French concert programme — Fauré, Mernier, Debussy & others — Concert Programmes

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Cinq mélodies de Venise Op.58 (1891)

Mandoline

En sourdine

Green

À Clymène

C’est l’extase

Benoît Mernier (b 1964)

Dans l’interminable ennui de la plaine (2010)

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Ariettes oubliées (1888–1895)

C’est l’extase

Il pleure dans mon coeur

L’ombre des arbres

Chevaux de bois

Green

Spleen

Bernard Foccroulle (b 1953)

3 Verlaine songs (2011)

Le piano que baise une main frêle

Ganyméde

De la douceur

Dansons la gigue

Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947)

3 Songs from Chansons grises (1887–90)

Tous deux

L’Heure exquise

Fêtes galantes

Fauré was neither the first nor the last composer to discover that “Verlaine is exquisite to set to music” but no one was more profoundly affected. The excitement of the discovery inspired his first song cycle, the Cinq Mélodies de Venise, which he started on holiday in Venice in the summer of 1891 and which, ordering the songs to make a loose kind of narrative while making harmonic and thematic connections between them, he completed on his return to Paris.

Mandoline is delightful in itself, of course, the piano imitating a plucked mandolin in its accompaniment and later taking over the decorative chromatic line introduced by the voice when it comes to the bird song in the first stanza. En sourdine, accompanied by gently rolling arpeggios and an expressive right-hand that joins the voice in counterpoint in the third line, is another lovely song in its own right. But the two are linked by a little phrase they have in common. In En sourdine that phrase is set in high profile in the piano part at the beginning of the fourth stanza. In Green the eager sentiment of Verlaine’s verse is reflected in the variety of harmonies applied to a variant of the little phrase common to the first two songs: it enters the piano part at the beginning of the second stanza and persists in its breathless way to the end.

Debussy set all but one of these five texts before Fauré approached them. The one he avoided is À Clymène which, since the poem is one long sentence, is an awkward subject for music. It must have appealed to Fauré, however, for its allusion to the barcarolle, which is an essentially Venetian song form. Certainly, he sets it in a characteristic barcarolle meter and integrates it into his Venetian cycle by incorporating the little phrase in the modal melody first heard in the piano introduction. The unity of the work is confirmed in C’est l’extase where the little phrase reappears prominently in the piano part and relates the whole cycle to this final expression of amorous ecstasy.

The younger of the two Belgian organist-composers represented in this programme, Benoît Mernier wrote his Deux Mélodies d’après Verlaine in 2010. They were first performed in Liège in February last year by Sophie Karthäuser and Cédric Tiberghien. In Dans l’interminable ennui de la plaine Mernier too seems to have found Verlaine “exquisite to set to music,” not least because the formal pattern of the poem – the first stanza repeated as the sixth, the second as the fourth – is so musically conceived. True to the uneventfulness of the scene in the snowy plain, the vocal part inflects slowly and, except at the end of the fourth stanza, with minimal passion. The motion and the colour, appropiately restrained, are in the sensitively drawn piano part.

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 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.

Bernard Foccroulle has contributed four songs to Sophie Karthäuser’s Verlaine anthology. He is clearly not reluctant to take on a challenge. Avoided by other composers, perhaps because it is almost music in itself, Le piano que baise une main frêle, inspires here not so much an attempt to make audible its faintly perceptible music as a dramatic response to the catastrophe implied in its penultimate line. It is presumably the obscurities that have discouraged others from approaching Ganymède: in Fouccroulle’s setting they are unshrinkingly reflected in the dissonances of the piano harmonies and an angular but not unshapely vocal line. The other two Verlaine poems seem to have persuaded the composer to relax his rigour. De la douceur releases a lyrical line from the cramped harmonies of the piano part, while Dansons la gigue (most entertainingly set in the 19th century by Charles Bordes) admits appropriately grotesque dancing rhythms.

Although he was not the greatest of those composers who regularly set French verse to music Reynaldo Hahn was unsurpassed in his sensitivity to the beauty and the integrity of the poetic text. It was Hahn’s not Fauré’s or Debussy’s Verlaine settings that moved the poet to tears. Their economy of means, their essential modesty, allowed the words to inflect as Verlaine heard them. Tous deux, with its unaffectedly joyful and rhythmically scarcely changing piano part, makes Fauré’s setting of the same words in La bonne chanson seem complicated. Simlarly, his L’Heure exquise, which reserves the wider intervals for the refrain, makes Fauré’s version seem almost extravagant. As for Hahn’s gift for popular melody, one of the most entertaining examples is is the festive piano tune that illuminates Fêtes galantes, a surprisingly bright setting of Verlaine’s Mandoline. Though set by the poet in the moonlight, as the comparatively veiled settings by Fauré and Debussy duly acknowledge, it thrives quite happily on its apparently daytime exposure here.