June 1, 2005

Love and life as only the French can understand them.

Programme Notes
by Andrea Budgey

Earl Kim: Three French Songs, text by Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire
Daniel Foley: L’amour du mensonge, text by Charles Baudelaire
Ernest Chausson: Chanson perpétuelle, text by Charles Cros
Dewi Minden: L’Ombre, text by Jules Supervielle
Alexander Rapoport: Fragments of Verlaine
Gabriel Fauré: La bonne chanson, text by Paul Verlaine

This programme takes us into the world of the French Symbolist poets – a group which included Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Cros – and a generation on either side: Baudelaire and Supervielle. The Symbolists (and, to a considerable extent, their mentors and successors) rejected “objective” realism in favour of unstructured, “internalized” expression – a disconnected, almost synaesthetic evocation of the manner in which thoughts and emotions pass through the mind. The great art of this poetry lies in its use of sensory precision to create mystery and ambiguity; in his Art poétique Verlaine compared the writing of poetry to musical composition:

Always choose your words (or notes) fastidiously, for nothing is more precious than that half-light in which the undefined and the precise meet... What we want is nuance, not colour – the nuance that weds dream to dream and flute to horn.

The composers represented on this programme have translated Verlaine’s dictum faithfully into their own realm of expression, choosing their notes fastidiously to create a meeting-place for ambiguity and subjective experience. The effect of this combined art is music which is at once elegant and unsettling, delicate and intensely personal.

Earl Kim (1920-1998) – Three Poems in French, for soprano and string quartet (1989)
The Korean-American composer Earl Kim studied in Los Angeles and at Harvard, and his teachers included Arnold Schoenberg, Ernest Bloch, and Roger Sessions. He had a long and active career as a composer and teacher, first at Princeton, and then, from 1967-1990, at Harvard. His Three Poems in French was composed in 1989, and first performed by Dawn Upshaw and the Lydian String Quartet. According to Kim, this work fulfilled

...a longstanding desire on my part to do a setting of some texts in French... I have always been intrigued and deeply moved by the special qualities inherent in French Impressionism. Composing the Three Poems in French was a way of entering more completely into that exotic and passionate realm.

The engagement with a musical style of the recent past can be an ambiguous enterprise for a contemporary composer, but Kim avoids any hint of mere nostalgia or pastiche. All three of the poems – Verlaine’s “En sourdine” and “Colloque sentimental” (both from Fêtes galantes) and Baudelaire’s “Recueillement” (from the third edition of Les fleurs du mal, 1868) – had been set by Debussy (“En sourdine” was also set by Fauré), and Kim’s settings are commentaries on the earlier composer’s work, rather than hommages. His tonal colours recall those of the Impressionists, but his textures are more austere, and his rhythms more static. The poems speak of illusion, disillusionment, and loss, of the coming of night and of winter, and even, in the ironically-titled “Colloque sentimental”, of the loss of the memory of love. Kim’s settings evoke the bitterness of these inexorable processes with resignation and profound emotion, but without a vestige of self-indulgence.

Daniel Foley (1952- ): L'amour du mensonge, for voice and string quintet, op. 34a (2002)
Daniel Charles Foley was born in Toronto, studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts with Robert Ward, and returned to his native city to pursue graduate studies at the University of Toronto with John Weinzweig and Lothar Klein. Other teachers have included Violet Archer, Serge Garant, Oskar Morawetz, Bruce Mather and Gilles Tremblay. From 1980 to 1986 he taught at the University of Guelph, but since then has devoted himself to composition, writing, arranging, and the promotion of new music.

L'amour du mensonge, a concert aria for baritone and string quartet, began life in 1974, in a version for soprano and piano. The text is by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), taken from the 1861 edition of the poet’s collection Les fleurs du mal; it was part of a new subsection entitled “Tableaux parisiens”. Baudelaire meditates in this work on the duplicity of appearances, and the interplay of desire and delusion. Foley interweaves contrasting melodic styles, so that the plausibility of smooth stepwise lines alternates with large leaps – moments of abrupt insight and objectivity. To begin with, the stanzas are marked by clear changes of metre, but this structural relationship becomes less clear in the final two stanzas, as the poet’s ambivalence intensifies, and the changes of metre accelerate. The string quintet nudges him now one way, now another, reinforcing, then challenging, the vocal line. It seems initially to conspire in the speaker’s final embrace of the beauty of the illusion, but ultimately subverts it with an ironic bolero rhythm; this enters under the final word of the text, but in effect gives the quintet the “final word”.

L’amour du mensonge is dedicated to the composer’s sister, Irene Kathleen Foley Sanchez.

Ernest Chausson (1855 - 1899): Chanson perpétuelle, for voice, string quartet and piano, op. 37 (1898)
When he was forty-two, Chausson’s quiet musical career began at last to take off, as his Poème for violin and orchestra and his Symphony both achieved great acclaim in Paris. Over the next two years, he composed some of his best-known works, including the Quartet in A for piano and strings, the tone poem Soir de fête, and the Chanson perpétuelle. At forty-four, however, his life was ended by a tragic bicycle accident.

