Igor Markevitch (1912-1983)
Complete Orchestral Music, Vol. 6: Piano Concerto • Cantate
• Icare
Markevitch’s extraordinary precocity as a composer is
startlingly revealed in this sixth instalment in the series of his complete
orchestral works: the Piano Concerto and Cantate were written when he was
sixteen and seventeen years old. Nevertheless they display unsullied confidence
of idiom and certainty of technique that are unnerving and remain to this day a
mystery. Years later, in the 1940s, his Parisian mentor and perhaps only true
composition teacher, Nadia Boulanger, said of him to colleagues in the United
States that already at the age of eight he had been “un phénomène”.#
Sergey Pavlovich Dyagilev, as so many times before in the
impresario’s meteoric career, was one of the first to spot this adolescent
talent, and he presented the boy with challenges and an environment in which he
could rapidly develop - or fall, as the case might be. The two had been
introduced by Dyagilev’s secretary, Alexandrine Troussevitch, at a performance
of Petrushka, and only days later Markevitch had played sections of his still
incomplete Sinfonietta to this maker of lives and of reputations. An immediate
commission to compose a Piano Concerto for the coming London season was the
result.
The youth was whisked headlong into a different world.
Markevitch knew that he was being “put to the test”, and he was not found
wanting. The work is in every sense an exuberant Concerto Grosso. If the outer
movements of this Concerto bear strong traces of attentive study of Bach (of
Hindemith, too, whom he admired), they are nonetheless harmonically and
rhythmically fresh, original and powerfully present. Indeed, the displacement
of metrical expectations, the shortening or lengthening of bars by an
unexpected quaver or semi-quaver, is a Markevitch hallmark that will
characterize his musical style throughout his maturity. Here is the sequence of
bars from the last pages of the first movement, where the “drive to the
cadence” is fuelled by rhythmic experimentation :
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3
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6
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7
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6
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5
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6
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6
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5(x2)
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3
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5
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6(x2)
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6(x2)
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4
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3
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4(x2)
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|
4
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8
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8
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16
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16
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8
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16
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16
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8
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16
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16
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8
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8
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8
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8
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The slow movement of the Concerto is most original, both in
its delicate polytonality, and in its self-confident spareness, most especially
in the featuring of solo snare-drum as a foil to the piano’s last restatement
of the theme. In the Finale, this idea is transformed into a cadenza with the
accompaniment merely of bass drum. The hymn-like quality of this second
movement, and the grandiose wind chorales of the third look forward to the
second movement of Cantate, to the Hymnes (Marco Polo 8.223724), and to the
‘ecstatic’ slow movement for strings alone of Lorenzo il Magnifico (8.223882).
If it looks backwards at all to Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind
Instruments of 1923-24, it is not in any sense derivative; rather it is in the
best kind of homage.
Its première at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in
London, on 15th July, 1929, with Desormière conducting, took place alongside
Stravinsky’s Renard and the great Nijinsky creations Carnaval, L’après-midi
d’un faune, and Les dieux mendiants. The audience was star-studded: the cream
of London society and intelligentsia, Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf among
them. Dyagilev was rapt. “This is a music,” he rhapsodised, “that draws its
vigour from the very same principles that underpin the world”. Overcome, too,
was the Duchess of Portland. “My dear”, she drooled, “Beethoven il est entré in
you!” Markevitch, to his credit, erupted inwardly into a “crazed laughter” at
this aristocratic infelicity.
Very few creations of sixteen-year-olds enter the repertoire
for their merits in themselves; most are curiosities of juvenilia. The energy,
invention, mastery of form and sheer explosive élan of the present work mark it
out as worthy of inclusion in the composer’s catalogue of mature works.
The intentional obscurities, non sequiturs and surreal
evocations of Jean Cocteau’s writing around 1930 are no surprise; this strand
of absurdist French poetry both grows in a natural progression from Rimbaud,
and is a reaction against the familiar comfort of the kind of images
immortalised by Proust. Without doubt, Mallarmé, Cocteau and René Char have
contributed beyond measure to the path taken by French music between Debussy
and the present day. The arts in France are perhaps more closely interlinked
and interdependent than in almost any other country.
Cantate, written in Paris in 1929 to a text by Cocteau,
should have been Markevitch’s first ballet. The day immediately following the
successful (éclatant, indeed) reception of his Piano Concerto at its London
première in 1929, Dyagilev excitedly discussed with Markevitch a new commission
for a ballet. The scenario would be drawn by Boris Kochno from Andersen’s The
Emperor’s New Clothes, the choreography be mounted by Lifar, and the sets and
costumes designed by Picasso. Heady stuff for a sixteen-year-old. The work was
to be called L’Habit du Roi, and Dyagilev conceived of it being “full of
researches and of new forms”. Klemperer had already agreed to conduct, subject
only to schedule considerations, and the other creative collaborators on the
project were to convene for a meeting in Venice in September.
The composer set to work immediately. Nor was he overawed by
Dyagilev; he caused consternation by proposing a fugue, no less, for the moment
of the score where the king is discovered to be naked, “Mais le roi est nu!”
