2016-448-E Arts - Chapel Hill Philharmonia - Spring 2016 Arts Grant Agreement

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DocuSign Envelope ID: D8671365-A26A-45AE-A1 BO-C9F674AC3364 from childhood as a Christian, Wagner wrote that he "has shown us that a Jew can possess the richest measure of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture...without even once through all these advantages being able to bring forth in us that profound, heart-and-soul searching effect we expect from music." The challenge today is to move beyond the subtle long-term impact of Wagner's poison,and perhaps of Mendelssohn's own insecurity, to hear again the freshness, strength, and passion in his music. Ravel: Pavane for a Dead Princess Maurice Ravel, considered alongside Claude Debussy to have 01 ritranslated French Impressionism from the visual arts into music, Iii , i was born in 1875 in Ciboure, France, a Basque town located only ' 1 A 11 miles from the Spanish border. As a teenager he became a student at the Paris Conservatory where he studied composition with Gabriel Faure. From an early stage he was recognized Y as a g g j highly original voice, perhaps to his detriment, as conservative juries ;; ,� v repeatedly turned him down for academic prizes. He was rebuffed ° �%� ��% five times as a contestant for the Prix de Rome. This finally sparked ;f '%i1 a scandal in 1905, by which time Ravel was a well-established figure in French music, when all of the Prix winners came from a �,° i ��r° single studio. While he wrote relatively few works, and these often �' �� compressed and tightly focused his distinctive use of harmony and 11 1111111111 r A,000014 j �,�,, ,� � �,, ,�� skilled orchestration strongly influenced his contemporaries.gro 1 Ravel never traveled abroad until 1905, when a sympathetic editor took him on a canal trip of Belgium and Holland as consolation for Infanta Margarita Theresa in Las Meninas his final failure to win the traveling fellowship to Italy. His first visit to Diego Velasquez, 1656 Spain occurred in the autumn of 1911. Nevertheless, already from his first years as a composer Ravel produced works that suggest an intimate familiarity with that country, which he called "ma seconde patrie musicale" (my second musical homeland). Ravel attributed the "subtle authentic Hispanism" in his music to the influence of his Basque mother, whose compelling reminiscences of her youth in Madrid had fascinated him since early childhood. The dance rhythm of the Spanish Habanera appears in early works such as Sites auriculaires and Rapsodie espagnole. Specific influence of the Basque culture can be found in some of Ravel's most important compositions, including the Piano Trio (1914). His most famous work, Bolero (1928), is obviously Spanish-inspired. Ravel wrote it for the ballet company of Ida Rubinstein and imagined factory workers playing out the story of a bullfighter killed by a jealous rival. Ravel composed the Pavane pour une infante defunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess) as a commissioned work for solo piano in 1899, at the age of 24. It was premiered three years later by Ricardo Vines and immediately became a popular hit. Ravel produced a version for orchestra in 1910 which won even greater acclaim.The title leads some to take the work as a morose dirge. However, Ravel explained that he merely liked the alliterative words. The piece, he averred, "is not a funeral lament for a dead child, but rather an evocation of the Pavane [a courtly dance dating to the Renaissance] that might have been danced by such a little princess as painted by [17th century artist Diego] Velasquez."A specific visual reference would be the five portraits by Velasquez of the Infanta Margarita, daughter of King Felipe IV of Spain. Ravel dedicated the Pavane to his patroness Winnaretta Singer, wife of Prince Edmond de Polignac and heiress to the Singer family of sewing machine fame. The couple's drawing room in Paris was a center for avant garde music, and inspired Marcel Proust's literary pictures of salon culture.