Arioso Furioso Trio - Debussy, Tournier, Damase, Ravel: Le jardin féerique (French Music for Flute, Bassoon and Harp) (2024)

The timbral palette of the modern concert harp is very rich; in the hands of a proficient player, it can evoke a whole world of tones and sounds, from the driest pizzicato to the most flowing arpeggios, and touching in between a rich kaleidoscope of timbres. In spite of this, undeniably there are musical gestures and sounds which seem particularly suited to this instrument, and which unfailingly evoke extramusical suggestions in the listener. The harp, in fact, is one of the most enchanted and enchanting instruments; when it is employed to hide and reveal the mysterious dimension of the supernatural, or even the mysterious dimension of the natural, the harp seems to bring another world on earth.
This is possibly due to the extraordinarily long history of this instrument, whose ancestors are among the very first instruments created by human beings: thus it seems to build a bridge between our world and a mythical one, where the enchantment of creation was much more deeply felt. Or, perhaps, it is due to the gorgeous resonances that the modern concert harp can offer, with rich projections of harmonic sounds which seem to embrace and encompass the listener’s aural space. Or else the phenomenon is due to these causes taken together, or to others we cannot imagine. The fact is that a consistent part of the harp repertoire (either original or transcribed) has something to do with mystery, fairy tales, enchanted worlds. This is observed particularly well in the fascinating compilation of original works and transcriptions recorded in this Da Vinci Classics album.
Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, originally written for solo piano, is a case in point. Its title derives from a poem by the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, who was one of the artistic and literary references of Debussy and of many of his contemporaries. Verlaine wrote of “your souls… like landscapes, charming masks and bergamasks, playing the lute and dancing, almost sad in their fantastic disguises”.
Arguably, the adjective Bergamasque which characterizes this Suite is derived by Verlaine’s passing allusion to the “masks and bergamasks”, which therefore puts the entire Suite under the spell of a magical carnival. Among Debussy’s predecessors, Robert Schumann had explored the musical and spiritual world of the carnival and of the masks up to an almost tragical ending. The carnival obsessed Schumann, who admired the masked people wondering which one was their true face: was it the mask or the one behind it? And what could a person’s unmasked eyes reveal of his or her interior world? Playing on the threefold meaning of the German Larve (the mask, the larva, and the ghost), Schumann suggested that living people are little more than ghosts wearing masks – but also waiting for their metamorphosis into butterflies). And while Debussy’s music seems to owe little to Schumann’s quintessential Romanticism, undeniably there are many red threads connecting Debussy’s music with Schumann’s: their interest in childhood (Schumann’s Kinderszenen op. 15 and Album für die Jugend op. 68), their charming Arabesques, and their interest in the carnival (Schumann’s Carnaval, Papillons, Faschingsschwank aus Wien and Debussy’s Masques and Suite Bergamasque, to name but the most important works).
Debussy’s Suite reveals from its very title and its outset the aesthetical framework of its concept: a blending of a pseudo-historicist approach to the Baroque era and to its feasts (frequently requiring masks), and a more modern fascination for the mysterious and the uncanny.
Debussy composed it in 1890, when he was not yet thirty, and thus it belongs in the class of piano pieces he wrote to make ends meet during his Bohemian years. It was sent to a publishing house, the Choudens Frères, to which Debussy was introduced by some good friends who actually saved his finances. In that period, Debussy – otherwise extremely meticulous in choosing only his best works for publication – was eager for his music to be printed and to earn him a little money. Thus some rather occasional pieces were conceived (such as Tarantelle, Mazurka, Valse romantique, Ballade, Marche ecossaise and Rêverie, by far the most famous of this series). Among them, Rêverie is possibly the only one to have achieved immortal fame: it is a beautiful piece which strongly anticipates the Suite Bergamasque’s best-known piece.
It was only in 1905, however (i.e. some fifteen years after its completion) that the Suite Bergamasque was eventually to be recognized for its intrinsic value. In that year, it was published by Fromont, in a revised version prepared by Debussy himself. The changes he made to the score are not too impacting, and the most evident ones regard the modified title of two of its four movements. What is now known as Clair de lune was initially to be called Promenade sentimentale, while the original Pavane became a Passepied. If, therefore, the entire Suite’s title is due to the citation from Verlaine’s Clair de lune (which Debussy had already set to music as a song), it is curious that the connection with it was made explicit only at a time much later than that of its composition.
