7 Chants d’Auvergne

Pastourelle

2 Bourrées: N'aii pas iéu de mio;    Lo Calhé           

Uno jionto    pastouro

Tè,    l'co, tè!

Baïléro

Malurous qu'o uno fenno

Although it has given few composers to the world – Emmanuel Chabrier is the only one of any significance – the Auvergne is (or was) 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 generally mountainous country where life was traditionally hard and which, because of its backward rural economy, remained largely unspoiled until well into the 20th century.

Joseph Canteloube, who was born in Annonay in the neighbouring Rhône Valley, started collecting folksongs in the Auvergne in the 1890s when the language of the region (nearer to Catalan than standard French) and its folk culture were still more or less intact. The first four books of his Chants d’Auvergne – comprising twenty-two songs, all in his own, often extravagant arrangements for the concert hall – were first performed between 1925 and 1932 and proved far more popular than any of his original compositions. Although, having studied with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, he was well equipped as a composer, little else in his prolific output has proved to be of lasting value. A fifth book of Chants d’Auvergne was published after a long absence from composition in 1955 but, perhaps because his treatment of the folk material had lost something of its earlier freshness, it was less successful than the others.

The principal source of Auvergnat 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 love songs, often featuring colourful local characters of one kind or another. Canteloube clearly had a particular weakness for the shepherdesses of the region – even those, as Pastourelle seems to suggest, who were not particularly pretty. Pastourelle (from Book 2) is one of the best examples of    a song developed to make use of natural acoustics to carry words, at a necessarily slow tempo, across such distances as the breadth of a river or the valley between two hillsides. If the orchestral setting seems over-glamourous for such a subject, it is because the composer was concerned not so much to echo the authentic folk instruments of the region as to evoke its romantic atmosphere. “If you suppress this atmosphere,” he said, “you lose a large part of the poetry.”

The instrumental accompaniment to the bourrée – the favourite dance form of the Auvergne, where a triple-time version co-existed with the duple-time version adopted by baroque composers –    would obviously not have been as sophisticated as that applied by Canteloube to the two triple-time examples included in Book 2, N'aii pas iéu de mio and Lo Calhé. He does, however, create a distinctive sound by means of an imaginative musettte-style colouring and prominent, modally inflected woodwind solos, not least from the clarinet in an expressive, unaccompanied solo episode between the two dances. After two vividly contrasted songs from the rarely visited Book 5, a shepherdess’s lament in Uno jionto    pastouro and her shrill commands to her dog in Tè, l'co, tè! comes what must be the most popular of all the Chants d’Auvergne. Another evocation of shepherds singing across a river, Baïléro from Book 1 is as much a rhapsody to the countryside round Vic-sur-Cere in Cantal where the song originated as it is a celebration of the melody which grew out of it. Romantic though the Auvergne peasants were, however, they also had a healthy and even cynical sense of humour, as Malurous qu’o uno fenno (Book 3) clearly demonstrates. Between the two verses Canteloube takes the opportunity to introduce a more than usually realistic simulation of the instrumental music he heard in the Auvergne.

Gerald Larner © 2010