Ensemble for the Romantic Century
presents
The Dreyfus Affair
A theatrical concert
Written by Eve Wolf
based on letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, and accounts by the historical figures involved in the Dreyfus Affair
Directed by Donald T. Sanders
Production Design by Vanessa James
Elizabeth Solley Caine as Citizen, German Officer, Spirit of the Republic
Simon Fortin as Émile Zola and Edgar Demange
Michael Lewis as Commandant Henry, Citizen, Guard, German General
Robert Ian Mackenzie as Commandant du Paty de Clam
Michael Milligan as Alfred Dreyfus
Randall Scarlata as Georges Picquart
Sam Breslin Wright as Edouard Drumont, Citizen, Judge, General, Guard, German General
Elizabeth Zins as Lucie Dreyfus
Eve Wolf, Executive Artistic Director
Max Barros, Artistic Director
James Melo, Musicologist in Residence
Donald T. Sanders, Director of Theatrical Production
***
The Biava Quartet
Austin Hartman, violin
Hyunsun Ko, violin
Mary Persin, viola
Jason Calloway, cello
Elizabeth Mann, flute
Randall Scarlata, baritone
Eve Wolf, piano and harpsichord
***
Cover design by James Melo
***
Wednesday, 7 February 2007 at 8 PM
Thursday, 8 February 2007 at 8 PM
Saturday, 10 February 2007 at 3 PM
The Kosciuszko Foundation
15 East 65th Street
This production is funded in part by a grant from
The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Special thanks to
Susan Winokur and Paul Leach for providing a Steinway Concert Grand piano for each concert of the
2006-2007 season at the Kosciuszko Foundation.
Stuart Pivar for his generous loan of a harpsichord for this concert.
The Diller-Quaile School of Music for loaning the percussion instruments used in this production.
Mount Holyoke College Department of Theatre Arts for loaning the costumes.
SYNOPSIS
Act I: The action begins 11 days after the arrest of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason. As the production opens,
he is interrogated by Major Mercier Du Paty de Clam. When he exits, Dreyfus recites a letter to his wife in
which he expresses disbelief in the fact that he has been accused of such a “monstrous crime” and he affirms his
belief in God’s justice. He asks Lucie to sink all their fortune into the search for the truth. In the next scene,
actors pull out newspapers, reading from the anti-Semitic press. We are introduced to the character of
Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, Émile Zola and Lieutenant Colonel Hubert Henry. Picquart challenges
the notion that Dreyfus has committed the crime, and Zola, who enters as an observer, frames the action as if he
is gathering material for a new novel. The two officers, Du Paty de Clam and Henry, begin to plot to make sure
that Dreyfus’s conviction is assured. Next, Lucie Dreyfus, wife of Dreyfus, writes to her husband, finally being
allowed to see him after two weeks of imprisonment. She swears that “together we will maintain the struggle
until the guilty one is found”. The next scene begins with the trial of Dreyfus, in which General Henry swears
before the judge that as early as March an “honorable person” alerted his service to the fact that an officer in the
Ministry was committing treason and that the traitor was Dreyfus. Crowds supply invectives against the Jews.
Dreyfus’ lawyer, Demange, (played by Zola) begins his defense but Henry claims that he is merely the
“syndicate’s lawyer”. Dreyfus is convicted of treason by “unanimous decision” and to a sentence of public
degradation and imprisonment in Devil’s Island. Demange declares that Dreyfus has “not been tried but he has
been murdered” and the crowd of onlookers goes wild with anti-Semitic agitation. Dreyfus cries out his
innocence, and the Ceremony of Degradation takes places in which a giant man in a helmet and flowing mane
tears off Dreyfus’s insignias, gold braids, buttons and the ornaments of his jacket and sleeve.
