Sept chansons pour Gladys Op.151 (1935)

M’a dit amour

Tu croyais le tenir

Prise au piège

La Naïade

Le Cyclone

La Colombe

Charles Koechlin was probably not the only composer in his 60s to fall for the Anglo-German film star Lilian Harvey in the 1930s. It is even possible that other former Fauré pupils could be counted among the fans of “the sweetest girl in the world.” But Koechlin was surely unique in an obsession so intense as to produce well over a hundred songs and instrumental pieces in homage to her. They are collected in two Albums de Lilian (1934 and 1935 respectively), Le portrait de Daisy Hamilton (1934) and the present Sept chansons pour Gladys. He had other screen idols – hence his Cinq Danses pour Ginger, an Epitaphe pour Jean Harlow and the monumental Seven Stars Symphony – but Lilian Harvey was the only one he actually wrote into a film scenario in which she would star opposite himself.

The inspiration for the Sept chansons pour Gladys was a film issued in French (Calais-Douvres) and German (Nie wieder Liebe) versions in 1931. The male lead with the orthographically suspect name of Macferson (André Roanne) has made a bet that he can live without women for five years and goes on a cruise with a crew of like-minded misogynists. After four years, however, he saves the life of the drowning Gladys O’Halloran (Lilian Harvey) and, in spite of a resolution to the contrary, falls in love with her. Koechlin apparently first saw the film in 1934, which resulted in four piano pieces for his Lilan Harvey tribute Le portrait de Daisy Hamilton, and then again in 1935, when he wrote what turned out to be the last of his not far short of 100 songs, Sept chansons pour Gladys.

The modally inflected, though beautifully shaped, vocal line of the minimally accompanied M’a dit amour and the more discreetly archaic style of Tu croyais le tenir are both well suited to the somewhat old-fashioned moralistic tone adopted by Koechlin in his words for these songs. In Prise au piège he avoids the harmonic banality which might have been an aptly ironic if obvious comment on the way that all film scenarios end. La Naïde blends archaism and modernism in a way entirely appropriate to the mixture of languages – Renaissance French, film-script Hollywood, and Catullian Latin – in the, even by Koechlin’s standards, eccentric text. The “fidèle Jean” referred to in Le Cyclone is a character in Calais-Douvres and the “savant d’Angleterre” none other, Koechlin tells Lillian, than the William Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood – a literary contrivance made almost acceptable the climax of blood-boiling figuration in the piano part. The most lyrical and perhaps the most attractive songs in the set are the last two – La colombe, with its seductive echo of Debussy towards the end, and Fatum, a re-setting of words used in the song “On ne lutte rien contre l’amour” in Calais-Douvres.