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PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Thursday, May 7, 2015, at 8:00
Friday, May 8, 2015, at 8:00
Saturday, May 9, 2015, at 8:00
Friday, May 15, 2015, at 1:30
Esa-Pekka Salonen Conductor
Chloé Briot Soprano
Marie-Eve Munger Soprano
Kate Royal Soprano
Marianne Crebassa Mezzo-soprano
Elodie Méchain Contralto
Manuel Nuñez Camelino Tenor
Stéphane Degout Baritone
Eric Owens Bass-baritone
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe Director
Anima—Young Singers of Greater Chicago
Emily Ellsworth Artistic Director
Ravel
Mother Goose Suite
Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty
Tom Thumb
Laideronette, Empress of the Pagodas
Conversations of Beauty and the Beast
The Enchanted Garden
Debussy
La damoiselle élue
KATE ROYAL
ELODIE MÉCHAIN
WOMEN OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS
INTERMISSION
Global Sponsor of the CSO
French
Festival
&
Ravel
L’enfant et les sortilèges
Music by Maurice Ravel
Poem by Colette
Chloé Briot soprano...........................................................................................................................................The Child
Marie-Eve Munger soprano................................................................. The Fire, The Princess, The Nightingale
Kate Royal soprano..............................................................................................A Shepherdess, The Bat, The Owl
Marianne Crebassa mezzo-soprano.....The Louis XV Chair, A Shepherd, The Squirrel, The Female Cat
Elodie Méchain contralto................................................................... Mother, The Chinese Cup, The Dragonfly
Manuel Nuñez Camelino tenor...................The Black Wedgwood Teapot, The Little Old Man, The Frog
Stéphane Degout baritone..........................................................................The Grandfather Clock, The Tomcat
Eric Owens bass-baritone...........................................................................................................The Armchair, A Tree
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe director
Shepherds, shepherdesses, frogs, animals, trees
Animal soloists: Sarah van der Ploeg, soprano; Sarah Ponder, contralto; Thomas E. Dymit, tenor;
Mathew Lake, bass-baritone
Anima—Young Singers of Greater Chicago
Emily Ellsworth artistic director
Bench, sofa, ottoman, wicker chair, numerical figures
Mike Tutaj Projection design
English surtitles by Kenneth Chalmers
The setting is an old-fashioned country house and its garden
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances
The CSO thanks Julie and Roger Baskes, lead sponsors of the Reveries & Passions Festival concert programming.
The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional sponsorship support for the Reveries & Passions Festival has been provided by: The Jacob and Rosaline
Cohn Foundation, Mr. & Mrs. Richard J. Franke, The Gilchrist Foundation, and Burton X. and Sheli Rosenberg.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBEZ 91.5FM for its generous support as a media sponsor of the
French Reveries & Passions Festival.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
2
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Maurice Ravel
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.
Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.
Mother Goose Suite
Although he had none of
his own, Ravel loved
children. Throughout his
life, he kept his ability to
see the world through a
child’s eyes, and he never
outgrew his passion for
creating elaborate toys
and reading fairy tales
aloud. The adult composer, little taller himself than most children,
particularly enjoyed the company of Mimie and
Jean Godebski, the daughter and son of his
friends Cipa and Ida Godebski, a young Polish
couple whose Paris apartment was a gathering
place for some of the greatest artists of the day,
including André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie,
and, from time to time, Igor Stravinsky. Ravel
was a regular visitor to the Godebskis’ salon, and
it’s possible that he was drawn as much by the
enchanting games and conversation he shared
with Mimie and Jean as he was by the more
rarefied discussion among the grown-ups.
Ravel often made up stories to tell the
Godebski children, and, when they were apart,
he sent them funny postcards. But the greatest
treasure among his many gifts to Mimie and
Jean is a suite of pieces inspired by the Mother
Goose tales, originally written for piano duet
and intended to be played by children. Ravel
COMPOSED
1908–1910, as piano duet; orchestrated as ballet score in 1911
FIRST PERFORMANCE
January 28, 1912; Paris, France
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
December 27 & 28, 1912, Orchestra
Hall. Frederick Stock conducting
July 8, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Ernest
Ansermet conducting
dedicated the score to Mimie and Jean in the
hope that they would give the first performance,
but, although they were unusually accomplished
pianists for children, they happily accepted the
gift but declined the premiere. “To us,” Jean later
recalled, “it mainly meant a lot of work.”
