Alborada del gracioso Maurice Ravel Born 1875 in Ciboure, France Died 1937 in Paris, France Maurice Ravel originally composed this work for piano in 1905 and orchestrated it in 1918. The first performance of the orchestral version was in Paris the following year, with the Pasdeloup Orchestra under the direction of Rhené-Baton. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, and strings. Ravel composed his Miroirs (Mirrors) as a suite of five pieces for the piano, each having a descriptive title: Noctuelles (Night Moths), Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds), Une barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean), Alborado del gracioso, and La valée des cloches (The Valley of the Bells). Alborado del gracioso is a bit tricky to translate; it is usually given as Morning Song of the Jester, which is fine as far as it goes. In other cultures, a “morning song” implies the song of the troubadour at dawn, intended to wake illicit lovers in time for them to depart; in the Spanish tradition, though, it’s more of a celebratory greeting of the morning. There may actually be a bit of both in this piece. Gracioso literally means a buffoon, clown, or indeed a jester. But in the Spanish comic theater a gracioso was a character not usually found in other traditions, with a meaning that is not quite the same. When asked, Ravel said, “I understand your bafflement over how to translate the title Alborada del gracioso. That is precisely why I decided not to translate it.” The work opens with the strumming of a guitar—though you may mistake it for harps and pizzicato strings. As the winds contribute a perky theme, the underlying rhythms suavely shift between 3/4 and 6/8 time, often both at the same time. Before you know it, though, the full orchestra enters with a crash, and the morning song becomes larger than life. This outburst vanishes almost as quickly as it came. In its place comes a lovelorn solo bassoon, instructed to play “expressively, like a recitative” and introducing the slow middle section. The fiery music of the opening section returns to lead us to the ending, which is just shy of being over-the-top. Ibéria Claude Debussy Born 1862 in St. Germain-en-Laye, France Died 1918 in Paris, France Claude Achille Debussy completed this work in 1909 as part of his orchestral triptych Images, and it was first performed in Paris in 1910 by the Concerts Colonne under the direction of Gabriel Pierné. The score calls for 4 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, celeste, and strings. Debussy famously turned the world of Romantic orchestral music on its head with his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Nocturnes, and La mer; their fragmentary melodies, cascades of whole-tone scales, and slippery harmonies reevaluated music’s first principles and came to some startling conclusions. But how might these techniques give us a taste of Spain? Debussy had only traveled to Spain once, and then only for a few hours in the border city of San Sebastian, where he saw a bullfight. But Debussy knew Spanish literature, art, and music—if not its topography—and his intention in Ibéria was to give us images of Spain. Program Notes 53
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