i. Soupir

ii. Placet futile

iii. Surgi de la croupe et du bond

 

Despite remaining a Finnish citizen throughout her life, Saariaho’s relationship with French music has been extensively remarked upon. A fascination with timbre, frequent reference to light and colour, as well as her longterm French residence, have all led commentators to draw links between her and various French composers.

 

One of these forebears is, of course, Maurice Ravel. Expelled from the Paris Conservatoire not once but twice (first as a piano student, then a composer), it is perhaps difficult nowadays to imagine how progressive his music sounded to his contemporaries. A painstaking composer, his output is relatively small, but what there is marks him out as one of the foremost orchestrators of musical history. Whether writing for orchestra, chamber ensemble, or his native piano, Ravel is hailed as a master.

 

Stéphane Mallarmé’s poems had a profound influence on music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inspiring composers including Claude Debussy, Darius Milhaud, and Pierre Boulez. Responding to the legacy of Charles Baudelaire, Mallarmé was a major figure in the Symbolist movement, seeking to express truth through allusion and metaphor. Although he died in 1898, it was only in 1913 that the first complete edition of his poems was published, and Ravel immediately pounced, setting these three poems that year.

 

Asked in 1927 by the New York Times to expound upon his relationship with this poetry, Ravel helpfully described it as “Useless to explain, the poetry speaks to you or it does not. It is very obscure, and if once it seizes you—marvellous!” As such, he prioritises comprehensibility of the words: the text is set syllabically throughout, and there are certain indulgences of word-painting (a slower tempo and long held note for “infinie”, a flute solo to accompany “M’y peigne flûte aux doigts”).

 

Like much of his music, Ravel wrote these songs in two versions: one for piano and voice, and the other in which the singer is part of a small chamber ensemble (string quintet, piano, and pairs each of flutes and clarinets). All three songs are dedicated to colleagues of Ravel’s: the first to Igor Stravinsky, the second to Florent Schmitt, and the third to Erik Satie.

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Joshua Ballance