Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)

D’un matin de printemps (1918)

Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, harp, celesta, and strings

Performance time: 5 minutes

First Grant Park Orchestra performance

The story of Lili Boulanger is both inspiring and tragic. Born to a musical family, the talented musician composed a number of masterworks during her short life before passing away at twenty-four. Her older sister, Nadia, who eventually became one of the most influential composition teachers of the twentieth century, claimed her sister was “the first important woman composer.” Obviously, her statement is hyperbolic, but had Lili lived a full life, who knows what glass ceilings she could have broken.

After becoming the first woman to win the coveted Prix de Rome in 1913, Lili devoted what little time she had left to coming to terms with her failing health through composition. She had always been frail. Bronchial pneumonia as a child had weakened her immune system and led to a lifelong battle with Crohn’s disease. In 1917, Lili composed two short related works, D’un soir triste (“Of a Sad Evening”) and D’un matin de printemps (“Of a Spring Morning”), which Nadia helped transcribe as Lili’s health worsened. Given that Lili completed Of a Spring Morning just two months before she died, the work is surprisingly optimistic and vibrant. Demonstrating her own take on French Impressionism, the piece is replete with colorful wind writing for the winds and unique textures. For instance, the low opening flute solo is set against the tingling of the triangle and quietly thrumming strings. This charming melodic figure then passes between various wind instruments before building to a climax. Boulanger showcases remarkable variety within the scope of such a short piece, thinning the instrumentation to a chamber-like configuration before crescendoing to a cinematic finish, complete with harp glissando and orchestral pop.

This work was provided by the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Stabat Mater (1950)

Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two harps, strings, chorus, and solo soprano

Performance time: 31 minutes

First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 27, 1977; Thomas Peck, conductor; Kathleen Battle, soprano

In August 1936, Francis Poulenc’s friend and fellow composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud died in a car accident. To process his grief, Poulenc made a pilgrimage to the ancient shrine of the Black Virgin at Notre-Dame de Rocamadour. The religious experience he had there was transformative, leading him back to the Roman Catholic faith of his childhood. Throughout the rest of his career, Poulenc produced a steady stream of sacred choral works. In 1950, Poulenc composed his largest-scale religious work to date, Stabat Mater. Again, the death of a friend—the painter and set designer Christian Bérard—spurred its composition. A liturgical Requiem setting seemed too formal and cold to memorialize a friend with whom Poulenc had attended costume balls and other entertainments. So, he turned to Stabat Mater, a thirteenth-century poem by Jacopone da Todi that has inspired numerous musical settings by composers from Pergolesi to Dvořák. While no less solemn than a Requiem, Stabat Mater depicts a more human expression of grief as Mary mourns the death of her son, Jesus, at the foot of the cross.

While similar to the later Gloria (1959) in configuration as a sacred concert work for mixed chorus, soprano soloist, and full orchestra, Stabat Mater is quite different in tone. This is not surprising given that the Gloria is a hymn of praise, whereas Stabat Mater is a meditation on Christ’s Passion. The greatest difference lies in Poulenc’s treatment of the choral forces. “My Stabat is an a capella chorus, while my Gloria is a large choral symphony,” he explained. Five of the twelve movements of Stabat Mater feature the chorus singing unaccompanied, and when the orchestra does appear, it is relatively restrained and deferential to the text. For instance, in “Fac, ut ardeat,” the orchestra only plays a short interlude between choral statements and punctuates the movement with a final chord. The texture of this movement is also paired down in its omission of the choral basses and stark polyphony.

Stabat Mater is driven by the drama inherent in the text. Poulenc combines the twenty stanzas of the original poem into twelve movements, perhaps in a nod to the twelve apostles. He captures the different moods of each stanza by employing varying textures, dynamics, and tempos within the span of one movement. For instance, in “Quis est homo, qui non fleret,” Poulenc paints the weeping of those who contemplate Mary’s suffering (“Is there anyone who would not weep upon seeing the Mother of Christ in such great distress?”) with anguished descending vocal lines over an agitated orchestra. Suddenly, the wailing stops as the choir whispers, “Quis? Quis?” (“Who? Who?”). The fury resumes as Poulenc portrays the flogging of Jesus with violent accents and slurred figures.

