Czardasz - from Pugni, not Delibes

A bit unseasonal this, since ‘musical surprises’ was the theme of my 2009 Advent Calendar. But I just couldn’t wait til next year to share my excitement at this one. It seems that not only is the Theme Slave varié (‘Friends’) from Coppélia not originally by Delibes, but the Czardasz isn’t either.

I discovered this looking through the microfilm of Pugni’s Théolinda, ou le Lutin de la Vallée (1860), a ballet by St Léon.  Look on page 29-30 and you’ll see great unmistakeable chunks of the Coppélia Czardasz, including so many stylistic particulars that it can only indicate that borrowing has taken place. My guess is both Delibes and Pugni were borrowing from a third source.   This is so obvious, and so extraordinary, I can’t believe that I can be the first or only person to notice it.

My grandfather's shop in Garratt Lane, late 1930s, I think.

Happy Christmas! Today’s revelation is not strictly a musical surprise, except that it vaguely concerns me and I’m a musician. But it’s quite surprising all the same, and I love it. I came across this old photograph of my paternal grandfather’s cornchandler’s shop at 759 Garratt Lane a couple of years ago.  The site doesn’t exist anymore as it was bombed in the blitz, but I believe it was at the junction with Franche Court Road, opposite Summerstown. Isn’t it slightly weird that after being born in Bournemouth, moving to London, and over 20 years of adult life, working my way down a succession of residences on the Northern line, I should end up where I live now, which – entirely by chance and without knowing about it  – is only a few minutes walk from where my grandfather had a shop?

If there’s a point it’s this: this Advent Calendar has often been about pointing out the realities behind abstractions, ideals and false unities in music.  So it’s rather appropriate that I point out the realities behind the author of these posts.  I rather like the idea that this blog, however metaphysical at times,  is just the ramblings, from Tooting,  of the grandson of a Tooting grocer.

I love Bartók’s Rumanian Dances, and indeed, I’ve just recorded them with the violinist Gillon Cameron on the album  After Class 2. But I was gobsmacked when I heard my favourite band, the Romanian Taraf de Haïdouks playing them as they might have been before they got turned into 20th century concert repertoire, or ‘re-gypsifying’ them as it’s called elsewhere. Enjoy.If you’re a speed junkie, the best bits are from 6’35″ onwards.

Vauxhall Gardens Estate. The name lives on, if not the splendour.

Although the light and popular dance rhythms of Johann Strauss II seem a sociocultural world away from the ‘classical’ Tchaikovsky, they’re not. It’s our own snobbery that obscures the connections in the music, for what is Tchaikovsky most famous for if not the Waltz of the Flowers, and the waltzes from Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake?

But there is a physical and geographical connection too.  For in 1865, Strauss – who was a regular guest conductor at summer concerts at the Pavlovsk station in Russia – conducted the first public performance of Tchaikovsky’s Characteristic Dances.

At a station? Well yes. The station at Pavlovsk was no ordinary railway terminus – it had been fashioned on the magnificent Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London, and included a concert hall in formal gardens, amongst other Imperial extravagances.   And it’s that connection with Vauxhall that, to this day, gave rise to the Russian word for ‘train station’ – vokzal. By the strangest of coincidences, I’m now off to Vauxhall to play for class for the Strauss Gala.

And as someone has wittily pointed out since reading this post, Tchaikovsky would have been very at home in today’s Vauxhall, which is gayer than Old Compton Street.

• More about Strauss and Pavlovsk from the St Petersburg Times
• Fascinating programme notes about Strauss & Pavlovsk from Naxos
• Etymological relations between Vauxhall & vokzal
• Pavlovsk Vauxhall from the St Petersburg encyclopedia

Standing on bridges makes me all spiritual and contemplative. A psychopompic moment if ever there was one.

Next time you get to a slow bit of a ballet where there’s something a bit wafty and barcarole-ish in 6/8, look out for a psychopomp.

A psychopomp, explains the scholar Rodney Edgecombe in a fascinating article ‘can be either a spiritual guide or a figure who conducts the soul from the zone of this life and the putative next.’ (2001, p.259).  And to illustrate the point, he cites a host of examples from opera and ballet where barcaroles underscore or signify the transition between two worlds, including the opening tableau of La Sylphide (1832), the ballabile of the Wilis in Act II of Giselle (1841), the beginning of the ‘Kingdom of the Shades’ from La Bayadère (1877), the ‘Panorama’ in Act II of Sleeping Beauty (1890) and the opening of Act II of The Nutcracker (1892). You can add several others to this list, including the ‘Rose Adage’ from Sleeping Beauty, ‘Prayer’ from Coppélia, the ‘White Swan’ pas de deux from Act II of Swan Lake, to name but a few.

So when Drosselmeyer takes Clara to the Kingdom of Sweets at the beginning of Act II of The Nutcracker, it’s not chance that the music is a barcarole, and it’s not chance that we sense we’re going on a journey. It’s part of a web of references in music that have a textual significance for us, even if we don’t recognise it consciously. What I love about articles like this, and books like Raymond Monelle’s (see yesterday’s post) is that they tease out the text beneath ostensibly ‘absolute’ music, and uncover a much more interesting world.

Edgecombe, R.S. (2001) On the Limits of Genre: Some Nineteenth-Century Barcaroles. 19th Century Music Vol. 24 No. 3 (Spring 2001) pp. 252-267. Get article from JSTOR here

Bits of this post were first published in the Dance Gazette a few years ago. I’m not lazy, it’s just that I still find it interesting.