3 mélodies

Le jardin mouillé Op.3 No.3 (1903)

Réponse d’une épouse sage Op.35 No.2 (1927)

Le bachelier de Salamanque Op.20 No.1 (1919)

The most influential of Henri de Régnier’s poems, at least as far as music is concerned, is his Fête d’eau – not because a great song came out of it but because it inspired the earliest piece of piano impressionism, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau. When, two years after Ravel had completed that work, Roussel came to write his first set of songs, the Quatre Poèmes Op.9 to words by Régnier, he seems, consciously or not, to have chosen Le jardin mouillé for the echoes of Jeux d’eau it brought to mind. Certainly, as the rain faills on the garden in Roussel’s setting the source of the piano figuraton is unmistakable, even though the melancholy that permeates the song is far from the sensuality of Ravel’s piano piece.

Among Roussel’s forty or so mélodies are three sets of Deux Poèmes chinois which – written in 1908, 1927 and 1932 respectively – are precious tokens of the composer’s long-term interest in the culture of the Far East. Based in every case on Henri-Pierre Roché’s French versions of Herbert Giles’s English translations from the ancient Chinese, they become less conspicuously oriental in their language, from the overt pentatoncism of Op.12 to the spare chromaticism of Op 47 twenty-four years later, and ever more crystalline in expression. Perhaps the most inspired of them, or even of all Roussel’s songs, is Réponse d’une épouse sage from the 1927 set, which is a concise but illuminatingly truthful character study. The discreet exoticism allied to the formality of the first few lines suggests an erotic vulnerability which, after the severe scolding of the middle section, is most touchingly confirmed when the opening is recalled with a shift of emotional emphasis at the end.

In Le bachelier de Salamanque, one of two settings of poems by René Chalupt written eight years earlier in 1919, Roussel is similarly discreet in his use of local colour. The influence of guitar figuration on the piano part is clear enough but its effect is ironic rather than atmospheric. Its purpose is to offset the characteristically restrained but poignant moment of pathos towards the end. The piano, however, refuses to be drawn into the sentiment.