There’s Something About Mariotte
(or the importance of being earnest)
Antoine Mariotte, depicted by Emile Beaussier, 1913
Mackerel sky. Gale-force winds blustering, waves crashing, a sinuous melody rises from beneath the churning waters. Suddenly, mercy from the sea gods, crepuscular rays peeking through the parted clouds. Such is the scene called to mind at the climax of the third movement of Antoine Mariotte’s piano sonata (1904–05), when all torment gives way to the return of the glorious, luminous Nocturne of the second movement, unapologetically affirming the key of D-flat without a hint of chromatic inflection. Here we find Mariotte at his most earnest, speaking with, as his contemporary Paul Landormy put it, a “simple, straightforward tone that goes straight to its goal, the phrase clear and boldly outlined, the rhythms ferociously energetic.”[1] The de rigueur cyclic return of theme in the French Romantic sonata yields to a cathartic outpouring: heart-on-sleeve, candid, and noble.
Known primarily as having produced the “French Salomé,” an opera that only made it to the stage in 1908 after an extended, public legal battle with Richard Strauss and the Oscar Wilde estate over the rights of use, Mariotte appears before us as a tragic character, serious without a trace of bitterness, the paradigm of the self-sacrificing artist. Born in Avignon, he received his first lessons from his mother at the age of five. Despite his precocious musical gifts, he entered the Naval Academy at the age of 15, probably to relieve her of his care. As the youngest in his class, he graduated second of seventy-one (“exceptional, talented, intelligent, hard-working, serious, energetic, bound to be a very good officer”). Though he was the right man for the job, it was not the right fit for him. He wrote, at the age of 18, while on board the frigate Iphigénie: “The Navy is beautiful; it’s splendid, sublime even. But at times it seems as if I am not in my vocation. I miss music, the piano. Ah! If I’d had the financial means, I’d have gone to the Conservatoire.”[2]
After missions to the Far East, he returned to France in 1896 and tendered his resignation from the Navy a year later. The journalist Auguste Thomazi recalls their first meeting, a day spent reading the Beethoven symphonies in a four-hands piano reduction: “Mariotte, in his enthusiasm, cried out with joy at a particularly moving moment in the Fifth. He was in such a hurry to know what came next that he ripped part of the page while turning it.” His fierce determination to turn to composition was met with a range of disappointing reactions, from disbelief (his vessel captain: “what a funny profession”), to regret (his mother), to derision (Saint-Saëns: “When you have the fortune of being in the Navy, how could you dream of quitting? In my stays in Las Palmas, I often saw Naval officers. They are the happiest people in the world! And since you play the piano, you have all the music in the world at your disposal, it’s not necessary to write more.”).[3]
After a stint in Charles-Marie Widor’s class at the Conservatoire, Mariotte entered the Schola Cantorum to study with Vincent d’Indy, all the while hustling on the side (writing articles, giving harmony lessons by correspondence, playing the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas for the Count of Chambrun for exactly 60 minutes a day). He was finally offered a piano class at the Lyon Conservatory in 1902, which he maintained until 1914, all the while leading the local symphonic society. He later became director of Orléans Conservatory (1920 –36) and General Administrator for the Opéra-Comique (1936–1939).
Mariotte premiered his sonata on November 30, 1905, as the first subscription concert of the Revue Musicale de Lyon that season. On the same program were two of his own mélodies, Mussorgsky’s Nursery, as well as the first performance in Lyon of Debussy’s Estampes as well as Séverac’s En Languedoc. A review signed by “an anonymous coward” wrote of the performance:
I found the sonata in F-sharp minor to be very nice, but here again, I have a nit to pick: what a pity that Mr. Mariotte wanted to write a sonata that was both a musical work and a virtuoso study! One does harm to the other and above all the filigree that appears in the beautiful Nocturne bothered me greatly. The vigorous and brilliant performance was…fitting to the work, to use a buzzword your contributors use frequently.[4]
While the critic was likely cavilling at the digital pyrotechnics of the final movement, he neglected the essential features of the sonata: dramatic intensity, complex rhythms, harmony, and counterpoint, as well as melodic transparency and beauty. This dualism of elaborateness and directness is, in essence, the defining feature of his musical language.