Two more precocious children, Geneviève
Durony and Jeanne Leleu, then only six
and seven years old, premiered the suite in
April 1910. Ravel was so enchanted by Jeanne’s
performance in particular that he wrote to her:
When you are a great virtuosa and I either
an old fogey, covered with honors, or else
completely forgotten, you will perhaps have
pleasant memories of having given an artist
the very rare joy of hearing a work of his, one
of a rather special nature, interpreted exactly
as it should be.
M other Goose is one of Ravel’s most
exquisite creations. “The idea of
evoking the poetry of childhood
in these pieces,” Ravel later explained, “naturally led me to simplify my style and to
refine my means of expression.” Even when
he orchestrated and enlarged the suite into a
ballet score in 1911, he managed to heighten
the music’s sense of fantasy and adventure
without taking away its grace and innocence.
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
August 6, 1981, Ravinia Festival. Edo
de Waart conducting
May 23, 2012, Orchestra Hall. David
Robertson conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes
and english horn, two clarinets, two
bassoons and contrabassoon, two
horns, timpani, triangle, cymbals,
bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone,
glockenspiel, celesta, harp, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
16 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1961. André Kostelanetz. Video Images
(video)
1968. Jean Martinon. RCA
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Ravel borrowed his title and two tales
(Sleeping Beauty and Tom Thumb) from
Charles Perrault, the
seventeenth-century
French writer who
is responsible for
preserving a number
of well-known
stories, including
those of Little Red
Riding Hood and
Bluebeard. (It’s
Perrault’s 1607
volume, Histoires ou
contes du temps passé
avec des moralitez—
French author
Stories or tales of
Charles Perrault
olden times, with
morals—that became
known in France as “Mother Goose.”)
The Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty is as simple
as the briefest of fairy tales—just twenty measures of limpid melody over plain, magically
colored harmonies.
Ravel prefaces Tom Thumb with a quote from
Perrault: “He thought he would easily find his
way, thanks to the bread he had scattered wherever
he had passed, but he was quite surprised when he
couldn’t see even a single crumb of it. Birds had
come along and eaten every bit.” Ravel shows us
Tom Thumb’s meanderings—the meter changes
often and unpredictably—and also, unforgettably,
the birds making off with the crumbs.
Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas is an
oriental tale by the countess d’Aulnoy, a Perrault
contemporary and imitator. The empress is
serenaded at her bath by her subjects: “At once
mandarins and mandarinettes set to singing and
to the playing of instruments: some had lutes
made of nutshells, some had viols made from the
shells of almonds, for their instruments had to be
in proportion to their own scale.” In the original four-hand version, the upper piano part is
written entirely for the black keys, automatically
producing melodies in the pentatonic scale, that
most convenient way of conjuring up the Orient.
When Ravel made his orchestral transcription, he serenaded the empress with an array
of bell-like and percussive sounds—cymbals,
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xylophone, glockenspiel, celesta, harp, and
the ceremonial striking of the tam-tam—
recalling the Javanese gamelan ensemble the
fourteen-year-old composer had watched in
wonder at the Paris Exhibition of 1889.
Ravel took the Conversations of Beauty and
the Beast from the Moral Tales of Marie Leprince
de Beaumont:
“When I think of your good heart you no
longer seem so ugly to me.” “Oh yes, good
lady! I have a good heart, but I am a monster.” “Many a man is more a monster than
you.” “If I had the wit, I should pay you a
great compliment, but I am only a beast.”
“Beauty, will you be my wife?” “No, Beast.”
“I die happy, for I have the joy of seeing
you once more.” “No, my dear Beast, you
will not die: You will live to become my
husband!” . . . The Beast had disappeared,
and she saw at her feet only a prince more
beautiful than the god of love, who thanked
her for having put an end to his spell.
Ravel gives the dialogue to the clarinet,
playing Beauty, and the contrabassoon as Beast.
She dances to a gentle waltz, and they talk.
Finally, with a sweeping harp glissando, he is
transformed into a princely violin.
The Enchanted Garden is Ravel’s own private
place—the world of his own childhood memories
viewed with the wisdom and affection of a grown
man who has learned that only in fairy tales does
one live happily ever after.
