Programme — Lieder, Mein Wagen rollet langsam Op.142 No.4 (1840), Die Spinnerin Op.107 No.4 (1851) …

4 Lieder

Mein Wagen rollet langsam Op.142 No.4 (1840)

Die Spinnerin Op.107 No.4 (1851)

Herzeleid Op.107 No.1 (1851)

Nachtlied Op.96 No.1 (1850)

3 Gedichte aus den Waldliedern von Pfarrius Op.119 (1851)

Die Hütte

Warnung

Der Bräutigam und die Birke

7 Lieder Op.90 (1850)

Lied eines Schmiedes

Meine Rose

Kommen und Scheiden

Die Sennin

Einsamkeit

Der schwere Abend

Requiem

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94)

4 mélodies

Les cigales (1890)

Tes yeux bleus (c.1883)

Lied (c 1885)

Chanson pour Jeanne (c.1885)

Gabriel Fauré

Le jardin clos Op. 106 (1914)

Exaucement

Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes yeux

La messagère,

Je me poserai sur ton coeur

Dans la nymphée

Dans la pénombre

Il m’est cher, Amour, le bandeau

Inscription sur le sable

Francis Poulenc (1889–1963)

La courte paille (1960)

Le Sommeil

Quelle aventure!

La Reine de coeur

Ba, be, bi, bo, bu

Les Anges musiciens

Le Carafon

Lune d’Avril

Robert Schumann (1810–56)

4 Lieder

Mein Wagen rollet langsam Op.142 No.4 (1840)

Die Spinnerin Op.107 No.4 (1851)

Herzeleid Op.107 No.1 (1851)

Nachtlied Op.96 No.1 (1850)

3 Gedichte aus den Waldliedern von Pfarrius Op.119 (1851)

Die Hütte

Warnung

Der Bräutigam und die Birke

7 Lieder Op.90 (1850)

Lied eines Schmiedes

Meine Rose

Kommen und Scheiden

Die Sennin

Einsamkeit

Der schwere Abend

Requiem

Unlike the other items in this group of rarely heard Lieder by Schumann, Mein Wagen rollet langsam dates not from towards the end of his career as a song composer but, on the contrary, from near the beginning. Written in the same month in 1840 as the Heine settings published in Dichterliebe, it was at one time intended for that collection but was withdrawn at a late stage and – it is important to remember – never published in Schumann’s life-time. Exactly why he decided to keep it out of sight, even though he chose to release two of the three other Dichterliebe rejects in 1854, we do not know. It could be, however, that he thought it an unsatisfactory setting of Heine’s text – in which case it would be unfair to belabour it for that very reason. It is true that Schumann seems to underestimate the menace of the shadowy figures that interrupt the poet’s reverie and that the piano postlude is disproportionately long. But the beauty of the song is the piano imagery inspired by the idea of a coach rolling so gently through the woods and fields, the wheels turning once in every bar, that thoughts turn dreamiily to the beloved. The intruders do not dissipate the dream, as they do in the poem, but most effectively offset it in preparation for an extended and poetically developed recall of the gently rolling figuration in the postlude.

The first two of the late songs are both girls’ laments. Just how serious the situation is in Die Spinneriin we cannot be sure. Brahms’s paradoxical harmonies in his treatment of the same words, in Mädchenlied Op.107 No.5, seem to derive from a more personally compassionate interpretation than Schumann’s setting which, while taking an authentic place in the tradition of spinning songs, has a generic inevitability about it. The allusion to Ophelia indicates that the situation in Herzeleid could scarcely be worse, as Schumann confirms in his weeping-willow piano figuration, set in a harmonically sensitive relationship with the voice, and the hint of a funeral-march rhythm in the closing bars.

There is probably no more poignant song from this troubled period in Schumann’s life than Nachtlied which, without attempting to emulate Schubert’s famous setting of the same words, comes so close to perfection in its contemplative demeanour. At the same time – in one or two instances of rhythmic unease but above all in the questioning rather than re-assuring upward seventh on the last two words – Schumann seems to fall short in confidence that Goethe’s promise of peace actually applies to him.

It was possibly through a continuing need to identify with nature that, a year later, Schumann turned to the recently published Waldlieder (Woodland Songs) of Gustav Pfarrius. Certainly, while there was a good chance of fashioning tuneful settings of the slightly smug Die Hütte and the slighly cynical Der Brautigam und die Birke, there was no hope of a song of more than minimal complexity from either of them. Happily, however, Warnung, which shows concern for someone other than the protagonist and at the same time echoes with syncopated bird song and comparatively sophisticated harmonies, comes between the two.

