“The 1925 arrangements of Chausson’s Poème and Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major No. 2 for violin, piano, and organ were premiered at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels by violinist Jeannette Dincin, an American student of Ysaÿe’s from Brooklyn, New York. Dincin, who later became Ysaÿe’s second wife, was the owner of this collection of unpublished manuscripts before it was acquired by the Juilliard School, home to the largest collection of Ysaÿe-related materials outside of Belgium. It is a treasure trove of Ysaÿe’s devotion to his students, friends and colleagues. Additional scores of these unpublished arrangements can be found in the papers of Ysaÿe’s student Viola Mitchell, which are also at Juilliard. As a pedagogue passing along this hallowed music from different corners of history, Ysaÿe also leaves hints of his artistic sensibilities and social sensitivities in his scores. Even 26 years after Chausson’s death, Ysaÿe titles the arrangement “Chausson’s Poème.”
Ysaÿe’s son Antoine attests that his father “infinitely preferred advertising and pushing the works of his friends to imposing his own.” In these arrangements of unusual instrumentation with organ, Ysaÿe does both, demonstrating his crucial role as composer-performer in furthering the work’s reach and broadening its potential musical valences. How he lived this artistic mission is an example for the multi-faceted musician today who has been trained to, perhaps superficially, associate an often literal compliance with the composer’s score with spiritual reverence for the music.
Ysaÿe’s arrangements challenge orthodoxical ideas around the composer’s intent, the nature of musical texts, and the authority of performance works. In other words, these manuscripts show not just remarkable transformations of familiar music, but an alternative brand of artistic freedom, pushing the boundaries of the role of a performer as interpreter and reminding us why we engage with the arts and music. A few weeks before Ysaÿe gave the Paris premiere of Chausson’s Poème in 1897, he penned these words: “The work of genius represented by thirty years of a fine solid career as an actor or a musician is worth more than a medal is, because the theater and music are the arts of the public and the most beautiful medal on earth can neither make people weep nor give them so immediate a sense of beauty.””