de Bilitis.

From the splendid body of piano music, start with the Suite Bergamasque, since it contains the ever-popular “Clair du Lune” (also available in numerous orchestral transcriptions), or the delectable “Children’s Corner,” with its snippets of early ragtime. The two books of preludes paint a wide array of vivid pictures in sound, as do “Estampes” (Engravings), while the etudes are as easy to hear as they are difficult to play.

“It may be possible,” Charles Ives (1874–1954) wrote in one of his essays, “that a day in a Kansas wheat field will do more good for an American composer than three years in Rome.” Ives was born pretty far from those wheat fields—in Danbury, Connecticut—but he maintained a lifelong separation from the conservatories of Vienna, Leipzig, Paris, and the other European centers where most composers (including Americans) sought their musical muses. He was the quintessential Yankee: original, experimental, eccentric, reclusive, and not one to allow outsiders to tell him what to do.

Ives’ father, George, was an ex-bandsman and music teacher whose love of the unusual was obviously a spur to the young Charles. George introduced his kids (Charles and his brother) to military marches, patriotic songs, hymns, spirituals, and all manner of other musical Americana. He also stretched their ears by getting them to play the piano with the right and left hands in different keys, or else he’d play an accompaniment while the boys sang the tune in a different key. “Why do I like these things?,” Charles wondered. “Are my ears on wrong?”

For a while, the young Ives behaved himself. At 14 he became the youngest salaried church organist in Connecticut, and after doing fine in prep school, he was admitted to Yale University in 1894. There, his battles with conventionality began. He barely passed his nonmusic courses and he was constantly torturing his famous, albeit ultra-conservative teacher, Horatio Parker, by dropping bits of folk tunes into his exercises or submitting pieces with free rhythms, quarter-tones and multilayered textures that give the impression of several things happening at once. Parker railed at his stubborn student until Ives decided to do his interesting stuff on the side, pacifying the professor and earning his degree with a well-behaved, unthreatening Symphony no. 1.

His diploma in hand, Ives swore off well-behaved music once and for all, trying out his fascinating new ideas in feverish bursts of composing activity (his “resident disturbances” his roommates called them). Realizing that his oddball music would not bring in a living, Ives went into business, taking a job with the Mutual Insurance Company in New York and later starting up a new agency with his friend Julian Myrick.

 
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“No genius ever stopped creating because he knew he never could make a million dollars,” said Ives, but he made his million dollars anyway, since his passion for originality applied to his insurance savvy as well: One of his innovations was a strategy for preserving wealth that we now know as estate planning.

With his financial house in order and his private life in an equally happy state (in 1908 he had married the sister of one of his Yale classmates, a lady with the glorious name of Harmony Twitchell), Ives could afford to be a part time composer, writing anything that struck his far-out fancy and worrying not a whit about what critics or anybody else might have to say about his music. Virtually none of it was published, and hardly any of it saw public performance, but Ives continued to turn out one fascinating, fresh, and inventive work after another. A heart attack and diabetes gradually caused him to lessen his activities, and he formally retired from business in 1930, four years after his musical star had set with a final song, ironically titled “Sunrise.”

Over the nearly quarter of a century left to him, Ives revised some of his pieces and tried to put some order into the chaos of the undated and often unnumbered manuscript pages that were strewn around the house. “Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to perfect truth,” he said, and musicologists are still trying to sort out the truth from some of the vague and conflicting instructions about his music that he left behind. Ives did, however, live long enough to see his pieces rise from obscurity to worldwide public acclaim, among them the Symphony no. 3, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, a mere 36 years after its composition.

Don’t expect to fall in love with Ives’ music right away, except possibly for his irreverent “Variations on ‘America’ ” originally for organ solo but far more entertaining in William Schuman’s brilliant orchestration. The Second Symphony, with its deliciously thumb-in-nose finale, and the Third Symphony, with its folk connections (the movements are titled “Old Folks Gatherin’,” “Children’s Day,” and “Communion”), will reward careful listening. So will
Three Places in New England,
one of which recreates a scene Ives remembered from childhood, where two marching bands approached, crossed each other’s paths in a blare of sonic dissonance, then went their separate ways again. There’s also an intriguing
Holidays Symphony
, its four movements depicting events on Washington’s Birthday, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving; it took Ives ten years to complete the set, so we ought to be able to spend 40 minutes listening to it.

Folk tunes also swirl about in the Fourth Violin Sonata, many of his 150 songs, and while it’s not easy listening, be brave and tackle the ground-breaking
Concord
Piano Sonata, honoring the famous New England authors Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau.

Perhaps no name on a program terrifies the average concert-goer more than that of Arnold Schoenberg. Well over half a century after their composition, many of his works are still difficult to penetrate, and even those of a warmly romantic bent tend to be shunned because they came from the same dreaded pen.

Born in Vienna to a set of unmusical parents (his father was a shoemaker), Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) found his way to the art only gradually, starting violin lessons at age eight, and later becoming reasonably proficient on the cello. When his father died, the 16-year-old Schoenberg took a job as a bank clerk, earning extra cash by arranging popular songs and orchestrating operettas. At age 20 he came forward with his first original composition, a set of three piano pieces, and then decided to pursue formal lessons with the composer Alexander Zemlinsky.

 
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It was a busy time for Schoenberg. In addition to his studies, Schoenberg played cello in his teacher’s instrumental ensemble, Polyhymnia, and went waltzing with Mathilde, Zemlinsky’s sister, whom he married in 1901. Later, Schoenberg took painting lessons and Mathilde had an affair with his art teacher, but that’s gossip for another day.

Schoenberg’s first major works appeared around the corner of the 20th century: “Verklarte Nacht” (Transfigured Night) for string sextet in 1899;
Pelleas und Melisande
a symphonic poem notable for its first-time use of a trombone glissando, in 1903; and his expansive
Gurrelieder
(Songs of Gurre, a medieval Danish castle), settings for chorus, orchestra and narrator of verses by the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen. The first two parts of this monumental cycle—conceived for such large forces that Schoenberg had to order special music paper long enough to include all the parts—were written in 1901, but the work was not finished for another ten years, and had to wait two years after that for its premiere.