0:00 Prison
2:04 Soir
Performers: Cyrille Dubois (voice), Tristan Raës (piano)
Programme notes from Hyperion:
In the summer of 1873 the tension between those run-away lovers Rimbaud and Verlaine reached breaking point. The pair had travelled backwards and forwards between London and Brussels, and the arrival of that éminence grise, Verlaine’s mother, complicated matters further. On 10 July Verlaine shot Rimbaud twice with a revolver and wounded him, though not severely. He was tried in October, and sentenced to two years in prison. (It was fortunate that this incident took place in Belgium, rather than England.) The poet spent the whole of 1874 in custody in Mons; during that time he reconverted to Catholicism, receiving communion. He was released in January 1875; a few months later he took up a position as a teacher in Stickney, Lincolnshire. The text for Prison - Fauré’s pithy title allows the uninformed listener to place these words in context - appeared without heading in Sagesse, a collection of poetry published in 1881 under a Catholic imprint, evidence of Verlaine’s chastening, albeit only temporary. The song is among Fauré’s most powerful, and it is certainly his most concise. In that most melancholy of keys, E flat minor, the clarity of the light, the muted poignancy of the chiming clock (in octaves on the third beats of bars 4, 7, 10 and 13), the enviable simplicity of life on the outside, the birdsong ruefully appreciated in the distance - all these things are depicted with rigorous economy. In Fauré’s setting the anguished middle section, beginning ‘Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là, / Simple et tranquille’, is no appeal to a higher power, but the self-castigating outburst of a battle-scarred ne’er-do-well (‘God, I’ve been so stupid’). The composer was a master of the religious miniature when he chose, but he ignores the devout penitent of Sagesse who emerges in Séverac’s music for this poem; this is no monastic cell, and the poet’s confession is for all to hear. The final lines are accompanied by inexorably rising harmonic progressions on an E flat pedal. This heartbreaking music signifies an evaporation of youthful hopes, a wasting of life’s vital substances, the disappearance of good fortune over the distant horizon. Debussy had the good sense not to attempt a rival setting. Reynaldo Hahn’s D’une prison has languid charm, but it suggests an idyllic incarceration on a desert island. In the ineluctable rhythmical impulse of Fauré’s music, quiet and gentle though the opening is, we can hear the bars of the poet’s cell, and the iron that has entered his soul.
Albert Samain’s collection Au jardin de l’Infante (1893) was given to the composer by his mistress Emma Bardac, the singer who had been the dedicatee of La bonne chanson earlier in 1894. Following on from the poem Larmes (which Fauré set as the duet Pleurs d’or), Élégie has nine strophes of which the composer selected the last three. The form is ABA broadly speaking, but like the great modified strophic songs at the end of Schubert’s life nothing is taken for granted - the music is continually rethought and newly invented. The accompaniment for this nocturne begins modestly in simple semiquavers (like Verlaine’s En sourdine), flowers into almost dizzying complexity in the second strophe, and deftly returns to a single stave at the beginning of the third (the ardent harmonic subtleties leading to this last transition are simply miraculous). In another Verlaine setting, C’est l’extase (1891), we have heard ‘le frêle et frais murmure’ of nature; musical imagery for almost inaudible sound returns in Soir, set off by the words ‘entends-tu pas quelque chose mourir?’. In both cases a delicate descant to the vocal line is traced in the little finger of the right hand; this is supported by off-beat mezzo staccato harmonies that change constantly, glinting and palpitating. This is a kind of musical pointillism, prickly in close-up, but blurring into a marvellously glowing picture from a distance. The final bars (‘si tristes et si doux’ followed by the postlude) encapsulate both the depth and economy of Fauréan expressiveness.
Негізгі бет Музыка Fauré: 2 Mélodies, Op. 83 (1894) with score
Пікірлер