Trois ballades de François Villon (1910)

Ballade de Villon à s’amye

Ballade que Villon feit à la requeste de sa mère pour prier Nostre-Dame

Ballade des femmes de Paris

Having devoted himself for most of his career as a song composer to modern poets - Verlaine most prominent among them - Debussy turned his attention at a comparatively late stage in his development to three representatives of the distant or fairly distant past: Charles d’Orléans and François Villon, both of whom were writing their ballades round the middle of the fifteenth century, and Tristan l’Hermite, who flourished two centuries later. Charles d’Orléans (whose verse Debussy first set to music for unaccompanied chorus in 1898) inspired two of the Trois Chansons de France in 1904, Tristan l’Hermite the other Chanson de France and then the Promenoir des deux amants six years later, François Villon the Trois Ballades also in 1910.

“Real verse,” Debussy said in 1911, “has its own rhythm, which is rather awkward for us.” Explaining why he thought prose poetry easier to set, he went on to say that “recently, I don’t know why, I set three Villon ballades to music… Yes, I know why: because I had long wanted to. Well, it’s very difficult to follow those rhythms truthfully, to put a musical ‘plating’ on them, while preserving their inspiration. If you fake it, if you are happy just to put one beside the other, obviously it’s not difficult, but it’s not worth the trouble either. Classic verse has its own life, an ‘interior dynamic,’ which is none of our business.”

Needless to say, Debussy’s treatment of Villon’s rhythms is infinitely flexible. In Ballade de Villon à s’amye nothing is predictable except the rhythm of the refrain “ung povre secourir” which, in accordance with the rule of the medieval ballade, recurs at the end of all four stanzas. The rigour in the setting is in the obsessively repeated reverse-dotted rhythmic motif in the piano part which, as is clear from the harmonies that go with it and its adoption by the voice on the anguished “Haro, haro,” reflects the desperate nature of the situation in which the rejected lover finds himself. The one place where it is not to be heard is in the first lines of the third stanza, where he briefly indulges himself in angered bitterness. The “prince amoureux” apostrophised in the last stanza, incidentally, is none other than Charles d’Orléans, nephew of Charles VI, whom Villon acknowledged as the master of the ballade.

Although Debussy avoided obvious archaisms in these settings - Villon’s fifteenth century language would certainly justify them - he could scarcely avoid admitting a modal flavour to Ballade que Villon feit à la request de sa mère pour prier Nostre-Dame. The setting derives much of its aura of simple faith - “En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir” as the refrain has it - from its modal harmonies. Together with the parallel triads in the piano part they impart the atmosphere of holy innocence that is so effectively offset by the alien harmonies that intrude with the devil in the second stanza and the torments of hell in the third.

Ballade des femmes de Paris, an exercise in verbal virtuosity on Villon’s part, inspires a setting which, with its brilliant toccato accompaniment and its breathtaking vocal acrobatics, demonstrates that - while it might be true that “il n’est bon bec que de Paris” - the composer certainly made the “interior dynamic” of the poem his business in this particular case.

Gerald Larner©