Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky: Music for Two Pianists

CHAN 10863 – DEBUSSY, BARTÓK, STRAVINSKY

Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky: Music for Two Pianists

Just as a black-and-white photograph may draw our attention to details and formal relationships that otherwise go unnoticed, so may the two-piano transcriptions heard on this disc refresh our experience of three great orchestral works, each of which was introduced to the world in 1913. At the same time, the new medium restores an old one, for we may imagine all three composers testing out their music at the piano as they were writing it. We encounter these works simultaneously after their orchestral realisation and before. In the case of Le Sacre du printemps, we also encounter the music as it was generally encountered at the time, for, following the first run of performances in Paris and London, Stravinsky’s orchestral score was not heard again until after the First World War, and it was through the four-hand version, published right away, that the music became known – not least to Bartók, though his Two Pictures had come earlier, composed in 1910 and first performed in February 1913, in Budapest.

Debussy: Jeux

Jeux, which Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) drafted in the summer of 1912, was to be his last large-scale movement, and his most remarkable. Harmonies wonderfully suggestive of darkness descending frame a continuous sequence of dance episodes, some extended and often reappearing, some only two bars long and never heard again. Debussy had developed this style in his orchestral Images, but Jeux is more intimate and less picturesque, music that drifts like dreams, and plunges like desire.

The version by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet for two pianos is, like any fine transcription, far more than a memento of the original. Trills and tremolandos, needed on the piano to maintain sustained notes and chords, become active participants in music of undulant ambiguity, and the soundscape more generally keeps bringing forward correspondences with the composer’s Préludes and Images. The interplay between the pianists, bouncing lines and motifs between them, even carries the music in some ways closer to its ballet scenario. This involves three tennis players – a young man and two young women – who come and go in various combinations, each of them attracted to the other two. (The idea is said to have come from a game Nijinsky observed in London involving Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf.) Flirtation and jealousy, yearning and laughter all flicker by, until at the climax, three mouths join in a kiss.

Nijinsky danced the young man in the original production, by Diaghilev’s Ballets russes, which he also choreographed. The ballet opened in Paris on 15 May 1913. It was followed two weeks later by the newly emerging choreographer’s next offering for the same company, Le Sacre du printemps, which caused a sensation that seems to have obliterated most people’s memory of Debussy’s exquisite and exquisitely poignant composition.

Bartók: Two Pictures

Debussy’s music of a slightly earlier period was one of the two great discoveries that Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945) made in his mid-twenties, the other being folk music. ‘In Full Flower’, the first of the Two Pictures, is often taken as his most Debussian composition, and yet, this arrangement by Zoltán Kocsis for two pianos emphasises rather the movement’s fully Bartókian character. It was, after all, the same lesson that Bartók drew from Debussy and from peasant musicians, namely that there were many more possible scales than major and minor, offering many more possible harmonic worlds. ‘In Full Flower’ makes some use of the whole-tone scale in Debussy’s manner, but in its luxuriant blossoming it touches on shapes and chords that came straight out of Bartók’s tours through the villages of Hungary and surrounding regions.

Of course, the latter connection is much more overt in the second picture, ‘Village Dance’. The contrast is highly characteristic, of the idealised and the grotesque, the effulgent and the sharp-edged – though it is a contrast alleviated in the central section of the movement, before the high-spirited ideas of the opening rebound. Bartók, like Debussy, made a version for solo piano of his work, but in both cases the two-piano format allows a fuller representation of the textures as well as a productive element of dialogue. Bartók’s two movements also provide here a route from Debussy’s world of erotic reverie to Stravinsky’s of ancient ritual.

Stravinsky: Le Sacre du printemps

The scenario of Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), enacting the spring rituals of the ancestral peoples of northern Europe, was put together by the Russian artist Nicholas Roerich, partly on the basis of nineteenth-century ethnographical researches, partly out of his own imagination – which supplied, most notably, the concluding sacrificial dance. Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971) took all this on board. A violent sacrifice was what he was making in his music, a sacrifice of his heritage both Russian (Rimsky-Korsakov) and French (Debussy). For example, where fundamentally triadic harmonies float in Jeux, in the most emphatic episodes of Le Sacre they hammer themselves into the ground. But also, the prehistoric setting unleashed a rhythmic revolution, an insistent pulsation at once savage and modern.

Indeed, this was the first music of the machine age, music of rotation and impulse, which is why it seemed so new at the time, as well as so primeval. (There is a clear parallel with the savage-modern aspect of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted in the same city a few years earlier and surely known within the avant-garde circles which Diaghilev’s company frequented.) For three centuries music had been based on the regular rhythmic patterns of civilised dance. Le Sacre du printemps changed all that. The unit now was not the orderly bar but the eruptive beat. Bar lengths could alter from moment to moment, creating a turmoil of syncopations. Beats could be grouped to create themes the identities of which are principally rhythmic. A musical work could not only sound like a machine but be one, rotating on cogwheels of rhythm, chopping up lengths of time.

Le Sacre du printemps is machine-like, too, in its form, being made of bits and pieces, with abrupt cuts from one thing to another. To that extent it is one of the first pieces of music made like a film, a sequence of ‘shots’ that may focus on an individual (the sage, the sacrificial victim), pull back to take in the group activity, or pull back further yet, to scan the landscape, as seems to happen in the introduction to the second part. This we might feel to be Stravinsky’s ‘In Full Flower’, a homage to Debussy that is also thoroughly Stravinsky’s own.

There are no developing themes; instead, sections are related at the most fundamental levels: their scale, rhythmic unit, and tempo. In matters of scale and melodic motif, Stravinsky found models, right from the start of the piece, in Lithuanian folksong, which was felt at the time to be the oldest within the Russian domains. (Bartók was, for a similar reason, drawn especially to the songs of Hungarian-speaking villages in Transylvania, the deeply ancient once again stimulating the highly modern.)

The climax in each of the two parts of Le Sacre comes when pulsation becomes rampant, in the ‘Danse de la terre’ (Dance of the Earth) and the ‘Danse sacrale’ (Sacrificial Dance). Ritual is recreated as arithmetic. We know that spring is brought about not by human sacrifice but by the rotation of our planet, round its tilted axis and round the sun – by, indeed, the ‘dance of the earth’, a dance of force and distance and angle. But spring’s creation of new life does indeed entail death, the death of what was. So it is here, as musical ideas are beaten to death in these great culminations of sound. Stravinsky’s orchestra, an orchestra founded on wind instruments and drumming, made the point emphatically, and yet, the music is hardly less forceful when committed to the thunder and the bells at the disposal of two pianists in full and accurate fury.