Nadia Boulanger was in her mid-30s when she discovered her true vocation as one of the most influential composition teachers of the 20th century.  Born into a musical family in Paris—her parents were both singers, her younger sister Lili a composer of great, but sadly unrealized, promise—she entered the Paris Conservatoire at age ten and seemed destined for a distinguished career as a concert pianist or composer. Devastated by Lili’s premature death in 1918, however, she gave up composing and joined the faculty of the newly founded American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, which would remain her base of operations for more than half a century. Virgil Thomson, one of the legion of up-and-coming musicians (mostly Americans) who flocked to study at what was irreverently known as the “Boulangerie,” described her as “a one-woman graduate school” for composers. Her roster of pupils and protégés was notably diverse, ranging from Aaron Copland to Quincy Jones to Philip Glass. The Three Pieces for Cello and Piano of 1914 reflect Boulanger’s grounding in the impressionistic idiom of Debussy and Fauré. Although all three movements are in the minor mode and share a symmetrical ABA form, the first two—based on organ “improvisations” that Boulanger had composed three years earlier—are distinctly more conservative in style than the last. “Modéré” (Moderate) sets the cello’s muted cantilena against a pattering, lightly syncopated piano accompaniment, while “Sans vitesse et à l’aise” (Without speed and relaxed) features simple canonic interplay between the two instruments. In “Vite et nerveusement rythmé” (Fast and nervously rhythmic), by contrast, Boulanger looks to the future in driving, often irregular rhythms redolent of Stravinsky’s early ballets.

© Harry Haskell, 2023

Marc-André Hamelin’s broad musical sympathies are reflected in his singularly eclectic repertoire, which ranges from the classical mainstream to rarely performed works by such pianist-composers as Valentin Alkan, Kaikhosru Sorabji, and Leopold Godowsky, as well as contemporary jazz and the wildly heterogeneous “third-stream” music of Nikolay Kapustin. Much of the music that Hamelin has written throughout his career as a concert pianist references composers of the past; witness his Renaissance-inspired Toccata on “L’homme armé,” a test piece for the 2017 Van Cliburn Piano Competition, and the hour-long set of 12 Etudes in All the Minor Keys, which pay homage to Scarlatti, Liszt, and other well-known composers. Four Perspectives for Cello and Piano, commissioned by the La Jolla Music Society in 2016, emanates from a source closer to our own time: the dissonant, fiercely concentrated modernism of the mid-20th century. As the title suggests, Hamelin approaches the subject from four distinct perspectives. Each section of the 12-minute-long work is defined by a different kind of movement and a different relationship between the two instruments and the sonic spaces they inhabit. Hamelin explores the contrasting personalities of the cello and piano, which move in and out of sync as their gestures, dynamics, and range grow steadily more expansive. What starts as a quietly playful dialogue in terse, skittery utterances ends in a grimly determined and highly virtuosic moto perpetuo. 

© Harry Haskell, 2023

At once radical and traditionalist, Debussy rebelled against the French Wagner cult and the ponderous academic style of establishment composers like Saint-Saëns and d’Indy. At the same time, he urged his compatriots to return to the “pure French tradition” as exemplified by the Baroque master Jean-Philippe Rameau. Debussy first made his mark in the early 1890s with a series of boldly unconventional and quintessentially gallic masterpieces, such as the emotionally turbulent String Quartet; La damoiselle élue (The Blessed Damozel), a Wagnerian “lyric poem” for women’s voices and orchestra; and his revolutionary masterpiece Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”). By the time Debussy published his first book of Images for solo piano in 1905, the composer and his aesthetic principles—loosely subsumed under the rubric “Debussyism”—had attracted praise and censure in equal measure. Together with the symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s great piano and orchestral pieces came to define musical impressionism in the popular mind. Although many critics associated him with painters like Manet and Whistler, he maintained that his music depicted not superficial impressions but essential realities.  Musicians alone, he declared, enjoyed “the privilege of being able to convey all the poetry of the night and the day,” whereas painters could “recapture only one of her aspects at a time.”

