Do you have a composer whose music you just can’t gel with? I’m not talking about a justifiably obscure composer whose music most would consider second rate (for me that would be Durand De Grau, a French contemporary of Saint-Saens, whose output consists of mind-numbingly benign salon music for 4 hands piano (you can check out ‘Il Corricolo’ – his Galop De Concert Op. 24 here – but please remember to listen to music responsibly, and to call the ‘make it stop, the aural centres of my brain are haemorrhaging’ helpline if you think you have a music problem).
No, I’m talking about just not ‘getting’ a much more respected top-level composer. One who I thought for a long time comes a bit close would be Brahms, but as I’ve heard more of his music, I realise that there’s too much of it I actually do like. So, while his Fourth Symphony I find interminably stodgy, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Sonata in G major, and Piano Quartets in G minor and C minor – are all too good to maintain a mindlessly contrarian position1. So, I’m going to choose an easier target: Carl Nielsen.
My Dad loves Nielsen. We had the complete set of his symphonies on LP when I was growing up, so I heard a fair amount in particular of the fourth symphony, the so-called Inextinguishable. In my view Nielsen’s music is more aptly described as the fire extinguisher-able, in part because he sprays around tonality like it’s some who’s lost control of the spray nozzle on the fire safety equipment. A typical Nielsen piece goes something like:
Here I am in C major, but what’s this modulation? B major!, ok so now I’ll go to G# minor and, oooh I bet you won’t expect this… D major! Nope, let’s make it F minor – oh OK, A major! Nah just kidding, E minor.
And that’s just the first 16 bars.
What I’m referring to here is the highly-developed form of ‘progressive tonality’ that Nielsen uses in his work which for me renders some of his work difficult to love (I find his clarinet concerto just plain ugly). Now, I’m all for colour and atonality when I sense that there’s some structure to it, but listening to Nielsen reminds me of the feeling of watching a TV series like Lost, or Battlestar Galactica (or dare I say Game of Thrones). An initial enthusiastic interest in the story and how good the first couple of series are, followed by the intrigued curiosity of “oh, where’s this going?”. But then this is followed by a growing feeling of “erm…this doesn’t make a lot of sense” – and finishes with a fairly deflated “you know, I’m not sure the writers really had any idea what they were doing”. Listening to Nielsen, is for me, exactly like this….. except without the good early series.
Where this is all coming to, in an even more roundabout way than is usual for me, is to what was my first orchestral concert experiences with Nielsen, which was a performance of his Helios overture. Although generally more coherent than his late work (which may explain why it is among his most regularly performed works), this overture depicts fairly obviously a sunrise (and later sunset). However, the middle bit, too me is essentially a ramble through different keys of various repeated motifs – that doesn’t really engage. The only thing I remember, actually, from the concert is that the soloist in the Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto completely forgetting their part, resulting in the entire concert stopping, after we were already about 10 minutes through the piece. It was excruciating.
But the thoughts of the underwhelming nature of the Helios overture, and the ramblingly unstructured nature of Nielsen’s work, stand in stark contrast to Saint-Saens, and, by exemplar, the symphonic poem Phaéton, written in early 1873 – during the period where he was most focussed on symphonic poem writing having recently written his Rouet D’Omphale, and being just about to embark on the orchestral version of Danse Macabre. If there’s one thing you cannot accuse Saint-Saens of, it is rambling (well, most of the time). Even when the melodic material is more academic than inspired (as it is here in this piece), there is always the sense of a tight-ship being run – of a piece that has a clear form and trajectory – and Phaéton is certainly a tight piece of writing, clocking in at barely 8 and half minutes of agitated drama (compared to Helios’s 12 or so minutes of fairly static progressive tonality2).
Of course, the already very clever of you will have worked out what really made me link Saint-Saens to Nielsen here. In that, in Greek mythology, Phaeton was the son of Helios, the god of the sun. The story here being Phaeton asks to borrow Helios’s sun chariot – but he’s reckless with it, and ultimately Zeus gets annoyed and throws a few lightning bolts and makes Phaeton crash, killing himself, and making Helios seriously regret not taking out third-party insurance. If you wanted a modern visualisation of this, it might look like the following:
Son: “Dad can I borrow your car”
Dad: “Hmm, you know I use it for work right?”
Son: “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful!”
Half-an-hour later
Son: “Woo! Alright ladies – Let’s do some burn-outs in the parking lot”
Old-man Jove (owner of the parking lot): “Pesky kid” (gets rifle and shoots out the tyres as the son speeds by).