Without children of his own, or even any
important students or disciples, Ravel grew, in
his final years, to lament that no one would carry
on his name or continue his work. “I have left
nothing,” he said. “I have not said what I wanted
to say. Alas, I am not one of the great composers!” But nearly all of the sixty-some pieces of
music he left behind have found a permanent
place in the repertoire—an astonishing and rare
accomplishment—and Ravel’s deep-seated fear
that, as he told seven-year-old Jeanne Leleu, he
would die “an old fogey,” completely forgotten,
turned out to be groundless. Claude Debussy
Born August 22, 1862, Saint Germain-en-Laye, France.
Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France.
La damoiselle élue
Debussy’s first encounter
with Wagner’s music was
at a performance of
Lohengrin in Paris in
1887, but his immersion—
his baptism by fire—came
at the great Wagnerian
shrine in Bayreuth. On
his first trip to the
German festival town of
Bayreuth in the summer of 1888, he saw both
Parsifal and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. He
returned the next summer, fully intoxicated, to
attend performances of those two music dramas
along with Tristan und Isolde, which completely
overwhelmed him. “It is Tristan that gets in the
way of our work,” he later told his close friend,
the poet Pierre Louÿs. “I don’t see . . . what can
be done beyond Tristan.” (Debussy knew the
opera inside out: he once won a bet by playing
the entire score from memory.)
Coming to terms with Wagner was a rite of
passage for any young composer in the 1880s.
“1889! Delightful period when I was madly
Wagnerian,” Debussy would later recall. But
Debussy’s uncritical adulation was short-lived.
In time, he turned against the Wagnerian legacy,
famously writing, in 1903: “Wagner, if I may be
permitted to express myself with the pomposity
befitting him, was a beautiful sunset mistaken
for a dawn.” Even so, he continued to grapple
with the revolution Wagner’s music had launched
even after he made own his way in the unmapped
territory of early twentieth-century music.
COMPOSED
1887–1889, revised 1902
FIRST PERFORMANCE
April 8, 1893; Paris, France
In the view of another revolutionary, Arnold
Schoenberg, Debussy’s battle against Wagner
“was indeed successful; but to free himself from
Wagner—that was beyond him.”
L a damoiselle élue, the lyric cantata
Debussy completed in 1889, at the
height of his “madly Wagnerian” fever,
is the work that most clearly shows him under
the master’s spell. Louÿs later recalled how
Debussy “boasted of having written La damoiselle élue upon his return from Bayreuth and
having succeeded in not imitating Parsifal.”
But the stamp of the Parsifal sound world is all
over Debussy’s score, starting with the spare
opening measures, which evoke the spacious
calm and glowing textures of the Parsifal
prelude—“as if lit from behind” is Debussy’s
own description of Wagner’s orchestration.
Debussy found his subject and his text for
La damoiselle élue in the work of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, one of the English Pre-Raphaelite
artists who were in vogue in Paris in the 1880s.
Debussy’s identification with Rossetti, in
particular, was eerily complete—in fact, when
Debussy appeared in London in 1908, the
papers all commented on his striking physical
resemblance to Rossetti. Debussy read Rossetti’s
poem “The Blessed Damozel” in a French
prose translation by Gabriel Sarrazin that was
published in 1883 in an anthology illustrated
by work of the Pre-Raphaelites. “The Blessed
Damozel” is itself a response to “The Raven” by
Edgar Allan Poe, a writer Debussy admired so
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 3, 4 & 5, 1977, Orchestra
Hall. Barbara Hendricks and Ellen
Stanley as soloists, Women of
the Chicago Symphony Chorus
(Margaret Hillis, director), Gennady
Rozhdestvensky conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists,
women’s chorus, three flutes, two
oboes and english horn, three
clarinets and bass clarinet, three
bassoons, four horns, three trumpets,
three trombones, two harps, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
20 minutes
5
much that he eventually intended to write operas
on The Fall of the House of Usher and The Devil in
the Belfry. In “The Raven,” a tormented, grieving
male yearns for his beloved in heaven. Rossetti’s
poem reverses the perspective: the woman cannot
bear to live alone in paradise while her lover is
left on earth. She craves the fulfillment of love
that now only death can bring—the theme that
animates the whole of Tristan, which Debussy
heard at Bayreuth while he was composing La
damoiselle élue.
