Le tour de France is finally making its New York début after a four-year delay. The product of a collaboration between the pianist Bénédicte Jourdois and me, it received its initial outing at Caramoor as part of NYFOS’s annual Schwab Vocal Rising Stars program. We were scheduled to bring it into New York, but we were not yet back onstage in the spring of 2021—those were still Covid Times. The program got a single, live-streamed performance in Katonah for an audience of five—three Caramoor staff members and two husbands (one of them mine)—and a revival that July as part of NYFOS@North Fork. But it has never made it to the Big Apple until tonight.
Bénédicte, my co-director and co-pianist, is a woman of tremendous gifts and wide culture. While she is fluent in five languages, she is often called on as a specialist in French music. She certainly has earned her stripes in that repertoire—at Juilliard, at the Metropolitan Opera, at Curtis. She is a magical presence, a catalyst for art, and a brilliant coach. I remember telling her about a program NYFOS once did called Road Trip, a musical travelogue of the United States.
Béné responded, “You could do the same thing for France.”
“You could?” My sense of French geography is on the mushy side.
“Of course! The Auvergne! Brittany! Paris! I’ll help you.”
The result is today’s Tour de France, a whirlwind voyage to all four corners of the country, ending with a five-song stay in Paris.
We’ll hear songs from number of composers new to NYFOS, but one very familiar composer kept turning up in almost every part of the map: Francis Poulenc. I had always thought of his music as the quintessence of Paris, and it often is. Hints of the Folies-Bergères permeate his sacred music, and the hon-hon-hon of song-and-dance man Maurice Chevalier has been known to turn up in his art songs.
You always know when you’re hearing a work by Poulenc. His is an instantly recognizable brew made from a blend of Neo-classicism, American jazz, a bit of Mussorgsky and Stravinsky, a touch of music hall, and a large helping of Ravel. Yet what variety he found using these disparate elements! In “Fagnes de Wallonie” we hear the relentless, rough winds of the north; in “Cimetière,” “Berceuse,” and “La petite servants” the peasanty roughness of the western seaside coast; in “Vers le sud,” the lazy sensuality of the sun-drenched south. “Voyage à Paris” and “Montparnasse” are each hymns to the City of Light, one the jaunty song of a longtime denizen returning home, the other the rapt meditation of the newcomer.
“C” is perhaps Poulenc’s most famous song. Aragon’s poem tells of a place in the Loire Valley (“Les Ponts de Cé,” or The Bridges of Cé), a site of bloody battles stretching far back in France’s history. In 1940 the Nazis fought the French forces there and brought the country to its knees. Aragon was able to cross the Loire into the “Free Zone” and join the Resistance. Every line in his poem ends with the syllable “cé,” just as history sadly repeated itself at Les Ponts de Cé. Aragon imagines knights of antiquity alongside rusted-out tanks, a landscape of destruction reaching across four centuries. After a piano introduction made from a long, single-note melody that rises and falls like a bridge, Poulenc sets Aragon’s poem with his unique mix of gravity and sensuality, an ode to a lost world.
Most of the other classical composers will be familiar to concert-goers, but some might be outside the casual music-lover’s frame of reference. Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) falls in that category. His music is rosy and seductive, the aural embodiment of charm. If Debussy is Cézanne, Hahn is Renoir. He was prolific, turning out score after score—cantatas, operet tas, film music, ballets, tone poems. But these days he is best known for two things: his output of 100 songs, and his four-year love affair with novelist Marcel Proust. Hahn’s music is so appealing that it is easy to write it off as trivial. But his best songs are perfectly crafted and gracious for both the performer and the listener. Yes, they were born old-fashioned, without a hint of spiky dissonance or impressionistic gauze. Hahn didn’t seem to need them. His melodic inspiration and emotional sincerity go straight to the heart.
Until Susan Graham’s CD of his songs brought him back to the spotlight, Hahn’s music had been out of fashion for many years. So was that of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) until Leonard Bernstein’s advocacy made him a household name again in the 1960s. These days we’re used to hearing his songs in recital with great frequency. Still, there are outliers like “Zum Strassburg auf dem Schanz,” a setting of a folk poem from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). I’d rarely heard it, and never played it. “Strassburg” is one of Mahler’s early songs, a military death march with ominous trills deep in the piano’s bass register. A few years later Mahler would return to set more Knaben Wunderhorn songs for voice and orchestra in an eponymous work that is often recorded and performed. “Strassburg” is a like preview of Des Knaben Wunderhorn’s better-known “Der Tamboursg’sell”—both are rueful monologues of soldiers facing the firing squad (in one case) and the gallows (in other).
I was surprised to learn that the current generation of singers is unfamiliar with Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne. When I was a tyke they received their first modern recording in stereo (still a new-fangled invention) by the Israeli soprano Netania Davrath on the Vanguard label. These fancy arrangements of Auvergne folk songs were a sensation, and soon lots of other singers tried their hands at them—Anna Moffo, Kiri te Kanawa, Frederica von Stade, Dawn Upshaw, and Victoria de los Ángeles. But no one captured the naïve purity of these melodies like Davrath.
Canteloube (1879-1957) had deep family roots in the Auvergne, and he devoted much of his musical life to preserving the folk music of the area. He spent over 30 years polishing the Chants d’Auvergne. His orchestrations are ornate and dense, almost cinematic in their colors. Yet they do not overwhelm the plaintive beauty of the original tunes. Instead, he makes each song into a lush soundscape in which the singer delivers the pure melody while the orchestra summons up its verdant, pastoral setting.
Along with Canteloube, André Caplet (1878-1925) is making his NYFOS debut with this program. Caplet first came to prominence as an opera conductor—not just in France, but in Boston where he spent six months of each year from 1910-1914. (Why Boston? Cherchez la femme—in this case, the wife of the company’s general manager.) Caplet’s combination of musical sensitivity and scrupulous exactitude brought him to the attention of Debussy. Caplet orchestrated some of Debussy’s piano works, conducted his mentor’s premieres, and was apparently an eagle-eyed proofreader.
Caplet’s own music has a fresh, improvisatory quality, with melodies that seem to dance forward without the trappings of thematic development. This gives his compositions a feeling of a spontaneous ad lib, a “happy accident.” It takes a sophisticated craftsman to create this illusion. “Ma chaumière en Yvelines” is a prime example of Caplet’s tumbling musical sunshine.
To round out the program Bénédicte and I included four songs by some of France’s iconic chansonniers: the singer/songwriter known simply as Barbara, the Academy Award winner Michel Legrand, the chansonnier Serge Gainsbourg, and the sophisticated team of composer Joseph Kosma and lyricist Jacques Prévert.
If you’re scratching your head about that last pair of artists, you certainly know at least one of their songs, “The Autumn Leaves” (originally “Les feuilles mortes”). Budapest-born composer Joseph Kosma (1905-1969) and French poet Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) are revered in France for the fifty songs they created together, works that hover in the gray area between art song and popular song. Prévert and Kosma’s chansons are in the same category as Marc Blitzstein and William Bolcom—too difficult for the average cabaret singer, yet too colloquial for Lieder purists.
Jacques Prévert remains one of the most popular poets in French literature, widely read, memorized by schoolchildren, and immortalized for concertgoers by his musical partner Kozma. With the single exception of his hit tune, “The Autumn Leaves,” Kozma tends to give Prévert’s lyrics a strong dramatic reading rather than a sweeping melody. But he always finds the right tempo for the poem, and a musical vigor that brings them to life. Kosma enjoyed a long career, including some famous movie scores (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Grand Illusion, and The Rules of the Game) and some neglected operas and ballets. But he’ll most likely be remembered as part of the Prévert/Kosma duo—or, in America, simply as the guy who wrote “The Autumn Leaves.”
Barbara (1930-1997) is another French icon whose songs may have bypassed many American music-lovers. After a slow rise to fame, she earned a niche as one of her country’s most beloved musicians. Accompanying herself at the piano, usually dressed in black, she conquered audiences with her emotional sincerity and her ability to summon deep feelings in simple language. Her given name was Monique Andrée Serf—she took her stage name from her Ukrainian grandmother Varvara. As a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Paris, she had to remain hidden during the war years, always on the run from French collaborators and SS goons. She resolved never to sing in Germany and held firm to that promise until a producer in Göttingen prevailed on her to give a concert. But when she arrived at the hall, there was only an upright piano onstage which obscured her face from the audience. She was about to cancel the show until a group of students went out and wheeled a grand piano through the streets. With a massive effort they hauled the instrument onto the stage. When she sang for them that night she received one of the greatest ovations of her career. Barbara commemorated the experience with the song “Göttingen,” an ode to the people of the town and a plea for peace and understanding. It is said that her song did more to advance Franco-German reconciliation than any political speech in the 1960s.
Michel Legrand (1932-2019) was a veritable fountain of music—over 200 film and television scores, earning him two Oscars and five Grammy Awards. Songs like “You Must Believe in Spring” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life” cleverly mix French sensuality with American terseness, creating an irresistible, international sound. One of his greatest successes was the film-operetta The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which inspired a sequel, The Young Girls of Rochefort. The two movies pretty much define “period piece” with their mod costumes and go-go choreography. Both scores are as sweet as their ice cream-colored cinematography, but there are some wonderfully bracing moments. Chief among them is the zesty “Chanson des jumelles,” the opening number of Rochefort that introduces us to the twin protagonists of the title.
“Le poinçonneur des Lilas” was one of Serge Gainsbourg’s first hit songs in 1957. Legend has it that Gainsbourg was working as accompanist for the cabaret star Michèle Arnaud when she brought the club’s owner, Francis Claude, to Gainsbourg’s house for a look at his paintings. While they were there, Gainsbourg regaled them with a few of his songs, chansons he had casually tossed off to amuse himself. Claude was bowled over—not by Gainsbourg’s paintings, but by his songs. The next evening Claude pushed a terrified Gainsbourg onstage to make his impromptu debut as a balladeer. One of the songs he offered on that auspicious occasion was “Le poinçonneur des Lilas.” The rest is history: a meteoric career that embraced jazz, pop, African percussion, and rock—17 LPs, including two gold albums and three platinum. Gainsbourg was known for his musical daring, his dexterity as a wordsmith, his gift for double-entendres, and his penetrating view of France’s social culture. Gainsbourg led a life of front-page extremes, fueled by nicotine, alcohol, celebrity love affairs, controversy—and a repertoire of songs that took France by storm.
“Douce France”—sweet France—is an epithet that has deep roots in literature. It first appeared in the Chanson de Roland, the eleventh-century epic poem—“dulce France.” It went on to the be the title of a famous song by Charles Trénet. Of course, French culture—indeed, French life—embraces so many more qualities than mere sweetness. Yet the phrase instantly conjures up a romantic vision of a country famous for its glamor and amorous arrangements.
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Le Tour de France will be performed at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center (NYC), February 26, 8PM. More info.
Comme je suis désoler d’être à Traverse City demain soir. I will dine well to console myself (it’s Restaurant Week). Seriously, I must read more about Barbara. These posts are magically informative. Even Adam Gopnik must envy a sentence such as, “If Debussy is Cézanne, Hahn is Renoir.” Bravo, Steve.
Please, Carol, could you share the date of the gala with me? I want to make sure I can attend.