Music
Prospect of pleasure
Robin Holloway
It is not too often that a song series can be recommended with such likelihood of pleasure as the seven recitals of French melodies running at St John's, Smith Square from this month through to next April, with a shifting cast of 14 singers and one unchanging pianist. Debussy's and Poulenc's complete output for voice and Piano makes the backbone, varied with brief appearances from other composers in the same genre, among them Gounod, Bizet, Chabrier and Satie.
Even objectively, pleasure can mean many things. The excruciations of a Salome, Pierrot Lunaire, Wozzeck produce a high state of pleasure-as-pain. Austerity, even downright ugliness, has its com- plementary joys — the ice-cold water of Sibelius, the abrasive meanness of middle- Period Bartok, the grinding ruggedness of Carl Ruggles. I mention these few masters from the same epoch as the French song recitals to show that, even within such limits, the word 'pleasure' scarcely suffices for the enormous range of music that one eagerly enjoys. The 'principle' is simply too narrow, not so much in itself as in its conventional usage. So far as the two featured composers go, the range is distinct though not small. What Debussy and Poulenc share is, so to speak, negative: a complete absence of the prevailing mood and tone of the great German-language lieder tradition from Schubert onwards — longing, nostalgia, pantheism, all heavily eroticised; soul- states exalted and abased, lustiness and gloom, narratives of unrequited love allegorised into spiritual journey or curd- ling into black introspection. Debussy's song output begins in the salon with a slender vein of vapid pretti- ness. Substance comes to his work in the late 1880s through close absorption in two major poets, Verlaine and Baudelaire (to Whom a third is added in the early Nineties With the wordless orchestral paraphrase of Mallarmes L'apres-midi d'un faun). There are four Verlaine groups (as well as a handful of isolated settings). The two best-known, both entitled Fetes galantes, evoke with fantastical delicacy of nuance the spirit of Watteau and the commedia dell'arte. A third, Ariettes oubliees, enters gently the area of tender but piercing Sensuality that in the contemporaneous five Baudelaire songs becomes a swooning ocean. This tumultuously heated music is as close as Debussy came to the letter and spirit of Wagner. It resembles Tristan rewritten with the retrospective aid of Scriabin, Berg, Messiaen and Gershwin, and is quite as wonderful as that sounds. Though only he could have written them, they are without parallel in Debus- sy's output, and his typical course is away from these abandoned raptures. Sensuality is refined and clarified in the three songs concerning the sentimental education of Bilitis, a Greek Anthology nymphet dreamed up in the words of Debussy's close friend Pierre Lout's. And after the turn of the century Debussy's songs, now rather infrequent, inhabit a different coun- try: severe and archaising for Villon and Charles d'Orleans, intimately suggestive for the 'metaphysical' Tristan Lhermite, and a final mysterious sublimation of the early hedonism when eventually (in his last important songs) he actually sets Mallar- me's words rather than letting them evoke his music.
Debussy's songs, though not his highest flight, are possibly the core of his oeuvre. But there is no question with Poulenc that his 150-odd melodies are the best of him. So far as I'm concerned that dreadful Gloria and organ concerto, above all that tacky opera about everyday life and ulti- mate decapitation in a nunnery, could be ditched tomorrow without a pang (though I admit a ticklish spot for Les biches). In his songs with piano, however, he is supreme of his kind. Granted their shared non- Germanness there couldn't be a greater contrast with Debussy. Poulenc's starting- point, rather than the salon, is the café, the street-corner, the music-hall, the fair- ground. His native soil is coarse and earthy. He would make mayhem with the only one of Debussy's favoured poets, Verlaine, with whom his talent is at all compatible. One can just imagine Poulenc succeeding with Verlaine's blue poems, but the thought of him trying Baudelaire or Mallarme is inconceivable. Fortunately he was completely sensible of what suited him, and found in Apollinaire exactly the mix of wit and canniness, simplicity and vulgarity, both subtly deceptive, to touch him off (six sets and several isolated songs, between 1918 and 1956). Without denying his natural idiom he expands to meet his other principal poetic muse, Paul Eluard (five sets and a few isolated songs, 1935- 58), with a directness of expression that 'By the the time your horse finishes, Lester Pig- gott will have retired again.' can take one aback with its force and intensity. The high-point is the cycle of nine Eluard-settings Tel jour, telle nuit (1937). Their sustained emotion continues to deepen in the plangent pieces, to words by Aragon among others, inspired by the tribulations of France during the second world war.
No doubt it is the high spirits of Chan- sons gaillardes or Banalites and suchlike which will elicit the most immediate delight in St John's over the coming months: but it is hard to see anything in these program- mes that will fail to discover one or another of the multifarious facets of pleasure.
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