Orientalism in western art and literature has been much commented upon, but a Paris concert series has broken new ground in exploring representations of the orient in music, writes David Tresilian Since the publication of the late Palestinian- American writer and critic Edward Said's work on the subject some 30 years ago, the ways in which western, mostly European, art, literature and scholarly and other writings have represented the Arab and Muslim world have been a source of sometimes heated debate. In his famous 1978 work Orientalism, Said argued that many such representations were "orientalist" in the sense that they fixed the Arab world in a backward-looking and picturesque mould. Yet, while the implications of Said's argument have been extensively investigated as far as European literature and scholarship are concerned, with 19th-century European painting and literature having been particularly fertile areas for research, far less interest has been shown in representations of the orient in European music, a perhaps surprising omission given the monuments that exist in the field. All the more welcome, then, was the decision by the Cité de la musique in Paris to dedicate its February concert series to the theme of orientalism in European music, taking in works from the French, German and Russian traditions. While some of the works given will have been familiar even to those having little knowledge of the field, with the 19th-century Russian composer Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov's suite Scheherazade, whose four movements are based on stories from the Thousand and One Nights, being performed by the La Chambre Philharmonique conducted by Emmanuel Krivine, other works may have been less familiar. They included repertoire by French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel and the 19th-century German composer Robert Schumann. Taken together with an accompanying series of lectures, the concert series yielded many intriguing discoveries, as well as the opportunity to hear fine accounts of sometimes rarely performed works. Orientalism in music, it turns out, has an unusually wide scope and a variety of meanings. Since this was a French concert series held in Paris special emphasis was given to works by French composers. While Debussy was represented by a piano recital by Turkish pianist Hèseyin Sermet, playing, among other works, the composer's Deux Arabesques, Ravel was given more extended treatment with a performance of his Scheherazade song cycle, Myung-Whun Chung directing the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. Textbook accounts of Debussy and Ravel designate them as "impressionist" composers, both having been concerned to renovate the language of French music at the end of the 19th century and to experiment with new musical forms. Petrified, perhaps, by the example of Wagner and searching for a new individual and national style, Debussy famously looked abroad for inspiration, absorbing ideas from the Javanese gamelan music he heard at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and incorporating these into his own music, along with experiments with whole-tone and pentatonic scales and unusual harmonies. The result was a music that brought in ideas and inspirations from the extra-European world, naturalising them and making them part of French music. This contrasted with the music written by earlier French composers, who, if they had looked for inspiration from abroad at all, had tended to do so in the manner of the 19th-century orientalist painters, creating musical markers for the orient through the use of minor keys, denoting melancholy or nostalgia, or using highly coloured orchestral effects giving the impression of luxury or decadence. Oriental markers of this sort come together in French composer Camille Saint-Sa�ns's late 19th- century opera Samson et Dalila, for example, where the oriental seductress Delilah, a standard character in orientalist opera from Lully's Armide and Handel's Rinaldo in the late 17th and early 18th centuries onwards, is presented through chromatic harmonies, contrasting with the simple harmony used for Samson, the biblical hero. Earlier works in the French tradition, such as Félicien David's choral symphony Le Désert, composed following a period spent in Syria and Egypt, is orientalist in a different sense in that though the musical language of this work is less elaborate than that employed by Saint-Sa�ns, David imports melodies into his symphony that he had apparently noted down on his travels in the Middle East, these being cited in the music and simply harmonised for western ears. Le Désert was a great success with 19th-century audiences, and it includes the voice of a muezzin performing the Muslim call to prayer, together with various orientalist musical markers, such as the occasional use of ostinato rhythms and percussive effects familiar from the "Turkish" music written by 18th- century European composers. "Janissary music" of this kind, named after the Ottoman sultan's janissary soldiers, is employed to great effect in Mozart's operas Zaida and Die Entfèhrung aus dem Serail, for example, which deal with the orientalist theme of European girls sold into slavery and kept in Ottoman