Composed in the summer of 1915, the Sonata for Cello and Piano was the first of six projected sonatas for sundry instrumental ensembles, of which only two more—scored for flute, viola, and harp and for violin and piano—would be realized before the composer’s death in 1918. The Sonata signaled Debussy’s emergence from a prolonged depression, exacerbated by cancer and the onset of war, during which he had felt incapable of producing music. “I’ve almost had to relearn” how to compose, he told the Italian conductor Bernardo Molinari. “It was like a rediscovery and it’s seemed to me more beautiful than ever! Is it because I was deprived of it for so long? I don’t know. What beauties there are in music ‘by itself,’ with no axe to grind or new inventions to amaze the so-called dilettanti.” The freshness and spontaneity of the Sonata may owe something as well to the therapeutic landscape of the Normandy coast, where Debussy had sought refuge from the tense atmosphere of wartime Paris.

True to his nationalist credo, Debussy proudly styled himself musicien français on the title pages of his three sonatas. The Cello Sonata, in three short movements, illustrates the “clarity of expression” and “precision and compactness of form” that he considered the hallmarks of the French style. Debussy’s music is predominantly spare and delicate, has an almost Neoclassical transparency. Despite the piano’s grandiose opening, the cello’s graceful arabesques and tenderly swooning melody set the tone for the Prologue. The Sérénade, fantastical and rhapsodic in character, is marked by crisp staccato accents, quirky, free-flowing rhythmic patterns, and subtle chromatic harmonies. The movement comes to rest on a quietly sustained A, then pivots without pausing for breath into the buoyant, lighthearted Finale.

© Harry Haskell, 2023

Franck wasn’t precisely a late bloomer—by his early 20s he had written several widely acclaimed works—but he was slow to win recognition as a central figure of the French Romantic school. Groomed by his overbearing father for a career as a concert pianist, he spent much of his early life in pursuit of a prize that stubbornly eluded him, despite his acknowledged brilliance as an improviser on the keyboard. Not until his 50th year did he achieve the equivalent of a tenured position as professor of organ at the prestigious Paris Conservatoire, where he would count Debussy, Bizet, and Vierne among his pupils. Virtually all of the music on which Franck’s reputation rests dates from the last dozen or so years of his life, including the ebullient Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra, the Lisztian symphonic poem Le chasseur maudit, the majestic Symphony in D minor, and the abundantly melodious Violin Sonata in A major.

Franck’s chamber works from early and late in his career include some of his greatest and most characteristic creations. By the time Franck he wrote the A-major Sonata in 1886, he was firmly under the spell of Wagner and Liszt, whose harmonic innovations he absorbed, along with the technique of generating large-scale works from a few germinal motifs. Franck not only dedicated his sonata to the great Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, one of his most stalwart champions, but presented the manuscript to the violinist as a wedding present. (Ysaÿe was also a close friend of Debussy and the dedicatee of his 1893 String Quartet.) Franck’s Sonata proved so popular with performers and public alike that it was soon transcribed for cello, viola, and flute, becoming one of the most frequently heard works in the recital repertoire. The Sonata figures memorably in literature, too: in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, Irene’s playing of Franck’s “divine third movement” triggers Young Jolyon’s fateful decision to tell his son about the tragedy that has loomed over their family since before his birth.

The A-major Sonata is deeply indebted to Ysaÿe’s purity of tone, liquid phrasing, and tasteful reticence. After hearing the violinist read through the first movement, Franck adjusted the tempo marking to a livelier Allegretto ben moderato, imparting a fresh undercurrent of urgency to the gently undulating principal theme. For all its lush chromaticism and lush textures, the Sonata has clarity that runs through even the restless second-movement Allegro. The work lacks a true slow movement. In its place, Franck created a spacious minor-mode meditation that revisits earlier thematic material in the manner of Liszt. Freely declamatory in style, the Recitativo—Fantasia mediates between the muscular lyricism of the first two movements and the disciplined canonic writing of the final Allegretto poco mosso. In its blend of vehemence and restraint, intense emotion and scintillating showmanship, Franck’s Sonata epitomizes the spirit of French Romanticism.

© Harry Haskell, 2023