Charles Koechlin - Les Heures persanes

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Charles Koechlin - Les Heures persanes

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If Koechlin never visited Persia, he was nevertheless well acquainted with Muslim culture. An avid reader, he was steeped in A Thousand and One Nights and Count Gobineau's Nouvelles asiatiques. A bout with tuberculosis exempted him from military service and in 1889 he was sent for an extended convalescence in Algeria, where he absorbed Arab customs, art, and music. One of the most affecting of the Persian hours is "La paix du soir, au cimetière," he told Roger Désormière—one of his most sympathetic interpreters—was inspired by "the Arab cemetery at Blida [near Algiers] and the Moslem peacefulness of these cemeteries is something I have tried to re-create here." Koechlin was an amateur photographer—an often-reproduced photo taken by him of a bustling street in Fez, Morocco, in 1932 is complemented by the Ives-like tumult of "À travers les rues" depicting an Arab bazaar, "…a scene swarming with people," he told Milhaud, "which I rediscovered later in the rue de Tala" at Fez. Les Heures persanes is subtitled "Suite d'après Vers Ispahan de Pierre Loti," whose travelogue, commentators have noted, is telescoped in Koechlin's work from some two months to two-and-a-half days, outlined by the titles of the 16 pieces (e.g., "Matin frais, dans le haut vallée," "Chant du soir," "Aubade," "Roses au soleil de midi," "Les Collines, au coucher de soleil," etc.). And then there is the vexed question of musically exotic influence. Koechlin put the matter succinctly when he asked "How can our Western conception, polyphonic and orchestral as it is, fail to betray Arabian ideas in translating them for our ears and sensibilities?" Three possibilities suggested themselves—faithful transcription of Arabic music; employment of similar, 'analogous,' modes and melodies; and taking inspiration from Arabic culture for a personal flight of imagination. Koechlin obviously took the latter path. Thus, the concern for verisimilitude is beside the point. Koechlin quietly discards "oriental" clichés to annex Loti's imagery as another corner of his fantastic inscape, inclusive of many times and places, evoked by the panoply of personal techniques—harmonies of superposed fourths and fifths, polytonality, a haunting flute melody—which renders the sound and geste of his music unlike any other as his orchestration makes fantasy palpable in its eerie glow and shimmer. While several of the pieces were heard in concert through the 1920s and '30s, the set as a whole seems not to have been heard complete until it was prepared for recording in the early '90s.