Villanelle des petits canards (Gérard)

Ballade des gros dindons (Rostand)

Pastorale des cochons roses (Rostand)   

Les cigales    (Gérard)

Although he spent most of his life in Paris, Chabrier was a countryman at heart. He was born in the little town of Ambert in deepest Auvergne and, in spite of his Parisian education and his nearly twenty years of service as a legal expert in the French equivalent of the Home Office, he never lost either his regional accent or his love of the countryside where he had been brought up. During the last ten years of his life, he stayed for much of the time at his country retreat at La Membrolle, near Tours, which was less remote than the Auvergne but scarcely less rural.

    So it is not surprising that when he was looking for material for a different kind of song - he had “had it up to the ears,” he said, with the insipid and depressing kind of thing commonly heard in the fashionable Parisian salons of the day - he was immediately attracted by the verse he found in Les Pipeaux by the then eighteen-year-old poet Rosemonde Gérard and Les Musardises by her fiancé Edmond Rostand (later author of Cyrano de Bergerac). Here he found none of “those stupid flower beds in three stanzas” and no “golden corn, golden eyelashes, golden hair, April nights and golden May.” What he did find was robust but affectionate caricature, reminders of everyday life in the countryside to which he could apply his sense of humour as well as his great gift for both comic and lyrical melody.

    Chabrier’s    four “poultry” or “zoo” songs, as he called them, were all written at La Membrolle early in 1890, round about the same time as the poems were first published, and dedicated for the most part to singers known for their ability in musical comedy. The melodic line of Villanelle des petits canards (Vilanelle of the Little Ducks) is important but the wit of the song is its waddling rhythms, in imitation of the movement of the ducks on the edge of the river. While the fat turkeys in Ballade des gros dindons have a more deliberate way of walking - the tolling rhythms and bell-like piano sounds derive from the fact that “dindon,” the French for turkey, and “din-don,” the French for ding-dong, sound much the same - their ponderous step is brilliantly offset by the waltz rhythms and the charmingly irrelevant allusion to Don Giovanni’s mandolin serenade in the piano solos at the end of each stanza. The satire is directed not so much at fat turkeys of course as pompous personalities of any species.

The Pastorale des cochons roses (Pastorale of the Pink Pigs) is no less fanciful but is more ambitious as a construction. With its spontaneously liberated harmonies it is the kind of setting that, but for its cheerfully trotting rhythms, might almost be applied to a serious love song - which, since the text is actually about a day in the life of a group of peregrinating pink pigs, is the comic point of the song. Perhaps the most delightful and certainly the most inspired of the four songs is Les Cigales where a monotonous grasshopper-like chirping is sustained in the repetitive dissonances in the piano part and at the same time celebrated in a melodious vocal refrain that declares the cicadas to “have more soul than viols” and to “sing better than violins.”

Gerald Larner©------------