By the time Debussy completed his Deux romances in 1891, he had already written some sixty melodies. Paul Bourget (1852-1935), a much-appreciated writer at the end of the 19th century, inspired Debussy’s music with its vaporous melancholy, beamed through by the consoling rays of memory. In a clear evolution from his compositions of the 1880s, the refined piano writing and the vocal part, with its emphasis on the mid-range, favour an interiorised tone. Based on poems from Sagesse, the Trois mélodies sur des poèmes de Paul Verlaine (also 1891) share these qualities. They mark his return to one of his favorite poets, set to music as early as 1882. In 1904, Debussy’s affair with Emma Bardac (who shared his taste for Verlaine) played a decisive role in the composition of the second collection of Fêtes galantes, dedicated to his beloved. The voice sings these crepuscular, melancholy poems, populated by frozen beings (the ceramic faun) or unsettling shadows (“Colloque sentimental”) in a melodic recitative tone characteristic of Debussy’s maturity – although a few lyrical outbursts also accompany the evocation of bygone happiness – while the piano delivers strikingly condensed material.
With these Fêtes galantes, the composer sealed his farewell to Verlaine. Henceforth, he turned to poets of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, who contributed to the exaltation of an idealised past. Contemporary with the last Verlaine triptych, Trois chansons de France gives new importance to horizontal writing; rhythm and metre are more straightforward; harmony makes greater use of perfect chords and archaic-like modal colors. Two poems by Charles d’Orléans (1391-1465) frame a melody upon verses by Tristan L’Hermite (ca 1600-1655). In 1910, Debussy took up this central section identically to make it the first piece of Promenoir des deux amants, dedicated to Emma, whom he had married in 1908. In keeping with the threefold structure so common in his work, he selected excerpts from L’Hermite’s long poem “Le Promenoir des deux amants” to carve out this cycle on the fragility of love. The same year, he confronted the constraints of fixed forms and the roughness (in his own words) of François Villon, a poet cum thief and murderer active in the middle of the 15th century. He chose three poems centered on female characters: the “amye” who makes the lover suffer, the praying mother and the gossiping Parisiennes. While nostalgic, melancholy and even sorrowful expressions dominate the first two ballads, this is the only collection of melodies that Debussy concludes with a brilliant bravura finale.
Ravel shared many of his fellow composer’s interests, and like Debussy, is dear to the conductor Boulez. In 1896, he composed “Sainte” on verses by Mallarmé, a poet who permeated Debussy’s imagination. Several of his scores were inspired by Spain, such as La puerta del vino, Debussy’s piano prelude referring to the Alhambra in Granada. But Ravel also explored other poetic worlds. He wrote the piano accompaniment to Cinq mélodies populaires grecques (1904-1906) at the request of his friend Michel Dimitri Calvocoressi, translator of the lyrics of these folk songs. In 1906, his musical setting of some of Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles (published in 1896) caused a resounding scandal. At the time of their premiere, critics were outraged by the deliberately trivial, unmusical-sounding vocabulary of these anthropomorphic vignettes. Secondly, Ravel reinforced their provocative dimension, peppering the harmony with biting dissonances and demanding rapid declamation based on numerous repeated notes. What’s more, he didn’t make the silent “e”s sing, even though the rules of his time demanded that they be considered syllables in their own right. Writer and musicologist Louis Laloy, one of the few to understand him, admired his discovery, “at a single glance, of the unexpected comedy and secret grimace enclosed in everything. And that slight irony, far from dampening the emotion, actually heightens it and makes it more poignant”.
In 1932, Ravel returned to Spain with “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée”. In Chanson romanesque, the knight declares his devotion to his lady in a quajira rhythm (a Spanish dance alternating between ternary and binary metre); the “Chanson épique”, an interiorized prayer in archaic modality, recalls the five-beat Basque zortziko; and the “Chanson à boire” expresses the drunkard’s euphoric intoxication with a certain aggressiveness. Intended for Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film adaptation, with Feodor Chaliapin in the role of Don Quichotte, the triptych was completed too late, and consequently discarded in favor of Jacques Ibert’s melodies. After 1932, a degenerative brain disease destroyed Ravel’s creative faculties, his voice dying out amidst the laughs of the Knight of the Sad Countenance.
Hélène Cao
