As today’s program will hopefully show, France can proudly boast of having one of the richest musical traditions of any culture. Even including just one example from the Baroque period – a time when France arguably dominated Western music (think of Versailles, Lully, the Couperins, and Rameau, for instance) – we can survey creativity that astounds us, from the late Middle Ages, through the 19th century, and up to modern moment. In these comments we will try to avoid falling back on tired clichés, attempting to peer below the surface to unriddle that distinctive French flair, to tease out useful insights rather than shrugging our shoulders when faced by French music’s certain “je ne sais quoi.”

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) was born into a German Jewish family, but the majority of his career unfolded in France.  He had moved to France as a teenager in order to study at the famed Paris Conservatory. However, academic pursuits left Offenbach cold, and he quickly transitioned into a career as a virtuoso cellist and budding impresario.  A contemporary of Richard Wagner, Offenbach’s musical tastes contrasted strongly with those of his countryman.  He strove to compose light-hearted and gently satirical stage works. By the 1870s he had succeeded tremendously, authoring nearly one hundred operettas and achieving international fame.

Upon his death in 1880, Offenbach was best known for his first operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld.  Orpheus typifies the grand scale that marked all of Offenbach’s productions: lavish sets, numerous principal roles, and a large chorus and orchestra.  Demonstrating the truth of P.T. Barnum’s famous phrase (“There’s no such thing as bad publicity”), a prominent Parisian critic’s condemnation of Orpheus for its profanity and satire of Napoleon III could hardly have worked better at filling the seats. The work’s most memorable theme is the Infernal Galop or Can-Can. Offenbach’s Infernal Galop forced the sexuality and abandon of low culture to rub shoulders with high culture.  It portrays a wild party thrown by the gods in Hell.  Having escaped their Olympian boredom, their frivolity seems almost boundless. A broad, magisterial introduction captures our attention without in the least foreshadowing what is to come. Triangle and mincing gestures transition to the first strains of the familiar can-can material, which features rollicking brass and crash cymbals. Even if some rejected the coarse implications of such music, almost no one doubted Offenbach’s ability to craft an infectious tune. I doubt even the most prudish listener could have kept from humming it afterward.

Contemporary French composer Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) turned an early interest and talent for music into a major international career, though his life was cut short by a ruptured aneurysm at age 52.  During his years of training at the Paris Conservatory and Darmstadt Institute, Grisey enjoyed the mentorship of Europe’s leading composers, including Messiaen, Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis.  A preeminent aesthetic emerged from these experiences, namely that music is sound above all else – sometimes to the exclusion of all else.  Composers should not be concerned with literature or theater, nor with mathematics or quantum physics, says Grisey.  He favors the immense variety and the immediate raw appeal of sound in and of itself.

Stèle, written in 1995, is characterized by the use of circulating soft brushes on one bass drum, offset by increasing and decreasing rhythmic patterns on the other drum.  There are stretches of silence.  The composer’s score indicates a definite concern with resonance and space, as he details precise locations for the instruments themselves, as well as where and how to strike the instruments to create certain effects.  To our ears, which are far more accustomed to following pitch-based progressions, Stèle offers a great challenge.  If I read his title correctly, the stele invoked (signifying a monument with a carved message, such as the Ten Commandments, Rosetta Stone, or Hammurabi’s Code) is charged with conveying the sheer scale of received historical wisdom and the resonances that have accompanied such pronouncements through the millennia.

From the 1990s we step back to France’s distant musical past to experience a composer born precisely 600 years earlier. Prior to the Middle Ages, we know very few names of professional musicians, nearly all of whom were working for the Catholic Church. With the generation of Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) we begin to see fully-fledged individuals with biographies verified by documents and significant bodies of music in manuscript. Dufay was perhaps the most well-known musician of his era. He was closely associated with the so-called Burgundian School of Franco-Flemish composers who became pivotal in the new “Renaissance” era of music. Dufay was also highly influential due to extensive travels in Italy before he returned to settle permanently in the northern French town of Cambrai. His body of sacred works represents a striking advance in sophistication, building stunning polyphonic structures often based on simple medieval chants.

