October 25th to 27th, 2019

"Ainsi la Nuit"

 

Ainsi la nuit -- the Quality of Night

 

Let’s be honest, we all love the “beautiful moments” in music, even if Theodor W. Adorno, frequently ill-tempered, enjoyed making disparaging remarks about this preference. One of the most beautiful of all the “beautiful moments” is at the beginning of Joseph Haydns Creation, where the choir sings in pianissimo: “And the spirit of God floats on the surface of the water” and Haydn gives God the words: “Let there be light” and the composer, with God’s help, creates light, with a tremendous, wonderful, all-encompassing and radiant C Major chord. “And there was light” - and out of the eternal darkness came the brilliant, clear day. A high point in the classical repertoire! The Apollonian triumphs! Not until the 19th century, the century in which romanticism blossoms, do we begin to find the Dionysian in music. In this era, the night becomes a central theme and the “beautiful moments” sound very different: less brilliant, more contemplative and melancholy, sometimes extremely impassioned, often poetically telling a story. Nights are not anymore just for sleeping, not just the time of stillness, rather they are invigorating, allowing new experiences and a time for passion and even ecstasy. Dreams are full of yearning like in Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, or in Schumann and Schubert’s music: “Night and Dreams” is the title of one of Schubert’s most poignant songs. It ends longingly with the plea: “fair dreams return again”.

The 19th century was the century of the nocturne. Admittedly, the 18th century already had its share of night music - more than just the hardly insignificant “kleine Nachtmusik” of Mozart. But in the 19th century many more composers were inspired by the night. Mendelssohn wrote unequalled music for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The Night Pieces of Schumann are a part of this festival program and there are the beautiful Trois nocturnes of Debussy. It is Chopin, however, who was undoubtably the master of the genre of the nocturne. His nocturnes are a far cry from a peaceful, dreamy, “good-night music” - just the opposite. Almost all are written in the A-B-A form and the B section often shows a more dramatic view of the night before the initial tranquility returns. Robert Schumann also had a special affinity for the night. His Träumerei is well-known, but his Traumeswirren (from Op 12) and certainly also the third piece of the Night Pieces Op 23 (“Nächtliches Gelage” – “Night Revelry”) show the restive and indeed for Schumann troubling moments of nocturnal experience.

Central to the program of this year’s Zwischentöne are two of the most important chamber music works of the 20th century: Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) and Ainsi la nuit (Thus the Night) by Henri Dutilleux. Schönberg’s work – composed shortly before the turn of the century in 1899 – was premiered in Vienna in 1902 and accompanied by the customary vociferous protests. Transfigured Night is without a doubt the high point of late romantic chamber music. This work stands at the beginning of a century which would bring immeasurable misery and ceaseless upheavals in the arts as well. Still, at this point we hear no indication of the Schönberg who will later break with tonality. Soon he would leave tonality altogether and ascend his ivory tower of 12-tone technique to find new freedom there. This eventually leads to a musical style and way of expression which opens possibilities for him and many innovators, but estranges the general public.

As a personality and as a composer a Frenchman through and through, Henri Dutilleux still by no means blithely continued the tradition of Debussy, Ravel and others. He found his own true musical language in which he had much to say, even in the autumn of his life. In his only string quartet, Ainsi la nuit, he searches for the essence of night and transforms this essence into sound.

The fascinating thing about the juxtaposition of these two works lies in their similarities. The night is their common theme. Schönberg writes program music and this in a time in which it was less and less accepted and even sometimes, as in Vienna, violently rejected. The work is based on a poem by Richard Dehmel. The subject: on a cold, moonlit night, a pair of lovers are having an intimate conversation. She confesses that she is pregnant by another man, and he, the new lover, touched by her confession and overwhelmed by the atmosphere of the night, declares his love and vows to accept the child as his own. The nocturnal experience of confession and forgiveness transforms everything, even the night itself.

Henri Dutilleux works in a similar way 75 years later in his string quartet Ainsi la nuit. He calls the technique croissance progressive (progressive growth) and throughout the work he constantly develops his thematic material. The piece begins with a Nocturne which is preceded by a chord. The listener continually discovers motivic elements or sounds which have been heard before, or which one thinks to have heard before. In the course of this extremely expressive work, the themes and sound-figures are woven together into a dense tapestry. For Dutilleux, the night seems to be something which develops from indistinct and, at first, seemingly disparate elements, gradually becoming a compelling unity. Thus is the quality of night, a combination of conscious and subconscious memory. Dutilleux’s music, as he himself said, is “never straight-lined, never evened out, never predictable, always full of surprises.” It is an aural adventure, like Transfigured Night.

The idea is intriguing: a certain Swedish folk song appears before the performance of Franz Schubert’s Trio in E-flat Major (D. 929). The text, “See, the sun is sinking”, brings us directly to the theme of this year’s festival: the essence of night. Schubert heard the song performed in a house concert by his Swedish poet-friend Franz Schober and the singer Isak Albert Berg, who visited Vienna during Schubert’s final year of life. In the Andante con moto Schubert quotes the somewhat sleepy melody. But what this inspired, ingenious composer does with this little folk song is pure, sublime Schubert.

In the Baroque, the title “Notturno” described the time at which a piece would be performed. These pieces were the court’s evening entertainments for the nobility’s invited guests. Thus the music played was often not terribly sophisticated. This changed in the 19th century. The night became a central motive of poetry and in music as well, especially in the art-songs of many composers – this trend lasts up until the present day. The list is impressive: Franz Liszt who repeatedly dreamt of love; Debussy who depicts an evening in Granada; Lili Boulanger, who wrote a sublime nocturne-trifle; and the American sound-magician George Crumb, who wanted his latest nocturnes, highly experimental night-music, performed as a gesture to the past “con sentimento di nostalgia”.

 

Elmar Weingarten
(English translation: MEW)