Contes fantastiques

André Caplet (1878-1925) started his formal music study at the Paris Conservatory, where he took the coveted Prix de Rome in 1901, beating out classmate Maurice Ravel in the process. Caplet made his conducting debut with performances in Paris and Boston, and eventually helped to orchestrate and direct performances of several of Claude Debussy’s compositions. Sadly, his professional career fell victim to the Great War: volunteering for service at the initial call-to-arms in 1914, Caplet was gassed while fighting in the trenches and subsequently gave up conducting and teaching. Only composition remained possible for him.
Conte Fantastique, inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” was completed between 1908 and 1919. Though strongly influenced by Debussy, Caplet’s musical style as evinced in Conte edges closer to atonality. It is perhaps more important to note his experiences behind the podium conducting avant-garde music. Some of the primary material for Conte Fantastique dates back to the heady days of 1909 when Arnold Schoenberg’s revolutionary twelve-tone art was still novel and incredibly influential in certain circles. By the time Caplet returned to the piece after the war, his style had grown more somber and mystical. Novel timbres and performance techniques come more to fore, which greatly enhances his ability to set an author like Poe. Poe had a powerful effect on generations of French artists: Baudelaire had made translations and Debussy himself worked for years on an opera, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Something in Poe’s celebration of the grotesque and horrid took root in the late 19th-century aesthetic of decadence.
An aura of fantasy enters Caplet’s Conte from the prominent use of harp and his penchant for pentatonic and modal melodies. Agitated string tremolos and bass pedals frequently underscore the narration, which is interrupted at intervals for violent musical gestures that clue into the mounting dramatic tension. Caplet’s depiction of the “gay and magnificent revel” near the piece’s midpoint certainly echoes Debussy and Ravel: the former’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande completed in 1905, the latter’s 1903 String Quartet. The music reaches its most anguished when the revelers note the presence of a new masked figure who “stalked to and fro among the waltzers.” At the end, harp motives from the beginning return to mark the omnipresence of the “red death,” the disembodied evil that has been an unseen/unheard force since the start of the work.

(c) Jason Stell