Today’s concert features Dufay’s setting of Ave maris stella (Hail, star of the sea). The chant seems to have originated as a hymn to the Virgin Mary at least before 800 A.D., though more precise dating has eluded scholars. In his setting, Dufay alternates between verses presented in the original monophonic plainchant and others delivered in three-part counterpoint. The latter generally move in parallel motion, creating consonant harmonies of sixths and thirds with the principal voice. The technique is called fauxbourdon or “false drone” and was a style Dufay helped to create. Cadence points often involve interesting chromatic touches, but the entire point is to allow utmost clarity for the spiritual message, supported by music that is rich but not overly intricate.

Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931) wore many hats in his long career, including composer, conductor, teacher at the Paris Conservatory, and editor.  In addition, he helped to found an institute – the Schola Cantorum – to study and revive early music as a counter-balance to the Conservatory’s excessive focus on opera.  This interest in early music highlights a recurring conundrum in d’Indy’s music, which is at times refreshingly non-modern but at other times quite pale in comparison to the expressivity achieved by his contemporaries.  He also found himself on the wrong side of several political topics.  Later he developed aggressive right-wing tendencies that spilled into anti-semitism during the divisive Dreyfus Affair.  Facing condemnation from his peers, it is perhaps understandable that d’Indy would retreat to greener pastures in the music of the past.

The Suite for Flute, Harp and Strings combines obvious echoes of the past with chromatic diversions that contribute much-needed spontaneity. On the one hand, his general style is not controversial or disruptive, even for a work composed as late as 1927. On the other hand, it is not always clear how his tonal progressions are structured moment to moment. The four movements together occupy just over 15 minutes. In first position d’Indy places an Entrée en Sonate that, as the name implies, provides a general introduction to the work but with touches of classical sonata form. The second movement carries a curious designation: Air désuet or “Outdated Song.” D’Indy achieves a startling effect by combining simple unison textures between all the instruments with piercing high harmonics in the violin. After this brief departure, he places a grave Sarabande in direct homage to the French Baroque era. The buoyant Finale draws inspiration from the lively farandole, a traditional chain dance still common in Provence. The main section (which appears three times) is played quickly and in triple meter; it is contrasted by a slower, pensive section in duple 4/4 time. As one might guess, the last word goes to the whirling and infectious dance theme, which d’Indy whips up faster and faster to the final cadence.

For modern audiences, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) is probably best remembered as a conductor – he directed the New York Philharmonic throughout the 1970s – even though that was the last aspect of his musical career to really take shape. Pierre showed early talent for music but suffered partly by growing up during World War II in German-occupied Lyon. He settled on a career in music despite repeatedly failing to gain admission to the conservatories in Lyon and Paris. Eventually, Boulez earned a spot in a secondary harmony class, proved himself a gifted student, and quickly came to work with legends in French music such as Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. Boulez became a champion of the avant-garde when he heard the tautly structured, mathematical systems espoused by Schoenberg and Webern. Their ability to extract the utmost intensity from minimal means inspired Boulez’s first mature works.

In 1957 he completed two Improvisations sur Mallarmé in homage to the titan of French Symbolism. Over the next few years he created three more related works to produce a five-movement work that, according to the composer, “gradually unfolds a portrait of Mallarmé.” The first Improvisation sets one of the poet’s most famous and cryptic sonnets.  Titled Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui, it is also known as The Swan for the prevailing image of the magnificent bird trapped in winter’s icy hold. Mallarmé uses this text to comment on creative paralysis, but the exact rendering of his elliptical phrases into English – not to mention the original rhyme scheme – proves extremely difficult. Boulez opens the Improvisation with a striking chord, followed by skipwise, highly erratic moves in the voice. Despite the variety, he returns again to again to certain key pitches, thus providing periodic anchor points in the form. The irony in such music is that what sounds like free-form, ad libitum gestures from each performer is actually part of a tightly-controlled system. Listeners must accept the striking timbral contrasts that unfold between the athletic yet lyrical soprano voice and the metallic, percussive sounds providing her sonic backdrop. Above all, this is music projecting a very distinct atmosphere.

Born to a life of privilege in the Basque region of southwestern France, Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) demonstrated a prodigious ability at the piano, enough to gain entrance to the Paris Conservatory as a teenager.  Despite his pianistic skills, he soon gravitated more toward composition. A marked eclecticism, inspired by his father’s numerous mechanical inventions, burst forth in great skill with all manner of instrumental styles and folk-inspired idioms. Although Ravel eventually moved to a quiet suburb outside Paris, he maintained established connections with most of the city’s avant-garde leaders, including Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, and Serge Diaghilev.

Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess), originally scored for solo piano, sounds lush and radiant in composer Zachary Wadsworth’s new orchestration, commissioned by Staunton Music Festival in 2023. Compared to Ravel’s other works, the Pavane uses rather simple, quaint harmonies aimed – as the title would suggest – to evoke a traditional Spanish pavane, or solemn court dance. Yet Ravel also glibly denied the literal connection and claimed he merely liked the way those words sounded when he spoke them! He favors a rich tapestry of seventh chords for the slowly changing, modal harmonies of the A section, which projects a porcelain-like delicacy. The B section is more rapturous, but at no point does Ravel stray from the simplicity of an antique lullaby. Pavane for a Dead Princess is dedicated to the Princesse de Polignac, who was a major patron of the arts and whose salon inspired Neoclassical works from Stravinsky, Satie, Poulenc, and others. The Princesse was very much still alive when the Pavane was composed in 1899. Among its many performances over the last 125 years, Ravel’s Pavane serenaded novelist Marcel Proust’s coffin to its final resting place in 1922.

INTERMISSION

The French can legitimately claim to have brought the harpsichord tradition to its fullest flowering, particularly in the generation active just after 1700. Paramount among harpsichordists is François Couperin, court musician to Louis XIV at Versailles and an important pedagogue and publisher. Prior to François there were other significant names who had developed harpsichord technique and repertoire to a very high level, including his uncle Louis and the latter’s good friend, Jean-Henri d’Anglebert (1629-1691). Son of a prosperous shoemaker, d’Anglebert’s early years are all but invisible to the historian’s glance.  His works first appeared alongside pieces by Louis Couperin and possibly originated in that circle.  The bulk of his career unfolded in court and chapel circles around Paris, including Versailles, where he held several keyboard posts.  His only published work, Pièces de clavecin, appeared in 1689 just before his death, though a fair amount of other music survives in handwritten copies. This collection was lavishly engraved for printing and included an invaluable “table of ornaments,” explaining in detail how each turn, trill, or mordent in a work like his Tombeau should be realized. A tombeau – etymologically linked to our word “tomb” – is a memorial, be it in stone or tones. D’Anglebert wrote his captivating Tombeau in 1672 on the death of his teacher, the eminent harpsichordist Jacques Chambonnières. This man did perhaps more than anyone else in elevating and fostering the Parisian harpsichord school. He was critical in offering a chance to young Louis Couperin, whose descendants would eventually assume all the highest musical positions at court.

No Couperin was more famous than François, nicknamed “Le Grand.” For both contemporaries and later generations, François epitomized the essence of the French Baroque: refined, expressive, vibrant, both indulgent and yet reserved. His image remained powerful well into the 20th century when a young Maurice Ravel added one more layer to the Couperin mystique.

Ravel’s early works, written prior to World War I, were experimental and extremely colorful. He was also a master pianist. Most of his compositions developed from thoughts worked out directly at the keys and require a virtuoso’s command of the instrument. Such is the case with Le Tombeau de Couperin composed for solo piano from 1914 to 1917. It would originally contain six movements, ranging from spirited technical material (Prélude and Toccata), strict counterpoint (Fugue), to several Baroque dances (Forlane, Minuet, and Rigaudon). The writing moves from sparkling to withdrawn, and the whole is one of Ravel’s most substantial and accomplished piano works. However, he was also a brilliant orchestrator – as he would show in his famous treatment of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1922). So in 1919 Ravel selected four movements of the Tombeau to set for orchestra; he omitted the Fugue and closing Toccata from the orchestral version while keeping the core dance movements. It is the orchestral version that we will hear this evening.

Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin is a double memorial. He began the piece shortly after war had erupted. Eventually, the six movements became tributes to six friends who died in battle. Moreover, Ravel pays tribute to the Baroque dance suite and forms that inspired François Couperin centuries earlier. No one would mistake Ravel’s piece for an actual Baroque dance suite, though at least the intent was there. It joins with works by Stravinsky, Poulenc, Satie, and others that escaped political and social upheavals of the time by seeking a Neo-Baroque or Neo-Classical sound.

Jason Stell, © 2025