“Why such a severe form?” asked Dyagilev. “To tame disorder with an element of
precision”, replied Markevitch; and in response to a searching look, “don’t be
afraid – it will be a ‘crazy’ fugue”. One thinks, perhaps, of La Damnation de
Faust as the ultimate inspiration behind this youthful idea. Other elements of
the music, highlighted in the complex polyrhythmic combinations already beloved
of Markevitch, were to anticipate the controlled disorder of aleatoricism, described
by Markevitch in the 1930s, not brought into general practice until the
Darmstadt school instituted it in the 1950s. Both ideas are carried forward
into the Cantate.
Events moved fast during the remainder of this summer.
Twelve days after the London première of the Piano Concerto, on the youthful
composer’s seventeenth birthday (27th July), Dyagilev and Markevitch were
staying in rooms overlooking the Rhine at the famous Hotel “Des Trois Rois” in
Basel (where Honegger composed his Symphony Di Tre Re). A contract was signed,
with the spectacular sum of ten thousand francs agreed as commissioning fee, to
be paid commencing August in ten equal instalments.
Only a short time later that summer, however, Dyagilev was
taken ill, falling into a coma and peaceful death at his beloved Grand Hotel
des Bains at the Venice Lido with Kochno, Lifar and Misia Sert# at his side.
Thus it was that, returning to Paris by train with his mother Zoya, Markevitch
conceived the idea of salvaging his substantial body of music already sketched
for L’Habit du Roi by asking his slightly older friend, the young-lion poet,
Jean Cocteau, to compose a text for a Cantate.
Cocteau, who already gloried in a self-proclaimed “slavery
of popularity”, lived in chaotic circumstances in an apartment on the top floor
of the Hotel Madeleine, indulging in a diet of petits-fours at Fauchon in the
square below, and of opium in his rooms above. “I am without doubt the most
famous and the least-known poet”, declared this outrageous, brilliant genius.
Journal of an Unknown and the film (with music by Georges Auric) The Blood of a
Poet were already under his belt. The latter had been first screened at the
Moulin Rouge, under Dyagilev’s auspices. On 2nd December, 1929, Cocteau would
accompany Markevitch to Brussels for the Belgian première of his Sinfonietta.
In part stimulated by working on Cantate together, the two had become
inseparable.
Cocteau’s work for the text of Cantate shows every sign of
being written at a high level of poetic zeal. He took a great deal of trouble
to tailor the text both to the Markevitch he knew, and, doubtless, to the
pre-existing musical sketches that were played to him. It is nevertheless
uncanny that, nearly three years before Markevitch worked on the defining
orchestral score of his career, L’envol d’Icare (The Flight of Icarus) Cocteau
should have included the lines :
Voyez, voyez,
je sais voler
je sais me tenir toute seule
je sais voler
me détacher de la terre
tourner sur moi
m’élever sans ailes
et monter en l’air
comme on tombe
doucement à l’envers.
Do you see, do you see,
I know how to fly !
all alone, I remain aloft
I know how to fly
to detach myself from the earth
spin around
raise myself without wings
rise into the air
just as one falls
gently upside down.
C’est le système des colombes
les inventions des rêves
on croit qu’on s’élève
et on tombe
oiseau cruel de rêve
votre secret est découvert.
This is the method of doves
these are the creations of dreams
one believes that one rises up
and one falls
cruel bird of dreams
your secret has been uncovered.
This reference can hardly be incidental. Allusions to
opium-reverie apart (“the creations of dreams”), the two men must have
discussed the Icarus myth, and Markevitch’s mind must already have been turning
towards its music. Likewise, the Chorale that ends Cantate is no accident. In
London the previous summer, Markevitch had mentioned to Dyagilev that he had
yet to see a staged version of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale. He must have had
the other-worldly Chorales of that work in his mind for some time.
Cantate was first performed in June 1930 at the Théâtre de
la Pigalle (of all places!) not even a year after the young composer’s triumph
with his Piano Concerto in London. The critics viewed the work as an indicator
of a great compositional career at its dawn. “The Cantate is testimony to rare
mastery and intelligence, marvellously in equilibrium with an outstanding
spirit”, wrote Henri Sauguet# in L’Europe nouvelle. Vuillermoz spoke of
“premature wisdom”, and Jules Casadesus of “joie de puer”, the “joy of simply
being young!”
Cantate is written for a chorus of male voices only, with
solo soprano and a standard orchestra without harps. It was published soon
after its composition by Schott and Sons, Mainz, with an illustration by
Cocteau for its cover.
The Icarus myth is the idée-fixe of Markevitch’s life: of
his long and successful career as a conductor, of the complex man revealed in
the autobiography Être et avoir été, and above all of the creative artist of
the early years. As Markevitch grew into the life of the mature artist, he
could never shake off the sense that, as an adolescent under Dyagilev’s
tutelage, he had soared too high too soon, and had inevitably fallen, wounded,
to earth. It was thus prescient that, at the age of twenty, he had chosen Icare
as the subject of his first major choreographic collaboration with Serge Lifar,
Dyagilev’s somewhat peacock-like substitute for Nijinsky.