Act II: Five light and comic theatrical interludes alternate, during which French and German officers comment
on the Dreyfus Affair. The conflict between Picquart, who defenders Dreyfus, and Henry and Du Pat de Clam,
who want to assure Dreyfus’s conviction, is intensified. Henry and Du Paty de Clam worry that Picquart may
expose the truth regarding the handwriting in the bordereau that was used to convict Dreyfus. Meanwhile, in his
cell in Devil’s Island, Dreyfus is watched over by two guards as he listens to the sound of the ocean. He writes
to his wife Lucie and tells her about his appalling conditions and his thoughts of suicide. He pleads with the
guards for a more humane treatment, to no avail. In Paris, Du Paty de Clam inflames public sentiment with
rhetoric against the Jews, while Zola observes the developments from among the crowd. The action again
focuses on Dreyfus in his cell, as he writes to the President Felix Faure protesting his innocence. Once again, he
pleads with the guards to let him go to the sea, and points out his deteriorating health. Next, Zola becomes
completely involved in the affair, and as Du Paty de Clam continues to inflame the populace and threatens Zola
with legal action, Zola counters with readings from his article J’Accuse, exposing the conspiracy behind
Dreyfus’s conviction. The last scene opens as Zola tells his wife that he must leave that evening for England
and we understand that he is fleeing and going into exile. The entire play ends with dramatic excerpts from
Zola’s “The Fifth Act” in which Zola speaks about the future of France and chillingly senses that events will
take place in France that are of even more tragic proportion.
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
(played by the cast and mentioned in the script)
Edgar Demange: Renowned criminal attorney in charge of Captain Dreyfus's 1894 court-martial defense. Represented
Mathieu Dreyfus at the Esterhazy court-martial in 1898. Served with Fernand Labori as co-counsel for the defense at
Rennes in 1899.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus: Son of a prosperous textile manufacturer in Alsace, graduate of the École Polytechnique and
École Superieure de Guerre, assigned to the Army General Staff. Arrested in October 1894, accused of high treason,
court-martialed in closed session, degraded, and deported to Devil's Island. Retried in 1899, reconvicted with "extenuating
circumstances," and pardoned by the president of the republic. Rehabilitated and reinstated in the army in 1906; awarded
the cross of the Knight of the Legion of Honor.
Lucie Dreyfus: Wife of Alfred Dreyfus, mother of two children, legal guardian of her husband's interests after the 1894
arrest. Worked closely with defense counsel. Petitioned the Chamber of Deputies in 1896; two years later successfully
petitioned the Cour de Cassation for her husband's retrial.
Edouard Drumont: The most influential anti-Semitic writer of the period. Author of the best-selling La France juive
(Jewish France), director of the newspaper La Libre parole (Free Speech). Condemned the presence of Jews in the army;
emerged as a powerful anti-Dreyfusard leader.
Commandant Armand Mercier du Paty de Clam: Officer in charge of Dreyfus's arrest and prison
interrogation. Investigated the captain's family and allies; helped compile the "secret dossier"; intrigued with Colonel
Henry to protect Esterhazy.
Commandant Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy: French infantry officer, spy for the German attaché in Paris. Protected by
members of the General Staff; court-martialed in 1898 and acquitted. Fled to England following Henry's suicide. Later
insisted he had written the bordereau as a double agent under orders of the French army's Statistical Section.
Commandant Hubert-Joseph Henry: Officer in the army's Statistical Section; later promoted to head of that intelligence
office. Co-conspirator in the plot to frame Dreyfus; forged documents for the "secret dossier". Arrested in 1898;
committed suicide in prison. Praised by extreme nationalists and anti-Semites as a hero and a martyr.
General Auguste Mercier: Minister of war responsible for Dreyfus's arrest. Testified at every major trial; refused to open
the "secret dossier" on grounds of national security. Replaced as minister of war in 1896; later elected to the French
Senate.
Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart: With Émile Zola, the most popular Dreyfusard hero. Promoted to chief of the
Statistical Section in 1895; discovered evidence of Esterhazy's treason. Clashed with General Staff colleagues; arrested in
1898, imprisoned, and dismissed from the army. Reinstated in 1906 and promoted to General.
Émile Zola: Renowned novelist and, after 1897, committed Dreyfusard. Published J'Accuse, an open letter to the
president of the republic, on 13 January 1898. Galvanized public opinion; helped turn the judicial case into a national and
international affair. Convicted of libel; fled to England; returned to France in 1899.
PROGRAM
CÉSAR FRANCK
Troisième Chorale (excerpts)
String Quartet in D major
– Scherzo
FROMENTAL HALÉVY
O Dieu de nos pères from La Juive (arr. by Max Barros)
CÉSAR FRANCK
Piano Quintet in F minor
-- Molto moderato—Allegro
INTERMISSION
JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU
Excerpts from Les fêtes d’Hébé (arr. by Max Barros)
-- Bourrée
-- Air gracieux pour Zéphir et les Grâces
-- Premier et Deuxième Tambourins
-- Ballet
-- Pour le genie de Mars
-- Tambourin en rondeau
FROMENTAL HALÉVY
Dieu que ma voix tremblante from La Juive (arr. by Max Barros)
MAURICE RAVEL
Deux mélodies hébraïques (arr. by Quentin Chiappetta)
-- L’énigme éternelle
-- Kaddish
CÉSAR FRANCK
Piano Quintet in F minor
-- Lento
-- Allegro non troppo
MAURICE RAVEL
L’énigme éternelle
PROGRAM NOTES
Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
(Shakespeare, Othello. Copied by Alfred Dreyfus in his prison notebook)
In 1970, looking back from the vantage point of historical distance, the great Catalan cellist Pablo
Casals, who was living under rather strenuous circumstances in Paris during the early years of the
Dreyfus Affair, wrote movingly about that event:
For me, perhaps, the most frightful aspect of the Dreyfus Affair was the fact that many people
were against him because he was Jewish. And I found it almost unbelievable that in Paris—with
all its culture and its noble traditions of the rights of man—that here in this city which was called
la ville lumière, anti-Semitism could spread like a foul plague. What words, indeed, are there to
describe this disease, which would later infect a whole nation and rationalize the massacre of
millions of men, women and children on the grounds that “Jewish blood” flowed in their veins?
One’s mind staggers at the monstrosity! (Joys and Sorrows, London: 1970, p. 95).
Having seen that historical interregnum whose horrors taint our collective imagination, Casals could
easily discern the thread that binds the Dreyfus Affair with the Holocaust, a link that was already present
as a dread of the future in the prescient mind of Émile Zola, as he mused on the meaning of the Affair
and its aftermath in French society. The political scholar Jeannine Verdès-Leroux once remarked that
“every regime has the scandals it deserves.” Judging from the magnitude of the Dreyfus Affair, it is
clear that the contemporaneous French society was ripe for the traumatic soul-searching that ensued.
The Dreyfus Affair evolved around what could have been, on the surface, just another tragic case of
miscarriage of justice: in 1894, the Captain Alfred Dreyfus (9 October 1859—12 July 1935), a highly
decorated French Jewish officer, was accused of high treason, arrested and, after a speedy and secret
court-martial during which he was found guilty, was imprisoned in Devil’s Island in the French Guyana,
a place notorious for its population of political prisoners, anarchists, and the most hardened murderers
and thieves dispatched there by the French government. As such, the infamous penitentiary already
carried a symbolic stigma for the degradation and humiliation that would attend Dreyfus’s predicament.
Dreyfus’s hasty conviction, under a shoddily assembled military court that was rife with prejudice, was
based solely on a piece of handwritten paper (the bordereau) offering access to French military secrets.
The paper had been retrieved from the wastebasket of the German military attaché, Max von
Schwartzkoppen, by a certain Madame Bastian, who was a cleaning lady employed by the French
counter-intelligence. It was immediately released to the French War Minister, Auguste Mercier, and
within a very short time it was concluded that the handwriting belonged to Dreyfus. The need for a
speedy dispatch was clear: the Army was fearful that the highly anti-Semitic right-wing press would
accuse it of covering up for a Jewish officer, if the trial were delayed in order to secure more conclusive
proof. The court-martial was marred by numerous procedural errors, legal inconsistencies, and appalling
gaps in the defense.
As it turned out, the bordereau was a fabrication by a French-born infantry officer, Ferdinand Walsin
Esterhazy, who was either trying to extract money from the Germans or planting a deception to throw
the Germans off the scent of a highly secret field gun project being developed by the French. This turn
of events was set in motion in early 1896, when Major George Picquart, who had become chief of the
Army Intelligence Service the year before, discovered preliminary evidence that seemed to implicate
Esterhazy as the author of the bordereau. Picquart’s suspicions were confirmed later in the year, but
shortly thereafter he left on extended duty to North Africa. In the meantime, a number of officials began
an investigation of Esterhazy, who was then brought to trial and acquitted by court-martial on 11
January 1898. It was this event that prompted Émile Zola to write his incandescent article J’Accuse,
which was published in the newspaper L’Aurore on 13 January 1898. The article, an open letter to Felix
Faure, the President of the Republic, was the catalyst for the momentous divisions within French society
that would follow. In its scathing indictment of the injustice and bigotry that had prevailed in the
handling of the Dreyfus case, Zola’s J’Accuse was unquestionably the most important piece of
journalistic writing in the process of transforming the private plight of Alfred Dreyfus into an “affair” of
national and international significance. From then on, a succession of important events took place: Zola
was brought to trial, convicted of libel, and while waiting the results of a second trial following his
appeal, fled to England (16 July 1898). On 31 August 1898, Colonel Henry, who had been instrumental
in the conviction of Dreyfus, committed suicide. The next day, Esterhazy fled to England, and a month
later (29 September 1898) the High Court began deliberating on a revision of the Dreyfus case. On 3
June 1899, a united High Court annulled the 1894 conviction of Dreyfus and ordered a new trial, which
led to a court-martial at Rennes whose outcome was to find Dreyfus once again guilty, but this time with
“extenuating circumstances”; Dreyfus accepted pardon and was released from prison. In 1899, Zola
returned to France, where he died in 1902. Four years later, the High Court annulled the Rennes verdict,
and in July 1906 Dreyfus was officially exonerated of the charges, reinstated into the Army under the
title of Lieutenant Colonel, and inducted into the Légion d’Honneur in a ceremony at the École
Militaire. He retired from the Army in 1907 but returned to fight during World War I.
The factions in the Dreyfus affair remained active for decades afterwards. The far right remained a
potent force, as did the moderate liberals. During the Nazi occupation of France, the collaborationist
right-wing Vichy Regime, which was composed of old anti-Dreyfusards and their descendants, deported
76,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps, including Dreyfus’s grand-daughter Madeleine Dreyfus Lévy,
who perished at Auschwitz. Although Dreyfus has been completely exonerated, his statues and
monuments are still vandalized by far-right activists. In 1985, President François Mitterrand
commissioned a statue of Dreyfus by the sculptor Louis Mitelberg to be installed at the École Militaire,
but the minister of defense refused to display it. Incredibly, the Army didn't formally acknowledge
Dreyfus’s innocence until 1995. In July 2006, in a speech delivered during the commemoration of the
100th anniversary of Dreyfus’s exoneration, President Jacques Chirac stated that "the combat against the
dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won," words that have a chilly resonance in
today’s political climate. He went on to call Dreyfus "an exemplary officer" and a "patriot who
passionately loved France." And yet, the French government has declined to move Dreyfus’s ashes to
the Pantheon, where Zola’s ashes (Dreyfus’s most vocal defender) are housed.
