Souveraines: Poèmes d’un autre jour

Description

The red thread of female creativity unites the works recorded in this Da Vinci Classics album, which explores how poetry and music can intertwine in the form of Lieder or mélodies. In some cases, the works recorded here are offered in their original version; in others, the recording artists have put their own creativity in the front line, realizing new combinations or commissioning new works.
The opening is entrusted to two works by David Walter, a living composer who is also the oboist in this project, permanent member of the Moragues Quintet since 1980, among others. He sets to music a poem by one of the protagonists of the French symbolism, i.e. Arthur Rimbaud. At the time of its composition, Rimbaud was just 16; whilst his young age may have prevented him from attempting novel poetical structures (as he would do later in his life), nonetheless this poem is an absolute masterpiece and one of the best-known works of his pen. The reader is drawn by the harsh contrast between an idyllic landscape and the tragic final image, which changes dramatically one’s impression of the preceding lines.
The second piece by Walter is a work for oboe and piano, whose title can be translated as “Just a flutter of a wing”. The composer makes an adroit use of the timbral and technical characteristics of both instruments, suggesting vivid imagery and fascinating ideas.
There follows a mélodie for soprano and piano by Claude Debussy, on lyrics by Théodore de Banville, from a collection called Stalactites. Here too we have a youthful work, which, once again, is a precocious masterpiece, revealing its composer’s genius. Written in 1880 by an 18-y.o. Debussy, and dedicated to Madame Moreau-Sainti, it is the first published work by the composer who is – perhaps simplistically – considered as the father of musical Impressionism. The dedicatee taught a class of singing, for which the young Debussy worked as an accompanist.
Banville’s lyrics offer a meditation on the “dead loves”, “amours défunts”; the evocation of a deceased beloved transforms the lover’s feeling into something otherworldly and, to some extent, transcendent. Debussy’s setting opens with the piano’s accompaniment, in supple arpeggios which may evoke a guitar or mandolin – the typical instruments for night serenades, thus contributing to the suggestion of a night scene. Night, stars, and the rarefied atmosphere of a starry firmament have always provided an intense inspiration to Debussy, many of whose works allude to night-time and its lights. The voice’s melody is frequently interspersed with rests, which powerfully evoke the idea of a lover’s sighs.
Joseph Canteloube was the child of a well-to-do and cultivated family in Auvergne. Before his fifth birthday, Joseph began receiving lessons from Amélie Doetzer, who seemingly had been one of Chopin’s favourite pupils and who transmitted to the child (her only student) her experience with the French-Polish master. Joseph then took violin courses, and later was enrolled at a school close to Lyons. Having lost his father in his adolescence, Canteloube graduated in philosophy, and he became a distance-learning student of Vincent d’Indy. In 1906 he relocated to Paris, in order to complete his studies with d’Indy there. He was particularly interested in the heritage of folksong, especially in the zones of France whence he came; he published collections of songs, and created a team, called La Bourrée, for the promotion of the local folklore. In parallel with this, he wrote operas, frequently bound in turn to the rediscovery of local identity and history.
He was also active as a lecturer, even on the international plane (in America, in 1948); and he wrote biographies of his friend Déodat de Séverac, and of his teacher d’Indy (1951).
The two songs recorded here exemplify his research on the songs of Auvergne; Obal, din lou Limouzi is a bourrée which the composer collected in Maurs (Cantal) during a feast-day for a religious vow. La delaïssádo is a story about a forsaken girl, whose lover leaves her alone in the starry night.
The night is also protagonist of a Lied by Robert Schumann, excerpted from his Spanisches Liederspiel op. 74 on lyrics by Emanuel von Geibel. Actually, Geibel was merely translating into German a collection of ancient Spanish poems, which Schumann set for a variety of ensembles – from the voice and piano duo upwards. This was perhaps one of the reasons why this cycle – for which Schumann erroneously foresaw a dazzling success – remained among his nearly-forgotten works to this day. “Todos duermen, corazón”, “O heart, all sleep”, says the first line: but the poet’s heart is restless for the hopelessness of his desire.