harems. The latter work in particular is full of exciting clanging and banging and percussive effects, designed to signal the arrival of the martial Turk, alternating, in Mozart's conception, with the Turk as comic villain. In the concert series itself, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France with soprano Anne Sofie von Otter gave a superb account of Ravel's Scheherazade, an orchestral setting of three poems on Middle Eastern themes by Tristan Klingsor, in which the poet hails "Asia, Asia, Asia, ancient and marvelous land of nursery tales," before asking to be transported to Damascus and the towns of Persia to see "beautiful silk turbans above dark faces with white teeth." According to Jean-Pierre Bartoli, professor of music at the Sorbonne in Paris and one of the speakers in the accompanying lecture series, Ravel's music, like that of Debussy, signals something different from Saint-Sa�ns's or earlier composers' interest in the orient as an excuse for luscious orchestration, famously present in the ranks of harps and trumpets used in Verdi's spectacular ancient Egyptian opera Aida, a performance of which inaugurated the Cairo Opera House in 1871. Instead, like the use of oriental themes in 19th- century Russian music, where references to the internal orient incorporated by the Russian conquest of Central Asia are used to signal the "Russianness" of the music and differentiate it from western European styles, the use of non-diatonic scales, chromatic harmonies and unusual orchestral timbres in Ravel's work signal the assimilation or naturalisation of the orient into French music. This was "nostalgia for the nostalgia of the orient," Bartoli commented, and part of a search for a new musical style free of German influences. Second-order nostalgia of this sort was also on display in another item on the concert programme. Ravel's marvelous orchestral piece La Valse, showing the composer living amidst the ruins of what had once been an entire tradition, was composed in 1919 after the first world war. According to Ravel himself, "an immense ballroom full of turning dancers... representing the imperial court in 1855" is visible through the jagged edges of the music. According to its time and place of composition, orientalist music thus turns out to have an intriguing variety of meanings, with French and Russian music even absorbing oriental materials in their search for national styles. Another concert in the Paris series, this time of the 1843 oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri by Schumann, went some way towards contrasting these with orientalism in German music. Schumann is best known for his piano music, and Das Paradies und die Peri, an oratorio for soloists, chorus and orchestra based on German translations of poems found in the Anglo-Irish writer Thomas Moore's 1817 oriental romance Lalla Rookh, is now seldom performed. The Paris performance, given by the Brussels Philharmonic and Accentus Choir under the direction of Laurence Equilbey with soprano Solveig Kringelborn in the role of the Peri, was thus a rare opportunity to hear the work in the concert hall. Schumann's oratorio is written in a romantic idiom, sounding, when played by a smallish orchestra, something like Mendelssohn in its melodiousness and finesse. While the text of the piece is full of orientalist imagery, the music itself reflects 19th- century German spiritual striving, beginning in a minor key before moving into a major key for the oratorio's final glowing affirmation. According to Persian tradition, a "peri" is a kind of supernatural being, half human and half angel, hovering about the gates of Paradise. Set in India, Egypt and Syria, though with no orientalist markers to signal this in the music, Das Paradies und die Peri describes the Peri's ascent to heaven, freeing itself from earthly ties. Unlike France or Russia, 19th-century Germany had no directly political interest in the orient. Politically divided until 1871 and without oriental or other colonies, German orientalism was mostly literary or academic in character, with German authors famously being responsible for some of the most important writings produced by the 19th-century European orientalists. German music, which at least since Beethoven had played a central role in the exploration of the German spirit and even before Wagner had been linked to German national themes, had little place for imported elements. Thus, while Schumann's choice of text reflects his literary or philosophical interest in the orient, his music is exclusively German in design and composition. One can imagine Das Paradies und der Peri, its chorus of Nile spirits and houris dramatising Beethoven-style heroic struggle rather than anything from the orient, once being given by choral societies across the German states, the Peri's romantic wanderings coding for the errant German spirit and underlining the peculiarly central position once held by music in German culture. Allowing audiences to share in some wonderful music-making and reflect on orientalist themes in the company of specialist musicologists, the Cité de la musique's orientalist season was a triumph of music programming. Orientalismes, Cite de la musique, Paris, 30 January to 9 February 2010
