4 French Folksong Arrangements

La belle est au jardin d’amour

Fileuse

Il est quelqu’un sur terre

Quand j’étais chez mon père

Most of Britten’s folksong arrangements - more than fifty of them, assembled at irregular intervals over a period of forty years or so - 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 are texturally and harmonically modest.

A texture as ample as that formed by the triadic harmonies in the piano introduction to La belle est au jardin d’amour is rare in these settings. Its point is to set up an illusory B flat major before its poignant meeting with the reality of the modal F of the song itself. The arrangement of Fileuse, which is accompanied by little more than a four-note ostinato, is contrastingly sparse in texture but no less expressive in effect. It spins along cheerfully enough, in a pedal-sustained blur, as long as the singer recalls her shepherdess past but then winds sadly down as she reflects on her spinster present. Il est quelqu’un sur terre is another spinning song but in this case the ostinato is a solemn descending figure in the bass and, unless it picks up in the right-hand syncopations in the second and third stanzas, the broken wheel is scarcely turning. With its clumsy Ländler rhythms and its fancifully rustic French Quand j’étais chez mon père is one of the most entertaining songs in the collection and, with the heightened vocal and piano colour of its ending, a very appropriate finale.