French Composer Archives - Port Townsend Symphony Orchestra

February 19, 2019August 11, 2019

CARMEN SUITE NO. 1 by Georges Bizet, 1838-1875

French composer Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” written in 1874, became the world’s most performed opera. Despite its eventual success, Bizet died in Paris of a “broken heart” (a ruptured artery) at age thirty-seven due to the initial “failure” of the work.

Some critics considered this piece “indelicate” in its depiction of the opera’s subject matter — the downfall of a soldier after Carmen seduces and abandons him. However, the story appealed greatly to the Parisian theatre-goers.

The “Carmen Suite” contains music derived from the opera and was published between 1882 and 1887, years after Bizet’s death.

The opening prelude introduces the ominnous theme associated with both Carmen and her fate at the hands of her lover, Don Jose. The following aragonaise (a dance from the region of Aragon in Spain) is the festive yet sinuous music that opens the final act of the opera as crowds arrive for a parade outside the bullring. An intermezzo, a serenely melancholic section based on the prelude to the final act, leads to a seguiedille that Carmen sings to seduce Jose. The suite ends with a jaunty military march, “Les Dragons d’Alcala,” followed by the famous march “Les Toreadores,” the entry of the bullfighters, which is actually the opening piece of the opera.

February 12, 2019August 11, 2019

PAVANE POUR UNE INFANTE DEFUNTE by Maurice Ravel, 1875-1937

(Pavane for a Dead Princess)

Maurice Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, France, a small Basque town near the Spanish border. He and his parents moved to Paris when he was very young. By the age of seven, he was taking piano lessons and studying harmony and composition. In 1889, at age fourteen, he passed the entrance exam into the Conservatoire de Paris by playing music by Chopin.

Ravel won the first prize in the Conservatoire’s piano competition in 1891, but otherwise did not stand out as a piano student. His ambition was to become a composer, but his early works were not well received by the faculty and he was expelled from the Conservatoire in 1895. In 1897 he was re-admitted and began to study with Gabriel Fauré who considered Ravel’s work “very imaginative.”

It was during this time, in 1899, that Ravel composed his first widely known piece: “Pavane pour une Infante Defunte.” The pavane was originally written for piano and it was played everywhere “by young ladies who did not play the piano very well.”

Eleven years later, Ravel orchestrated the piece into the form we hear today, a version featuring the tonal intricacies of a symphony.

January 29, 2019August 11, 2019

PAVANE, OP. 50 by Gabriel Fauré, 1845-1924

Gabriel Fauré was born in the south of France in 1845. At age nine, he was sent to Paris to be trained as a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saens, who became a lifelong friend. As a young adult, Fauré made a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition.

By middle age ha had become the director of the Conservatoire de Paris (the Conservatory of Music in Paris), and during the summers he would retreat to the countryside to relax and concentrate on composing.

On an 1887 creative outing, Fauré wrote to his wife, “while I was thinking about a thousand different things of no importance whatsoever, a kind of rhythmic theme in the style of a Spanish dance took form in my brain… This theme developed itself, became harmonized in different ways, changed and modulated, in effect, it germinated itself.”

That theme became Fauré’s Pavane Op. 50, and it recieved its premiere in Paris the following year (1888). The pavane is bnased on one basic melody first introduced by solo flute with pizzicato strings imitating a guitar accompaniment. Its pattern and form were used by Fauré’s student at that time, Maurice Ravel, for his “Pavane pour une infante defunte.”