# Offrandes (Varèse)

Offrandes (in English, Offerings) is a short composition for soprano and chamber orchestra by French composer Edgard Varèse. It was finished in 1921.

## Background

Offrandes, entitled Dedications for the premiere, was written on a commission by the International Composers' Guild, of which Varèse himself was the director. This was the first commission out of many, one each year, until the guild was dissolved in 1927. The piece, finished in 1921, was completed shortly after Varèse released a manifesto praising composers and attacking performers. According to Varèse, "the composer is the only one of the creators today who is denied direct contact with the public. When his work is done, he is thrust aside and the interpreter enters, not to try to understand the work but impertinently to judge it." The first movement was dedicated "à Louise", Edgard Varèse's wife, who was also an influential literary figure, and played an essential role in supporting Varèse's career. The couple married in 1922, the same year Offrandes premiered. The premiere occurred on April 23, 1922, at the Greenwich Village Theatre, in New York City and marked Varèse's first work to be premiered in the American continent. It was conducted by long-time collaborator and renowned harpist Carlos Salzedo, to whom the second movement was dedicated. Nina Koshetz played the part of the soprano with the New Symphony Orchestra, an orchestra created by Varèse in 1919 to secure the American premieres of compositions by other contemporary composers, most notably Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky's Les noces. It was first published in 1927 by C. C. Birchard and republished in 1960 by Franco Colombo and Ricordi.

## Structure

This compositions is cast into two movements and has a total duration of just under 7 minutes. Varèse calls for a soprano and a small orchestra consisting of a piccolo, a flute, an oboe, a clarinet in B-flat, a bassoon, a French horn in F, a trumpet in C, a trombone, a harp, a string quintet consisting of two violins, a viola, a cello, and a double bass, and a relatively complex percussion section (as was customary in Varèse) consisting of a ratchet, a snare drum, a mammoth bass drum, cymbals, castanets, a tambourine, a triangle, and two differently-pitched gongs. Varèse specifies that if the string section were to be larger, the total forces would not exceed six first violins, four second violins, four violas, two celli, and two double basses. The piece also has specifications for advanced techniques for the harp.
The movement list is as follows:
* Chanson de là-haut (Song from on high). Lent
* La croix du sud (The Southern Cross). Lent modéré, très lourd
The two movements of the piece are set to an unspecified poem by Vicente Huidobro and José Juan Tablada's La cruz del sur, the latter originally written in Spanish but translated into French for the composition. In these two settings, the melody did not prevail over duration and timbre, and there is a shift of orchestral powers: the strings are underpowered whereas the percussion is strongly emphasized, both in presence and in number of musicians. Varèse was an innovator insofar as he worked with the entire range and held notes in the extremes of the orchestral range for relatively long periods of time. Varèse aimed to eliminate the performer's lung capacity as a limiting factor, ensuring that long, extreme notes in his compositions could be sustained without interruption.

## Recordings

| Conductor | Soprano | Ensemble | Date of recording | Place of recording | Label | Format |
| Riccardo Chailly | Sarah Leonard | Asko|Schönberg | April 1994 | Concertgebouw, Amsterdam | Decca | CD |
| Christopher Lyndon-Gee | Maryse Castets | Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra | April 2000 | Grzegorz Fitelberg Concert Hall, Katowice | Naxos | CD |