THE CULTURAL MILIEU OF THE DREYFUS AFFAIR
It should be noted that the Dreyfus Affair was primarily created by the Parisian press, which was by then
the largest, most diverse, and most inflammatory in the world. The impact of Zola’s article, therefore, is
easy to imagine. Anti-Semitic riots erupted throughout France, the general population as well as the
highest echelons of French society were increasingly drawn into the controversy, and political and
cultural allegiances were forged along sharply divided lines that cracked the veneer of French propriety
and decorum. The involvement of intellectuals, artists, writers, musicians, salonnières, workmen,
politicians, and every stratum of society caused a cultural commotion of unprecedented proportions,
leading to the division of society into “Dreyfusards” and “anti-Dreyfusards”, a division that ran along
issues of class, political affiliation, and the allegiance to the Catholic Church. An array of artworks in
several media was created to express the views of artists and intellectuals, and it has been estimated that
a complete assemblage of the imagery generated by the Dreyfus Affair would number in the tens of
thousands of items, including cartoons, postcards, photographs, paintings, lithographs, sculptures,
posters, woodcuts, drawings, and board games, not to mention the vast literature (both journalistic and
scholarly) that sprang up in connection with the Affair. Popular songs were written, and canonical works
in the classical repertoire acquired political connotations as emblems of French pride and tokens of
uncontaminated cultural tradition.
The speed of Dreyfus’s arrest, conviction, and imprisonment offers a sharp contrast to the decades-long
reverberation that the affair had in the political landscape of France and the rest of the world. At the time
of the Affair, France was profoundly humiliated by the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and issues of
nationhood were on the forefront of society. Anxiety about cultural, political, and economic integrity fed
the stream of anti-Semitism that was very much alive in France’s collective consciousness. In the 1880s,
the most hardened anti-Semites in France came to the realization that the hatred and fear of Jews could
be successfully exploited to inflame popular sentiment. Concomitantly, there was an increasing
politicization of the intellectual classes, a development that would have an enormous impact on the
course of the Dreyfus Affair. Another important factor was the growing population of assimilated Jews
in France. At the time of the French Revolution, there were an estimated 40,000 Jews living in three
distinct regions of France; by the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the Jewish population of Paris itself had
reached that number, many of them coming from Alsace-Lorraine, the region where Alfred Dreyfus was
born. Thus, if anti-Semites wanted to capitalize on the irrational fears of the general population, they had
now the favorable conditions to do so. The fact that Alfred Dreyfus was a highly decorated and
promising officer, who had chosen to become a French citizen when his native Alsace was taken by the
Germans, did nothing to stop the wheels of the anti-Semitic bureaucracy. French pride demanded some
kind of cleansing and burnishing. And ultimately, the Dreyfus Affair held up an unforgiving mirror to
every French citizen. In Proust’s magnificent panorama of Parisian society, À la recherche du temps
perdu, the Dreyfus Affair affects many of the characters. Particularly memorable are these remarks
concerning the ambitions of Madame Verdurin, whose plebeian and rather vulgar salon aspires to the
prestige of that hosted by the refined Duchesse de Guermantes:
Mme. Verdurin, thanks to Dreyfusism, had attracted to her house certain writers of distinction
who for the moment were of no use to her socially, because they were Dreyfusards. But political
passions are like all the rest, they do not last. New generations arise which no longer understand
them; even the generation that experienced them changes, experiences new political passions
which, not being modeled exactly upon their predecessors, rehabilitate some of the excluded, the
reason for exclusion having altered... It was thus that, from each political crisis, from each
artistic revival, Mme. Verdurin had picked up one by one, like a bird building its nest, the several
scraps, temporarily unusable, of what would one day be her Salon. The Dreyfus case had passed.
(quoted in Norman Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice. Berkeley, 1987, p.
136).
