Fairytale worlds, mirror images

Maurice Ravel was a composer who is said to have retained his childlike nature, as his contemporaries characterised him. He also described himself in this way in his autobiography, where he reflected on his Five Children's Pieces from 1908: ‘The intention to evoke the poetry of childhood in these pieces naturally led me to simplify my composition and streamline my style.’

Five Children's Pieces? Ravel gave this subtitle to the piano cycle Ma mère l'Oye in its first version, set for two pianists – or more precisely: conceived for two children, namely those of a couple who were friends of his, but who were overwhelmed by it despite its relatively simple structure. Ravel himself remained a bachelor and childless, but he wanted to preserve a kind of children's world. In his house, he was surrounded by music boxes, knick-knacks, porcelain dolls and bird song automata; as a child, he himself had once swallowed a music box, someone once wrote about him.

The fairy-tale world of playfulness was his world, and nowhere did he bring it to life as vividly as in the cycle Ma mère l’Oye, expanded from piano to orchestra, with its new simplicity, where the basic intervals of fourths, fifths and octaves, combined with pentatonic figures and gamelan-like timbres, create a timeless atmosphere of purist beauty. One hears birds pecking away at the little thumb's pieces of bread, one hears Chinese figurines playing exotic instruments for the bathing empress of the pagodas – a fairy-tale world in sound.

American composer Caroline Shaw also looks into a fairy-tale world. Wait, no, that's too vague. Her piece Entr'acte is not fairy-tale music, but illusion music. She was inspired by the minuet movement of a Haydn string quartet, by a special transition that is sophisticated and astonishingly simple. ‘I love the way some music suddenly transports you to the other side of Alice's mirror, in a kind of absurd, subtle “Technicolor transition”,’ says the composer.

Entr'acte is a play with transitions that come completely unexpectedly, that amaze, irritate, amuse, that sometimes wobble and sometimes seem far-fetched. The music tips over to the other side time and again – in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the lesser-known sequel to Lewis Carroll's children's book Alice in Wonderland, a curious and imaginative girl looks to see what she can find behind the mirror in her room. There she discovers the living counterparts to the things in her house. And, incidentally, a unicorn.

A child leaves one world and enters a new one – well, you don't have to open a fairy tale book to know that; in the delivery rooms of hospitals, this is everyday life. Lapland-born composer Outi Tarkiainen has explored this theme in an orchestral work, whereby: The Rapids of Life was inspired by the so-called “Ferguson reflex”, a reflex in which the release of oxytocin supports labour contractions. It occurs in only a few women, but must have a strong, almost magical intensity. In any case, the music sounds grippingly intense, like a wave-like swelling.

And if she hadn't died? Then Béla Bartók's First Violin Concerto, and with it the fourth work in this “fairytale” programme, would probably never have been performed. Bartók had dedicated it to a violin student he adored and had even given her the score, even though she – her name was Stefi Geyer – had already rejected him at that point. She locked it away, and it fell into a slumber lasting almost fifty years. It was only after Stefi Geyer's death in 1956 that the work was made public.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja recently played Bartók's written love offering in Munich and interacted with the audience about it in her own communicative way. She said that she had thought the only ‘funny melody’ in this late Romantic, heartfelt work was a Hungarian folk song, but she had to be corrected: it is a German children's song, a canon with the following lyrics: ‘The donkey is a stupid animal, what can the elephant do about it? Iah, iah, iah!’ And then the audience was asked to sing this canon under Kopatchinskaja's guidance. Yes, behind Alice's mirror, the roles are often reversed.

Author: Stefan Schickhaus