3 mélodies

Manteau de fleurs (1903)

Le Cygne (1906)

Le Paon (1906)

Whatever his talents as a poet and actor, Paul Barthélémy Jeulin – who wrote under his stage name Paul Gravollet – was clearly an accomplished self-publicist. Without that ability, or a lot of money, or both, he would surely not have been able to get as many as 22 eminent French composers to contribute to the collection of settings of his poems published in 1905 under the title Frissons. Not even Ravel and Debussy (let alone Chaminade, d’Indy, Caplet, Widor and all the others) were able to compensate for the banality of the verse and produce a thoroughly distinctive and memorable song. This is not to say, however, that their efforts are uninteresting or unattractive. Ravel’s Manteau de fleurs is, in fact, remarkable for its elaborate expressivity – not just the rosey haze secured by the chromatically harmonised piano tremolandos and the contrastingly chaste chords applied the lily half-way through but also the similarly symbolic counterpoints to the vocal line. Perhaps because the linear aspect of the piano part is dificult to register in performance, Ravel made (but did not publish) a version of the song for voice and orchestra.

Among poets working at the same time and in the same language there could scarcely be a bigger contrast than that between the flowery verse of Paul Gravollet and the pithy prose poems of Jules Renard. Although Renard was reluctant to give Ravel his permission to set his Histoires naturaeles – he couldn’t see the point – the composer insisted that he only wanted “to say with music what you say with words” and finally got his way. The first performance at the Société Nationale in 1907 was not a great success: Gabriel Fauré’s comment, “I like Ravel very much but I wish he wouldn’t set such things to music” was a characteristic reaction to mélodies based on prose and, as a natural conseqence, resistant to the convention that song settings must sound the mute ‘e’.

One reason why Ravel was so enthusiastic about the Histoires naturelles must have been that he shared the poet’s sense of irony. In Le Cygne ­– the third song in a set of five – the swan, ostensibly chasing reflections of clouds in the water, floats on ripples of Debussy-like impressionism, but only until its poetic pretensions are drily dismissed in the end. In Le Paon, strutting about in his best clothes as though it were his wedding day, the peacock is accompanied in his progress by the stately dotted rhythms of the Baroque French overture; his “diabolical cry” of “Léon! Léon!” is heralded by a crescendo of discords and his ceremonial display of his tail feathers signalled by a dramatic glissando in both hands.