PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON

Chicago Symphony OrchestraRiccardo Muti Zell Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, May 7, 2015, at 8:00Friday, May 8, 2015, at 8:00Saturday, May 9, 2015, at 8:00Friday, May 15, 2015, at 1:30

Esa-Pekka Salonen ConductorChloé Briot SopranoMarie-Eve Munger SopranoKate Royal SopranoMarianne Crebassa Mezzo-sopranoElodie Méchain ContraltoManuel Nuñez Camelino TenorStéphane Degout BaritoneEric Owens Bass-baritoneChicago Symphony Chorus

Duain Wolfe DirectorAnima—Young Singers of Greater Chicago

Emily Ellsworth Artistic Director

RavelMother Goose SuitePavane of the Sleeping BeautyTom ThumbLaideronette, Empress of the PagodasConversations of Beauty and the BeastThe Enchanted Garden

DebussyLa damoiselle élue

KATE ROYALELODIE MÉCHAINWOMEN OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS

INTERMISSION

&French

Festival

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RavelL’enfant et les sortilègesMusic by Maurice RavelPoem by Colette

Chloé Briot soprano ..........................................................................................................................................The ChildMarie-Eve Munger soprano ................................................................ The Fire, The Princess, The NightingaleKate Royal soprano..............................................................................................A Shepherdess, The Bat, The OwlMarianne Crebassa mezzo-soprano ....The Louis XV Chair, A Shepherd, The Squirrel, The Female CatElodie Méchain contralto .................................................................. Mother, The Chinese Cup, The DragonflyManuel Nuñez Camelino tenor ..................The Black Wedgwood Teapot, The Little Old Man, The FrogStéphane Degout baritone .........................................................................The Grandfather Clock, The TomcatEric Owens bass-baritone ..........................................................................................................The Armchair, A Tree

Chicago Symphony ChorusDuain Wolfe director

Shepherds, shepherdesses, frogs, animals, treesAnimal soloists: Sarah van der Ploeg, soprano; Sarah Ponder, contralto; Thomas E. Dymit, tenor; Mathew Lake, bass-baritone

Anima—Young Singers of Greater ChicagoEmily Ellsworth artistic director

Bench, sofa, ottoman, wicker chair, numerical figures

Mike Tutaj Projection designEnglish surtitles by Kenneth Chalmers

The setting is an old-fashioned country house and its gardenFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

The CSO thanks Julie and Roger Baskes, lead sponsors of the Reveries & Passions Festival concert programming.

The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional sponsorship support for the Reveries & Passions Festival has been provided by: The Jacob and Rosaline Cohn Foundation, Mr. & Mrs. Richard J. Franke, The Gilchrist Foundation, and Burton X. and Sheli Rosenberg.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBEZ 91.5FM for its generous support as a media sponsor of the French Reveries & Passions Festival.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Maurice RavelBorn March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.

Mother Goose Suite

Although he had none of his own, Ravel loved children. Throughout his life, he kept his ability to see the world through a child’s eyes, and he never outgrew his passion for creating elaborate toys and reading fairy tales aloud. The adult com-

poser, little taller himself than most children, particularly enjoyed the company of Mimie and Jean Godebski, the daughter and son of his friends Cipa and Ida Godebski, a young Polish couple whose Paris apartment was a gathering place for some of the greatest artists of the day, including André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and, from time to time, Igor Stravinsky. Ravel was a regular visitor to the Godebskis’ salon, and it’s possible that he was drawn as much by the enchanting games and conversation he shared with Mimie and Jean as he was by the more rarefied discussion among the grown-ups.

Ravel often made up stories to tell the Godebski children, and, when they were apart, he sent them funny postcards. But the greatest treasure among his many gifts to Mimie and Jean is a suite of pieces inspired by the Mother Goose tales, originally written for piano duet and intended to be played by children. Ravel

dedicated the score to Mimie and Jean in the hope that they would give the first performance, but, although they were unusually accomplished pianists for children, they happily accepted the gift but declined the premiere. “To us,” Jean later recalled, “it mainly meant a lot of work.”

Two more precocious children, Geneviève Durony and Jeanne Leleu, then only six and seven years old, premiered the suite in April 1910. Ravel was so enchanted by Jeanne’s performance in particular that he wrote to her:

When you are a great virtuosa and I either an old fogey, covered with honors, or else completely forgotten, you will perhaps have pleasant memories of having given an artist the very rare joy of hearing a work of his, one of a rather special nature, interpreted exactly as it should be.

M other Goose is one of Ravel’s most exquisite creations. “The idea of evoking the poetry of childhood

in these pieces,” Ravel later explained, “nat-urally led me to simplify my style and to refine my means of expression.” Even when he orchestrated and enlarged the suite into a ballet score in 1911, he managed to heighten the music’s sense of fantasy and adventure without taking away its grace and innocence.

COMPOSED1908–1910, as piano duet; orches-trated as ballet score in 1911

FIRST PERFORMANCEJanuary 28, 1912; Paris, France

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESDecember 27 & 28, 1912, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

July 8, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Ernest Ansermet conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESAugust 6, 1981, Ravinia Festival. Edo de Waart conducting

May 23, 2012, Orchestra Hall. David Robertson conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, two horns, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, glockenspiel, celesta, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME16 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1961. André Kostelanetz. Video Images (video)

1968. Jean Martinon. RCA

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Ravel borrowed his title and two tales (Sleeping Beauty and Tom Thumb) from

Charles Perrault, the seventeenth-century French writer who is responsible for preserving a number of well-known stories, including those of Little Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard. (It’s Perrault’s 1607 volume, Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec des moralitez—Stories or tales of olden times, with morals—that became

known in France as “Mother Goose.”)The Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty is as simple

as the briefest of fairy tales—just twenty mea-sures of limpid melody over plain, magically colored harmonies.

Ravel prefaces Tom Thumb with a quote from Perrault: “He thought he would easily find his way, thanks to the bread he had scattered wherever he had passed, but he was quite surprised when he couldn’t see even a single crumb of it. Birds had come along and eaten every bit.” Ravel shows us Tom Thumb’s meanderings—the meter changes often and unpredictably—and also, unforgettably, the birds making off with the crumbs.

Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas is an oriental tale by the countess d’Aulnoy, a Perrault contemporary and imitator. The empress is serenaded at her bath by her subjects: “At once mandarins and mandarinettes set to singing and to the playing of instruments: some had lutes made of nutshells, some had viols made from the shells of almonds, for their instruments had to be in proportion to their own scale.” In the orig-inal four-hand version, the upper piano part is written entirely for the black keys, automatically producing melodies in the pentatonic scale, that most convenient way of conjuring up the Orient. When Ravel made his orchestral transcrip-tion, he serenaded the empress with an array of bell-like and percussive sounds—cymbals,

xylophone, glockenspiel, celesta, harp, and the ceremonial striking of the tam-tam—recalling the Javanese gamelan ensemble the fourteen-year-old composer had watched in wonder at the Paris Exhibition of 1889.

Ravel took the Conversations of Beauty and the Beast from the Moral Tales of Marie Leprince de Beaumont:

“When I think of your good heart you no longer seem so ugly to me.” “Oh yes, good lady! I have a good heart, but I am a mon-ster.” “Many a man is more a monster than you.” “If I had the wit, I should pay you a great compliment, but I am only a beast.”

“Beauty, will you be my wife?” “No, Beast.”

“I die happy, for I have the joy of seeing you once more.” “No, my dear Beast, you will not die: You will live to become my husband!” . . . The Beast had disappeared, and she saw at her feet only a prince more beautiful than the god of love, who thanked her for having put an end to his spell.

Ravel gives the dialogue to the clarinet, playing Beauty, and the contrabassoon as Beast. She dances to a gentle waltz, and they talk. Finally, with a sweeping harp glissando, he is transformed into a princely violin.

The Enchanted Garden is Ravel’s own private place—the world of his own childhood memories viewed with the wisdom and affection of a grown man who has learned that only in fairy tales does one live happily ever after.

Without children of his own, or even any important students or disciples, Ravel grew, in his final years, to lament that no one would carry on his name or continue his work. “I have left nothing,” he said. “I have not said what I wanted to say. Alas, I am not one of the great compos-ers!” But nearly all of the sixty-some pieces of music he left behind have found a permanent place in the repertoire—an astonishing and rare accomplishment—and Ravel’s deep-seated fear that, as he told seven-year-old Jeanne Leleu, he would die “an old fogey,” completely forgotten, turned out to be groundless.

French author Charles Perrault

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Claude DebussyBorn August 22, 1862, Saint Germain-en-Laye, France.Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France.

La damoiselle élue

COMPOSED1887–1889, revised 1902

FIRST PERFORMANCEApril 8, 1893; Paris, France

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 3, 4 & 5, 1977, Orchestra Hall. Barbara Hendricks and Ellen Stanley as soloists, Women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis, director), Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONsoprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, women’s chorus, three flutes, two

oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, two harps, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME20 minutes

Debussy’s first encounter with Wagner’s music was at a performance of Lohengrin in Paris in 1887, but his immersion— his baptism by fire—came at the great Wagnerian shrine in Bayreuth. On his first trip to the German festival town of

Bayreuth in the summer of 1888, he saw both Parsifal and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. He returned the next summer, fully intoxicated, to attend performances of those two music dramas along with Tristan und Isolde, which completely overwhelmed him. “It is Tristan that gets in the way of our work,” he later told his close friend, the poet Pierre Louÿs. “I don’t see . . . what can be done beyond Tristan.” (Debussy knew the opera inside out: he once won a bet by playing the entire score from memory.)

Coming to terms with Wagner was a rite of passage for any young composer in the 1880s. “1889! Delightful period when I was madly Wagnerian,” Debussy would later recall. But Debussy’s uncritical adulation was short-lived. In time, he turned against the Wagnerian legacy, famously writing, in 1903: “Wagner, if I may be permitted to express myself with the pomposity befitting him, was a beautiful sunset mistaken for a dawn.” Even so, he continued to grapple with the revolution Wagner’s music had launched even after he made own his way in the unmapped territory of early twentieth-century music.

In the view of another revolutionary, Arnold Schoenberg, Debussy’s battle against Wagner “was indeed successful; but to free himself from Wagner—that was beyond him.”

L a damoiselle élue, the lyric cantata Debussy completed in 1889, at the height of his “madly Wagnerian” fever,

is the work that most clearly shows him under the master’s spell. Louÿs later recalled how Debussy “boasted of having written La dam-oiselle élue upon his return from Bayreuth and having succeeded in not imitating Parsifal.” But the stamp of the Parsifal sound world is all over Debussy’s score, starting with the spare opening measures, which evoke the spacious calm and glowing textures of the Parsifal prelude—“as if lit from behind” is Debussy’s own description of Wagner’s orchestration.

Debussy found his subject and his text for La damoiselle élue in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the English Pre-Raphaelite artists who were in vogue in Paris in the 1880s. Debussy’s identification with Rossetti, in particular, was eerily complete—in fact, when Debussy appeared in London in 1908, the papers all commented on his striking physical resemblance to Rossetti. Debussy read Rossetti’s poem “The Blessed Damozel” in a French prose translation by Gabriel Sarrazin that was published in 1883 in an anthology illustrated by work of the Pre-Raphaelites. “The Blessed Damozel” is itself a response to “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, a writer Debussy admired so

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much that he eventually intended to write operas on The Fall of the House of Usher and The Devil in the Belfry. In “The Raven,” a tormented, grieving male yearns for his beloved in heaven. Rossetti’s poem reverses the perspective: the woman cannot bear to live alone in paradise while her lover is left on earth. She craves the fulfillment of love that now only death can bring—the theme that animates the whole of Tristan, which Debussy heard at Bayreuth while he was composing La damoiselle élue.

Debussy later owned a copy of Rossetti’s painting on the same subject. But Pre-Raphaelite art came to France only in the 1890s, and so it is unlikely that Debussy had seen Rossetti’s painting when he began to write the music. Today, The Blessed Damozel is Rossetti’s most famous work (it hangs in the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard). Rossetti, renowned as both a writer and a painter, was repeatedly asked to give pictorial life to his popular poem that was first published in 1850. In the painting, completed in 1878, the luminous heroine dominates the large primary canvas, while her disconsolate lover occupies the small predella—the lower panel that also includes the first four stanzas of Rossetti’s poem inscribed along the base of its gilded oak frame.

D ebussy set selected stanzas from Rossetti’s poem in Sarrazin’s prose translation. He split the narrative

portions between a female chorus and a low-voiced female soloist; when the blessed damozel speaks, she has the voice of a soprano. (With her long hair, “yellow like ripe corn,” she is a prototype for Mélisande in Debussy’s Maeterlinck opera, which he began writing the year Damoiselle was premiered.) [The CSO performs the opera next week under Salonen.] Debussy’s scoring for female voices and chorus echoes the music for Kundry and the Flower Maidens in Parsifal. The radiant orchestral prelude introduces musical themes that do not

function quite like Wagner’s leitmotifs, but are nonetheless recurring ideas associated with certain aspects of the tale—hope, yearning. The entire score, from the stillness of the prelude to the soft chanting of the chorus and the natural, flowing melodies of the damozel, is suffused with Rossetti’s “peace of utter light and silence.”

The Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)

Note: The supertitles for these performances duplicate the lines of Rossetti’s original English poem whenever possible.

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Maurice Ravel

L’enfant et les sortilèges, Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts

COMPOSED1920, 1924–25

FIRST PERFORMANCEMarch 21, 1925, Monte-Carlo

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESThese are the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances.

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, piano, luthéal (a kind of prepared piano), harpsichord, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME45 minutes

CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS RECORDING2006. Julie Boulianne, Geneviève Després, Kirsten Gunlogson, Philippe Castagner, Ian Greenlaw, Kevin Short, Agathe Martel, Cassandre Prévost, and Julie Cox as soloists; members of the Nashville Symphony Chorus (George Mabry, director), members of the Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain Wolfe, director), Chattanooga Boys Choir (Vincent Oakes, director); and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra; Alastair Willis conducting. Naxos

When Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette—better known simply as Colette, the celebrated actress, writer, and music hall star—first met the young Maurice Ravel, she was not impressed. “He liked loud ties and frilly shirts,” she said, even though Ravel

was known to be a fastidious dresser. “He wanted to be noticed, but at the same time he was afraid of the critics,” she continued, knowing that her own husband at the time, who went by the pen name Willy, was one of Ravel’s harshest critics. (Colette’s erotic Claudine novels, which made her famous in the first years of the twentieth century, were originally published under Willy’s name.) She also thought that Ravel’s whiskers and hairdo unfortunately “emphasized the contrast between his striking head and his tiny body.” Ravel was, in fact, no larger than the children he knew and loved, and so it is easy to imagine him as the child at the heart of L’enfant et les sortilèges, the fantastical short opera he would eventually write with Colette. “Perhaps he was really shy,” Colette later remembered. “But he remained distant and reserved.”

Their professional relationship, which also remained distant and reserved—and involved lit-tle direct contact—began in 1914, when Jacques Rouché, the head of the Paris Opéra, asked Colette to write the scenario for a fantasy ballet. Uncharacteristically, she tossed it off in a mere

eight days. Although Rouché suggested several composers who could set it to music, including Stravinsky and Dukas, Ravel was the only one Colette wanted, despite Willy’s negative—“cruel” was the word Colette used—reviews of his music. Colette had been warned that Ravel was a slow worker, but she was still probably not prepared to wait another eleven years for their project, which became a short fantasy opera, to be completed, even with the intervention of World War I.

