Crosscurrents and Collaborations: Selections from the French Collaborative Piano Repertoire of the Early 20th Century

Abstract

The first half of the 20th century in France is perhaps the most stylistically versatile period in music history. Paris welcomed both the domestic and foreign avant-garde. These included artists, composers, performers, poets, writers, critics, choreographers, dancers, impresarios and their rich supporters, whose interactions resulted in artistic achievements of great variety. The musical forms included ballets, operas, piano music, orchestral pieces, instrumental and vocal chamber works and art songs. The style was anything but unified – it consisted of many different currents such as impressionism, symbolism, exoticism, primitivism, neoclassicism, jazz, popular music and crossover. The period produced a wealth of remarkable musical masterpieces which continue to inform and influence us more than 100 years later.

My dissertation focused on representative works written in most of these various styles, by both French and foreign composers, composed in different forms (including works originally written for piano and transcribed pieces) and taken from both the vocal and instrumental repertoire.

Included were Ravel’s transcription of Debussy’s famous orchestral Nocturnes (completed in 1899, premiered in 1901) and his beautiful Sonata for cello and piano (1915), Enescu’s lesser-known Sept chansons de Clément Marot (1907-08), Stravinsky’s own four-hand transcription of his groundbreaking Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), Ravel’s famous jazz-inspired Sonata for violin and piano No.2 (1923-27), along with some of his vocal pieces - the symbolist Trois Poèmes de Stephane Mallarme (1913), Shéhérazade (1904) and Chansons Madécasses (1925- 26), the last two cycles representing exoticism, Poulenc’s Banalités (1940) and three anti-war songs (Poulenc’s Priez pour paix (1938) and C (from Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon) (1944) and Debussy’s Noel des enfants qui n’ont plus de maisons (1915).

The three recitals were all performed at the University of Maryland, the first two in Gildenhorn Recital Hall on February 17th, 2017, and on October 24th, 2018, with Christopher Koelzer, piano, Nicole Levesque, mezzo-soprano, James Stern, violin and Seth Castleton, cello, and the last in Ulrich Recital Hall on November 4th, 2018, with Dorotea Racz, cello, Yong Clark, flute and Nicole Levesque, mezzo-soprano. The recordings are available in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM).