Debussy composed “Masques,” “D’un cahier
d’esquisses,” and “L’isle joyeuse” in 1904, most probably with the
intention of publishing them as a group. For a number of reasons, the
pieces ended up being published separately by two different publishers,
with “Masques” and “L’isle joyeuse” being premiered together by Ricardo
Viñes early in 1905. The pieces were composed and revised at the
time that Debussy was falling in love with Emma Bardac—something of a
scandal. The two eloped to the island of Jersey in the summer of 1904;
biographers have suggested a link particularly between the spirit of
“L’isle joyeuse” and the couple’s passion.
The three pieces share a sense of erotic potential tied in with travel
and the sea. I am struck by the way in which these pieces sonically
seem to take off from the first act of Wagner’s Tristan—the act in
which Tristan and Isolde fall in (impossible) love as they travel
across the sea. Much of Debussy’s water music is imbued with Wagner’s
water, especially this first act of Tristan with its odd mix of
military fanfares and eroticism. Debussy’s triptych suggests the
possibility that Tristan and Isolde don’t have to die of their love:
rather they can retreat to their Happy Isle away from King Mark (or the
judgment of Parisian society) and waltz together ecstatically forever
after.
Beethoven’s Sonata in D major, op. 28, creates
a space the composer revisited several times in the years around his
anguished discovery of his increasing deafness: a world in which the
stricken composer takes solace in nature, in the sound and solitude of
a world away from the hurly-burly of the city. Beethoven evokes the
pastoral here most obviously in the last movement, with its lilting
bass and repetitive harmonic pattern, but the tone has been there from
the very beginning of the first movement. While the sonata constantly
evokes simplicity and stillness, it is filled with surprising and
telling moments that bespeak Beethoven’s mature craftmanship—the
unusual use of the minor key in the first movement’s modulatory
passages; the surprising virtuosic outbursts in the midst of that
movement’s overall calm; the Schubertian half-dark of the second
movement; the odd twist to B minor in the Scherzo; and the charming
concision of the finale.
Liszt issued his first of what would be three
“Années de Pelèrinage” in 1855, although some of the
music in it dates as far back as his sojourn in Switzerland with Marie
d’Agoult in 1835-36. The “Years of Pilgrimage” may have been an attempt
on the part of Liszt to better control his reputation as a composer: to
remind the musical public that he was far more than just a virtuoso
pianist who made the ladies faint. (He had retired from the
professional concert stage in 1848.) The cycle of pieces included in
the book represents a pilgrimage in a Bunyan-esque sense: the landscape
is there more as metaphor than as picture. Liszt is more interested in
evoking emotional states (reactions to the sublimity of nature) than in
evoking nature itself.
It has been suggested that the progress of “Switzerland” is from the
mountain to the valley, from the countryside to the city—a progression
reinforced by the final two pieces, “Homesickness” and “The Bells of
Geneva.” One related theme is the relationship of man and nature, and
that eternal Romantic idea of a connection between the moods of nature
and the moods of man. Thus, the centerpiece of the cycle is
“Vallée d’Obermann,” a large-scaled tone poem in and of itself,
based not on any actual place, but rather on the existential
ruminations of the eponymous hero of Sénancour’s epistolary
novel Obermann. As epigram, Liszt includes a brief passage from the
novel that begins, “What do I want? What am I? What should I ask of
nature?” The rhythm of all of the motives in the piece echoes the
rhythm of the French original, “Que veux-je? que suis-je? Que demander
à la nature.”
The other personality that pervades the whole cycle is that of Byron,
whose Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is referred to several times. The
epigram for “At the Wallensee,” the second piece, is typical:
…thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring.
For “Orage,” Liszt returns to Byron:
But where of ye, O tempests! Is the goal?
Are ye like those within the human breast?
Or do ye find, at length, like eagles, some high nest?
On a cheerier note, after the melancholy of Obermann, Liszt heads
“Eglogue” with these further words from Byron:
The morn is up again, the dewy morn,
With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,
Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,
And living as if earth contain’d no tomb.
A number of the pieces use Swiss folk songs as their bases, and the
second-to-last, “Le mal du pays,” includes two pages of prose from
Sénancour explaining the deep significance of this material.
“The ranz des vaches doesn’t only bring back memories, it paints
pictures.” The author continues by explaining how the sound of this
music brings back the sense of the mountains, their grandeur and their
stillness, their sounds and their silence.
Along with the drama of the mountains, water plays a role in the
development of the cycle, with No. 2 set by a lake surrounded by
mountains, No. 4 by the beginnings of a mountain stream (which grows
into a small river), No. 5 during a mountain thunderstorm, and No. 8
safely by the lake of Geneva.
Liszt has arranged the keys of the pieces carefully: the first is in C
major, the place of all good beginnings musically (at the mountaintop
Chapel of William Tell); this is followed by A-flat major, E major,
A-flat major (a triptych of short pieces evoking the countryside and
the happy local people and their cows); C minor (for the tempest of
“Orage”); E minor (with C major and E major playing prominent roles in
“Obermann”), A-flat major, and E minor (a second triptych); and a final
settling into B major for the return to Geneva.
In the end, Liszt has succeeded in combining a travelogue with a
journey of self-realization. With “The bells of Geneva,” he returns us
to the company of our fellow human beings, and to civilization—from the
tone of the piece, we can assume that this is a good thing.