The six Lenau settings of Op.90 were clearly written as a cycle and meant to be performed as one. The Lied eines Schmiedes – which opens in rude (E flat major) health a cycle which is to end in a death wish (in E flat minor) – is not so much a song in itself, in spite of its splendid hammer-wielding rythms, as an introduction. Exquisite though it is on its own, Meine Rose (in B flat major) is all the more fragrant by contrast with the workshop muscularity of its predecessor. Kommen und Scheiden is a daringly vague, almost impressionistic transitional item, beginning in one key (E flat minor) and ending in another (G flat expressed enharmonically as F sharp major) to approach the bright (B major) mountain atmosphere of the next song. But, for all its initial outdoor freshnes, Die Sennin declines into the elegiac (D sharp or E flat minor) tendency which is to prevail from this point – not least in Einsamkeit, the piano part of which the undulates throughout with the waters of the fountain while passing through a variety of tonalities but ends (in E flat minor) where it began. The desolation of Der schwere Abend is all the more intense for the (surely deliberate) allusion to Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet, the triple-time rhythm of which is at first contradicted by a vocal line in duple time as though to indicate that this is no dream.

The day after he wrote Der schwere Abend, in the belief that Lenau was dead Schumann added a Requiem for the poet in the form of a setting of a German translation of part of Héloïse’s lament for Abelard (“Requiescat e labore”). A consolatory (E flat major) inspiration, ripples with heavenly harp figuration throughout. The composer was dismayed to discover, however, that Lenau was still alive when he wrote it. Worse still, he actually died on the day of the first performance of the six Lenau songs and the Requiem just before the Schumann family left Dresden for what they hoped would be a new life in Düsseldorf.

Chabrier

Perhaps the most delightful and certainly the most inspired of the four songs is Les Cigales where a monotonous grasshopper-like chirping is sustained in the repetitive dissonances in the piano part and at the same time celebrated in a melodious vocal refrain that declares the cicadas to “have more soul than viols” and to “sing better than violins.”

the cicadas of Chabrier’s Les cigales. One of a set of four “zoo songs,” written at the composer’s country retreat in Touraine, Les cigales echoes throughout with a joyfully dissonant chirping in the piano part and three times resolves into the major for a delightfully melodious refrain.

Although Chabrier presumably cannot have known Maurice Rollinat’s Tes yeux bleus before it was published in his Névroses in 1883, the song cannot have been written very long after the composer’s first, traumatic encounter with Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880. Certainly, the love scene is still echoing in his memory here, alongside chromatic extensions that even Wagner himself would not have thought of. Formative experience though Tristan was, however, it is rare that its influence shows through so clearly in Chabrier’s music. Lied, written perhaps two years after Tes yeux bleus, is no less sophisticated but is pure Chabrier. While the innocently mischievous rhythms and provocative harmonies of his setting of these faux-naif verses by Catulle Mendès might seem unthinkingly spontaneous, they are finely calculated elements in a precisely accurate study in characterisation.

When Francis Poulenc said of Chabrier’s Lied that he knew nothing “more impertinent in the entire literature of French song” he hit on exactly the right word. Impertinence is not an easy attitude to express in music. Most composers, relying on the words to do it for them, wouldn’t have tried.

Like most Chabrier fans, Francis Poulenc - who loved Lied for its “impertinence” - deplored the influence of the “insufferable” Mendès. But he surely agreed that both here and in Chanson pour Jeanne, which was also written in about 1885, the poet supplied the composer with just what he needed. Undistinguished though the words of Chanson pour Jeanne are, and dangerously close though the setting comes to the salon in its early stages, Chabrier’s subtly equivocal harmonies here are so original in their application that they had a profound effect on the development of another distinguished Chabrier admirer, Maurice Ravel.

Fauré

Le jardin clos Van Lerberghe July–Nov 1914 (1915)

Poulenc

Poulenc’s last song cycle was written in 1960 for Denise Duval who, after the retirement of Pierre Bernac, was his favourite singer. Or rather, as the composer explained, “they were written for Denise Duval to sing to her little boy of six.” Unfortunately, although the cycle was dedicated to her – “the light of my heart and my music” – Duval didn’t much like La Courte Paille and never actually sang it. The reason is perhaps not too difficult to find. Of the seven little poems chosen from Maurice Carême’s La Cage aux grillons and Le Voleur d’étincelles, only three are the playful sort of thing you might expect in a children’s song and two are positively sinister.

One can well imagine a mother being reluctant to tempt fate with the first song in the cycle, Le Sommeil: set as not so gentle a lullaby with worrying chromatic intrusions on its C major harmonies, it is clearly addressed to a child who is sick. Even Quelle aventure!, which is one of the more fanciful poems and represents Poulenc in music-hall mode, has its alarming aspects for the child at least. La Reine de coeur, written for the most part in the manner of a popular song in easily flowing slow-waltz time, finds itself in an uneasy harmonic situation in the spooky third stanza. Ba, be, bi, bo, bu, beginning with a nursery mnemonic for vowels and including another one for nouns that take ‘x’ rather than ‘s’ in the plural, is a small-scale anarchist rebellion against lessons. Poulenc enjoyed quoting Mozart, as he discreetly does in the piano part at the beginning and end of Les Anges musiciens, and the angels clearly share his enthusiasm. But not many six-year-olds do. Le Carafon is a delightful blend of music-hall rhythms and popular-song melody entirely appropriate to its amusingly whimsical words – until, that is, the detached and curiously dry minor chord at the end. If the idealistic vision of Carême’s Lune d’Avril seems a little off-topic, Poulenc’s serenely melodious setting links it harmonically to Le Sommeil and completes the cycle in C major tranquillity, as the piano postlude confirms.