Continuing our ongoing exploration of classical music inspired by water in some way, we have this short and lovely piece by Maurice Ravel.
It took me longer than I suppose it should have to “discover” Ravel, because my introduction to him was Bolero, and that’s just bad news for anybody. Ravel’s work is so much more wonderfully colorful and pictorial than the dreary Bolero, and that is certainly true of today’s piece, Jeux d’eau.
This is an early work by Ravel, and it’s sometimes considered one of the very first Impressionist works for solo piano. The title doesn’t translate well to English; literally it’s “Water Games”, but I’m not sure that works. In any event, while I generally try to ascribe specific pictorial descriptive power to music, it’s very hard to listen to Jeux d’eau and not “hear” the light shimmering on the surface of a fountain’s pool or maybe dancing on the splashes of a brook.
Ravel wrote the piece for solo piano, but it did eventually get orchestrated (multiple times, if my brief Googling is to be believed), and so I present both. The piece is only about six minutes long, you’ve got time!
Continuing with our exploration of music with a water theme or inspired by water, we look at the early days of American classical music.
America didn’t really “come of age” musically until the 20th century, with the arrival of jazz and the passing of Romanticism; those two events allowed America’s voice to finally develop into something that went beyond the standard Germanic style of music that most American composers of the 19th century produced. But to note the limited nature of that whole century of American music isn’t to downplay it or suggest it’s not worth hearing, because a lot of it is. Such is the case with this work (which I happened to catch on the radio when I left for work one morning).
John Knowles Paine was the first American composer chiefly noted for his large-scale orchestral music. His sound is typically dark and European, and so are his forms and his inspirations. Poseidon and Amphitrite: An Ocean Fantasy is a typical tone poem in the European style, with dense scoring that recalls Liszt. The inspiration is, of course, the Greek God of the Sea and his wife, who spurned his advances at first and fled before being convinced by a dolphin to return. Paine’s work is moody and evocative and at times thrilling; as with many such works, it doesn’t merit a spot in the standard repertoire…but neither does it merit its obscurity, either.
The weekly music feature returns! As does the theme we were exploring before December took over: music inspired by water, or written with a watery “theme”. And today we have two works, by two titans of classical music, neither one of which I had ever heard of before last week when I listened to them for the first time. I feature these two works because they share identical inspiration: a pair of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The poems are called “Calm Sea” and “Prosperous Journey”, hence the two works Calm Sea and Prosperous Journey. The first is a cantata by Ludwig van Beethoven; the second is a concert overture by Felix Mendelssohn. The works date, respectively, to 1815 and 1828.
First, the poems:
“Calm Sea”
Deep stillness rules the water Without motion lies the sea, And worried the sailor observes Smooth surfaces all around. No air from any side! Deathly, terrible stillness! In the immense distances not a single wave stirs.
“Prosperous Voyage”
The fog is torn, The sky is bright, And Aeolus releases The fearful bindings. The winds whisper, The sailor begins to move. Swiftly! Swiftly! The waves divide, The distance nears; Already I see land!
Reading the first poem, one might wonder why the speaker seems so vexed by calm seas. Wouldn’t you want a calm sea? Well…no, you wouldn’t, because this was in the days of sailing vessels, and a calm sea means no wind…and therefore, no voyage. Calm seas were viewed with dread by sailors. Read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner again for a good illustration of this: a calm sea means a ship floating along powerlessly. No, for a sailor, the wind is the key to a prosperous voyage.
Here are Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, first by Beethoven (op. 112) and then by Mendelssohn (op. 27).
Continuing our tour of music inspired at least in part by water, we have a bit of film music by the master himself: the title track from John Williams’s score to the 1984 film The River. The movie is about a family who struggles to maintain their farm and their lives beside a river in Tennessee. I’ve never actually seen the film, but the score is highly regarded. The main theme is optimistic Americana with a southern twang to it.
Continuing our exploration of classical music that is inspired by water, in one context or another, we have a monumental masterpiece by Claude Debussy.
I’ve never had the easiest relationship with Debussy’s music. His approach to music from a place of tonal color-painting, with less emphasis on melody and on form, has generally kept him at arm’s length for me. I’ve generally found it difficult to engage with Debussy’s tendency to create musical mood through orchestral effect and color alone.
But…as I’ve engaged more and more with the visual arts in the last bunch of years, and engaged more and more with the abstract in the visual arts–even in photography!–I’ve found myself drawn more and more to the abstract impressionism in Debussy’s music. (Debussy famously disliked the label “impressionist” being applied to his music, but it seems to have stuck.) So we have this piece: La Mer, a three-movement tone painting in which Debussy paints in sounds and tones and chords his feelings regarding the sea.
Cascading fountain, Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens
Continuing our series exploring classical music about or inspired by water, in one way or another, we have one of the most evocative tone poems of all time: The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. Respighi lived 1879-1936, and his gift for using the orchestra for illustrative effect is nearly unparalleled. His music sings with pictorial clarity that recalls Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, and echoes Richard Strauss, albeit with an Italian flavor. His scores are shot through with brilliant light.
Fountains is perhaps a bit more introspective than Respighi’s other famous showpiece, The Pines of Rome, but it contains its own moments of showpiece brilliance. One device that Respighi uses frequently, to great effect, is his off-setting of the beat; he also makes great use of a “shimmering” sound in the strings. More than any other composer, Respighi’s music always seems to have a visible “sheen” to it.
Fountains is also in four movements, each representing one of Rome’s fountains at a different time of day. The opening movement depicts the Valle Giulia at dawn. Now enveloped in the suburbs north of Rome, the Valle Giulia was, during Respighi’s lifetime, a pastoral landscape. The orchestra gradually awakens, murmuring strings joined by plaintive oboes and English horn as cattle pass through the mists in the distance.
