Maurice Ravel - Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé

Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, song cycle for voice & ensemble (or piano) (1913)

Marie-Thérèse Escribano Ensemble
Friedrich Cerha

In a 1927 interview, Maurice Ravel said of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé that he "exorcised our language, like the magician that he was. He has released the winged thoughts, the unconscious daydreams from their prison." Mallarmé had been an immense influence on a variety of artists, including Ravel, who had set his first Mallarmé poem, Sainte, in 1896 and returned to the poet's work in 1913 with the Trois poèmes. Around that time Ravel had heard Igor Stravinsky's Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise (1912-1913), and was particularly impressed by Stravinsky's arrangement, in which the singer was backed by an ensemble of piano, string quartet, two flutes, and two clarinets. Stravinsky, in turn, had been much influenced by Arnold Schoenberg's notorious Pierrot lunaire (1912), with its similar instrumentation. On completing his songs, which employed the same instrumental layout as Stravinsky's, Ravel envisioned what he called a "scandalous concert," featuring his songs along with Stravinsky's and Schoenberg's. That concert did take place, although with songs by Maurice Delage replacing the Schoenberg, under the auspices of the Société Musicale Indépendante on January 14, 1914. Soprano Jane Bathori, one of the best known French singers of her day, was featured, along with an ensemble conducted by Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht.

The increasing angularity and dissonance of Ravel's Trois poèmes reflects the increasingly dissociative imagery of the three Mallarmé poems. The first song, "Soupir" (Sigh), is in two parts, the first slow and delicate (evoking the poet's "white fountains"), the second more spacious and evanescent. The vocal line becomes a bit more jagged in "Placet futile" (Futile Petition), a gently melancholy love song. And with the third and final song, "Surgi de la croupe et du bond" (Risen from the Crupper and Leap), Ravel comes as close to the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg as he ever would. This setting of what Ravel once called "the strangest, if not the most hermetic" of Mallarmé's sonnets is still and mysterious, with a very spare accompaniment.

Coincidentally, at the very time that Ravel was composing his Trois poèmes, Claude Debussy was also setting three of Mallarmé's poems (both were perhaps inspired by a new complete edition of Mallarmé's poetry which had just been published). Not only that, but they had both chosen to set two of the same poems; Debussy called this a "phenomenon of autosuggestion worthy of communication to the Academy of Medicine." [Allmusic.com]

Art by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Category:

Music

Tags:

• ravel
• cerha
• mallarme
• poemes
• marie-therese
• escribano
• ensemble
• song
• cycle
• voice