The Chanson perpétuelle is a setting of a (slightly abbreviated) text from the collection Le coffret de santal (“The Sandalwood Chest”) by the fascinating Symbolist poet Charles Cros (1842-1888). Cros was associated with Verlaine and Rimbaud, but is equally well known as an inventor, credited with advances in colour photography, telegraph technology, and sound recording. The poem is a voluptuous elegy for lost love, spoken by a young woman whose lover has abandoned her; now she intends to drown herself – she will abandon herself to the water, as she had to the lover, and feel its embrace instead of his. The tone is sensuous and passionate, a single extended expression too intensely felt to be nostalgic, and Chausson’s setting reflects this dramatic unity. The opening melody in the piano reappears, transformed but recognisable, at intervals throughout the piece, echoed even in the fragmented viola line which brings it to a close. The instrumental interludes convey the passage of time rather than large emotional shifts, although the speaker’s frémissement, or “trembling”, are evoked by tremolo strings. Chausson marked the work “Lent, dans le sentiment d’une chanson populaire”, and the combination of folk-like, partly modal melody with intense emotional expression have made this work popular with audiences since its first performance.

Dewi Minden: L’ombre, for voice, violin and cello (2005)
Dewi Minden is a composer (and trumpet player) originally from Vancouver, now working in Toronto. She has written music for numerous stage productions, film scores and three albums, and was a founding member of the Robert Minden Ensemble, which performed original compositions scored for an eclectic orchestra of found objects; for ten years she toured internationally with the ensemble and wrote much of its music. She received degrees in performance from the University of British Columbia and Laval University, and later studied composition at the University of Toronto.

L’ombre was commissioned by the Talisker Players, with the assistance of a grant from the Laidlaw Foundation. The work sets a poem by Jules Supervielle (1884-1960), who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and divided his life between his native country and France. A novelist and short-story writer as well as a poet, he is known for his use of concrete imagery in addressing metaphysical subjects, and “Hommage à la vie” is a striking example of this, embracing the processes of ageing as an intensification of the experience of life. Minden has divided the poem into nine compact movements, including solo and duet sections for the violin and cello. The “turn” of the poem comes in the fifth movement, with the words C’est beau d’avoir connu l’ombre sous le feuillage. The vocal part includes sections in recitativo style (especially in the first and eighth movements), as well as passages in which it moves like an instrumental partner with the strings (as in the third movement); the final movement integrates these ensemble textures, underlining the integration of the poet’s physical imagery into the abstract world of the poem.

The title page of L’ombre bears the words “This music is dedicated to the life of my beloved cousin Amy Minden (1971-2004)”.

Alexander Rapoport (1957- ): Fragments of Verlaine, for voice and string quintet (1996)
Toronto composer Alexander Rapoport came to Canada from the U.S. as a child in 1970. He studied composition at the Hochschule für Music und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, and at the University of Toronto, where he completed a doctorate in 1991, and where he now teaches. Rapoport has received commissions for chamber, vocal and orchestral music, musical comedy, and incidental music for theatre and film. The Talisker Players performed his Northscapes in 2001, Chicago Portraits in 2002, and Shakespeare’s Aviary earlier this season.

The “fragments” in the work on this evening’s programme are all adapted and rearranged from a single poem, “Mon rêve familier”, from Verlaine’s first published collection, Poèmes saturniens (1866), which reflects Verlaine’s combination of romantic idealism and deep ambivalence about women. Alexander Rapoport explains the origins of the musical materials:

Film director Chris Philpott suggested that I use settings of Paul Verlaine’s “Mon rève familier” in my score for his feature The Eternal Husband (Canada, 1999). Verlaine’s haunting lines about an unknown – and unknowable – woman fit Chris’s treatment of Dostoyevsky’s novelette perfectly. In my setting I decided to treat the poem itself as the femme inconnue. In none of the movements are we allowed to hear the entire poem: we hear only fragments, and even these fade away before are able to grasp their significance.

The fragments of the poem are repeated in different combinations – as if the speaker were trying out different strategies for approaching the unknowable – and separated by instrumental movements which reinforce the elusiveness of the inconnue.

The concert version of Fragments of Verlaine was created especially for the Talisker Players, and this evening’s performance is a premiere.

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924): La bonne chanson, for voice, string quintet and piano, op.61 (1892-1894)
In 1892, Fauré met the singer Emma Bardac, with whom he became deeply infatuated. Inspired by their affair, he began the collection of nine songs on texts from La bonne chanson by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) which was eventually published in 1894; Fauré described Emma as “the most moving interpreter” of the cycle. Verlaine had written these poems in 1870, at the time of his doomed marriage to Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, and they express in highly idealized language his hopes and anxieties for the couple’s future happiness, soon to be eclipsed by his abusive and violent temper, and by his affair with the younger poet Arthur Rimbaud. Fauré must have felt that the unalloyed optimism of the poems outweighed their real-life aftermath!

The cycle was first published in a version for voice and piano, but a setting for voice, piano, and string quartet was announced at the same time. In 1898, Fauré seems to have prepared such a version for a private performance in London, but nothing was known of it until a score was sent anonymously to the French baritone Martial Singher in 1944; this is the version on this evening’s programme.

Fauré sets the naïve but subtle rhythms of Verlaine’s poems with great sympathy, in the deeply expressive arioso so characteristic of his vocal music. The melodies mediate the text without drawing particular attention to themselves, so that the overall effect is one of accompanied poems, the atmosphere and structures of the instrumental parts supporting the poetry directly. He unifies the cycle with recurring melodic motives, harmonic successions, and accompanimental figurations, several of which are brought together in the final song, “L’hiver a cessé”, for a splendid declaration of confidence in the future of love.


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