Réponse d’une épouse sage from Deux Poèmes chinois Op35 (1927)

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.