Composed in 1920, Pour une Fête de printemps marks a turning point in the evolution of Roussel's symphonic language and aesthetic outlook. In the polarized Parisian musical microcosm of the decade preceding the Great War—largely provoked by d'Indy's outspoken opposition to Impressionism—Roussel's turn toward Impressionism in such early works as the Poème de la forêt and Evocations occasioned anxiety among d'Indyistes. Roussel was one of d'Indy's most talented pupils, a keen student who not only stayed the Schola Cantorum's decade-long course, but was employed there as a professor of counterpoint. D'Indy, himself, was never so forbidding. He met Debussy on cordial terms, and, one notable evening chez the Chaussons, heard Debussy play through parts of his work-in-progress, Pelléas et Mélisande, followed by d'Indy playing and singing from Fervaal. It is a measure of d'Indy's greatness that he could see beyond the debt to Impressionism in Le Marchand de sable qui passe to recognize the work's individuality. On July 21, 1910, he wrote to Roussel, "I read your Marchand de sable and was charmed...I found in it the fine and sound musical qualities I like in you..." though he could not resist a slap at the Impressionists—"There are now so many composers who arrange (or disarrange) sounds literally or pictorially or merely aurally...." Such strictures certainly had resonance for Roussel, and it is more apt to say that his "Impressionism" is less formulaic than a matter of seduction by Debussy's sensuous orchestral writing, which he absorbed and refined to an acerbically pointed utterance; nearly all of Roussel's works show a strong formal design. But his compositional development was interrupted by the Great War and delayed by the orchestration of Padmâvatî after it. That done, through bouts of ill-health, he began his Second Symphony, the most enigmatic of his works, beginning with a scherzo that not only outgrew its intended purpose, but spontaneously embraced an aesthetic Roussel was determined to leave behind. Published separately as Pour une Fête de printemps, it was first heard at a Colonne concert led by Gabriel Pierné on October 29, 1921. It begins and ends with pastoral brooding, sandwiching episodes of propulsive twitching, writhing, and swarming after the manner of Le Festin de l'Arraignée. The initial chord, on strings—either a conflation of the keys of A major and D sharp major, or the last inversion of a major eleventh with a minor ninth—was Roussel's aural discovery, much admired by Darius Milhaud, and widely imitated.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide