Five Elements Vol. 1: Acqua (Music by Scriabin, Liszt, Ravel, Debussy)

Description

The indissoluble bond between art and nature is the framework in which this project moves, a fascinating yet infinite search among the five elements: water, earth, air, fire and ether. In this personal symbolic-visionary journey, water is the beginning: it is this element which Thales of Miletus, first of the “Seven Wise Men” of the ancient world and considered the first philosopher in history, indicates as the first principle, the origin of everything that comes after, arche in ancient Greek.

«Water is the principle of all things:
all things are from water and all things are resolved into water».
Thales of Miletus

The second of ten, Alexander Scriabin’s Sonate-Fantaisie deviates from the form of the four-movement grand sonata for its innovative sonorities, even if it fits into the late Romantic style. Composed over a long period of time, from 1892 to 1897, it was titled Sonate-Fantaisie but it is also known as the ‘Sonata of the Three Seas’, for which the Baltic, the Black and the Mediterranean Seas became the inspiring vision.

«The first section represents the peace of the night on a southern seashore;
the development is the dark roughness of the deepest sea.
The E major of the middle section evokes the moonlight that appears
after the first dark of the night, like a caress.
The second movement represents the wide expanse of the agitated ocean after a storm».
Alexander Scriabin
Between 1835 and 1882 Franz Liszt composed the collection Les Années de pèlerinage. In its third and final book, Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este is the result of his sojourns in the enchantment of Tivoli. Among the notes, one glimpses a mature Liszt who now feels the need to end the journey of existence like a pilgrim, a German Wanderer, who has reached a state of serenity devoid of material burdens. The most detailed visions in the piece, such as the gushing fountains of Villa d’Este, give way to moments of great spirituality and religiousness. Liszt himself marked a personal annotation in the composition, taken from the Gospel of John:

«Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life».
John 4:14

In 1901, Maurice Ravel composed his own version of Jeux d’eau as a tribute to Liszt’s piece, which left an indelible mark on the world of music. Departing from the concept of consonance, here the sound material is characterised by a new pianistic gesturality, which gives a glimpse of a more abstract pianism. The quotation at the top of the first page of the score is taken from the poem Fête d’eau, ‘Water Feast’, by Henri de Régnier and is close to a pagan vision of nature:

«Deity of oceans on tortoise’s back, river god laughing at watery tease».
Henri de Régnier

Miroirs, ‘Mirrors’, is a piano suite that Ravel composed in 1905, dedicating its five pieces to the avant-garde artists’ movement of which he was a member, called ‘Les Apaches’, ‘The Thugs’. The piece Une barque sur l’océan, dedicated to the painter Paul Sordes, tells of a boat gliding over the ocean’s waves: the blinding brilliance that strikes the water surface, lit up by the sun and rippled by the wind, tells of the triumph of light.

The well-known triptych Gaspard de la nuit, composed by Ravel in 1908, is inspired by a collection of prose ballads written in 1836 by Louis Bertrand, known by his pseudonym Aloysius. It was Ricardo Viñes, a pianist friend of his, who introduced the young Ravel to the reading of these mystical tales at a time of great sadness for the composer: his family had moved into a gloomy flat in Rue Chevalier, filled with the ‘deafening noise of metal sheets, din of lorries, strikes on the anvils and siren screams’; his father Joseph was infirm and living in a state of unconsciousness due to a brain condition. Therefore, the three subjects chosen for his piano work among Bertrand’s characters share a feeling of anguish and bewilderment. Ondine is a wicked and capricious mermaid who, lit by the moon, drags into the abyss the poor unfortunates who are enchanted by the sound of her voice.

«And when I told her that I was in love with a mortal woman, she began to sulk in annoyance, shed a few tears, gave a burst of laughter, and vanished in a shower of spray which ran in pale drops down my blue window-panes».
Aloysius Bertrand
If Ravel’s language can be described as evocative and metaphysical, Claude Debussy’s style is mainly related to symbolism. Both La Cathédrale engloutie (from the first book of the Préludes of 1910) and Reflets dans l’eau (from the suite Images of 1905) reveal his unique search for tone and colour. The former is a piece inspired by a Breton legend that tells of Ys, a city swallowed up by the sea because of the sins of its inhabitants. Every day, the city’s cathedral re-emerges from the waters at dawn as a warning to the new population, before sinking into the abyss and disappearing again. Debussy took inspiration from this legend to portray a portentous event in music, where the morning mist, the roar of the waves, the sound of the bells and organ are rendered with highly evocative onomatopoeic effects.
The first book of Images begins with the piece Reflets dans l’eau. Claude Debussy’s biography tells of a room wallpapered with elegant images cut from art magazines, which the composer shamelessly took from the library of Raymond Bonheur, a fellow Conservatoire student. Ever since he was a child, his imaginative world was nourished by visions of beauty. In the four collections of Images, the composer clearly wanted to capture into the scores the fascinating visions related to nature that impressed him the most. Debussy finished the Reflects only a few months after the exhibition of Claude Monet’s first thirteen canvases dedicated to the waterlilies in the pond of his house in Giverny.

«I think music contains freedom, more than any other art, not being constrained to the exact reproduction of nature, but rather to the mysterious correspondences between nature and imagination».
Claude Debussy

Debussy composed L’isle joyeuse inspired by the painting L’embarquement pour Cythère (1717, Louvre Museum) that Antoine Watteau painted, fascinated by the myth of the Fortunate Isles or the Isles of the Blessed. This composition is conceived as a grand concert piece, in which a post-Lisztian virtuosic structure prevails: transpositions of the element of water and the love theme emerge, stimulated by a strong musical enthusiasm enhanced by an exotic touch.

«The encircling Ocean is awaiting us: let us seek out
The fields, the golden fields, the islands of the blest,
Where the land, though still untilled, yields a harvest every year,
And the vines flower forever, though un-pruned,
Where the shoots of the olive-trees bud, and are never failing,
The dark fig graces the branch of its native tree,
Honey flows from the hollow ilex, and from the lofty hill
The stream leaps lightly down with a splashing of feet».
Horace – Epode XVI, 41-48

F. M. Moncher, S. N. Pirruccio @ 2023