Two songs bear cryptic dedications that reference Britten’s romantic past and present. That line of text returns later in the Interlude the melody is the same, but the new accompaniment creates a more intimate and vulnerable atmosphere. In the opening Fanfare, bright triads and shimmering tremolo figures build anticipation to the single line of text: “I alone hold the key to this wild parade.” Pears added Les Illuminations to his repertoire the following year, and it remains the territory of both sopranos and tenors. He dedicated the new score to Sophie Wyss, the soprano who gave the premiere performance in January 1940. The author, French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), wrote most of the texts while visiting London in 1873 with his own love interest and creative foil, fellow poet Paul Verlaine.īritten composed Les Illuminations for the Boyd Neel String Orchestra, the group that had provided a major career boost in 1937 with a last-minute commission to write Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for the Salzburg Festival. Shortly before embarking, Britten began a song cycle using texts from the compilation Les Illuminations, a set of ecstatic prose poems that captured the bright spirit of travel, inspiration and love. Britten’s traveling companion was the tenor Peter Pears, and in those years their relationship blossomed into a lifelong romance and one of the most fruitful musical exchanges of the century.
He passed through Canada, visited briefly with Aaron Copland, and then spent three years around New York, first on Long Island and later in Brooklyn Heights, in a house he shared with the poet W. 18īenjamin Britten left England in 1939, evading the specter of war, some troubling romantic attachments, and an uncertain musical future. Les Illuminations for Tenor and String Orchestra, Op. History of the relationship between Stravinsky and Debussy Online score from Boosey and Hawkes (free login required)įull text of Stravinsky: An AutobiographyĮxcerpt on Symphonies of Wind Instruments from Taruskin’s Stravinsky biography The scoring for wind ensemble heightens the flinty dialect of the Symphonies, especially in phrases that place the clarinets and oboes into their piercing upper ranges.Įlaborating upon fragments heard earlier, the final portion of the work intones a humble chorale. I had hoped, however, that it would appeal to those in whom a purely musical receptivity outweighed the desire to satisfy emotional cravings.” … This music is not meant ‘to please’ an audience or to rouse its passions. It would be futile to look in it for any passionate impulse or dynamic brilliance. It is devoid of all the elements which infallibly appeal to the ordinary listener and to which he is accustomed. Even the title supports this more elemental understanding of the music: It is not a symphony in the usual sense, but rather a presentation of Symphonies, in line with the term’s original Greek meaning of “sounding together.”Īfter the inauspicious premiere of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in London in 1921, Stravinsky wrote, “I did not, and indeed I could not, count on any immediate success for this work.
In his autobiography, Stravinsky described the work as “an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogeneous instruments.” As the scholar Richard Taruskin observed, its progression of chant-like phrases could be viewed as an approximation of a Russian Orthodox burial service. Stravinsky designed the Symphonies of Wind Instruments as a tribute to the late French composer Claude Debussy, and yet the music still connects strongly to Russia. Stravinsky’s style was morphing into something more urbane, dry and restrained, woven through with antique, “ neoclassical” details, as exemplified in the sparkling ballet Pulcinella from 1920. He also left behind the splashy orchestral effects of his breakthrough ballets, a sound that reached its ritualistic climax in The Rite of Spring from 1913. Stravinsky composed the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1920, six years after leaving his native Russia in what proved to be a permanent exile.
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