Amphion, ballet-melodrama for speaker, vocal soloist, 4-part female vocal quartet, chorus & orchestra, H. 71

• Date: 1929
• Composer: Arthur Honegger
• Period: Modern (1910-1949)

Review

This is an exceptionally beautiful and inventive work and it just about had to be since the music was written to accompany an allegorical play about the very creation of music itself. Amphion is one of six large-scale works Honegger wrote for one of the most colorful figures on the Paris arts scene, Ida Rubinstein. A very wealthy woman who was a dancer, actor, and singer, she commissioned an impressive series of masterpieces from many composers, including Ravel and Stravinsky, but worked with no composer more often than Honegger. The text is by poet Paul Valéry and was a favorite project of his. He had sketched it out in 1891, when he was 20, and hoped to interest Claude Debussy in the project. Valéry, in his text, reacts to Wagner's idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work in which all forms of art merge. In Amphion, all of the arts are present while maintaining their independence. Honegger, a rapid worker, composed the score in the middle part of 1929. Its first performance was on June 23, 1931, with Rubinstein acting the title part. The story takes place before man has any arts or culture. Apollo gives one of them, Amphion, a lyre, from which he discovers the laws of music and music itself. Music inspires to rocks, which form the first temple to Apollo, and therefore inspires architecture. Eventually, Amphion is forgotten (for mankind forgets creative artists after they have complete their work) and disappears with a veiled woman. This scenario forced a difficult form on Honegger. The entire first part of the story had to create the impression of being without music, then there had to be a suggestion of the entire evolution of music itself. There are three main sections broken down into 12 movements. The eighth section stands by itself and is the only part in which words are spoken with musical background. Hence the term "melodrama" is a misnomer for the work as a whole. When sounds from the orchestra steal into the story, they scarcely amount to music at all. The bows tap on the strings and pentatonic scales on xylophone suggest music inchoate. Unearthly sounds of a children's chorus suggest the heavenly inspiration of music and then Amphion appears. Throughout the next scenes, more suggestions of the "non-music" continue with contrasts suggesting the dream quality of music. Finally, Apollo gives Amphion the lyre and music now swells into existence. Throughout the entire ensuing section, Honegger manages to create extremely beautiful yet completely novel sounds. Now Amphion awakens and dances (percussion only as it is still "non-music"), but then creates a lovely and utterly fresh melody. Amphion invents the scales, then polyphony, then four-part toccata-like textures. This is the section in which there is spoken melodrama. The music coalesces into a great fugue, which inspires the formation of the temple architecture. At the end, the choir joins in a great hymn to the Sun and finally the light fades. The Muses abandon Amphion, whose melodies on woodwinds (especially saxophone) sink as darkness falls. ~ Joseph Stevenson, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Honegger: Amphion; L'Impératrice aux Rochers	1996

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