THOUGHTS ON THE MUSIC
The Dreyfus Affair brought to the fore a debate about the nature of French music and the notion of
French cultural identity, which had been simmering underground for a few years already. Music is
capable of powerfully embodying feelings of national identity, tradition, religiosity, and cultural
superiority. Its immediate effect on the human psyche, which derives its strength from being elusive and
difficult to categorize, is a perfect vehicle for galvanizing the most basic feelings of patriotism and its
counterpart, exclusion of the other. Many musicians and composers became profoundly involved with
the Dreyfus Affair, which also affected several foreign artists and musicians then living in Paris. At the
time, France harbored some resentment against the overwhelming dominance of the Germanic tradition,
which acquired an even stronger tint after the surrender to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war. Not
surprisingly, involvement in the Dreyfus Affair touched off heated discussions about the nature of
French music and its superiority vis-à-vis other traditions.
Tonight’s production brings together some icons of French musical tradition, which have been
contextualized to reflect the political and aesthetic conflicts that attended the unfolding of the Dreyfus
Affair: the music of César Franck (1822-1890), considered a bastion of French chamber music and the
composer who stands at the gateway of the revival of absolute music in France; Maurice Ravel (18751937), who was perceived to embody quintessentially French values; the venerable legacy of JeanPhilippe Rameau (1683-1764), whose music was considered to be untainted by foreign influences; and
excerpts from the politically charged opera La Juive by Jacques Fromental Halévy (1799-1862), one of
the most successful Jewish composers in France during the 19th century. Music not only can give
expression to the subterranean streams of the human psyche, its fears, and its irrational needs, but can
also become a powerful vehicle for conveying political ideals. A very interesting document, housed at
the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, sheds light on these political implications of music during times
of social and political upheaval. The document is a response to a request by a member of the monarchist
Action Française, who had approached Louis Bourgaul-Ducoudray, the professor of music history at the
Paris Conservatoire, seeking advice for a music concert to benefit the nationalist league. Such
preoccupations continued to be a pressing issue for right-wing and liberal institutions in the aftermath of
the Dreyfus Affair. Ducoudray had refused to participate in the event, but then penned a response in
1910, a little before his death:
In my opinion, the Action Française, like the Patrie Française, should seek in art, and particularly
in musical art, less a means of revenue than a means of propaganda through feeling. Since the
idea of the homeland is beaten... it is important to formulate with all the power it carries, the
auguries of national feeling. I read in the Gaulois this definition of nationalism: the deep feeling,
the traditions, the dreams, the energies of a race... Organize a musical worship of the homeland
and of the French tradition and give a concert of patriotic music at the Trocadero... You will
affirm with an incomparable power of influence the idea we serve. (quoted from Jane F. Fulcher,
The Concert as Political Propaganda in France and the Control of “Performative Context”)
The pieces presented in tonight’s program convey the notion of the French tradition in unique and highly
individualized manner. The ones with the most obvious political overtones are the two arias excerpted
from Halévy’s La Juive. Although the opera depicts the persecution of the Jew Eléazar and his supposed
daughter Rachel, the success that greeted the opera at its premiere in 1835 (and its long career as a
favorite in the operatic stage) was motivated primarily by its anti-clericalism and its spectacular
credentials as a grand opera. During Halévy’s lifetime, the “Jewish question” had not yet become an
issue in French culture, but the survival of his opera helped to keep alive not only the theme of the
persecution of the Jews but also elements of Jewish culture, religion, and music. It is rather surprising
that such a vicious anti-Semite as Richard Wagner admired La Juive, praising Halévy for writing “music
that issues from the innermost depths of human nature.” The popularity of the opera may be judged by
the fact that, between its premiere in 1835 and 1934 it was staged 562 times at the Paris Opéra alone.
The two arias sung in the program encapsulate the plight of the Jews who endure religious persecution
in a society that is inherently inimical to their beliefs.