Sometime in 1916, Colette finished a full libretto and sent it off to Ravel. But the com-poser, who served as a truck driver during part of the war, was stationed in Verdun at the time, and he never received the text. Another copy did finally reach him, but only in 1918. For some time—ever since the death of his mother the previous January—Ravel was unable to compose at all, and a piece anchored by the love of a child for his mother apparently seemed untouchable to him for many months. Finally, he wrote to Colette in 1919, with his first thoughts about their little opera. Ravel began to write the music in 1920, but quickly set it aside. “Oh! Cher ami, when, oh when?” Colette finally wrote to him in the summer of 1923, begging him to resume work on the piece she called a Divertissement for My Daughter. Only in the spring of 1924, with a premiere now set for the Théâtre de Monte-Carlo—the Paris Opéra had long ago dropped out—did Ravel finally set to work in earnest. “I’m only leaving the job to take some food,” he wrote that summer, “or to walk a few

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kilometers in the forest when I feel as if my head’s going to explode.” Just five days before the premiere, Ravel wrote to Colette one last time, asking for some new words to fit a few measures of music he had just composed. (Their “collab-oration” was so different from the exhaustively detailed, give-and-take working relationship of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal during this same time.)

The premiere of L’enfant et les sortilèges—the new title, loosely translated as The Child and the Enchantments, was Ravel’s—took place in Monte-Carlo on March 21, 1925. Conducted by Victor de Sabata, and with choreography by a twenty-one-year-old Georges Balanchine—this was his first major assignment—it was a great public success. (Ravel once claimed that de Sabata knew the score by memory within twelve hours of receiving it.) Ravel appeared three times to accept the audience’s prolonged applause. During the performance run, Colette wrote that it was “playing twice a week before a packed but turbulent house.” The audience was more turbulent still at the Paris premiere, at the Opéra-Comique, in February 1926. “The modernists applaud,” Colette wrote, “and shout down the others.” “It would be good if we could

finally hear my music in silence,” Ravel told his pupil Manuel Rosenthal in 1936. (Rosenthal, at the age of seventy-seven, was the conductor when the Metropolitan Opera finally staged L’enfant in 1981!) Performances were soon given in Brussels, Prague, Leipzig, Vienna, and even San Francisco, but it wasn’t until 1939 that L’enfant was pro-duced at the Paris Opéra, under the direction of Jacques Rouché, who had had the idea for the work in the first place—now more than two decades earlier. The opera has always presented technical hurdles in creating its fantastic hap-penings on a conventional opera stage—when Ravel’s brother saw Walt Disney’s Snow White shortly after the composer’s death, he said, “This is the way L’enfant should be presented”—but the heart of its magic lies entirely in the music itself.

André Devambez, Auguste a mauvais caractère. Paris, 1913. BnF / Dep. Estampes et photographie. This cartoon may possibly have inspired Colette to write the libretto for L’enfant et les sortilèges.

Ravel as a small child

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F rom the opening measures, when the meandering lines of two oboes suggest the aimlessness and loneliness of the

bored child, Ravel’s music perfectly captures the mood and the substance of each scene. Ravel’s score is arguably his greatest feat of purely descriptive orchestral writing, and he, perhaps alone among history’s greatest masters of instrumentation, had not only the technical knowledge, but also the sheer creative daring, brilliance, and wit to bring the opera’s world of enchantments to life. Colette handed Ravel an entire book of linguistic games: the fake Chinese of the china cup (“Keng-ca foo Mahjong”), the broken English of the angry, cracked Wedgwood teapot (“I knock out you, stupid chose”), the frog’s “Kekekekekecekca,” the textless “miaowed” cat duet (Ravel fussed over the “words,” asking Colette if he could switch one “mouao” for a “mouain”). Throughout the opera, there is an astonishment of sounds, musical and otherwise: the song of nature in all its richness, the noises of the animal kingdom, the magic of the night.

The opera proceeds, as Ravel himself said, “in the spirit of the American musical comedy”—that is, as a succession of separate numbers—solos, duets, ensembles, choruses. Ravel presents a parade of musical styles as diverse as the array of animals and inanimate objects they accompany—a stilted baroque minuet for the dance of the Louis XV chair, the foxtrot of the

Wedgwood teapot, a “Valse amércaine” for the dragonfly, an old-world pastorale for the shep-herds and shepherdesses, the grand waltz of the frogs (years before La valse), and a touching monologue for the child that Ravel admitted was based on Manon’s famous “Adieu, notre petite table” from Massenet’s opera. “There’s a bit of everything in [L’enfant],” Ravel said. When he told Colette that he wanted the cup and the teapot to sing “ragtime”—the kind of American music that was beginning to sweep Europe fol-lowing the war, Colette replied: “What a terrific gust from the music hall to stir up the dust of the Opéra.” Ravel spoke at Houston’s Rice Institute in 1928, and he admitted that although he loved adopting the popular forms of American music in his scores, “nevertheless it is French music, Ravel’s music, that I have written.”

I f a child could tell about his childhood while he is passing through it, his true childhood,” Colette once wrote, “his

account would perhaps be nothing more than one of intimate dramas and disappointments.” L’enfant has long invited speculation about its meanings—loneliness and acceptance, the ache of loss, alienation, authority, the tension between conformity and creativity, the price of imagination, the allure of home, love. Colette’s final word, “Maman,”—“mama”—which Ravel sets unforgettably to a descending fourth—an interval that recurs throughout the score—seems to release the depth of emotion that lies behind so much of childhood—ours; Ravel’s as he wrote this music, his first major work following the death of his own mother; and Colette’s: “I always remained in touch with the character who, little by little, has dominated all the rest of my work . . . my mother.” On the last page of Ravel’s score, the wandering oboes return, but now they settle, home at last.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954)

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L’enfant et les sortilèges

SYNOPSIS

A little boy of six or seven is sitting idly at an exercise book. He is out of sorts, and just wants to get up to mischief.

His mother scolds him and leaves him some tea and dry bread. As soon as she’s gone, he flies into a rage, smashes the teapot and cup, sticks his pen into the caged squirrel, pulls the cat’s tail, stirs up the fire, knocks over the kettle, attacks the wallpaper with the poker, swings on the clock’s pendulum, tears up his books, and collapses in an armchair.

At this point fantastic things begin to happen and the child’s world fights back. The arm-chair stirs into life and begins to dance with a Louis XV bergère: they’ll not let the little boy sit on them anymore. Nor will the bench, the sofa, or the wicker chair. The clock, striking irregu-larly, is badly damaged. The Wedgwood teapot, in broken English, and the china cup, in broken Chinese, console each other by teasing the boy. The fire flares out of the hearth and threatens him, but is restrained by the cinder.

Night is falling and a group of shepherds and shepherdesses peel away from the torn wallpa-per and lament their fate. From the page of a mutilated book a beautiful princess appears, sad that her story will never reach its end and her prince will never come. She disappears, leaving the child desolate. From another book leaps

a cavalcade of numbers led by a little old man spouting meaningless mathematics. The moon is now up, and the boy attempts to stroke the cat. But the cat spits back and pays more attention to another cat out in the garden.

At this point, the walls of the room fall away and the boy finds himself in the moonlit garden. Insects, frogs, owls, and nightingales are heard. The child is happy to be in the garden, but is rebuffed by a tree which he had attacked with a knife. A dragonfly dances with some moths and sings a duet with a nightingale, to a chorus of frogs. The dragonfly wants his mate back, so does a bat, both bereaved by the wicked child. Frogs dance, and a squirrel complains about being prodded in its cage. The frogs and squirrels dance and fight in the night, the cats miaow to each other. The child realizes that they care nothing for him and that he is alone. “Maman!” he cries, as they all persecute him.

A baby squirrel falls wounded and the boy ties up its paw with a ribbon. Suddenly the animals feel sorry for him and are touched by his action. The child, too, has been hurt, and wants his mother, they realize. He is a good child after all. They lead him back to the house, where he holds out his arms to his mother.

Hugh Macdonald

© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra