French concert programme — Fauré, Hahn & Bordes — Concert Programmes

Offrande (Vingt Mélodies I, No.8 in C major)

L’Heure exquise (Chansons grises. No.5 in E major)

Seven songs to words by Paul Verlaine

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Clair de lune

En sourdine

Green

Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947)

Offrande

L’Heure exquise

Poldowski (Irene Wieniawska) (1880-1932)

En sourdine

Charles Bordes (1863-1909)

Dansons la gigue!

“Verlaine is exquisite to set to music,” said Gabriel Fauré, speaking for generations of composers who have been drawn to this most musical of modern French poets. Debussy was one of the earliest, writing the first of his eighteen uniquely inspired settings in 1882. Fauré, who wrote a similar number, did not realize Verlaine’s musical potential until 1887, after he had been given a copy of Fêtes galantes by Robert de Montesquiou. The great attraction, he discovered, was that Verlaine does more than merely suggest a musical dimension to the composer who has the sensitivity to hear it: sometimes he seems even to demand it from him. “There is a short poem by him, called Green,” Fauré wrote, “which contains a fresh and melancholy landscape, but this landscape is only atmosphere, ambience. Harmony must be applied to underlining the profound sentiment which the words only sketch.”

An even better illustration of the musical potential of Verlaine’s poetry is Clair de Lune, Fauré’s first Verlaine setting and surely the most inspired of his songs up to the time he wrote it in 1887. The poem (from Fêtes galantes) is a scene in a Watteau painting, the unheard music of its “almost sad” masqueraders waiting to be made perceptible by the floating rhythms and exquisite modal ambiguity of the minuet in Fauré’s piano part. The still atmosphere of En sourdine (also from Fêtes galantes) is broken at the end by the song of the nightingale, a sound which the poet could presume to be familiar to any reader’s ear. So Fauré makes no special point of the birdsong and concentrates instead on the counterpoint of the lovers’ senses with the silence around them, sustaining the arpeggio accompaniment but also drawing muted melodies in the pianist’s right hand through and round the vocal line. As for “underlining the profound sentiment” in Green (from Verlaine’s Romance sans paroles), it is done not so much by harmony as by a little motif which enters the piano part at the beginning of the second stanza and which persists in its breathless way to the end of the song. En sourdine and Green, incidentally, are the second and third numbers of Fauré’s Cinq Mélodies de Venise (written partly in Venice and partly in Paris in 1891) where their thematic material gathers additional reverberations as they echo in the Verlaine songs later in the cycle.

Verlaine himself did not much appreciate Fauré’s setting of his verse. Reynaldo Hahn’s on the other hand moved him to tears when he heard them towards the end of his life in 1893. He no doubt appreciated Hahn’s modesty. Certainly, the two composers’ settings of the same text in Fauré’s Green and Hahn’s Offrande, though written in the same year, could scarcely be more different. Whereas Fauré found “a lively, almost panting” motion implied in the words, Hahn took his clue from the restful last line of the poem, limiting rhythmic movement for the most part to two minims per bar in the piano part, repeating basically the same two chords throughout and reducing the vocal line to minimal melodic inflections. As he told Jules Massenet, his teacher of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, it was his aim to “fix, by means of notation, the characteristic inflections of every emotion.” His vocal lines are in consequence treated with great economy. His L’Heure exquise, which reserves the wider interval for the refrain, makes Fauré’s setting of the same words (La lune blanche) in La Bonne Chanson seem almost extravagant. The effect of the last line of all is heightened in Hahn’s setting by the sudden silencing of the piano arpeggios, leaving the voice to floated upwards unsupported.

Poldowski was the pseudonym of Irene Wieniawska, daughter of Henryk Wieniawski. Brought up in Brussels, where her father was based at the time, she studied composition with Gevaert at the Conservatoire there, then with Percy Pitt in London and with Gédalge and d’Indy in Paris. So, while she might have been dismissed as an opportunist if she had written under her maiden name or as an amateur if she had used her married name of Lady Dean Paul, she actually had nothing to hide behind her pseudonym. She was a thoroughly professional composer and not unsophisticated either, as he setting of En sourdine - one of her many Verlaine settings - confirms. She adopts a different texture for each stanza, pressing the voice to a surprisingly dramatic pitch of intensity in the second, confining it almost to a monotone in the fourth, and returning to the initial rocking movement and resolving the harmonic ambiguity only at the end.

Charles Bordes, a pioneer of the early music revival and one of the founders of the Schola Cantorum in Paris, was also a thoroughly professional composer, though not the most sophisticated of those around him. How much he understood of the irony of Verlaine’s Street (Soho) - a poem blending a memory of a London scene with an image of the poet’s wife Mathilde after she had discovered the truth about his relationship with Rimbaud - is open to doubt. But renamed Dansons la gigue! and taken at face value, with alternations of major and minor harmonies and a suitable relaxation of tempo for the apparently sentimental bit near the end, it is perhaps the most effective of his many Verlaine settings.

Gerald Larner©

Clair de Lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi

Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur

L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune

Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur

Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,

Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres

Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,

Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

(Paul Verlaine)

Moonlight

Your soul is a choice landscape

charmed by passing masks and bergamasks

playing the lute and dancing and almost

sad under their fantastic disguises.

While singing in the minor mode

about conquering love and the easy life ,

they seem not to believe in their happiness

and their song mingles with the moonlight,

with the calm, sad and beautiful moonlight,

which makes birds dream in the trees

and fountains sob with ecstasy

the high and slender fountains among the marbles.

En sourdine

Calmes dans le demi-jour,

Que les branches hautes font,

Pénétrons bien notre amour

De ce silence profond.

Fondons nos âmes, nous coeurs

Et nos sens estasiés,

Parmi les vagues langueurs

Des pins et des arbousiers.

Ferme tes yeux à demi,

Croise tes bras sur ton sein,

Et de ton coeur endormi

Chasse à jamais tout dessein.

Laissons-nous persuader

Au souffle berceur et doux,

Qui vient à tes pieds rider

Les ondes de gazon roux,

Et quand, solennel, le sour

Des chênes noirs tombera,

Voix de notre désespoir,

Le rossignol chantera.

Muted

Calm in the half-light

under the high branches,

Let our love be permeated

by this profound silence.

Let our souls, our hearts

and our ecstatic senses

dissolve in the vague languor

of the pine and arbutus trees.

Half-close your eyes,

cross your arms on your breast

and drive from your sleeping heart

every purpose for ever.

Let us go along

with the sweetly rocking breath

which comes to ripple at your feet

the waves of russet grass.

And when solemn night

falls from the oaks,

the voice of our despair,

the nightingale, will sing.

Green

Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches,

Et puis voici mon coeur, qui ne bat que pour vous.

Ne le déchirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches

Et qu’à vos yeux si beaux l’humble présent soit doux.

J’arrive tout couvert encore de rosée

Que le vent du matin vient glacer à mon front.

Souffrez que ma fatigue, à vos pieds reposée,

Rêve des chers instants qui la délasseront.

Sur votre jeune sein laissez rouler ma tête

Toute sonore encor de vos derniers baisers;

Laissez-la s’apaiser de la bonne tempête,

Et que je dorme un peu puisque vous reposez.

Green

Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches,

and then here is my heart which beats only for you.

Do not rend it with your two white hands

and may your lovely eyes look kindly on my humble present.

I am coming to you still all covered in dew

that the morning wind is freezing on my brow.

Allow me, resting weary at your feet,

to dream of the precious moments which will refresh me.

On your young breast let me rest my head

ringing still with your last kisses;

let it calm me down from that clement storm

and let me sleep a little, since you are resting.

Offrande - see Green above

La lune blanche

Luit dans les bois;

De chaque branche

Part une voix

Sous la ramée…

O bien-aimée.

L’étang reflète,

Profond miroir,

La silhouette

Du saule noir

Où le vent pleure…

Rêvons, c’est l’heure,

Un vaste et tendre

Apaisement

Semble descendre du firmament

Que l’astre irise…

C’est l’heure exquise.

Offering

The white moon

Shines in the woods;

From each branch

A voice is heard

Under the branches…

Oh my love.

The pond reflects,

In its deep mirror,

The silhouette

Of the black willow

Where the wind is weeping…

Let us dream, it is time,

A vast and tender

Tranquillity

Seems to descend from the firmament

Iridiscent with stars…

It is the time of enchantment.

En sourdine - see above

Dansons la gigue

Dansons la gigue!

J’aimais surtout ses jolis yeux,

Plus clairs que l’étoile des cieux,

J’aimais ses yeux malcieux.

Dansons la gigue!

Elle avait des façons vraiment

De désoler un pauvre amant,

Que c’en était vraimant charmant!

Dansons la gigue!

Mais je trouve encore meilleur

Le baiser de sa bouche en fleur,

Depuis qu’elle est morte à mon coeur.

Dansons la gigue!

Je me souviens, je me souviens

Des heures et des entretiens,

Et c’est le meilleur de mes biens.

Dansons la gigue!

Let’s Dance the Jig!

Let’s dance the jig!

I loved most her pretty eyes,

brighter than the stars in heaven,

I loved her mischievous eyes

Let’s dance the jig!

She had ways of really

distressing a poor lover,

which was really charming of her!

Let’s dance the jig!

But I love even more

the kiss of her mouth in bloom,

now that she is dead to my heart.

Let’s dance the jig!

I remember, I remember

some times and some talks we had,

and it’s the best of my possessions.

Let’s dance the jig!