In the second movement, the majestic Triton Fountain on the Piazza Barberini springs to life in the morning light. The fountain was created by the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and his work – and Respighi’s as well – was inspired by the story of the end of the flood from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “The ruler of the seas sets his trident aside, smoothes the billows, and summons the sea-blue Triton who towers up over the depths… and commands him to blow into his sounding shell and by his signal recall the waters and the rivers.”
The third movement represents what is undoubtedly the grandest of Rome’s fountains, the Trevi Fountain, at midday. Respighi’s majestic writing for brass over swirling strings and cresting waves of percussion captures the fountain’s sheer scale, with its central depiction of Neptune in his shell chariot, emerging from beneath the sea and standing under a Roman triumphal arch.
The finale depicts the modest fountain in front of the Villa Medici, which sits atop a hill overlooking St. Peter’s, at dusk. Respighi’s orchestra provides the rich atmosphere of graceful birdsong, gentle evening breezes, and twinkling stars through a combination of sumptuous writing for strings and woodwinds and his use of percussion instruments such as the celesta and the orchestra bells. The work ends as gently as it began.
Here is The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Resphigi.
Here’s something I didn’t know until today when I was driving home: English composer Frederick Delius lived for a time in Florida in the 1880s, during which he managed a local orange grove while he studied with a noted organist in Jacksonville. From this stay arose one of Delius’s most popular works, The Florida Suite. We’re only concerning ourselves with one movement from the suite, because our focus in this series right now is music inspired by water.
The orange grove Delius managed was on the St. Johns River, which is the longest river in Florida, running over 300 miles from headwaters south of Orlando to its mouth near Jacksonville. The river runs parallel to the seacoast, and it’s actually a fascinating river to track on Google Earth, as it winds back and forth and into and out of large lakes along its path.
Since the St. Johns doesn’t have much elevation drop at all, its flow is generally slow and sometimes even ebbs with the shifting of the tides. Thus Delius’s work, which paints a tone picture of life along a slowly moving waterway. There is little drama here, just the slow life spent along a slow river.
A month or two ago when I was doing a series of music posts using music inspired by the moon, one post featured a work by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. As I seem to do whenever I find a new piece (new to me, anyway) by Einaudi, I always end up saying something like “I need to explore Einaudi’s music more!” And then I don’t, really, until the next time I’m looking for inspiration.
Which brings us to the current series, which is “Music inspired by water”.
Yes, I need to listen to the album this comes from, which is apparently highly regarded; it’s called In A Time Lapse. Yes, I need to listen to more Einaudi.
I haven’t found anything specific about this track, just its title, but it’s called “Waterways”, so that counts. Right? And it’s hypnotically beautiful. Kind of like a waterway.
Looking across the Niagara River Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/7.1, 1/1000sec, ISO 250
Continuing our self-guided tour of classical music inspired by water, we have perhaps one of the two greatest works ever directly inspired by a river (well, maybe three, depending on how strongly we consider Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen to have been inspired by the Rhine). The other work will surely show up in this series, but for now, we’ll stick with Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava, known to English-speaking audiences as The Moldau.
The work opens with a quiet shimmering that evokes the flow of Vltava, the longest river in the Czech Republic. Written as part of a cycle of tone poems evoking Smetana’s homeland, called Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland”), Vltava is the most well-known of the group and is often performed on its own. Its main melody is one of the great tunes in all classical music, an earworm for the ages, but Smetana’s orchestration is marvelous throughout as he casts the work with sonic effects that evoke the flowing waters and the country through which it flows. Smetana himself wrote of the work:
“Two springs pour forth in the shade of the Bohemian Forest, one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Moldau. Through thick woods it flows, as the gay sounds of the hunt and the notes of the hunter’s horn are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is celebrated with song and dance. At night, wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles — witnesses of bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John Rapids, the stream races ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad riverbed — finally, flowing on in majestic peace toward Prague and welcomed by the time-honored castle Vyšehrad. Then it vanishes far beyond the poet’s gaze.”
Here is Vltava by Bedrich Smetana (in a particularly wonderful live performance).
Water Abstract Taken at Canalside, Buffalo, NY Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/5.0, 1/4000sec, ISO 500
This theme ought to yield some good things! That’s right: after completing an exploration of music inspired by the moon, we’re going to explore music inspired by water, in all its forms. And we’re going to start with a work premiered over 300 years ago, the usefully-titled Water Music by George Frideric Handel.
And maybe this isn’t the best place to start, because the work wasn’t actually inspired by water. Handel wrote it for the water…or rather, the boats upon it. Let me explain…no, is too much. Let me sum up.
In 1717, King George I decided to take a barge up the Thames in London, using the tide to propel the barge upstream before coming about for the return trip. The King wanted music, though, so he commissioned Handel to write some; this was performed on another barge that accompanied the Royal Barge on its journey. Some fifty musicians played Handel’s music on that other barge, and apparently many Londoners took to the water in boats and barges of their own to hear the music and pay homage to the King. This must have been quite a spectacle, and honestly, were I given the keys to Doc Brown’s DeLorean and told I could go back in time to witness one concert, the initial performance of Handel’s Water Music might well be the choice.
And the concert was very much a success: the King liked the piece so much he had it performed again on the return trip back down the Thames.
I’m not the best listener when it comes to Baroque music, but Handel and Bach are always exceptions. The Water Music is one of the most pleasant works I know: in its short movements over three suites, Handel deftly creates music of opulent delight and meditation in simple pleasure. As you listen to it, you may notice familiar themes throughout; the Water Music has provided a great deal of familiar music used for other things beyond some King’s barge journey. One movement was the theme music to The Frugal Gourmet, for instance.
Here is a wonderful original-instruments performance of Handel’s Water Music.
