Psalm 130

One of the vocal pieces Lili was working on during her first visit to the Villa Medici in Rome in 1914 was a setting of Psalm 130, “Out of the depths,” that was destined to become the most convincing of indications of her genius. Having more or less completed it at Archachon in the spring of 1917, after illness had compelled her to retreat from Rome for a second time, she finished the orchestration while recovering from an (ineffective) operation at the Boulangers’ country home at Gargenville in the summer.

Dedicated “à la mémoire de mon cher Papa” - her father had died when she was only six but had left a lasting impression on her - “Du fond de l’abîme” is a dramatic expression of a theme common to much of her work, which is a longing for light in the prevailing darkness. The symbolism is clear enough in the slow orchestral introduction where, over rumbling percussion and amid B flat minor harmonies made all the more oppressive by their modal inflections, a tuba and a solo cello utter a subterranean fragment of plain song. They are answered by lower strings and woodwind striving upwards in aching arpeggios. First and second violins take off by themselves and climb ever higher before being pressed down again.Together with a new theme, a searing trumpet call, this material develops in intensity until the tempo and the dynamic level are reduced for the first entry of the voices.

Coming slowly to life, the chorus begins by merely chanting the words of the first section of the text and only gradually, by way of a lyrical expansion on the holy names of “Iahvé” and “Adonaï,” finds the melodic inspiration for sustained supplication. The second section, which is signalled by an acceleration to Allegro très rythmé and by urgent reminders of the upward striving arpeggios and the trumpet call (now transferred to trombones), begins in the same way - proceeding from a soft chant to a broad climax on the “Adonaï” material - before the chorus yields to the alto soloist. Supported by a solo cello, she introduces a new melody which, though in an E flat minor still distorted by modal inflections, is set in a more relaxed tempo and a more intimate texture. As the Allegro très rythmé tempo and the trumpet calls return, the chorus takes fright again, asking with growing insistency “Qui donc pourra tenir?” (“Who shall stand?”) - most emphatically of all on a fortissimo augmentation of the trumpet call

The answer is in the third section which, while it is not the climax of the work, is its turning point as far both the construction and the message are concerned. The tempo slows and, against gently rippling arpeggios on harp and organ, a devout new melody arises on woodwind for the alto soloist to take up with the consoling words “Mais la clémence est en toi” (“But there is forgiveness with thee”). The oppressive modal inflections are still there, however, and it is only at the beginning of the fourth section, where the alto is joined by a tenor soloist, that Lili’s vision at last glimpses the radiance of major harmonies.

Although she sustains the mood with the help of an ecstatic semi-chorus, she is too much of a realist to leave it there. At what might with any one else have been the high point of the work, she plunges the chorus back into the darkness of the depths, from where it must resume the struggle to achieve a last, liberated climax of “Iahvé, Adonaï” and offer an ethereal expression of hope. Even then, the oppressive modal inflections return and the work ends without the harmonically unambiguous consolation Lili was too honest to provide.

Gerald Larner©