Lifar was not up to the task, and the ballet never came to
stage realisation; but under the title L’Envol d’Icare (The Flight of Icarus,
or more literally, The launching into air of Icarus) the extraordinary
orchestral score had several performances and recognition that can only be
described as awed. “This work … will probably mark a date in the evolution of
music”, wrote Darius Milhaud#; while Cocteau commented that the work might have
“fallen from the moon”, quoting Nietzsche’s remark that “the ideas which change
the face of the world make their entrance on doves’ feet#”.
(For exhaustive notes on the work’s genesis and musical
content, the reader is invited to refer to the liner notes for L’Envol d’Icare,
Markevitch Complete Orchestral Works Volume 2, Marco Polo 8.223666.)
Why, then, was the work rewritten in 1943-44 while the
composer was living in the Villino on the grounds of Bernard Berenson’s Villa I
Tatti, outside Florence? In part to blame may well have been the less than
thrilling experience of its performance at the 1937 Venice Biennale, where the
orchestra was so mediocre that only three sections of the work could be
rehearsed to performance standard in the time available. This was the famous
occasion of the rapprochement between Stravinsky and Markevitch, when L’Envol
shared a programme with Jeu de Cartes. The older man (Dyagilev’s first Igor)
had been somewhat arch with his younger rival up to this point, but admired
L’Envol enough that he softened and warmed.
The 1938 Brussels recording on 78s of L’Envol d’Icare was
not a great deal more assured, and Markevitch may have concluded that the score
could be made more accessible for orchestras unaccustomed, in particular, to
playing with quarter-tone intonation. Then again, it is possible that, during
the fallow period of the Second World War, living at Settignano, he simply
could not leave alone this emblem of what, by now, was a former life. In a
fascinating letter of March 1944 (one of the first that Markevitch attempted in
English), offering the dedication of the new score to Bernard Berenson, he
relates how “by and by I considered Le Vol d’Icare as these sketches which
painters make before a fresco, and I began to wish to make my real fresco also.
Years passed, and finally, last summer I took this work in hand. But very soon
I understood it was impossible to “correct” the first Icare. All my conception
had evoluted [sic: evolved] with myself and a new work began to appear. It was
the same as I am the same man of twelve years ago . . . Quite the same, and
quite different. Indeed, it would be possible to give both Icare[s] in the same
concert (and probably it will be interesting to try). To compare with a great
example I should say there is as much difference between both, as between the
first and the third Beethoven’s Leonora. I could say, besides, there is a
second Icare, not written and constituted by my evolution, my sufferings, and
my experiences during these last years.”
The small refinements in some of the movement titles
distance the work from Stravinskian associations, but indicate no structural
changes whatsoever; not one single measure is added or subtracted from the
original composition. The large number of alterations of substance between
L’Envol d’Icare and its recasting as Icare all occur on a level of musical
detail that might at first be imperceptible, but which is in fact quite
profound.
Most immediately noticeable is the removal of the group of
solo instruments tuned a quarter-tone higher than the remainder of the
orchestra. There are many changes of instrumentation: the substitution of
trumpet for bassoon on the opening motif and countless other small
reorchestrations. More significant is the addition of long-phrased, legato
counter-melodies that are not present in the sparer textures of the original. A
troped melody for ’cello solo that is added during the six bars at Où l’on
apprend la Chute d’Icare is perhaps the most obvious recomposition. Does it
represent a loss of confidence in his musical vision? Is it a filling-out of a
suspended thought that was more effective as a “hidden melody” à la Robert
Schumann? It “works”, but does it perhaps say too much?
Many composers have rewritten or recast earlier scores. In
the present case, what results is an utterly different, completely valid work.
Though the surface distinctions are almost imperceptible, as compared, say, to
the wholesale hacking out and replacement of significant passages in Bruckner’s
symphonies, the internal rethinking of the work is profound. While it would be
a rank overstatement to say that courage is replaced by caution, exploration by
convention, it is undoubtedly the composer’s intention to seek understanding of
a work that, in the ascetic spareness of its first incarnation, was perhaps
ahead of its time and outside of its audience’s æsthetic ken.
And the composer remained ambiguous about the virtues of the
two versions. In the same letter to Berenson, Markevitch later writes, “Perhaps
some will regret the taste of unripe fruit of Le Vol d’Icare. I think they
would be in the wrong. Today we have too often the tendency to take awkwardness
for genius, and inexperience for originality.”
The Icare incarnation has had considerable success in the
concert hall. It was performed at Carnegie Hall three times in April 1958 by
Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic (the two conductor-composers
had a warm mutual admiration and affection). Other than radio broadcasts of
concert performance, this is its first recording under studio conditions.
Notes and translations by Christopher Lyndon-Gee
Copyright © 2003 Christopher Lyndon-Gee