Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 1 – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand by Maurice Ravel

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 1 – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand by Maurice Ravel

I sometimes see Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy grouped together under the stylistic category of musical Impressionism.  I’m sure you are aware of the stunning work of the impressionist painters, Monet in particular, who achieved astonishing and unprecedented visual effects in their paintings, depicting the behavior of light with uncanny accuracy and arresting beauty through their pointillistic painting techniques.

One of the miraculous features of impressionistic painting is the way that the countless points of color, which seem random and unintelligible when viewed close to the canvas, coalesce into an image that is remarkably clear, yet nuanced, when viewed from a proper distance.  It’s like the ultimate expression of losing the forest for the trees.

 

In my opinion, this style of painting fits Debussy’s manner the best.  While he himself did not appreciate that label (see this post for more about that), feeling a greater connection with the Symbolist poets than the Impressionist painters, I think Debussy’s music provides a brilliant analogue to those paintings, glowing, soft and warm, with auras instead of edges and an impeccably imaginative control of pastel color and light.  And it is for this reason that I don’t particularly see Ravel as an impressionist.  None of the qualities of light and softness really apply to him.  His edges are sharp and crisp.  His colors are bold and primary.  His flavors are cool and astringent.  His music in no way exhibits the glow of Monet.  So I don’t know why Ravel is so often grouped with the Impressionist musicians.  Even Erik Satie feels more Impressionist (for more about Satie, see this post).

Ravel seems to much more completely evoke the clear, crystalline strokes of Neo-Classicism as exemplified by Stravinsky.  And the two shared an affinity for one another.  Once, Diaghilev wanted to stage Mussorgsky’s rough, unfinished opera Khovanshchina (for more about Mussorgsky’s roughness, see this post) and commissioned his frequent collaborator Igor Stravinsky (for more about Stravinsky and Diaghilev, see this post) to touch up the orchestration, for which he phoned a friend, Ravel, to help him complete the job.  Later, Ravel would orchestrate Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, yielding the popular concert version played by so many orchestras today (for more about Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, see this post).

Ravel and Stravinsky shared not only an affinity for similar patterns of orchestration and musical clarity, but also for the jazzy harmonies to which the Americans were dancing in the 1920s and 1930s.  Both Ravel and Stravinsky, at various points in their output, infused their pointed, astringent orchestral colors with the rhythms and harmonies of the jazz that poured out of American dance bands.  Here are a couple examples of Stravinsky’s forays into American jazz music:

 

Ravel had visited the United States in the late 1920s, touring around to major symphony orchestras and drinking in the American culture as he did so.  Among the many elements of American life that impressed him was the jazz music, and the two piano concertos he composed in the early 1930s, shortly after his return from the States, seem to reflect this.

Just a few years before Ravel’s trip to America, a remarkable pianist named George Gershwin, in fulfillment of a commission from bandleader Paul Whiteman, had written a seminal and monumental rhapsody for piano and orchestral that is to this day probably still the most authentic and convincing synthesis of jazz idioms and classical scope.  It came to be known as Rhapsody in Blue and is still beloved by modern listeners for its epic orchestral sweep, bluesy piano part, and alternation of moods, by turns meandering, opulent, relaxed, frenetic and euphoric.  In 2000 Disney animators showed just how well Gershwin had captured the flavor and spirit of interwar America, creating a brilliant piece of animation which managed to hit on numerous of the distinctive cultural notes and tropes to accompany Gershwin’s score in the sequel to Fantasia (for more about the original Fantasia of the 1940s, see this post).

 

Incidentally, the orchestration of Rhapsody in Blue is not Gershwin’s (he was not actually skilled enough at its time of composition to orchestrate it successfully), but went through several versions at the hand of Whiteman’s favorite arranger, Ferde Grofe.  For more about Grofe, see this post.

Given Ravel’s high level of involvement with the American musical scene during his visit, and also given the popularity of Rhapsody in Blue within that scene, it seems inevitable to me that the French watchmaker would have heard Gershwin’s jazzy essay himself.  It also seems likely given the extent to which Ravel seems to have been working under its influence in the two piano concertos written upon his return to France.  Interestingly, he worked on both of them simultaneously.  The Concerto in G, written for two-handed pianists, is the more famous of the two.  If you wish to note the similarities to Gershwin’s Rhapsody, simply listen to the 8-minute first movement and hear the sighing clarinet licks as they pop out of a succession of moods and colors very similar to Gershwin’s:

 

The Concerto in G is justifiably famous, but my preference is actually for Ravel’s other piano concerto, commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein for orchestra and piano left hand alone.  While the two-handed Concerto in G is cast in the conventional fast-slow-fast three movement format popular since Vivaldi (for more about Vivaldi’s concerto format, see this post), the Concerto for the Left Hand, at about two thirds the length, is one through-composed movement with no double bar until the end.  While there are rather obvious sections within the movement, this structure, which also features a similar scheme of opulent intensification and meandering relaxation, colored by often bluesy piano figuration and a ticking modal march that is pure Ravel, gives a clear nod to the parallel feature of Gershwin’s great Rhapsody.  Ravel’s Left Hand concerto could as easily be called a rhapsody as could Gershwin’s rhapsody be called a piano concerto.

There are several instances of the Germanic and conservative Wittgenstein, who was most active in seeking out and commissioning the most prominent composers of his day, reacting to the fruits of his commissions with displeasure and even vexation.  There are some commissions which he unfortunately did not see fit to premiere, for example those by Hindemith and Prokofiev (see this post).  While he initially did not know what to make of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand with its mixture of French mist and jazzy clouds, happily he came to embrace it after getting to know it, eventually considering it to be a significant and notable work, and seeing fit to premiere and record it.  And so, we are able to hear Wittgenstein’s own realization of Ravel’s synthesis of French gentility and American extravagance:

 

P.S.  Here’s a nifty video of Wittgenstein’s surviving left hand playing excerpts from Ravel’s Left Hand Concerto.  It’s worth seeing:

 

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Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 3 – BONUS DOUBLE POST! Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel and Nobilissima Visione by Paul Hindemith

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 3 – BONUS DOUBLE POST!  Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel and Nobilissima Visione by Paul Hindemith

Depending on where you look in the history Western music, “passacaglia”, or its frequently-encountered French version “passacaille”, may refer to an assortment of different but related musical phenomena.  In attempting to define the term, I long ago concluded that it is only really possible to list characteristic tendencies, and even then there are always exceptions.  But here are some things that tend to be true about passacaglias:

1. Like its close cousin, the chaconne, it is usually in triple meter, and usually a fast triple meter which feels almost like one beat per bar with a compound division.  If anything is nearly always true of movements labeled as passacaglias, it is this.  Oh, except for this one:

 

2. Passacaglias tend to be in minor keys, with a heavy character, often described as “ponderous”.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Even if passacaglias are not strictly tonal, especially in twentieth century examples, this is more or less true.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Well, maybe that’s subject to interpretation?  It certainly has a breadth and solemnity, even if it’s not exactly ponderous.

3. Passacaglias tend to be built by stringing together phrases, often called variations, of regular length, all built around some kind of repeating melodic figure.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Granted, you could say it’s more the chord progression that unifies the phrases of Handel’s example there, but usually when the unifying theme of the passacaglia variations is described it refers to a melody that is literally stated somewhere in the ensemble during each one, and it’s generally considered a mark of craftsmanship by critics to successfully pull that off.

It’s the third point that I most often find identified as the distinctive hallmark of the passacaglia, and it is that device which tends to help the best-known and most widely-respected examples of the genre stand out from the pack.

The earliest examples of this technique tend to see the recurring melodic phrase in the lowest voice, also known as the bass.  Sometimes this specific technique is known as a ground or ground bass.  One of the most famous examples of this can be found toward the end of Englishman Henry Purcell’s short opera Dido and Aeneas, written on an episode of Virgil’s Aeneid.  Shortly before Queen Dido expires out of heartsickness, she sings a plaintive lament about her death, a lyrical outpouring of drooping melody which is set above a recurring passacaglia-like bass ground:

 

The ground bass was a favorite technique of Purcell’s; his music is just peppered with repeating basslines of all styles and characters, and he was quite ingenious in composing nuanced and fascinating musical lines for the upper parts which leveraged the ground bass’ propulsive character while at the same time avoiding a slavish conformity to the phrase lengths happening below.

There is another famous passacaglia from the Baroque period which features this highly disciplined technique, although it twists the ground bass convention by moving the recurring phrase around within the texture; the repeating line is often in the bass, but frequently moves to the upper and middle voices also.  It is Bach’s great Passacaglia in c minor for organ:

 

Admired widely by fans of Bach’s music across all subsequent generations, I think it is probably Bach’s idea to moving the passacaglia ground around throughout the ensemble that enshrined the passacaglia within Western compositional technique as the rigorous, disciplined, and powerful exercise that it has come to be when written by subsequent composers.

Passacaglias largely fell out of favor during the Classical and Romantic eras, more or less replaced by the theme and variations technique, a comparable practice which better fit the virtuosic character of the musical sensibility that drove European art music during these periods, but as brainy composers began to delight more self-consciously in the intellectual rigor of past music, the passacaglia started to make a comeback.  Granted, you don’t hear them all the time, but many notable composers during the twentieth century have written at least one of them as part of a significant work, and when they appear they somehow manage to emanate antiquity and modern freshness in equal measure.

One example of which I am quite fond is the passacaglia from Paul Hindemith’s 1938 ballet about Saint Francis of Assisi, Nobilissima Visione.  In this movement, the finale of the ballet, Hindemith portrays the great holy man’s state of spiritual ecstasy, his sense of unity with God and all of creation, as the phrases of the passacaglia, written around the ever-present, stoic, 6-bar theme, build to a magnificently orchestrated climax.  In this work Hindemith really created an orchestral work which transcends the passacaglia discipline:

 

 

And so did Maurice Ravel, writing just before the onset of the First World War, for considerably different forces.  Ravel’s passacaglia is found in his Piano Trio, written for the standard instrumentation of violin, cello and piano, but shimmering with his unique and compelling approach to orchestration.  The third movement is built around a solemn, long-breathed 8-bar phrase, present somewhere in the texture during each variation, although Ravel does take liberties with it at certain points.  In customary passacaglia form we hear the triple meter subject (it is so slow that the meter seems ambiguous from just listening) in the lowest register of the piano.  It is then transferred from instrument to instrument in the succeeding variations, creating a pensive and reflective character throughout, cast in Ravel’s crystal clear and sensuously French orchestration and harmonies.  We even hear echoes of much more sentimental French voices like Chausson in some of the more thickly scored sections.  Like Hindemith’s monumental passacaglia from Nobilissima Vision, Ravel crafts a fluid musical movement which rises and recedes, cast in compelling and varied instrumental colors with each new iteration:

While the passacaglia seemed to suffer an identity crisis from its inception centuries ago, it proved immediately useful as an ideal vehicle for composers to cast a solemn, introspective spell over their listeners.  As musicians’ agreement of its textbook characteristics coalesced in more recent years, it has, and continues to, provide a challenging exercise in formal control and development of continuous variation, with the finest examples transcending the contrivances of their construction.

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