Dora Pejačević was the most important Croatian composer of her time, in spite of her short life (she did not reach her fortieth birthday). Her setting of Karl Kraus’ Verwandlung was written to celebrate her friend Sidonija Nádherný von Borutin’s wedding… which actually did not take place! Still, the Lied that had been composed for that occasion remained as a lasting legacy of Pejačević’s talent: Kraus scheduled it for performance in Vienna, where he held soirées of literary readings, and Arnold Schoenberg was particularly impressed with it. Pejačević’s original scoring was for alto, violin, and either organ or piano; the composer selected three stanzas from Kraus’ poem and interspersed them with an instrumental interlude which becomes one of the composition’s pillars. This Lied also represents one of the composer’s most advanced works as concerns her treatment of harmony.
Rita Strohl, like Pejačević, lived the passage between nineteenth and twentieth century. At thirteen, she was accepted at the Paris Conservatoire, and she was still a teenager when her Piano Trio was premiered in public. At twenty, her Mass for six-part choir, orchestra and organ was performed at Rennes and Chartres. The religious inspiration was a constant theme in her life, bearing witness to a spiritual openness which led her to explore religious traditions other than the Western one. She founded a theatre for the performance of symbolist works and operas, including her own; within her output of vocal chamber music, pride of place is due to her setting of Les Chansons de Bilitis (1898). This collection, which attracted the interest of many of her contemporaries, including Claude Debussy, was in fact a fake similar to Ossian’s Songs – and, similar to Ossian’s Songs, it enjoyed impressive success. Written by Pierre Louÿs and published in 1894, the collection claimed to be the work of a poetess from ancient Greece (Louÿs even crafted archeological documents to enhance the credibility of the attribution). Even when the fake was discovered, the poems’ lyrics had conquered a special place in the general public’s affection. Here too, the songs selected for this Da Vinci Classics program are related to night, described in no. 11 and surrounding slumber in no. 12.
The time of a day is also crucial for Gabriel Fauré’s cycle Poème d’un jour, which originally was the setting of lyrics by Charles Grandmougin, with a high degree of sentimentality. The cycle narrated the futile and feeble parable of a love which lasted just one day. With a highly creative initiative and endeavour, Trio Marilys decided to apply other lyrics to these melodies, and excerpted the new texts from three collections of poems by Renée Vivien. These are Ainsi je parlerai (from À l’heure des mains jointes); Chanson (from Etudes et Préludes); Sur le rythme saphique, from Cendres et Poussière. The poetess, whose true name was Pauline Mary Tarn, was born in London in 1877; in 1899 she moved to Paris, dying there ten years later, at 32. Despite this brief life, she left behind a varied body of work, sitting at the crossroads of many different literary movements. In spite of this, her poetry remained unnoticed and neglected by musicians of her time, so that none of it was set to music. Thanks to Trio Marilys, we may get a partial idea of how a setting of her works by Gabriel Fauré might have sounded like.
Another of Vivien’s poems, Nous nous sommes assises (again from À l’heure des mains jointes) is set to music by Inès Halimi in a new work recorded in this Da Vinci Classics album in a world premiere. Halimi is a composer, singer, pianist, author and comedian, and she also directs a company which realizes multidisciplinary spectacles. She receives numerous commissions from many performers and several of her works have been awarded prizes.
Night is the protagonist also of Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne for oboe and piano; Lili, in spite of her short life (just twenty-five years!) was a figure of great importance in the musical panorama of her time; a pupil of Fauré, she won the Prix de Rome, and, notwithstanding her prolonged suffering and pain, managed to leave an important heritage of splendid works.
Les Chemins de l’amour, set by Francis Poulenc on lyrics by Jean Anouilh (1940), is derived from a sung waltz found in the incidental music for Léocadia. It was tailored upon the vocal features of Yvonne Printemps, a comedian and singer who premiered and recorded it.
Other works in this collection belong in the operatic world and are among the best-loved soprano arias (Porgi, amor, the Countess’ sweet lament in Le Nozze di Figaro, or the carefree and springy Quando m’en vo, from Puccini’s La Bohème, originally sung by the character of Musetta; or Nannetta’s Sul fil d’un soffio etesio from Verdi’s Falstaff – one of the few enchanted moments in the plot -; and Bellini’s Eccomi in lieta vesta, portraying Juliet’s anguish for her impending nuptials and her longing for her Romeo, from Bellini’s opera I Capuleti e i Montecchi on a libretto by Felice Romani).
Together, these works offer us a perceptive perspective on femininity, on the world of a woman’s strength, inner richness and accomplishments, and on how these are expressed through the arts of words, of music, and also through visual art (as represented in the graphic creations designed by Hélène Walter which are featured in this booklet and CD).

Chiara Bertoglio © 2024