4 Hugo Songs

Guitare (1856 rev 1885)

Puis’qu’ici-bas (1856 rev1885)

Oh Quand je dors (1856 rev1885)

Dieu qui sourit (1856 rev1885)

Édouard Lalo was not the first composer to set a poem by Victor Hugo. That distinction should probably go to Ferdinand Hérold (of Zampa fame) who wrote a patriotic chorus on Hymne au morts de juillet in 1831. Then there was Berlioz in 1832, followed at some distance by Wagner, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Franck and Gounod. Lalo was, however, the first composer to devote a whole set of songs to France’s leading poet of the day, the “6 mélodies avec accompagnement de piano, poésie de Victor Hugo” published in Paris in 1856.

Lalo revised his Hugo settings in 1885 but (except for one of the two songs not included in today’s programme) the second versions are not very different from the first and give a good idea of how innovative they were in 1856. While they are still strophic in form, they are true mélodies in that the piano part is not just an accompaniment but is intimately involved in the expression. Guitare (Hugo called the poem Autre Guitare to distinguish it from a Guitare also included in Les Rayons et les Ombres) cannot compete with Bizet’s later setting in terms of charm and local colour but, in its left-hand guitar sounds, it has more of Spain in it than an earlier version by the 16-year-old Saint-Saens and, thanks partly to its melodious piano part, more textural interest than either. Puis’qu’ici-bas (from Les voix intérieures), another favourite with composers, is set here with a sophisticated harmonic subtley as it wavers between minor and major and finally, and sweetly, chooses the latter.

The piano part of Oh Quand je dors is so elaborate in comparison with the others that one wonders whether Lalo had seen Liszt’s 1842 setting of the same words (his much simplified revision had not been published at this point). Certainly, it is the most ambitious of Lalo’s Hugo songs, not exactly through-composed but, with its expressive change of harmony for the second stanza and its varied piano figuration, not just unthinkingly strophic either. Dieu qui sourit (also from Les Rayons et les Ombres) is contrastingly straightforward and, not least because of its dashing piano part, irresistible in its momentum.

Check on order in which these composers came to Hugo