Tombez mes ailes (1866)

Gounod, according to Maurice Ravel, was nothing less than “the true founder of the mélodie in France.” However that may be - and Berlioz is the only other candidate - it is certainly true that he was an early contributor to the peculiarly French tradition of insect songs. Culminating in Le Grillon in Ravel’s Histoires naturelles in 1906, the tradition goes back at least as far as 1842 and Gounod’s setting of Hugo’s La Fleur au papillon, which was later to inspire one of Fauré’s earliest songs. Gounod’s other insect song Tombez mes ailes was written more than twenty years later to words by Ernest Legouvé (1807-1903), who was a dedicated pioneer of feminism, not much of a poet, and clearly not an entomologist. Although the poem is more about being a mother than being a butterfly, Gounod happily does not resist the temptation to base his setting on a fluttering figuration in the upper half of the keyboard, effectively offsetting the darker piano colours when the butterfly comes down to earth at the end.