Quatre chansons françaises

Although the production of Hugo songs declined significantly after the poet’s death, composers have continued to make fruitful discoveries among those not so slim volumes - not least Reynaldo Hahn whose first Hugo setting, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, written in 1888 at the age of thirteen, set him up for life. Britten was just a year older than that when

he wrote his Quatre Chansons Françaises as a wedding present for his parents. Never performed in his life time, they were first published in 1982 in a vocal score arranged by Colin Matthews from the soprano-and- orchestra original. The first of the two Hugo songs in the set, Nuits de juin (from Les Rayons et les ombres) is obviously overwritten but, for a mere schoolboy, what overwriting! He had been studying with Frank Bridge for only a year by this time but the means by which he attempts to capture the sensual reverberations of the poem - as though he were aware of Hugo’s description of music as “the vapour of art” - are astonishingly sophisticated. L’Enfance (from Les Contemplations) is more prophetic of the later composer, not so much in its sound, though there is less Ravel here, as in its subject matter and its imagery. With its mingling of childhood and adult experience, the latter represented by snatches of French folk song, it is a clear anticipation of At the Railway Station (or The Convict and Boy with the Violin) in Winter Words.