2 Songs from Mélodies persanes Op.26 (1870–71)

Au Cimetière

Tournoiement

Saint-Saëns had been composing songs for 30 years, many of them to texts by Victor Hugo, before he wrote his first song cycle. The inspiration in this case was Armand Renaud, a relatively obscure poet (and an official in the Hôtel de Ville in Paris), who in 1870 published a collection of Nuits persanes (Persian nights). Being a regular visitor to the Middle East, particularly but not exclusively the French colony of Algeria, and an enthusiast for the music of the region, Saint-Saëns was immediately captivated and completed within a few months a cycle of six songs, Mélodies persanes, based on a selection of poems from Nuits persanes. Still under their spell twenty years later, at the request of Edouard Colonne he wrote a new version, Nuit persane, for contralto, tenor chorus and orchestra, adding two more Renaud settings and a spoken text to link the various sections.

Au Cimetière is remarkable for its economy, the piano restricted largely to a pattern of four crotchets per bar from beginning to end, for the comparative flexibility of the vocal line in 12/8, and for the sepulchral atmosphere. The orchestral version, which transfers the crotchets to the harp and the occasional counter-melody to violins or violas, is scarcely more colourful. Tournoiement, though not the first drug-induced delirium to be translated into musical terms, is another daring concept: the singer’s feet scarcely touch the ground as the vocal line takes flight against the semiquavers spinning between the two hands in a piano part muted and limited to one line at first but later encountering the heavy marching rhythms of “soldiers brandishing their swords” and finally disappearing into the stratosphere.