Claude Debussy - Chansons de Bilitis | Текст песни

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Chansons de Bilitis, song cycle for voice & piano, L. 90 (1897-1898)

Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano
Pei-Yao Wang, piano

Debussy's Trois Chansons de Bilitis were published in their original form for voice and piano in 1897, with a dedication to the writer André Gide. The texts were those of the well-known prose poems by Pierre Louÿs. As Edward Lockspeiser writes, these songs \"provide the most moving revelations of the hedonistic, pagan art of Debussy, a reminder that the antique grace and splendour of the earlier Après-midi d'un faune was not only still alive in the composer's imagination, but that it was capable of a more remote, and therefore still more poignant spiritualization. Indeed, one may go further and conjecture that Bilitis and the Mallarméan faun are in a sense the illegitimate progenitors of the ultimate glory of Debussyan paganism, Le Martyre de saint Sebastien.\"

The second song of the group, as it was eventually published, was in fact the first to be written. It was printed and issued independently in the October 1897 issue of the journal L'Image, while the surrounding panels of this triptych, La Flûte de Pan and Le Tombeau des Naïades, were both finished in September 1898. Notable for their sensuality and beguiling mild eroticism, the three chansons were first performed in public at a Société Nationale de Musique concert on March 17, 1900, when Debussy himself accompanied Blanche Marot at the piano. Later in 1900, Fernand Samuel, director of the Théâtre des Variétés, approached Louÿs suggesting the cycle could perhaps also be recited and mimed, whereupon Debussy was asked to remodel and enlarge the score appropriately. He provided a reworking for pairs of harps and flutes with celesta, which was finally presented at the Salle des Fêtes of Le Journal on June 7, 1901.

The first of the Trois Chansons, \"La flûte de Pan,\" suggests something of the pastoral simplicity evoked to such palpably sensuous effect in Debussy's Syrinx for solo flute. \"La Chevelure\" is at once more declamatory and confident in style; but once again, amid the calmly undulating expressive lines of the vocal part, it is possible to clearly recognize the powerfully erotic language Debussy used so graphically in the Tower Scene of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande. A number of critics, among them Romain Rolland, have identified the spirit of Jules Massenet in this song. Massenet \"whose spirit (says Rolland) will continue to slumber in the heart of every Frenchman\" was noted for lyrical elegance, but also for his forthright exuberance, a passionate quality which emerges also powerfully enough in this dream of ecstatic lovemaking between Pan and Bilitis.

In the final song, \"Le Tombeau des Naïades,\" explains Lockspeiser, \"Bilitis is following the lonely trail of a faun to the distant tomb of the naiads,\" in this glacial setting in which Debussy's crystalline-textured accompaniment etches mysterious footprints in the fresh snow. Finally Bilitis reaches the vast blocks of ice that Pan has hewn from the naiads' mausoleum and, says Lockspeiser, the reflection of a wintry sky \"is marvellously transformed in this music into a remote, icy and colourless disillusionment.\" [allmusic.com]

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