Total Eclipse

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

There is no shortage of songs set to Verlaine's poetry; composers as diverse as Ravel, Stravinsky, Dinu Lipatti, and Georges Brassens have all written music to his verses.  The Ravel piece was unpublished until 1950, and it is seldom programmed probably because it is well-nigh unsingable; the Brassens song, on the other hand, sounds faintly like the theme song of a television show.  The Fauré and Debussy songs are among the very earliest settings of Verlaine's poems; some of them were written during his own lifetime.  Verlaine's mother-in-law, Mme. Mauté, was an early piano teacher of Debussy.  Verlaine's subjective lyricism seems made for the particular sensitivities of Fauré and Debussy; poem and music are so closely joined that there seems to be no other reading possible, and other settings of the same poems seem only like interesting curiosities.

There are far fewer settings of Rimbaud's poems.  In his own day, he was a cult figure, well-known to an inner circle; his works were kept alive by Verlaine.  Rimbaud's writing became more widely known in the 20's and 30's, when it was re-discovered by the Surrealists.  To my knowledge, only one major French composer has written music to his poems, and that is Darius Milhaud, who composed two songs on his texts.  The Swiss Honneger, and Czech Nelhybel, and two Americans, Judith Zaimont and Lee Hoiby, have each written a handful of Rimbaud songs, some with instrumental ensemble.  The classic work is Britten's "Les Illuminations", which dates from early in the composer's career, and was originally composed for chamber orchestra.

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