A delicate touch of melancholy

Could you name a composer, or even a single piece of classical music, that you like best? Quite difficult, given the wide selection... Maurice Ravel, according to his friend, harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, had such a favourite piece: It is called L'Arlequine and was composed by François Couperin (1668–1733).

Together with Jean-Philippe Rameau, Couperin was one of the most famous representatives of the clavecinists, a French school of composers of the 17th and 18th centuries. As classics of French music history – in contrast to the German tradition of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, for example – both Couperin and Rameau were highly regarded by Ravel, but also by his colleague Claude Debussy.

Ravel's admiration for his long-deceased colleague Couperin found musical expression in his suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, originally composed for piano: A tombeau is a mourning and memorial composition that has been a kind of instrumental alternative to the vocal requiem in French music history since the 17th century. It is usually a tribute to a composer, aimed specifically at connoisseurs and colleagues. Couperin himself also wrote tombeaux, incidentally.

For fallen friends

Maurice Ravel began work on the suite in July 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War. Even at this early stage, his Tombeau seems to have been intended not only as a tribute to Couperin, but also as a patriotic declaration of support for French music in general. This is made clear in a letter Ravel wrote to a friend, in which he announces the new piece as a “French suite” and, in this context, ironically mentions the French national anthem, La Marseillaise: “I am also working on music, […] starting […] two series of piano pieces. First, a French suite, no, it is by no means what you think: the Marseillaise will not appear in it; instead, a forlana, a gigue; no tango, however ...” When Ravel completed the suite in 1917, it was no longer just a musical monument to Couperin and a proud patriotic statement: he dedicated each movement to a friend who had fallen during the war. Some also see the composition as a funeral march for Ravel’s mother, who died in the same year.

Ravel's tribute to Couperin reveals the neoclassical structure of the work: it is a suite, i.e. a sequence of Baroque dances framed by a prelude with fugue and a toccata. It is difficult to say whether this music truly expresses grief for fallen friends and his mother, even though Ravel had already begun composing it in 1914. Nevertheless, this interpretation of the Tombeau is widely accepted today. Musicologist Siegfried Schmalzriedt, for example, writes: “Each movement of the entire suite displays an artistry of extreme refinement and, at the same time, the full aesthetics of renunciation. There is nothing left of the rushing sounds of the Daphnis et Chloe ballet, nothing of the transcendental virtuosity of Gaspard de la Nuit, and certainly nothing of the coquettish grace of the piano waltzes with their dramatic climaxes and swelling dynamic waves. The Tombeau is a jewel of classicism and introverted expression, a monument to sublimated grief and sublimation par excellence. All self-torment, all renunciation of love, all pain for his mother and fallen friends have found an artistic superstructure here. Ravel's heart has now become entirely music.”
 

Two years after completing the piano suite, Ravel orchestrated four movements from it. In today's performance, they are complemented by Gianluca Cascioli's orchestration of the remaining two movements of the piano suite, Fugue and Toccata. Cascioli (born 1979) is, like Ravel himself, a composer and pianist. His orchestral arrangement also reflects what musicologist Dietmar Holland writes about Ravel's noble and restrained instrumentation: ‘[...] the lines fit together as if drawn with a silver pen [...]. Music of floating grace, which, through the delicate colours of the orchestral setting, allows the harpsichord artistry of Rameau and Couperin to shine through.’

The magic of the night

How many summer nights have lovers sworn ‘Toujours!’ (‘Forever!’), only to admit to themselves later that eternal love is not so simple. This is precisely the subject of Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été, a cycle of six songs originally composed in the early 1840s for voice and piano accompaniment. It was only later that Berlioz gradually produced arrangements for voice and orchestra, thus creating the first orchestral song cycle in music history. The title remains a mystery to this day. Is it an allusion to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream – Le songe d'une nuit d'été in French? In any case, the title of the collection of poems from which Berlioz took the texts was different: La comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death) was penned by Théophile Gautier (1811–72), a friend of Berlioz.

Les nuits d’été is shrouded in mystery, as Berlioz remains conspicuously silent about the work and its origins in his otherwise extensive correspondence. Today, it is speculated that he was processing the beginning of the breakdown of his marriage to Harriet Smithson – to whom he dedicated the Symphonie fantastique – but this is pure conjecture. What is certain is that Berlioz did not plan the orchestration of the songs from the outset. Rather, external circumstances were the reason: he orchestrated Absence in 1843 at the request of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy for a performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. This was followed in 1855/56 by Le spectre de la rose, whose instrumentation so pleased a German publisher that he asked Berlioz to orchestrate the rest of the cycle as well. However, the complete cycle was never performed in its orchestral version during Berlioz's lifetime – he later spoke of a ‘work that no one in France knows and that I myself have never heard in its entirety.’

