Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé

Soupir

Placet futile

Surgi de la croupe et du bond

After a first half of songs based on folk texts, the second half of the programme begins with three mélodies inspired by some of the most sophisticated poetry ever set to music. While it is remarkable enough that Ravel chose to work on Mallarmé poems that are so very difficult to understand, it is quite extraordinary that Debussy was doing much the same thing at much the same time. It could be that both composers had found their interest in Mallarmé renewed by an important complete edition recently published by the Nouvelle Revue française but the fact that, out of the dozens of poems they had to choose from, they both selected Soupir and Placet futile was, according to Debussy, “a phenomenon of auto-suggestion worthy of interest to the Academy of Medicine.”

However that may be, in the modernist frame of mind Ravel was in at the time, under the influence mainly of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Mallarmé’s verse was just the sort of challenge he needed. He didn’t know Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire but he knew of it from Stravinsky, who had been present at the first performance in Vienna in 1912, and he had seen Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics with an instrumental ensemble similar to that of Pierrot Lunaire. Scoring his settings for piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, string quartet and piano, Ravel “joined,” he said, “the Schoenberg school… If they didn’t become quite Schoenberg it is because, in music, I am not so wary of charm, which is something he avoids to the point of asceticism, martyrdom even.” On their first performance, in the chamber version, in Paris in January 1914 the public was duly charmed even if they did not, as Ravel had jokingly predicted, “go home humming the tunes.”

There are no hummable tunes in the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé. There is melody - the first of them contains one of the most shapely and most sustained of all Ravel’s melodic lines - but, as in his Histoires naturelles, it observes no regular pattern and is determined entirely by the natural rhythms and pitch inflections of the text. There is also an intense lyricism illuminated, even in the piano-only version, by an exquisitely calculated vocal and instrumental sound. The luminous colouring of the muted piano arpeggios reflecting the poet’s white fountains sighing “towards the Azure” in the first half of the autumnally lingering Soupir is only the first example of Ravel’s magical scoring here. Writing of Placet futile, an evocation of a pastoral scene echoing with half-reminders of Daphnis et Chloé, the composer confessed that it was a “great audacity to have attempted to set this sonnet.” He had to match not only the preciosity and elegance of the text, he said, but also “the profound and adorable tenderness which suffuses it.” This he certainly succeeded in doing in music which at one point, where the recurring instrumental melody and the vocal line coincide, touches on pure romantic sentiment.

Mallarmé’s Surgi de la croupe et du bond, which Ravel set to music a few months later than the others, has few obvious attractions for a composer Ravel himself described it as “the strangest if not the most hermetic of the sonnets” and, unless it was in a spirit of competition with Debussy, it is difficult to understand why he chose it. The tenuous hold on meaning in the text is reflected by a similarly tenuous hold on tonality in the music. The conclusion is achieved not be a harmonically definitive cadence but by the ingenious device of having the voice agree to adopt the winding melody of the piano accompaniment and, finally, to echo the repeated notes which have been the one stable element in the flux. It was as far as Ravel was ever go in the modernist direction.