Ariettes oubliées

C’est l’extase

Il pleure dans mon coeur

L’ombre des arbres

Chevaux de bois

Green

Spleen

Debussy set more of Verlaine than of any other poet. Although the two men had little in common, there was something in Paul Verlaine’s poetry that Debussy identified as essentially of himself, above all when he was in love with Marie-Blanche Vasnier in his early twenties. Fourteen years older than the composer, Mme Vasnier was an amateur singer with a voice of such beauty that she inspired the best of his early songs – including his first real masterpiece, a series of six Ariettes based on texts from Verlaine’s 1875 collection, Romances sans paroles . The songs were completed just as the affair was coming to an end and first published in 1888, when Debussy inscribed a copy of each one “to Mme Vasnier, in grateful homage.” Five years later he dedicated a second edition of the same songs, now called Ariettes oubliées (“Forgotten Airs”) to Mary Garden, his “unforgettable” first Mélisande.

Each of the Ariettes oubliées reflects a singular state of mind, one that is familiar and yet indefinable in language any more explicit than Verlaine’s poetry, sensitively illuminated though it is by Debussy’s music. C’est l’extase, words whispered in the night perhaps by one lover to another, is a characteristic example: the vocal line takes its shape not from any preconceived melodic idea but from the natural inflections of the text, while the piano harmonies are designed to suggest the enchanted quality of the atmosphere. Il pleure dans mon coeur is a more regular setting, the rain pattering in the persistent figuration of the piano part and appealingly allied with a recurring melodic phrase formed by the words “O bruit doux de la pluie.” In L’Ombre des arbres too there is a recurrent phrase – inspired perhaps by the song of the turtle doves and heard first in the opening bars – which in this case is the one constant element in music as elusive as the shadows on the misty river.

Chevaux de bois, the earliest of the six Ariettes, is different from the others in that it is an observation of an external rather than internal event, the music as brilliantly colourful and, until nightfall halts the activity, as regular in its revolutions as the fairground horses. It is well placed before the poignant pairing of Green and Spleen, the one recalling the erotic bliss of C’est l’extase, the other marking the end of the affair in a song based on a melancholy piano melody that anticipates and confirms the disillusion expressed in the vocal part.