Fanfare from La Péri (1912)
Paul Dukas (1865-1935)

Runtime: Approx. 3 minutes

Paul Dukas was a French composer, teacher, and music critic, known in his lifetime as an excellent composer and a particularly deft orchestrator. But today he has become what we might affectionately term a one-hit-wonder after Disney’s popular adaptation of his symphonic poem, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, launched the work into the popular zeitgeist. Dukas’ rather small catalog of enduring works was partially of his own making; he was exceptionally self-critical and destroyed much of his music later in life for fear that it wasn’t good enough. La Péri was nearly one of those lost works, but he was ultimately persuaded by a friend to allow the piece to remain.

La Péri is a one-act ballet written originally for Paris’s famed Ballet Russes, and was to feature the company’s star danseur Vaslav Nijinsky alongside ballerina Natalia Trouhanova. Unfortunately, the Ballet’s director Sergei Diaghilev felt that Trouhanova’s dancing was not strong enough to feature alongside the famous Nijinsky and the production was canceled. The work was finally given its premiere a year later by the Théâtre du Châtelet and starred Trouhanova and another male lead.

The Fanfare was added after the completion of the rest of the music and mostly served to startle and hopefully quiet down the typically rowdy 1912 audience. Just three minutes long, it uses only the orchestra’s brass section and is perhaps Dukes’ only work that comes close to rivaling The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in popularity, frequently serving the same purpose in today’s concert halls for which it was originally intended: to start the show.

In addition to composing, Dukas taught both orchestration and later composition at the Paris conservatory where his pupils included significant young composers Maurice Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, and Manuel Ponce. He also wrote extensively as a music critic and scholar, authoring some of the most thorough essays written on the music of Rameau, Gluck, and the composer featured on our second half, Hector Berlioz.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897)
Paul Dukas (1865-1935)

Runtime: Approx. 11 minutes

Most people will immediately recognize The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Disney’s Fantasia, but may be surprised to learn that the beloved animation comes exceptionally close to Dukas’ original conception of the story. The work is based on German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling” (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”), a popular setting of a long-enduring folk tale. The cautionary tale about a young magic student who creates havoc when he tries to cut corners on his chores by enchanting his broomstick has become well-known in German speaking countries. One particularly keen line—“The spirits that I summoned / I now cannot rid myself of again”—has even earned its place as a popular adage.

Premiered in 1897, (exactly 100 years after the publication of Goethe’s ballad) Dukas’ symphonic poem is a textbook example of “programmatic music,” an approach to composition that was rapidly gaining ground during the Romantic era. In a charge led by Richard Wagner and his contemporaries, proponents of programmatic music sought to move away from traditional symphonic forms in favor of music that carried a narrative arch. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice does just that, depicting each of Goethe’s turns of phrase through deft musical painting.

At the beginning of the piece, the sorcerer’s apprentice is left alone in his master’s workshop with the mundane task of fetching water from the well. Right from the beginning, the water is reflected in a gently cascading downward melody played by the violins. The drudgery of the chore and the boredom of the apprentice is borne out by a slow iteration of what will soon become the main melody, first played by the clarinet, and then echoed by the oboe and flute. Abruptly, a short burst of energy chimes from the woodwinds as the apprentice gets the first spark of his mischievous plan; he will enchant a broom into doing his chores for him—what could go wrong? He takes a quiet moment to think it through (though perhaps not long enough), heard in the contemplative flute melody and restated by the horn. Then, he gets to work, setting in motion magic he doesn’t fully understand. The music builds to a final strike on the timpani, and the spell is cast.

He waits in silence to see if it worked, and finally the broom starts to twitch. After a few moments testing out its newfound mobility, it sets about on its task, marched along by the bassoons. The apprentice is quite pleased with himself, and the orchestra steadily trots along as the broom dutifully completes its work. With the chores finished, the apprentice commands the broom to stop, but it continues on. The orchestra begins to pick up speed as the broom continues pouring more water into the now overflowing basin. Things become more and more desperate as water begins to flood the room. The trumpets sound dissonant chords as he desperately tries various magical commands to neutralize the broom, but nothing works. Not knowing what else to do, he grabs an ax, and with four explosive crashes in the orchestra, he chops the broom in half. Finally, all is quiet.

The apprentice thinks he’s out of the woods, but the disparate pieces of the broom stir to life once more as the bassoons and clarinets restart their diabolical dance. Each shard of the axed appliance has formed into a brand new broom and set about gathering more water. The room continues to flood, now exponentially faster as the music spins out of control. The apprentice is panicking, the workshop is in chaos, and everything is soaking wet. At the height of the madness, the sorcerer bursts through the door. The orchestra erupts into five final enormous crashes as the sorcerer takes command of the situation. When the broom is once again still and the water recedes, the now sheepish apprentice, rendered by a muted, tender orchestration, glances up at his teacher in shame. But the final mischievous chords make us wonder whether he has really learned his lesson.

Disney’s version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was originally conceived as a standalone short film and was recorded separately from the rest of the Fantasia soundtrack, which was added later. Famed Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski led Hollywood studio musicians in a three-hour recording session that began at midnight (the musicians were more alert late at night, or so claimed Stokowski.) The resulting short film produced the term “Mickey Mousing”—a film technique where music is precisely timed with actions on screen. Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice became so beloved and iconic that it was the only short from the original film to also be included in its successor, Fantasia 2000.