César Franck was one of the most fastidious composers in the history of Western music. Many of his
compositions are unique examples of a particular musical genre, as if he had fulfilled in that single
example all the compositional and artistic expectations that the genre had to offer him. Thus, he
composed only one String Quartet (1890), from which comes the Scherzo performed tonight, one Piano
Quintet (1878-79), one Symphony, and so on. His instrumental music remains one of the most
impressive testimonies of the development of absolute music in France in the late 19th century. Although
Franck died four years before Dreyfus’s arrest and conviction, references to his works permeated the
discourse of many composers who lived through the Dreyfus Affair and who were intent on affirming
the supremacy of French music. Among these was Vincent D’Indy, the founder and director of the
conservative Schola Cantorum, and who was a pupil of César Franck. D’Indy was a declared antiSemite, and even composed works with the sole purpose of expressing his views, such as the operas
Fervaal (1897), with its glorification of racial purity, and La Légende de Saint Christophe (1908-15),
probably the only overtly anti-Semite opera in the history of French music. But César Franck’s music
was admired by many other composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as representing an ideal of
form that could be placed on the same level as the greatest works of the Germanic tradition. The Piano
Quintet in F minor, for example, is unparalleled in French music for its structural breadth and intensity
of dramatic expression. The scale of its individual movements is almost symphonic in conception, and
the work as a whole benefits from Franck’s exquisite handling of cyclical form. The String Quartet in D
major was one of Franck’s last compositions, and it is symptomatic that he waited until very late in his
career to tackle such a venerable musical genre. Like the Piano Quintet, the String Quartet combines a
strict handling of classical forms with an intense emotionalism typical of the late Romantic style. The
Troisième Chorale is part of a set of organ chorales that Franck wrote specifically for liturgical use. A
practicing Catholic and superb organist, Franck brought together the technical and liturgical aspects of
organ music to revive the classical organ playing style in France. As with his chamber music, in the field
of organ music he stands as a bastion of French tradition and as a model for several composers in the
successive generations.
Ravel’s Deux mélodies hébraïques (L’énigme éternelle and Kaddish) were written originally for voice
and piano in 1914 and orchestrated by Ravel himself in 1920. The songs were commissioned by AlvinaAlvi, a soprano in the St. Petersburg opera company, who gave the first performance in June 1914 with
Ravel at the piano. Ravel had used folk melodies in a number of other works, but the Deux mélodies
hébraïques represent the last instance of his use of traditional music in his compositions. L’énigme
éternelle is based on a traditional Yiddish poem, while Kaddish is in ancient Aramaic, taken from the
Jewish prayer book. While the first song is set in a recurring rhythm that is almost hypnotic in its
circularity, as the protagonist questions the world on the meaning of existence, the piano texture of
Kaddish is a marvel of suggestiveness, mystery, and declamatory punctuation. A remarkable feature of
the text for Kaddish is the complete absence of any reference to death (although it is sung as a prayer for
the dead in the Jewish liturgy), being instead a glorification of God.
Jean-Philippe Rameau holds a secure position as one of the most venerable composers in the history of
French music. His compositional and theoretical works have influenced several generations of
musicians, both in France and abroad, and his operas and ballets de cour are considered to be among the
finest examples of these genres from the Baroque period. For many generations of French composers,
Rameau epitomized the purity of French musical ideals, uncontaminated by foreign influences. The
excerpts performed tonight come from Les fêtes d’Hébé (1739), an opera-ballet that dramatizes the
interactions between gods and men. Dance music was essential to French Baroque opera, and this
feature distinguished it from other contemporaneous operatic traditions. The selected dances are
emblematic of Rameau’s style, with its mixture of compositional correctness, dabblings of exoticism,
and vivid rhythmic designs.
As the Dreyfus Affair unfolded, no French composer or performer of the time was completely immune
from the political implications of his métier, as music became increasingly politicized. The responses of
composers, musicians, and audiences to French and foreign music were inevitably influenced by
whatever side of the debate they embraced in the controversy. Thomas Jefferson once remarked that “the
tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” One might
also say that political regimes periodically elect sacrificial victims or scapegoats in order to salvage their
myths. The Dreyfus Affair, which exposed the underbelly of French society in such a spectacular
fashion, was one such instance. Its theme is perpetually contemporaneous and relevant, because
scapegoating remains a highly cultivated art by political regimes everywhere.
James Melo
Musicologist in residence