D'Indy Istar

 Day 73

D'Indy Istar

Orchestra national de Lyon

Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider

D’Indy crops up quite often in the musical literature, mainly because of his importance as a teacher. His pupils included Honneger, Milhaud and Roussel , to say nothing of Eric Satie and Cole Porter. He also is said to have been the prompter for the first performance of Carmen, though I don’t know how true that is. He was certainly at the first performance of the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876.

He had a long career and has a fairly extensive output. I vaguely remember hearing his symphony on a French mountain air years ago but other than that I don’t think that I have heard any of his music.  Istar is a tone poem from 1896 which recounts the legend of an Assyrian goddess who descends into the underworld to retrieve her dead lover, removing an item of clothing at each of the gates which she passed though until she was completely naked at the end. 

Structurally the piece is interesting in that takes the form of a theme and variations but the theme is only fully revealed toward the end of the piece in a rare example of an orchestral unison which goes on for several pages.  I enjoyed the work a lot. It is very varied in mood and is full of variety. Only occasionally does it become over-heated in the way that French music of this era, and particularly with these erotic overtones, often becomes. To me it is a much more inventive piece that the Dance of Seven Veils in Salome, which just seems tawdry.

One of the things that has struck me in this project so far is how all of the major French composers knew each other and how there is an almost continuous line of pupils in one generation becoming teacher in the next. I suppose it shows how much French music was centralised in Paris and the importance of the Paris Conservatoire. It is interesting that Boulez studied with Messiaen who studied with Dukas, who studied with Guiraud (the man who wrote the recitatives for Carmen), who studied with Halévy, who studied with Cherubini.  There are plenty of other lineages which could be drawn. I don’t think that this would be the case to anything like the same extent for German or Italian music, which was much less centralised. A wall chart of connections would be fascinating.