The joys and pains of love

In the first song, Villanelle, the harmonic tension that builds from verse to verse lends a melancholic undertone to the text, which tells of a couple's mutual confession of love in spring. In the second song, Le spectre de la rose, Berlioz conjures up a delicate soundscape for the singing voice: the ghost of a rose visits a sleeping woman who wore this rose at her first ball. Sur les lagunes builds on the recurring semitone motif of the beginning, which can represent both the pain of the lyrical ego over the loss of his love and the rocking of the boat on the waters of the lagoon. It is the only song in a minor key and the most dramatic of the cycle. In Absence, on the other hand, there is a play between major and minor keys: the painful absence of the beloved is expressed in the minor passages, while the recurring plea “Reviens!”, “Come back!”, is in a major key. In Au cimetière, a cemetery scene by moonlight, Berlioz reveals himself to be a subtle magician of sound. The mood of the last song, L’île inconnue, brings us back to the beginning, but its final lines break the idyll: the island of the blessed can never be reached. “‘Lead me,’ said the fair one, ‘on the golden boat to the faithful shore. If you fly with the winds, you will never find the land, you will search in vain for the path.’”

The power of fairy tales
For his Scheherazade, Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov drew on the framework story of the famous oriental fairy tale collection One Thousand and One Nights: Sultan Shahryar is so enraged by his wife's infidelity that, out of vengeance and hatred, he spends every night with a different virgin from his harem and has her killed the following morning. The clever Scheherazade volunteers to be the next candidate, because she has a cunning plan: before falling asleep, she tells the Sultan exciting stories, but always saves the ending for the next night. Thanks to the Sultan's curiosity to hear the rest of the stories, she escapes execution morning after morning. After 1001 nights, Scheherazade's plan succeeds: impressed by her cleverness and loyalty, the Sultan pardons all the remaining ladies of the harem and takes Scheherazade as his wife. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov belonged to the Russian composers' group ‘The Mighty Handful,’ which was dedicated to creating Russian realism modelled on Franz Liszt's ‘New German School.’ The composer probably considered his literary source material to be authentic and chose it for that reason. In fact, however, the collection of fairy tales became known in Europe in a heavily edited version by the French orientalist Antoine Galland, who first published it in 1704: his source, an Arabic manuscript, breaks off in the 282nd night, which prompted Galland to insert further stories from completely different sources. He also toned down the sometimes extremely erotic source material and adapted it to European moral standards.

Fantasy journey to the Orient
Galland's approach and the European reception of the Orient based on it offer a prime example of ‘Orientalism’ as understood by the American literary theorist Edward Said: an undifferentiated “Orient” as the embodiment of the ‘foreign’ and as a projection screen for one's own fantasies. In Rimsky-Korsakov's setting, the case is somewhat different. After its imperialist expansion, the Russian Empire stretched so far east that the Orient was considered part of Russia. Of course, no distinction was made here either: for Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov used melodies from the Caucasus that the leader of the group ‘The Mighty Handful’, Mili Balakirev, had brought back from a trip to the Caucasus.
 

This includes, for example, the theme of the solo violin accompanied by the harp, which embodies Scheherazade herself. Musicologist Melanie Unseld explains her musical characterisation: "The exceptional nature of Scheherazade's character is emphasised by the instrumentation, the flexibility and freedom of the performance. At the same time, the rhapsodic gesture of the music underlines her function as a narrator, while the exoticism, emphasised by ornamental melodies and euphony, stands for the sensuality and seductiveness of the young woman telling the story.” The Sultan is portrayed quite differently. His theme opens the piece, is loud and almost brutally orchestrated, a trill sounds like an unfriendly gesture, and the performance instruction is ‘pesante’, ‘heavy’.

Without specific titles

Rimsky-Korsakov uses these two themes as a musical framework, while the four movements represent the stories Scheherazade tells the Sultan. Originally, the composer had given these four movements programmatic titles that vaguely hinted at their content: ‘The Sea and Sinbad's Ship,’ ‘The Fantastic Tale of Prince Kalender,’ ‘The Prince and the Princess’ and ‘The Festival in Baghdad and the Ship that Crashes Against the Rock with the Bronze Horseman’. However, his aversion to an overly specific programme led him to later withdraw these titles, as he decided to "leave the more precise and specific ideas to the will and mood of each individual. All I wanted was for the listener, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, to gain the impression that it was undoubtedly an oriental tale of numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders."
A small miracle does indeed occur at the end, as the title character has the last word, musically speaking as well: first, the Sultan's clearly tamed theme and Scheherazade's violin theme are heard simultaneously. But the final bars belong to her theme alone. ‘By not remaining silent until the end,’ says Unseld, ‘she escapes death.’

Dr Ulrich Wilker studied musicology, German language and literature, and theatre, film and television studies at the University of Cologne. He also received his doctorate in Cologne with a thesis on Alexander Zemlinsky's one-act opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf). After holding several academic positions, he joined the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe as a concert dramaturg in 2022. Since 2024, he has been a dramaturg specialising in concerts at the Theater Aachen.