Les Illuminations Op.18

Fanfare –

Villes

Phrase –

Antique

Royauté

Marine

Interlude –

Being Beauteous

Parade

Départ

Sophie Wyss, the soprano who gave the first performance of Les Illuminations and to whom the work is dedicated, recalled a conversation with Britten in 1938 and his excitement on discovering the writings of Arthur Rimbaud, to which he had just been introduced by W.H. Auden. “He was so full of this poetry that he just couldn’t stop talklng about it.… He was eager to set it to music.”

Britten was so eager to create a song cycle to prose-poems from Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations that he got to work immediately ­– and, on at least two counts, recklessly. For one thing he had little experience in setting French words to music, which is a very specialised art. For another, Rimbaud’s poetry was inspired in some respects by his homosexuality, as Auden was aware of course, and it was a risk for a young composer at that time to associate himself with it. In the event, perhaps because the poems are written in fairly obscure French and certainly because of some judicious cutting, there was no scandal either when Sophie Wyss sang Being Beauteous and Marine with John Hock and his string orchestra in Birmingham in 1939 or when she gave the first complete performance with the Boyd Neel Orchestra in the Wigmore Hall early in 1940. On the contrary – in spite of the compoer’s controversial absence in America, where he had completed the work in October 1939 – reactions were generally very favourable.

Given a score of such evident genius, entirely worthy of that of the teenage poet, reactions could scarcely have been otherwise. When, in the opening Parade, Rimbaud proclaims that he alone has the key to his fevered visions, Britten establishes the harmonic key to the whole work – actually a conflict of two keys in the brilliantly simulated trumpet fanfares on B flat on the violas and E major on violins.

The composer described Rimbaud’s Villes as an “impression of chaotic modern city life.” Rather than attempting to mirror each of a flood of poetic images, he sustains an equivalent surge of activity in a succession of ostinatos on different rhythmic figures until, at the end, he relaxes the dynamic pressure to reflect what he called “a prayer for a little peace.” The short but magical Phrase, poised on harmonics as tenuous as the poet’s golden chains, leads by way of a downwards swoop on the word “danse” to Antique – a sensuous near-waltz in B flat recalling one key element of Parade and featuring an intimate relationship betwen the voice and a solo violin. The other key element is recalled in the resplendent E major harmonies applied with ceremonial double-dotted rhythms to the happy couple in Royauté. The fanfares persist, now in a radiant A major, in the shimmering seascape of Marine.

Interlude – which recalls the words of the opening Parade, “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage,” in a far less exuberant mood than when they were first uttered – is, according to Britten, “a reproof for the exaggeratedly ecstatic mood of Marine.” Certainly, a necessary calm is established for the dreamily erotic, melodically inspired contemplation of Being Beauteous, which (dedicated to Peter Pears) is surely the most revealing as well as the most beautiful song in the whole cycle. The exuberance of “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” is restored as confidence returns at the end of Parade, a Mahlerien march of grotesque imagery which would have been even more disturbing if a cut had not been made in Rimbaud’s text here. Départ goes off at a harmonic tangent to the rest of the work, suggesting a reluctance to leave rather than a definitive departure.

Gerald Larner © 2009