Quintessentially French

Felicity, pleasure, happiness, luxe, calme et volupté.

Felicity, pleasure, happiness, luxe, calme et volupté. Perfection: the blissful rightness of every note; a peach, or a rose, caught at the exact moment of poise between not-quite and slightly-past. Such thoughts are set off by a recent chance re-encounter with Debussy’s cantata setting a French translation of D-G. Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’. It’s one of two complementary gems poised upon the edge of maturity while retaining the flush of youth. The Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is played every day; La Damoiselle élue is sadly neglected.

Both are saturated in poetry; the purely orchestral Prélude assimilates the fluctuations of Mallarmé’s original in a miraculous rendition of one medium in terms of another — acknowledged thus by the grateful poet himself. One can’t imagine surly Rossetti being pleased by any attempt upon his words, let alone one that in its sweet chastity puts their blowsy diction to shame. Debussy wrote his setting for women’s chorus with two female soloists and orchestra before his youthful passion for Wagner had grown bitter and gone underground. Many touches of Tristan shine out from a total saturation in Parsifal, sometimes so close as to be actionable were the transmutation into French not so intimate. In particular Debussy’s opening pages are like Wagner’s heard down the wrong end of the telescope, rich stained colours refined into subtle pastel shades. The work’s heart, the Damozel’s long solo, sounds like Gounod or Massenet on speed, then the lovely work ends with further Parsifal — a miniaturisation of the Act I close. 

No intonation problems with Verlaine’s La bonne chanson, born of the first vernal impulse of love for his fiancée, then wife, before absinthe and Rimbaud poisoned the waters. Fauré’s setting must be the summit of felicity in all music.