Scènes d’enfants

Cris dans la rue: gai

Jeux sur la plage -

Jeu 1: vif

Jeu 2: vif - très vif

Jeu 3: vif

Jeunes Filles au jardin: calme - vif

Partly French by descent, Mompou studied piano and harmony in Paris before the First World War and on his return to France in 1921 he chose to stay there for as long as twenty years. The composers he most admired among his contemporaries, Satie and Debussy prominent among them, were French. His true home, however, was Barcelona, where he spent the first eighteen and the last forty-six years of his life, and the sources of his inspiration were predominantly Catalan. His major piano work, Cançons i Danses, which he started in 1918 and completed in 1962, is based almost entirely on Catalan songs and dances. In spite of its French title and its implied associations with Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Scènes d’enfants (Scenes with Children) derives directly from Mompou’s observation of life in Barcelona.

In the absence of bar lines and key signatures Scènes d’enfants looks on the printed page like a score by Satie. For the most part, however, its sound is distinctively its own. Written between 1915 and 1918, after the outbreak of war had caused the composer to return from Paris to Barcelona, the music echoes with the cries of children at play on the streets, beaches and gardens of the city. The three central movements, Jeux sur la plage, were completed first and the two outer movements, both of which makes an attractive feature of the Catalan song La Filla del marxant, were added later to form a kind of cyclic framework.

In Cris dans la rue, which opens with the children’s cries in the street characteristically harmonised in primitive fourths and fifths, La Filla del marxant is introduced at a slower tempo and a gently lilting rhythm just before the return of the cries at the end. While all three of the Jeux sur la plage begin and end with more children’s cries, their central sections are quite different - a hypnotically repetitive Satie-like dance in the first case, a more petulant episode in the second and a dramatic exchange in the third. In Jeunes Filles au jardin, although they too have their shrill cry, the little girls in the garden are characterised by a more tender melody and more sophisticated harmonies than the children on the beach. La Filla del marxant - “to be sung with the freshness of damp grass” according to the composer’s direction - is heard again before a last recall of the cries of the girls at play.