In typical Poulenc fashion, even the darkest texts are treated with touches of light, as in the blithe setting of “Quæ mœrebat.” While these sudden shifts in affect are not as pronounced as in the Gloria, they still reflect Poulenc’s famously dualistic nature as “half monk, half rascal.” To explain this hallmark of his musical character, Poulenc said, “[The French] realize that somberness and good humor are not mutually exclusive. Our composers, too, write profound music, but when they do, it is leavened with that lightness of spirit without which life would be unendurable.”

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

Scheherazade, op.35 (1888)

Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, two oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings

Performance time: 42 minutes

First Grant Park Orchestra performance: August 1, 1935; Eric DeLamarter, conductor

The collection of Middle Eastern folktales One Thousand and One Nights has inspired countless works of art and adaptations for over a millennium. Though its history is murky, the stories were likely collected and translated into Arabic from sources across North Africa and West, Central, and South Asia during the “Islamic Golden Age” of the eighth through fourteenth centuries. One Thousand and One Nights, colloquially known as Arabian Nights, features the following framing story: the cruel Sultan Shahryar believes all women are unfaithful. To enact his revenge on the entire sex, he takes a new wife each day, executing her the next morning before she has a chance to betray him. The cycle of violence finally breaks when he marries Scheherazade. A cunning woman, she saves herself by weaving enchanting tales of adventure, ending each night in the middle of a story to ensure her survival until the next day. She does this for 1,001 nights until the Sultan pardons her.

The work captured the European imagination when Antoine Gallard adapted and translated it for a French audience in the early 1700s. Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) likely used Gallard’s version as inspiration for his most famous work, Scheherazade, written in 1888. Instead of telling specific stories from Arabian Nights, Rimsky-Korsakov scatters separate, unrelated episodes throughout the four movements. The connecting thread between them is the recurrence of the solo violin, which embodies Scheherazade, our intrepid narrator. Rimsky-Korsakov explained his intentions: “Developing the musical material quite freely, I had in view the creation of an orchestral suite in four movements, closely knit by the community of its themes and motifs, yet presenting, as it were, a kaleidoscope of fairy-tale images and designs of Oriental character.” Instead of distracting the listener with a specific program, Rimsky-Korsakov provides evocative titles for each movement to “direct the listeners’ fancy.”

Despite the lack of an explicit program, it is easy to hear the bombastic opening as a depiction of the brutal Sultan and the following violin solo as the flattering Scheherazade trying to save her skin. After the introduction of the work’s main characters, the first movement, titled “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,” paints a visceral picture of the churning sea (something Rimsky-Korsakov was intimately familiar with as a former naval officer) with a rocking cello accompaniment and chromatic melody in the violins. Scheherazade’s violin again opens the second movement, titled “The Story of the Kalendar Palace.” In this movement, Rimsky-Korsakov displays his brilliance as an orchestrator. His use of unique orchestral effects, such as the clarinet recitative over plucked strings, would directly influence composers such as Debussy and Ravel.

“The Young Price and the Young Princess” shows Rimsky-Korsakov at his most lyrical. Instead of introducing the movement, Scheherazade’s theme comes in the middle, as if a theatrical aside, then blends with the themes of the prince and the princess. The fourth movement carries the most descriptive and lengthy title: “Festival at Bagdad. The Sea. The Ships Break Against a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman.” It opens like the first movement by depicting the contrast between the Sultan and Scheherazade. Melodies from the second and third movements recur during the festivities. Then, as the spectacle reaches its zenith, the stormy sea music from the first movement rolls in. Scheherazade’s solo emerges from the ensuing shipwreck, soaring into the stratosphere, finally freed from the Sultan’s tyrannical clutches.

Program Notes by Katherine Buzard