Impressionist Reverie

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), meticulous yet hot-headed, took after both of his parents, a Swiss engineer and a Basque peasant. Even though he was raised in Paris, Ravel was a perennial outsider who got himself expelled from the Paris Conservatory once as a piano student in 1895, and then again in 1900 after he returned as a composer and wouldn’t follow the rules for writing a proper fugue. His five consecutive rejections in the prestigious Rome Prize competition became something of a public scandal, and even his own teacher, Gabriel Fauré, piled on when he labeled Ravel’s final submission “a failure.” The submitted piece was none other than the String Quartet in F Major, which has long since taken its rightful place as a cornerstone of the quartet repertoire.

One musician who recognized the power of Ravel’s quartet was Debussy, who wrote to his younger colleague, “In the name of the gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have written in your Quartet.” Ravel’s quartet in fact shares many traits with Debussy’s own string quartet from a decade earlier, in the way they both develop thematic connections that link the separate movements.

Ravel’s String Quartet opens with a sweet theme from the first violin, split into two balanced phrases—a promising start for a competition entry. It only takes five measures, though, for the harmonies to abandon the home key, while the telltale melody glides over mystical whole-tone sequences and Eastern-tinged minor modes.

A close kin of the opening melody returns as the basis of the second movement, marked “rather lively, very rhythmic.” The plucking textures and modal harmonies transport this scherzo-like statement to the realm of a Flamenco dance, reflecting Ravel’s fascination with his mother’s native Spain.

The central melody of the “very slow” third movement, introduced by the muted viola, is a drawn-out variant of the same unifying theme. The motive returns yet again as a secondary figure in the finale, but first the quartet presents music that lives up to the “lively and agitated” tempo marking. Having worked through this provocative material, the quartet rises to a bright F-major chord, reaching the conclusive home key in a manner contrary to everything Ravel learned in a classroom. 

The extraordinarily long and rich career of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) began in the late 1850s, when his gifts as an organist and improviser won over important champions like Berlioz and Liszt. He went on to compose brilliant piano concertos that he performed himself, along with operas and symphonies that placed him at the forefront of French music. At the same time he rallied support for chamber music, a genre that had been neglected in France for generations, and his own efforts and his support for younger peers sparked a glorious renaissance.

The impetus for the Fantaisie in A Major for Violin and Harp (op. 124) that Saint-Saëns composed in 1907 came from the sisters Marianne and Clara Eissler, who had left their native Moravia to build a successful duo career performing violin and harp recitals. We know from letters that Saint-Saëns crossed paths with the sisters several times as they built up a following in England and France, and his contribution to their repertoire seems well-tailored to fit in with the type of salon fare they were known for. The genre of Fantasy gives a composer license to follow their fancies wherever the music leads, and this example explores everything from modern harmonies (taking some cues from the younger upstart Debussy) to old-fashioned Baroque dances.

Two masterpieces of the harp repertoire, one by Ravel and the other by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), owe their existence to a rivalry between manufacturers. The Pleyel Company unveiled a new chromatic harp in 1897, and in 1904 they commissioned Debussy’s Danse sacrée et Danse profane for harp and string orchestra as a showpiece for the instrument. The next year, Érard responded by asking Debussy’s young rival Ravel to write a feature vehicle for their competing double-action pedal harp.

These designs were necessary because modern composers were loosening the rules of tonality and using all twelve chromatic tones to color their harmonies, meaning that old harps tuned to play a single scale or ones with rudimentary mechanisms to change pitches couldn’t keep up. In the “Sacred Dance” that comes first in Debussy’s set, we hear progressions that find pleasing combinations of chords that should belong to different keys. In the playful “Profane Dance,” a steady bass line that rocks back and forth sometimes clashes with what’s happening above it, so that the music seems to be in two keys at the same time. It was possible to play these harp parts on the cross-strung harp that Debussy was asked to write for—a design that has the equivalent of the piano’s white keys on one plane, and the black keys on another plane slightly askew—but in time the other design proved to be more effective, with seven pedals controlled by the harpist’s feet making it possible to raise or lower the pitch of any note.

Marcel Tournier (1879-1951), once a star pupil of the harp professor Alphonse Hasselmans at the Paris Conservatory, was selected to take over the harp department when Hasselmans died in 1912, an influential role through which he groomed generations of the world’s greatest harpists for the next 36 years. Besides performing and teaching, Tournier also wrote harp music that remains central to the repertoire, including a competition piece for his students that he completed during his debut year on the conservatory faculty. Feérie was designed to be playable either by a solo harp or with strings, a setting that adds extra shimmer to the ephemeral textures in Tournier’s indubitably French evocation of “magic.”