Debussy later owned a copy of Rossetti’s
painting on the same subject. But Pre-Raphaelite
art came to France only in the 1890s, and so
it is unlikely that Debussy had seen Rossetti’s
painting when he began to write the music.
Today, The Blessed Damozel is Rossetti’s most
famous work (it hangs in the Fogg Museum of
Art at Harvard). Rossetti, renowned as both a
writer and a painter, was repeatedly asked to give
pictorial life to his popular poem that was first
published in 1850. In the painting, completed in
1878, the luminous heroine dominates the large
primary canvas, while her disconsolate lover
occupies the small predella—the lower panel that
also includes the first four stanzas of Rossetti’s
poem inscribed along the base of its gilded
oak frame.
D ebussy set selected stanzas from
Rossetti’s poem in Sarrazin’s prose
translation. He split the narrative
portions between a female chorus and a
low-voiced female soloist; when the blessed
damozel speaks, she has the voice of a soprano.
(With her long hair, “yellow like ripe corn,”
she is a prototype for Mélisande in Debussy’s
Maeterlinck opera, which he began writing
the year Damoiselle was premiered.) [The CSO
performs the opera next week under Salonen.]
Debussy’s scoring for female voices and chorus
echoes the music for Kundry and the Flower
Maidens in Parsifal. The radiant orchestral
prelude introduces musical themes that do not
6
he Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
T
(1828–1882)
function quite like Wagner’s leitmotifs, but
are nonetheless recurring ideas associated with
certain aspects of the tale—hope, yearning. The
entire score, from the stillness of the prelude to
the soft chanting of the chorus and the natural,
flowing melodies of the damozel, is suffused with
Rossetti’s “peace of utter light and silence.” Note: The supertitles for these performances
duplicate the lines of Rossetti’s original English poem
whenever possible.
Maurice Ravel
L’enfant et les sortilèges, Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts
When Sidonie-Gabrielle
Colette—better known
simply as Colette, the
celebrated actress, writer,
and music hall star—first
met the young Maurice
Ravel, she was not
impressed. “He liked loud
ties and frilly shirts,” she
said, even though Ravel
was known to be a fastidious dresser. “He wanted
to be noticed, but at the same time he was afraid
of the critics,” she continued, knowing that her
own husband at the time, who went by the pen
name Willy, was one of Ravel’s harshest critics.
(Colette’s erotic Claudine novels, which made her
famous in the first years of the twentieth century,
were originally published under Willy’s name.)
She also thought that Ravel’s whiskers and
hairdo unfortunately “emphasized the contrast
between his striking head and his tiny body.”
Ravel was, in fact, no larger than the children he
knew and loved, and so it is easy to imagine him
as the child at the heart of L’enfant et les sortilèges,
the fantastical short opera he would eventually
write with Colette. “Perhaps he was really shy,”
Colette later remembered. “But he remained
distant and reserved.”
Their professional relationship, which also
remained distant and reserved—and involved little direct contact—began in 1914, when Jacques
Rouché, the head of the Paris Opéra, asked
Colette to write the scenario for a fantasy ballet.
Uncharacteristically, she tossed it off in a mere
COMPOSED
1920, 1924–25
FIRST PERFORMANCE
March 21, 1925, Monte-Carlo
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
These are the first Chicago Symphony
Orchestra performances.
eight days. Although Rouché suggested several
composers who could set it to music, including
Stravinsky and Dukas, Ravel was the only one
Colette wanted, despite Willy’s negative—“cruel”
was the word Colette used—reviews of his
music. Colette had been warned that Ravel was
a slow worker, but she was still probably not
prepared to wait another eleven years for their
project, which became a short fantasy opera,
to be completed, even with the intervention of
World War I.
