"Idyll" for Two Pianos (2020)
Francis Kayalı
"Idyll" is adapted from the first movement of an experimental theatrical piece I composed in 2009. As a genre, the idyll describes a bucolic setting, sometimes depicting the love life of shepherds. In French, the word "idylle" often pertains to "tender and naïve love, usually chaste."
The music in "Idyll" includes brief musical quotations.
(1) mm. 33-36, from "Les patineurs" ("Skaters Waltz," 1882) by Émile Waldteufel (1837-1915), a piece associated with elegant entertainment for a carefree 19th-century bourgeois class.
(2) mm. 53-56, from the "choral hymn" in the Finale of Camille Saint-Saënss Piano Concerto No. 4 (1875), which depicts a reconstructed "noble" medieval sound.
(3) m. 72: a brief evocation of Édith Piafs song "Hymne à lamour" (1949).
(4) mm. 81-83, from Ruggero Leoncavallos 1892 opera Pagliacci (the famous climactic passage "Ridi, Pagliaccio" in the tenor aria "Vesti la giubba").
These musical quotations affirm an idealized, nostalgic version of the past. With its popular-inflected melodies, its cute, kitschy-sweet sounds, and music-box-like timbres, this piece evinces a naïve, exceedingly sentimental vision of beauty. But this is true to the utopian character of idylls: they help listeners escape their troubles by travel to imaginary places where they can find solace.
"Idyll" received its first live performance in Iwamizawa, Hokkaido (Japan) in August 2020, performed by pianists Yui Shimizu and Kazuco Sugiyama.