Symphonie espagnole, Opus 21, for violin and orchestra

Lalo wrote the Symphonie espagnole in 1874 for his friend, the Spanish virtuoso violinist Pablo de Sarasate, who gave the premiere February 7, 1875, in Paris. The Boston Symphony Orchestra first performed it November 12, 1887, Wilhelm Gericke conducting, with soloist Charles Martin Loeffler, the BSO’s assistant concertmaster. Pinchas Zukerman was soloist with the BSO and Daniel Barenboim in the first Tanglewood performance on August 1, 1971.

Though he is best-known for his opera Le Roi d’Ys and a handful of symphonic scores, Édouard Lalo first made his mark as a composer of chamber music—at a time when all of the chamber genres were almost entirely neglected by French composers. Lalo’s parents had encouraged his early study of the violin and cello, but when it became clear that he intended to become a musician, they objected strenuously, forcing him to leave home at the age of 16. Lalo went to Paris to study composition, for the most part privately. He made his living primarily as a violinist and teacher. He was eager to revive the moribund traditions of chamber music in France, and by the early 1850s he had composed a pair of piano trios and founded the Armingaud Quartet (in which he played viola and later second violin) to make better known in Paris the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as the “moderns” Mendelssohn and Schumann. None of these figures was held in particularly high regard in France either by the general public or the academic musical establishment.

In the late 1850s Lalo became discouraged at his progress, and he almost gave up composition for nearly a decade. He wrote very little until 1866, when he entered an opera competition with a grand opera based on Friedrich Schiller’s Fiesko. It did not win the prize, and though it was seriously considered for production by several houses, it remained unperformed, but Lalo drew on its material for a number of other works. By the 1870s there was a new interest in purely orchestral music in France, partly fostered by the founding of the Société nationale de musique by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1871 and the development of orchestras under such conductors as Jules Pasdeloup, Charles Lamoureux, and Édouard Colonne. A friendship with the great Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate gave Lalo the opportunity to hear some of his new orchestral scores featuring the violin—in particular the F major violin concerto in 1874 and the Symphonie espagnole the following year.

More orchestral works followed, but it was finally the overwhelming success of his opera Le Roi d’Ys that made Lalo famous, just four years before his death. Still, it is his instrumental music that remains of far greater historical importance, in that Lalo undertook to send French music in a decidedly new direction (at about the same time that Saint-Saëns and César Franck were trying much the same thing). Though not his most searching orchestral score, the Symphonie espagnole has always been the most popular. The work does, however, prompt one to ask, “When is a symphony not a symphony?”

And if that sounds like a trick question, it is only because one answer certainly must be, “When it is Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole.” The title is pure whimsy. The “Spanish Symphony” is quite simply a five-movement violin concerto with all the trimmings. It has a melodic freshness and a sureness of orchestral color that have made it irresistible from the beginning. Lalo’s decision to compose tunes of a Spanish flavor may have come in part from his own heritage (his name is Spanish, though his ancestors had lived in Flanders or northern France since the 16th century), but more likely it was in tribute to his friend Sarasate, who was to give the premiere performance. The Symphonie espagnole had some surprising adherents from its early days. In 1877 the dour Prussian pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow, for example, wrote an unfavorable review of Bruch’s Second Violin Concerto, which he had heard Sarasate play in England, and compared it to Lalo’s “splendid Symphonie espagnole, showing genius in every way.” Ten years later he wrote in a letter about possible concert programs that the inclusion of the Lalo would be most agreeable to him, but “without amputation.” This remark suggests that the practice of cutting the third movement—and occasionally others—was already firmly established.

Another friend of the work was Tchaikovsky, who wrote to his longtime patron Mme. von Meck on March 15, 1878:

Do you know the Symphonie espagnole by the French composer Lalo? This piece has recently been brought out by the very modern violinist Sarasate…. The work has given me the greatest pleasure. It is so delightfully fresh and light, with piquant rhythms and beautifully harmonized melodies. It resembles closely other works of the French school to which Lalo belongs, works with which I am acquainted. Like Léo Delibes and Bizet he shuns carefully all that is routinier, seeks new forms without wishing to be profound, and cares more for musical beauty than for the old traditions as the Germans care. The young generation of French composers is truly very promising.

The Symphonie espagnole was composed at the same time that Bizet was working on Carmen, and both scores were premiered in the same year. Together they are among the earliest and most successful of those musical evocations of Iberia at which French composers—think of Debussy and Ravel—have excelled ever since.

STEVEN LEDBETTER

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.