Sometime in 1916, Colette finished a full
libretto and sent it off to Ravel. But the composer, who served as a truck driver during part
of the war, was stationed in Verdun at the time,
and he never received the text. Another copy did
finally reach him, but only in 1918. For some
time—ever since the death of his mother the
previous January—Ravel was unable to compose
at all, and a piece anchored by the love of a child
for his mother apparently seemed untouchable
to him for many months. Finally, he wrote to
Colette in 1919, with his first thoughts about
their little opera. Ravel began to write the music
in 1920, but quickly set it aside. “Oh! Cher ami,
when, oh when?” Colette finally wrote to him
in the summer of 1923, begging him to resume
work on the piece she called a Divertissement
for My Daughter. Only in the spring of 1924,
with a premiere now set for the Théâtre de
Monte-Carlo—the Paris Opéra had long ago
dropped out—did Ravel finally set to work in
earnest. “I’m only leaving the job to take some
food,” he wrote that summer, “or to walk a few
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes
and english horn, two clarinets,
E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet,
two bassoons and contrabassoon,
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion,
harp, celesta, piano, luthéal (a kind of
prepared piano), harpsichord, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
45 minutes
CHICAGO SYMPHONY
CHORUS RECORDING
2006. Julie Boulianne, Geneviève
Després, Kirsten Gunlogson, Philippe
Castagner, Ian Greenlaw, Kevin Short,
Agathe Martel, Cassandre Prévost,
and Julie Cox as soloists; members
of the Nashville Symphony Chorus
(George Mabry, director), members of
the Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain
Wolfe, director), Chattanooga Boys
Choir (Vincent Oakes, director); and
the Nashville Symphony Orchestra;
Alastair Willis conducting. Naxos
7
André Devambez, Auguste a mauvais caractère. Paris, 1913. BnF / Dep. Estampes et photographie. This cartoon may
possibly have inspired Colette to write the libretto for L’enfant et les sortilèges.
kilometers in the forest when I feel as if my
head’s going to explode.” Just five days before the
premiere, Ravel wrote to Colette one last time,
asking for some new words to fit a few measures
of music he had just composed. (Their “collaboration” was so different from the exhaustively
detailed, give-and-take working relationship of
Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
during this same time.)
The premiere of L’enfant et les sortilèges—the
new title, loosely translated as The Child and
the Enchantments, was Ravel’s—took place in
Monte-Carlo on March 21, 1925. Conducted
by Victor de Sabata, and with choreography by
a twenty-one-year-old Georges Balanchine—
this was his first major assignment—it was a
great public success. (Ravel once claimed that
de Sabata knew the score by memory within
twelve hours of receiving it.) Ravel appeared
three times to accept the audience’s prolonged
applause. During the performance run, Colette
wrote that it was “playing twice a week before
a packed but turbulent house.” The audience
was more turbulent still at the Paris premiere,
at the Opéra-Comique, in February 1926. “The
modernists applaud,” Colette wrote, “and shout
down the others.” “It would be good if we could
8
finally hear my
music in silence,”
Ravel told his pupil
Manuel Rosenthal
in 1936. (Rosenthal,
at the age of
seventy-seven, was
the conductor when
the Metropolitan
Opera finally staged
L’enfant in 1981!)
Performances
were soon given in
Brussels, Prague,
Ravel as a small child
Leipzig, Vienna, and
even San Francisco,
but it wasn’t until 1939 that L’enfant was produced at the Paris Opéra, under the direction
of Jacques Rouché, who had had the idea for
the work in the first place—now more than two
decades earlier. The opera has always presented
technical hurdles in creating its fantastic happenings on a conventional opera stage—when
Ravel’s brother saw Walt Disney’s Snow White
shortly after the composer’s death, he said, “This
is the way L’enfant should be presented”—but the
heart of its magic lies entirely in the music itself.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954)
F rom the opening measures, when the
meandering lines of two oboes suggest
the aimlessness and loneliness of the
bored child, Ravel’s music perfectly captures
the mood and the substance of each scene.
Ravel’s score is arguably his greatest feat of
purely descriptive orchestral writing, and he,
perhaps alone among history’s greatest masters
of instrumentation, had not only the technical
knowledge, but also the sheer creative daring,
brilliance, and wit to bring the opera’s world of
enchantments to life. Colette handed Ravel an
entire book of linguistic games: the fake Chinese
of the china cup (“Keng-ca foo Mahjong”), the
broken English of the angry, cracked Wedgwood
teapot (“I knock out you, stupid chose”), the frog’s
“Kekekekekecekca,” the textless “miaowed”
cat duet (Ravel fussed over the “words,” asking
Colette if he could switch one “mouao” for a
“mouain”). Throughout the opera, there is an
astonishment of sounds, musical and otherwise:
the song of nature in all its richness, the noises
of the animal kingdom, the magic of the night.