Piano Concerto (2024 World Premiere)
Carlos Izcaray

Program notes to come from Carlos Izcaray soon!

Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 (1830)
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Runtime: Approx. 50 minutes

This concert’s exploration of programmatic music continues with Berlioz’s celebrated masterpiece, Symphonie fantastique. Berlioz was, for lack of a better word, a Beethoven super-fan, joining a long list of composers who revered and paid tribute to the composer, including Camille Saint-Saëns as discussed on our previous masterworks series concert. Beethoven is often considered to be the originator of the programmatic symphony with his groundbreaking depiction of various nature scenes in his Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral.” Coincidentally (or perhaps not), the Pastoral Symphony appears alongside The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s original Fantasia, and Berlioz pays homage to Beethoven in his work by adding an unusual fifth movement to the normally four-movement symphonic form, just as Beethoven did in the Pastoral.

In discussing Symphonie fantastique for his beloved Young People’s Concerts, conductor Leonard Bernstein declared it to be “the first psychedelic symphony in history…written one hundred thirty-odd years before the Beatles.” The semi-autobiographical story follows a lovesick artist who has poisoned himself with opium after his advances are rejected by the object of his adoration. In real life, Berlioz was desperately in love with Shakesperian Actress Harriet Smithson, whom he had never met but had seen performing in the role of Ophelia. He became obsessed with the actress and began to persistently send her letters, all of which she ignored until several years after the work’s premiere.

The Symphonie follows the artist down his drug-fueled rabbit hole, from a scene at a ball to the countryside where his idyllic fantasy is startlingly interrupted by a march to the scaffold for his own execution. It is then once again supplanted by a scene at a Witches’ Sabbath, the music whirling ever faster into a bacchanalia that conjures images akin to Heironymus Bosch’s famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Berlioz provided his own program notes, which he instructed are to be read alongside the performance like the lyrics of a song. Prior to reading his notes, it may be useful to offer a bit of insight into some of the terminology Berlioz uses, which, at the time of its writing, might have been more commonly known.

Idée Fixe – In psychology, an idée fixe is a preoccupation of the mind—an idea that one cannot help but dwell on and return to over and over despite attempts to refocus. In music, it takes the form of a recurrent melody that represents a foundational idea to the work. The melody returns throughout the piece, played by different instruments, often interrupting other melodic ideas just as intrusive thoughts pop up in our own minds.

In Berlioz’s work, the idée fixe represents the object of his obsessional love, and appears for the first time about six minutes into the work after an extended introduction. Bernstein describes it as “haunting the symphony; wherever the music goes, she keeps intruding and interrupting, returning in endless forms and shapes.” In the introduction, which sets up the premise of the story, a reluctant protagonist first spots his love and the strings and woodwinds play halting, tentative melodies that build into flourishing excitement as his interest grows. One can almost taste the excitement and passion of early love. But passion soon morphs into a melancholic yearning as the artist’s affections go unreciprocated. The introduction culminates in two great, striking chords, echoed by two softer ones, after which the idée fixe is first presented by the violins. The deftly shaped tune first rises hopefully, pauses, and then rises once more before tumbling back down, echoing the dramatic arch of the artist’s longing and ultimate disappointment. Different iterations of the idée fixe melody can be heard in each of the work’s five movements as the artist’s obsessive love continues to haunt him, even after his own death.

Dies Irae – “Dies irae” (“day of wrath”) comes to us from the Requiem Mass, but in the case of Berlioz’s work, the “Dies irae” references a particular melodic setting of the text that likely dates back to the 16th century. The short melody has become a frequently used musical symbol of doom and the macabre and is quoted in a myriad of works, from composers like Holst and Mahler to movie soundtracks for The Shining, Nightmare Before Christmas, The Lion King, and Danny Elfman’s Batman. It appears in the final movement of Symphonie fantastique, first as a haunting chorale played by the trombones and tuba, then joined by the rest of the brass, creating a stately and persistent platform on which the witches (woodwinds and percussion) gleefully dance. It returns at several points in the final movement, perhaps supplanting the original love theme as a new idée fixe.

On a somewhat happier note, Harriet Smithson did eventually take notice of Berlioz’s affections. Two years after the premier of Symphonie fantastique, Smithson attended a performance of the work’s less-performed sequel, Lélio, and realized that the compositions were indeed about her. She wrote to the composer, finally agreeing to meet him, and the two were married in 1833.

In his final summation of the work, Bernstein quips, “I can’t honestly tell you that we have gone through the fires of hell with our hero and come out nobler and wiser, but that’s the way it is with trips, and Berlioz tells it like it is…You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.”

– Valerie Sly, 2024

Read Symphonie fantastique in the composer’s own words, from the 1845 edition of the score:

Part one
Daydreams, passions

The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.

This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations – all this forms the subject of the first movement.

Part two
A ball

The artist finds himself in the most diverse situations in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.

Part three
Scene in the countryside

One evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their ‘ranz des vaches’; this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier coloring. He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own… But what if she betrayed him!… This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his ‘ranz des vaches’; the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part four
March to the scaffold

Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes somber and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part five
Dream of a witches’ sabbath

He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roar of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.

– Hector Berlioz, 1945