3 French Folksong Arrangements

Fileuse

Eho! Eho!

Voici le Printemps

Most of Britten’s folksong arrangements - more than fifty of them, compiled over a period of forty years - were written for Peter Pears and derive from British or Irish sources. The major exception is the volume of eight “chansons populaires” compiled in 1942 for the Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss, who had given the first performance of Les Illuminations two years earlier. Applying the same economical principles to the French folk tunes as to the others, Britten furnishes piano accompaniments as discreetly effective as they texturally and harmonically modest. Fileuse, which spins along cheerfully enough on its four-note ostinato while the singer recalls her shepherdess past but then winds sadly down as she reflects on her spinster present, is a particularly resourceful example. The piano figuration in Eho! Eho!, based on the semitone inflection of the opening exclamation of “Eho,” is rather more elaborate than that of Fileuse but similarly chastened when it comes to pointing the moral at the end. The setting of Voici le Printemps rubs along on the friction between the C major favoured by the piano and the G minor tonality of the chanson itself. The piano has the promising last word.