Si tu le veux from Cinq Mélodies Op5 (1894)

Keep that schoolgirl complexion from Premier Album de Lilian Op139 (1934)

Si tu le veux, the most freqently performed of Koechlin’s not far short of a hundred songs, was one of the earliest to be written - before eccentricity, sometimes genial but sometimes alienating too, began to leave its mark on his composition. Actually, even Si tu le veux might have failed to make it into the regular repertoire if Koechlin’s publisher hadn’t persuaded him to drop the words by Armand Sylvestre for which the music was originally conceived and replace them with seductive verse by Maurice de Marsan. Certainly, it is a very attractive song in this form. Modestly structured on a ternary pattern and reminiscent of Koechlin’s teacher Fauré in melodic and harmonic style (if not in its extravagantly expressive vocal writing), it is peculiarly hypnotic in effect.

One of the most bizarre manifestations of Koechlin’s eccentricity was his obsession with the 1930s film star Lilian Harvey, who inspired an embarrassingly large number pieces of music of one kind or another - beginning in 1933 with the second movement of a Seven Stars Symphony featuring also Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings and Charlie Chaplin. From 1934 to 1937, however - before he briefly turned his attention to Ginger Rogers and Jean Harlow - he was devoted exclusively to Lilian, with whom he corresponded in a way by writing his own words for the songs he addressed to her. As Graham Johnson has wittily observed, it must be the only example of “stalking” through music. Keep that school girl complexion, the title of which comes from the Palmolive slogan of the day, is the first of nine pieces in the Premier Album de Lilian of 1934. By no means an advertising jingle in style, it is remarkably free in rhythm (in no set metre), liberated in harmony (in no fixed tonality), flexible in line, suprisingly passionate in expression and lovingly written for the voice.