The opera proceeds, as Ravel himself said, “in
the spirit of the American musical comedy”—
that is, as a succession of separate numbers—
solos, duets, ensembles, choruses. Ravel presents
a parade of musical styles as diverse as the
array of animals and inanimate objects they
accompany—a stilted baroque minuet for the
dance of the Louis XV chair, the foxtrot of the
Wedgwood teapot, a “Valse amércaine” for the
dragonfly, an old-world pastorale for the shepherds and shepherdesses, the grand waltz of
the frogs (years before La valse), and a touching
monologue for the child that Ravel admitted was
based on Manon’s famous “Adieu, notre petite
table” from Massenet’s opera. “There’s a bit of
everything in [L’enfant],” Ravel said. When he
told Colette that he wanted the cup and the
teapot to sing “ragtime”—the kind of American
music that was beginning to sweep Europe following the war, Colette replied: “What a terrific
gust from the music hall to stir up the dust of the
Opéra.” Ravel spoke at Houston’s Rice Institute
in 1928, and he admitted that although he loved
adopting the popular forms of American music
in his scores, “nevertheless it is French music,
Ravel’s music, that I have written.”
I f a child could tell about his childhood
while he is passing through it, his true
childhood,” Colette once wrote, “his
account would perhaps be nothing more than
one of intimate dramas and disappointments.”
L’enfant has long invited speculation about
its meanings—loneliness and acceptance, the
ache of loss, alienation, authority, the tension
between conformity and creativity, the price of
imagination, the allure of home, love. Colette’s
final word, “Maman,”—“mama”—which Ravel
sets unforgettably to a descending fourth—an
interval that recurs throughout the score—
seems to release the depth of emotion that lies
behind so much of childhood—ours; Ravel’s
as he wrote this music, his first major work
following the death of his own mother; and
Colette’s: “I always remained in touch with the
character who, little by little, has dominated
all the rest of my work . . . my mother.” On the
last page of Ravel’s score, the wandering oboes
return, but now they settle, home at last. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
9
L’enfant et les sortilèges
SYNOPSIS
A little boy of six or seven is sitting idly
at an exercise book. He is out of sorts,
and just wants to get up to mischief.
His mother scolds him and leaves him some
tea and dry bread. As soon as she’s gone, he
flies into a rage, smashes the teapot and cup,
sticks his pen into the caged squirrel, pulls
the cat’s tail, stirs up the fire, knocks over the
kettle, attacks the wallpaper with the poker,
swings on the clock’s pendulum, tears up
his books, and collapses in an armchair.
At this point fantastic things begin to happen
and the child’s world fights back. The armchair stirs into life and begins to dance with a
Louis XV bergère: they’ll not let the little boy sit
on them anymore. Nor will the bench, the sofa,
or the wicker chair. The clock, striking irregularly, is badly damaged. The Wedgwood teapot,
in broken English, and the china cup, in broken
Chinese, console each other by teasing the boy.
The fire flares out of the hearth and threatens
him, but is restrained by the cinder.
Night is falling and a group of shepherds and
shepherdesses peel away from the torn wallpaper and lament their fate. From the page of a
mutilated book a beautiful princess appears, sad
that her story will never reach its end and her
prince will never come. She disappears, leaving
the child desolate. From another book leaps
10
a cavalcade of numbers led by a little old man
spouting meaningless mathematics. The moon is
now up, and the boy attempts to stroke the cat.
But the cat spits back and pays more attention to
another cat out in the garden.
At this point, the walls of the room fall away
and the boy finds himself in the moonlit garden.
Insects, frogs, owls, and nightingales are heard.
The child is happy to be in the garden, but is
rebuffed by a tree which he had attacked with a
knife. A dragonfly dances with some moths and
sings a duet with a nightingale, to a chorus of
frogs. The dragonfly wants his mate back, so does
a bat, both bereaved by the wicked child. Frogs
dance, and a squirrel complains about being
prodded in its cage. The frogs and squirrels dance
and fight in the night, the cats miaow to each
other. The child realizes that they care nothing
for him and that he is alone. “Maman!” he cries,
as they all persecute him.
A baby squirrel falls wounded and the boy ties
up its paw with a ribbon. Suddenly the animals
feel sorry for him and are touched by his action.
The child, too, has been hurt, and wants his
mother, they realize. He is a good child after all.
They lead him back to the house, where he holds
out his arms to his mother.
Hugh Macdonald
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra