Andromède

In all of her poèmes symphoniques Augusta Holmès transliterated her poem into music. The one she wrote for Andromède – is long, eleven quatrains in French alexandrine – tells the story of Cassiopeia’s daughter Andromeda and how she is saved from the sea-monster by Perseus. Abandoning the national vein of her two previous works in the genre, Irlande and Pologne, Holmès returned here to Greek mythology, which had inspired several of her works for voice and orchestra: Prométhée, Hymne à Apollon, Les Argonautes. But, as previously, she used her subject as a means of celebrating freedom: the last verse but one reads 

Âme humaine, arrachée aux cieux que tu pleuras, 
De ton humanité captive torturée, 
Crois en la liberté! tu seras délivrée; 
Crois en la Vie! et, dans ta Norme, tu vivras.

Human soul, snatched from the heavens for which you grieved, 
From your tortured, captive humanity, 
Believe in freedom! you will be set free; 
Believe in Life! and you will live according to your Norm.

The work opens with an impressive fanfare (trombones in unison), representing the Oracle of the beginning of the poem, sentencing Andromeda to be chained to rocks on the sea and devoured by a sea-monster. A syncopated descending theme then launches the Allegro. Andromeda’s lament, expressed in a Largo piangendo, is beautifully and very delicately conveyed. In the episode in which Perseus, riding Pegasus, saves the maiden, the theme, superimposed on creeping chromaticisms in the low register, appears to have been inspired by the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” from the beginning of Act 3 of Wagner’s Die Walküre. After the vibrant lyricism of a Largo appassionato, the work ends not with a triumphant peroration as its subject might suggest, but with an ethereal pianissimo. Composed in 1883, Andromède was not premiered until 14 January 1900. It was very well received. Amédée Boutarel, in a laudatory article for Le Ménestrel, felt that “[…] the work deserves to rank with its elders and is a credit both to contemporary artistic production and to the initiative of M. Colonne”.