Venezia: chansons en dialecte vénitien (1901)

Sopra l’acque indormenzada

La barcheta

L’Avertimento

La Biondina in gondoleta

Che pecà

La Primavera

The first performance of Reynaldo Hahn’s Venezia was given on a gondola - which somehow accommodated both the composer and his piano as well as two gondoliers - at a place in Venice where, he recalled, “three canals met three charming bridges… Gradually passers-by gathered on the bridges, an audience of ordinary people pressing forward to listen.” Naturally, they were delighted by what they heard, partly because Hahn was so expert in accompanying himself at the piano but mainly, one imagines, because in setting these dialect poems he had so accurately and so affectionately mimicked the Venetian idiom.

All six songs are characteristically uncomplicated, musical preoccupations never taking precedence over the natural pitch inflections and rhythmic requirements of the words. And they are effectively grouped - L’Avertimento introducing a timely note of scepticism after two romantic nocturnes, Che pecà presenting an entertainingly ironic study in matrimonial disillusion after the fresh eroticism of La Biondina in gondoleta, and Primavera cheerfully anticipating further joys to come. It is difficult to think of any other French composer - before Poulenc at least - who could have set these poems so modestly without, on the one hand, intellectualising them or, on the other hand, sending up the kind of music that naturally goes with them.