Clair de lune is by far the best-known movement in the Suite, and arguably the best-known piece ever written by Debussy. It is indeed a masterpiece, with its ability to evoke mystery without revealing it. Debussy portrays human aspirations (the ascending intervals at the very beginning!) but also the disquieting and fascinating interactions of mystery with the world of perception. The luscious arpeggios of the piano’s left hand seem to find their perfect rendition in the harp version, where they acquire a wealth of harmonics and resonances.
The other movements have a style which markedly differs from that found in Clair de lune. Whilst the third movement predates some developments of Debussy’s style, in the direction which will be called “musical Impressionism”, the others prefer to look back to the Baroque and early Baroque era. It was the time of a Couperin, whom Debussy greatly appreciated (if perhaps not without Ravel’s same intensity). The Prélude sets the tone with its improvisatory style and its cascades of quick notes. The Menuet evokes courtly rituals of the past, while also inserting subtly delicate modulations. The concluding Passepied is likely to excite the hearers’ fantasy up to its very last note.
Mystery is also evoked in Marcel Tournier’s Féerie (Prélude et Dance), one of his most beloved pieces. An early work by its composer, it is by no means an arid exercise: it is a wonderful immersion into a world of manifold colours and multifaceted realities. It is as if the composer had actually experienced some kind of benevolent magic, resulting in his discovery of new or unusual sound effects. This work was also arranged by the composer, in 1924, as a piece for harp and string quartet; it had been written in 1911 for a “competition” (i.e. the final exam) of the Paris Conservatoire, and it displays the many techniques and resources which are required of the player. The world of Faërie (as Tolkien called it) is evoked through enchanted and enchanting dances, which at times are more pronouncedly rhythmical, at times more rarefied.
These themes were interesting also for Jean-Michel Damase, a composer born in 1928 in a family of musicians who encouraged him to study music. A child prodigy, when he was not yet ten, he set to music some work of poetess Colette who was an acquaintance of his family. He studied the piano with Alfred Cortot and composition and similar subjects with Henry Busser and Marcel Dupré. He maintained a rich musical activity both as a concert pianist and as a composer, and was fascinated, in turn, by things remote and mysterious. He wrote incidental music for Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and for ballets such as La Croqueuse de diamonts, first performed by Roland Petit. His long career encompassed nearly the entire twentieth century, and he obtained some important prizes such as the Grand Prix Musical of SACD, and the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris. His Trio, one of his best-known works, reveals the vastity of his emotional palette and of the resources he could use for expressing it.
The CD’s programme is completed by another work which is among the best known and most beloved of the entire piano literature. It is, once more, a Suite, derived almost entirely from fairy-tale books originally written in the seventeenth century. The title comes from a fairy-tale by Charles Perrault, Ma mère l’Oye, “Mother Goose”. The other pieces are derived from other collections: Marie Chaterine d’Aulnoy, with her Serpentin vert, furnished him the inspiration for Laideronnette; Marie Leprince de Beaumont that for La Belle et la Bête, and Perrault provided material for La belle au bois dormant and Petit poucet.
The world of fairy tales began to intrigue Ravel thanks to a couple of good friends of him, Ida and Xavier-Cyprien (aka “Cipa”) Godebsky, whose two children, Jean and Mimie, were studying the piano. Ravel, invited at their place, wanted to write something so simple that children could (reasonably) play it, but not simplistic or trivial. He managed to succeed, and even though in the end the work was too complex for its dedicatees to premiere it, still its first performers were two teenager (or even pre-teen) girls, Généviève Durony, who was fourteen, and Jeanne Leleu, who was just eleven.
Ravel realized an orchestral version of this cycle in 1910, following a prompting by his publisher; its extraordinary success encouraged him to follow another instigation by the director of the Théâtre des Arts and to make a ballet of it by adding some more music. Its pieces narrate the tales of Sleeping Beauty (whose nobility and whose slumber are both evoked in the Pavane), Petit poucet (Tom Thumb, whose spiraling steps into the woods are suggested by a seemingly uncertain music), Laideronnette, where musical exoticism is at its peak, the slightly disquieting Beauty and the Beast with the mysterious nature of the monstrous prince, and the Fairy Garden, where the composer’s fantasy is unchained in depicting the wonders of Faërie.
Together, these pieces invite us to a listening experience which is more akin to a children’s fantasy film than to what happens in a traditional concert; and our dive into the magic of the harp’s sound will certainly be highly rewarding.
Chiara Bertoglio