It’s a compelling story of youthful arrogance and, basically, as is the case with 95% of Greek mythology, a reminder about not pissing off Zeus3.
Like the Helios overture, Phaéton is written in the key C major, (although that’s nominal, largely in the former). That all said, Saint-Saens begins with a loud E flat major brass chord followed so some swift run-ups, obviously depicting the chariot of Helios being pulled by horses as it lifts up into the air (or wherever it is that it operates, given it’s meant to carry the sun). It’s a similar device used by Howard Blake at the beginning of Walking in the Air from the Snowman, where the boy and the snowman are taking off on their own flight.
We then proceed to the ostinato agitato rhythmic motif that feature almost throughout the entire work, clearly represent the horses galloping along furiously.
Pretty soon the major theme makes an appearance in the trumpets and trombones in G major – as theme go, it’s not a belter – but it’s serviceable5 – and does a reasonable job of conveying the youthful impetuosity of Phaeton, wind blowing through his golden locks6.
After a bit of climax and several repetitions of the theme, including in canon echoing contrapuntally among various orchestral groups, the music fades to just the violins pianissimo maintaining the ostinato galloping on a high B flat, while a new chorale like tune in E flat comes in quietly on the clarinets and horns enters. This is a favourite device of Saint-Saens to provide a change of pace, found in, for example the finale of the second piano concerto, but also the Bacchanale from Samson and Delila – and it works well here also. The tune is gentle and peaceful, with just a hint of melancholy that suggest that perhaps there is something beautiful going on here – perhaps Phaeton realising that actually this isn’t a bad job his father has and, boy, those mountains over there are rather lovely when illuminated by the sun.
But, with that violin line chirruping away, you are always aware that something is going to go off the rails – and so it does – things get more frenetic again with the recapitulation of the initial ‘galloping’ motif. But things become more menacing quickly – you sense the approach of Zeus through a growlingly chromatic bass line. When he does appear with this thunder, it’s through the (for the time reasonable ingenious) use of 3 timpanists played a timpani chord in E flat, along with a gong, and bass drum and cymbals. Crash. Take that Phaeton.
Well, this rather stops the galloping chariot in its tracks, and the piece ends rather sadly and wistfully with a reminder of the ‘beautiful mountains’ – into which Phaeton has driven head first. My only question, which remains unanswered, is what has happened to the sun. Zeus hasn’t thought of that has he?7
You can listen on this link complete with score….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM_WFzy7Rjk
Phaéton Op. 39
Why you might want to listen to it: It’s one of Saint-Saens’ less well-known symphonic works, probably unfairly although I can see why, because it’s not totally compelling melodically – it’s more of a scene-painting piece. But unlike Phaeton’s chariot skills – Saint-Saens technical skills are at their peak here.
Why you might want to avoid it: You know, I’m really upset that the writers have portrayed Zeus this way – I haven’t been this disappointed since what happened to Daenerys in the final series of Game of Thrones.8
1 Though if you ever get an opportunity to read the slightly unhinged liner notes for the 2002 CPO recording of the Symphony by Hans Rott, it will give you a whole new perspective on Johannes Brahms: as a train-bombing terrorist responsible for committing three composers (Schumann, Hugo Wolf and Rott) to mental asylums because of his jealousy of their talents or (in the case of Schumann) their wives.
2 Can something that is progressive also be fairly static?
3 Zeus not being known for proportionate responses to minor irritants.
4 As I write Howard Blake has undertaken his own Zeus-ian lightning strike on the BBC over a new adaptation of the The Snowman, calling it a ‘vile desecration’. Ow.
5 To be honest, I don’t know what I mean by this, except that I used to collect film soundtracks by John Barry, and in one compilation, the liner notes consistently referred to certain films of his using the words “for this film, Barry produces a serviceable score”. The definition is “fulfilling its function adequately: functional and durable rather than attractive”. Fairly damning with faint praise – so I think it’s appropriate here.
6 Phaeton of course carries around padlocks made of gold, because of course, his hair, being Greek, was almost certainly black.
7 Note that since I have written this, Zeus has contacted me and I wish to say that I’m very very sorry for it, and that I hope to soon be able to live life not as a goat. If nothing else, hooves are very bad for laptop keyboards.
8 ***SPOILER*** For those who had more of a life in the 2010s: main character in the series that was basically a heroine for most part of the early series, but then appeared to change9 and become an evil psychopath at the end, causing many fans of the series to, well let’s say, respond very much like Zeus would have.
9 Except it was all completely signposted from even the earliest series, and those fans were just too besotted with her to notice.