Mariotte wrote in 1928 that having been trained at the Schola, his first gods were “naturally, Beethoven, Franck, and Wagner.”[5] Nowhere is the synthesis of these three clearer than in the first movement of the sonata, a Fantaisie in which he sets out and develops incessantly (à la Beethoven) the basic thematic elements that unify the work: the rising scale, the neighbor-tone figure, the dotted rhythm. The movement unfolds like a series of set pieces: one cannot help but conjure images of the rough seas in the rollicking opening theme. It barely begins before giving itself over to a lonely, yearning recitative that seems to be taken straight out of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. After two more attempts to break through, the theme reaches the upper registers, unleashing a torrential passage of Lisztian octaves, leading the true first thematic group: a variant of the opening rising scale with its characteristic dotted rhythm, singing above a stormy bass. The clouds part for the second theme, a gentle chorale that outlines the contours of the opening, as well as the third, an inversion of the second, placed over a gently undulating accompaniment. Franck’s influence emerges here in the graceful modulations and hidden motivic connections. Spiritually, we dream and bow our heads in reverence. The development that follows is notable for its emphasis on polyphony and the dialogue between the tenor and upper voices. A truncated recapitulation and imitative passagework in which the principal motifs stagger one another in stretto leads to a rugged, rough-and-tumble coda: here, a reminder of the opening gives way to an ending full of resplendent octaves.
The second movement, a rich, densely layered Nocturne, has likely precedents in Fauré’s seventh nocturne (1898), with its shared tonality, compound meter, harmonizations in parallel thirds and sixths, and penchant for the limping Lombardian (eighth-quarter) figure. The cantilena theme, based on the neighbor-tone figure of the first movement, strives ever upward, finally breaking through in the extravagant middle section, launching into those lavish fioraturas that the “anonymous coward” found so excessive. After a luminous chorale and a climax full of impassioned filigree, the theme returns over gently pulsating chords suspended in asymmetrical bars of 10/8 and 13/8.
Given the fact Mariotte was preparing Estampes alongside the sonata, it is likely he had Debussy’s Jardins sous la pluie in mind when he composed his final movement, the Divertissement. Here, the neighbor-note and “short-long” figures are rendered into a guileless, effervescent toccata. The textures soon thicken considerably. Eventually, Mariotte ushers in the first movement’s themes. This glorious synthesis occasions the heroic, cathartic return of the nocturne and eventually a turn to the parallel major, a Franckian transfiguration that renounces all frivolity and embraces all that is jubilant, passionate, and luminous.
For all that we can trace the influence of his musical idols, we should keep in mind the Mariotte who so missed music on the seas, the one who tore a page of the Beethoven symphony in a white heat of impatience. While those around him could speak with acid tongues and write with cutting wit, his true virtue was his unwavering sincerity. In responding to critics who called Salomé dense and difficult, he wrote, “if I write complicated music, it’s doubtlessly because it’s absolutely impossible for me to do otherwise.” He continues:
But one cannot confuse the complexity of writing with a complexity of conception. I am certain, at least for me, that the most arduous and entangled technical realizations can be perfectly allied with the simplest of conceptions, with the clearest of designs. And, if the technical combinations can interest the intelligence of the expert, even the least prepared listener will always be able to find something that touches their heart.[6]
[1] Paul Landormy, La musique française après Debussy, Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 242.
[2] Auguste Thomazi, “Trois marins compositeurs,” La revue maritime, 3, 28 August 1948, 961–969, p. 962.
[3] Thomazi, “Trois marins compositeurs,” p. 963–64.
[4] Un lache anonyme, « Premier Concert de la ‘Revue Musicale’ », La revue musicale de Lyon, 10 Dec., 1905, p. 264.
[5] Antoine Mariotte, Musique, 1/10, 15 Jul., 1928, p. 439.
[6] Thomazi, “Trois marins compositeurs,” p. 967.
