6 Folksongs of the Auvergne

Bailèro (Shepherd’s song)

Thut, tchut (Hush, hush)

Brezairola (Lullaby)

Malurous qu’o uno fenno (Unfortunate he who has a wife)

Là-haut, sur le rocher (High on the rock)

Lou Coucout - (The cuckoo)

Although it has given few composers to the world - Emmanuel Chabrier is the only one of any significance - the Auvergne is a region rich in folk song. Situated at the heart of the Massif Central in the middle of the southern half of France, it is a mountainous country where life is traditionally hard and which, because of its backward rural economy, remained largely unspoiled until well into the twentieth century. Joseph Canteloube, who was born in Annonay in the neighbouring region of the Rhône Valley, started collecting folk songs in the Auvergne in 1895, when the folk culture and the language of the region (nearer to Catalan than standard French) were still more or less intact. By 1955 he had published thirty Chants d’Auvergne, all in his own sophisticated arrangements and all far more successful than any of his own original works.

Canteloube’s main source of folk song was the shepherd community who, left to themselves in the mountains for months on end, had plenty of time to develop the art of singing of their own experience to melodies based on the traditional modes of the region. There are lullabies, comic dialogues, work songs and, of course, love songs. Baïlèro, the earliest and much the most popular of Canteloube’s folk song arrangements is both an authentic evocation of shepherds calling to each other across the river and a rhapsody to the countryside round Cantal where the song originated. While his affection for the Auvergne peasant girls is very prettily demonstrated in the flirtatious Tchut, tchut his love of the region and its music is nowhere more evident, than in his tenderly scored, gently rocking accompaniment to the traditional lullaby Brezairola.

Romantic though the Auvergne shepherds and shepherdesses were, however, they also had a healthy and, as Malurous qu’o uno fenno clearly demonstrates, even cynical sense of humour. Between the two stanzas Canteloube takes the opportunity to introduce a short but delightful pastiche of the Auvergnat instrumental music. If Là-haut, sur le rocher, a strangely sentimental setting of not very sympathetic words in standard French, is uncharacteristic of Canteloube at his best, Lou Coucout, a brilliantly orchestrated and wittily harmonised salute to the cuckoo, is much more like the real thing.