Notes for: July 26, 2011
About The Debussy and Mahler Arrangements
The concert continues with two orchestral works performed by reduced chamber-sized groups in arrangements inspired by composer Arnold Schoenberg. Following World War I, Schoenberg, with his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern, established the Vienna “Society for Private Musical Performances” (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen) to present music by contemporary composers to the city’s conservative musical public. The society had to go out of business in December 1921, due to the postwar inflation in Austria, but in its four seasons it gave 353 performances of 154 works in a total of 117 concerts.
The Society’s range of music was wide – the “allowable” composers were not limited to the Schoenberg circle but drawn from all those who had “a real face or name.” The programs included works by Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, and Reger as well as Webern and Berg. During the Society’s first two years, in fact, Schoenberg, the father of atonality, did not allow any of his own music to be performed.
Concerts were normally given at the rate of one per week. The players were chosen from among the most gifted young musicians available, and each work was rehearsed intensively, either under Schoenberg himself or by a “Performance Director” appointed by him. The primary objective was audience education, with clarity and comprehensibility of the performance the overriding aim. No applause was permitted, and complex works were sometimes played a second time at the same concert.
The audience was highly selective — only those who had joined the organization and had been issued photo ID cards were admitted. Such precautions were exercised to exclude ‘sensation-seeking’ members of the Viennese public who would often attend concerts with the intention of whistling derisively at “modern” works. Further, to prevent hostile criticism in the press, a sign was displayed on the door: “Critics are forbidden entry”.
Orchestral music was presented with reduced musical forces to minimize costs and to accommodate the small stage that was available. Schoenberg believed the arrangement of large works for reduced forces made possible “a clarity of presentation and a simplicity of formal enunciation often not possible in a rendition obscured by the richness of orchestration.”
In the Society’s first three seasons, orchestral works were generally performed in piano transcriptions, but in the fourth season performances were offered by a chamber orchestra of up to 16 of Schoenberg’s students. The two arrangements we hear this evening were among the ten manuscripts of such chamber-orchestra arrangements now known to exist. Many of these arrangements, however, were unperformed by the Society because of its abrupt termination midway through the fourth season.
Schoenberg was keenly interested in the music of Debussy – 16 of Debussy’s compositions were included in the Society’s programs. In this case, the arrangement was completed in October 1921, and scheduled for performance in the second half of the season – the half that was canceled. The arranger was Benno Sachs, one of the Society’s rehearsal conductors and its correspondence secretary. Beyond that, little is known about him.
Composed in 1894, the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was Debussy’s first full-blown work of musical impressionism. In his effort to coin a distinctly French musical language, he turned to the paintings of the French impressionists — Monet, Manet and Renoir — and to the poetry of the French symbolists -- Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Their works suggested a new type of music in which the emphasis would be on understatement rather than heated emotion, on ambiguity and instrumental colors rather than the formal development of musical ideas.
This one-movement piece was inspired by Mallarmé’s poem, L’Apres-midi d’un Faune, initially published in 1875 and revised in 1876, which had shocked the literary world with its emphasis on ambiguity, sensuousness and symbolism. Only 116 lines long, it is, in essence, the monologue of a faun, a sensuous half-human creature who could exist only in the imagination of an obscurantist poet. The faun awakens in a sunlit forest and tries to recall an encounter with two beautiful nymphs who had resisted his erotic embraces. But the recollection may have been only a dream and, as the forest grows warm, the faun again drowses off to sleep.
Debussy did not intend his Prelude as a synthesis or musical retelling of the poem. While the prominence of the flute clearly represents the piping of the faun, the music, according to the composer, is “a series of scenes against which the desires and dreams of the faun are seen to stir in the afternoon heat.” The work opens with a famous arabesque — Debussy’s term — for flute. This languorous melody is repeated and developed by the other instruments with subtle variations in harmony and tone color. A middle section is a sensuous transformation of the original flute melody. The opening strains return, and the music fades off into thin air.
As written by Debussy, the Prelude requires a relatively small orchestra — three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two harps, tiny antique cymbals and a full body of strings. Sachs scored it for eleven instruments – flute, oboe, clarinet, harmonium, piano, string quintet and antique cymbals.