Arthur Lourié engraving

• Prelude Op. 12 No. 2
• Op. 13 Masques
• Op. 40 Miss Death's Mistake

Some of Arthur Lourié's works have previously been available only as manuscripts. This repository has LilyPond sheet music that's hopefully easier to read while keeping the futurist feel of Lourié's presentation.

Most information about Lourié below comes from Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié, usually the chapter "Arthur Lourié: A Biographical Sketch".

Quarter-tone prelude

A manuscript of a prelude for "piano of higher chromaticism" survives because it was published in the avant-garde poetry-focused journal Strelets. It's numbered Op. 12 No. 2, with No. 1 nowhere to be found, it seems. The accompanying article introduces a new notation for quarter-tone sharps and flats, which are used in the score.

It's Lourié's only microtonal work. Ivan Wyschnegradsky would later complain that Lourié refused to fund the construction of a quarter-tone piano, and it was on a trip to meet with Wyschnegradsky and other composers of higher chromaticism in Berlin that he decided not to return and thus abandoned the Soviet Union. There is some evidence he didn't even attend the meeting.

The work has been performed on two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. It sure looks like it would be a real challenge to play on a single instrument.

Masques

Lourié wrote his Op. 13 Masques (Tentations) in 1913: he was 20 or 21, and graduated from conservatory the same year. There's a clear connection to Scriabin's one-page poem "Masque" (Op. 63 no. 1) published the year before, even in the indications "énigmatique" and "caché" (from "Avec une douceur cachée"). Discarding Scriabin's rigid underlying bar structure, Lourié writes entirely in free time. Phrases often fall just short of an even duration, or they might have an additive structure with varying numbers of repetitions. Similarly, Masques features harmonies and transpositions that recall Scriabin's, without the systematic framework of octatonic and mystic scales.

Each piece has its own character and can comfortably stand on its own (eh, maybe not II), although there are various connections between them and they work well in sequence too. Part I is one of the hardest to play, and feels more derivative of Scriabin and less focused musically. Also requires staccato chords up to tenths as written, while the other parts can be played without even reaching octaves, only major sevenths. I think parts IV, V, and especially VI make better starting points for those who don't want to take on the whole thing at once. And VII is concise and elegant, although its interleaved voices with precisely-specified dynamics are hard to play well. But given the style, the technical challenges in Masques are small, I mean, they're not beginner works (though Lourié has those) but we're a long way from Roslavets.

"Hence, too, the development of a specific virtuosity having nothing in common with music. A virtuosity whose principal task seems to consist in getting out a definite number of notes in a definite unit of time, whereas genuine virtuosity seeks to display the organic tonal dynamics embodied in a musical composition." (Lourié in Sergei Koussevitzky and his Epoch, p. 178)

Scriabin died young in 1915, and Masques is the high-water mark of his influence on Lourié, as earlier works tend to take more from Debussy and the immediately following ones are more in a modernist vein. In the 1931 publication Sergei Koussevitzky and his Epoch he remarks positively about Scriabin's work but negatively about its impact and the merits of imitating it. Regarding opinions in western Europe, "The reaction against Wagner, which set in with the rise of impressionism, has effaced Scriabin for years, and Heaven only knows when he will be recalled to mind, and the genuine music that was in that strange and aristocratically capricious art will be plainly heard." (p. 195). But in Russia, "None of those who have come under his sway has added anything to what Scriabin himself achieved, but to this day traces of Scriabinism, as of an unpleasant and too protracted disease, are perceptible in the works of the younger generation of Russian musicians now appearing in Russia." (p. 195-196).

But Masques marks the beginning of another equally short-lived trend in Lourié's writing, of using the arrangement of musical notation itself to convey a sense of motion and space. Further developed in Synthèses, this stylistic experimentation culminated in the 1915 composition Formes en l'air: it was dedicated to Picasso, who was hard at work developing Cubism, and one glance shows that it's as much visual art as musical (I've used these two engravings as a reference for how Lourié expected things to appear). His techniques grew out of notation used in earlier pieces, which have lots of sharply sloped beams in complicated groupings owing to the flying arpeggios and jagged rhythms. The loose slurs that go well beyond their nominal endpoints are already hinted at in Op. 1 and used by Op. 2; Masques also incorporates the meandering shapes and tie-to-nothing notation for laissez vibrer (let ring) that were becoming popular among impressionist pianists at the time. And it plays with staff placement, kneed beams, and detached beams, which might be formed when a beam connects to a rest, laissez-vibrer tie, quarter note, or just plain nothing. A possible inspiration is seen in Op. 12 No. 2, where two beams that can't be joined are each drawn with a gap.

I don't know the exact nature of the manuscript whose scan on IMSLP I used as a source. I'm told it's held in NYPL's Lourié collection, and thus was in Lourié's possession when he died. The manuscript is dated 1913 and stamped Breitkopf & Härtel, although I can't find any connection between Lourié and this publisher (they did make an edition of Formes en l'air in 1980). Signing as "Arthur Vincent Lourié" on several pages reinforces a time of writing around 1913, as Lourié began to prefer "Arthur Sergeyevich" a year or so later. And it's unclear when or if the work was published. Editions Russes printings of earlier works, from around 1915, name Masques under the header "preparing for printing". Just below is Synthèses, which survives in an edition printed by Muzgiz in 1920; Lourié caused some resentment by using his position as the head of Muzo to get his compositions published quickly and in high quality. So if Masques didn't make it out before the 1917 Russian revolution, it seems likely that the first publication would have come out not long after. However, given Lourié's loss of interest in Scriabinism, it's also possible that he simply abandoned the work.

Miss Death's Mistake

In 1917 Lourié, gaining fame among the artists of St. Petersburg, joined with Vladimir Tatlin and Nikolay Punin to bring Velimir Khlebnikov's absurd poetic drama "Death's Mistake" to the stage. His incidental music is titled "Miss Death's Mistake" (Ошибка барышни Смерти, perhaps more literally "The mistake of young lady Death"); as Khlebnikov's drama does center on one Miss Death, the difference in titles does not appear meaningful. Khlebnikov's work depicts a party thrown by Death where twelve guests drink beer from skulls. But a thirteenth shows up insistent on having a drink, and, lacking another skull, Death is forced to use her own, jawbone excluded, as a vessel. And then it gets weird. The titular mistake, it seems, is not the excessive commitment to hospitality, but comes later when Miss Death pours one drink of life and one of death and, lacking the use of her eyes, chooses to drink the wrong one. Whoops!

Just after the October Revolution, Lourié and Punin visited the new People's Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky to authorize a performance. The performance didn't happen, but Lunacharsky was inspired to appoint Lourié as head of Muzo, from which position he proceeded to nationalize all manner of property and industry related to music publishing and performance (his two collaborators were granted similarly powerful offices). Not such a bad outcome, huh? Well, Lourié ticked everyone off with his arrogant demeanor while failing to keep up with the more mundane obligations of the job, and was eventually forced to resign in 1921. Better to have staged the drama perhaps.

Miss Death's Mistake is for the most part truly atonal (though far from serial; it could be analyzed with pitch sets perhaps). It uses chromatic scales and juxtaposes harmonically-unrelated components for an unsettling effect, for example with descending chromatic scales separated by eleven semitones starting on measure 4. Lourié has largely left Scriabin's influence behind, although the way harmonies are used and changed is arguably similar at a higher level, and a few more specific traces remain ("prestissimo volando", now where could that have come from?). There are also some striking intrusions of tonality, such as several measures of movement 4 entirely in D major, that recall Lourié's early Debussy-like work.

Because this work was composed for a complete performance, individual movements might suffer when separated from the rest—however, a full performance is also problematic given that movement 2 is incomplete. The prelude could easily be incorporated into a different program, and movement 3 seems fairly self-contained. Movement 2 is a real mess so another approach could be to drop it and play the others. Technical difficulties here are much greater than those in Masques and many passages are just awkward, with widely-spaced voices that require a lot of movement around the keyboard (but the faster parts aren't as hard as they look, as they tend to break down into simple repeated patterns). There are ninths and minor tenths that will be uncomfortable and may require compromises for smaller hands. Still, it's not especially challenging in the context of standard classical repertoire.

As with Masques, my edition is based on the scan on IMSLP. However, Davide Giordani made an edition in 2011 that keeps closer to the manuscript's layout; while not published as a score, it's shown in Youtube videos (first, second) with Moritz Ernst's recording. I checked against this version for proofreading but confirmed all changes with the manuscript scan as ground truth. The ordering in the videos follows Ernst—Davide, who got in touch a while later to discuss his own history with Lourié's work, confirms that his edition matches mine and doesn't know why Ernst chose to swap movements 3 and 4 relative to it.