The well-established poetic form of the aubade, or ode at dawn, has been adapted in many ways. Perhaps most famous is the scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet where the lovers must part at the break of day to avoid discovery but nonetheless take a moment to argue about larks and nightingales: There is always plenty of reference to the natural world and its beauty in this genre, and on this evening’s program are featured contributions that celebrate further twittering birds, dew, flowers, and happy awakenings of all kinds.
Bizet’s choice of Louis Bouilhet’s “Chanson d’avril” checks all those boxes and more: A bustling piano part rouses the lover for the rebirth of spring, a profusion of bright light, buds, buzzing insects, and bubbling. Everything is limpid clarity in his song—although the piano part hints at just how sensual it is to “dampen one’s feet in the moist dew.” His setting of Louis Delâtre’s “Ouvre ton coeur” focuses on the opening and closing of flowers’ petals as a metaphor for the (re)awakening of love, while Paul Barthélemy Jeulin’s “Manteau de fleurs” is, in Ravel’s interpretation, a cloak of glittering effervescence toward the top of the scale, the various blooms an apt ornament for the graceful object of his desire. In much the same way, Rachmaninoff’s setting of “Before My Window” by Glafira Adol’fovna Galina is all silvery blossoms, freshness, and fragrance, with a light treble texture to match—at least until that fragrance makes him lose his head and the music momentarily becomes the more familiar, muscular Rachmaninoff of the well-known piano concertos. And Messiaen’s “Le collier” is very much in the same vein. Part of the Poèmes pour Mi he gave to his wife as a wedding present (“Mi” was her affectionate nickname), it is similarly redolent of fresh morning air, rainbows, and pearls, even if—again—there are some slightly more corporeally seductive melismas at the ends of the middle lines.
By analogy with these (in many ways highly conventional) aubades, Messiaen’s “Résurrection” (like “Le collier,” composed to his own text) is just another kind of morning full of love, another joyful rising from a different sort of sleep. Certainly, much of the gestural idiom is the same: in the voice, frequent excitable peaks and palpable, bodily joy in the flowing melismas (here, unsurprisingly, on the words “sing” and “stream”); in the piano, energetic, circling treble textures and equally excitable moments of more pianistic enthusiasm.
Bizet, Ravel, Messiaen, and Rachmaninoff were all keyboard virtuosos, and this is of course evident in the piano parts for many of their songs, some of them containing truly wonderful writing for the instrument. As hinted above, Rachmaninoff’s are especially good examples: “A Dream,” to a text by Fyodor Sologub (the pseudonym of Fyodor Kuzmych Teternikov), is relatively restrained—mostly sleepy tinkling that becomes more insistent only around the “wings” of sleep and its “secret delights.” The textures of the next song from his Op. 38 Romances, “A-u,” are highly reminiscent of his piano preludes; his very next opus, composed in the same period, would consist of the difficult Études-tableaux. The agitated text, by the passionate but self-destructive Romantic Konstantin Dmitrevich Bal’mont, no doubt helped inspire the moments of extravagance.
It’s perhaps surprising that despite their virtuosic pianism, Bizet, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff, at least, were quite often reluctant performers: Bizet’s career as a composer never really took off during his lifetime, but even though he was supposedly ranked as an equal by the great Liszt, he preferred to earn money from making piano arrangements in private to giving lessons or performing in public; Ravel, whose pieces are some of the most difficult in the solo recital repertoire, was unwilling to put in the long hours of practice necessary to being a star performer of them; and Rachmaninoff, despite being one of the most celebrated concert-pianists of all time, found touring fatiguing, and above all a distraction from composition. Messiaen is the exception here, perhaps, because he was organist at La Trinité in Paris for more than 60 years, playing regularly at mass. He seemed to do everything with the same seraphic good humor and, of course, religious devotion; one cannot imagine him complaining about his duties for an instant.
Nevertheless, these songs do not lack for moments of composer-pianist self-expression: It’s difficult not to hear, in the short interludes and especially, the postludes written into their settings, the performing personalities of Bizet, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff. And notwithstanding the general effusiveness, it’s worth noticing how many of those cameos communicate a faint note of reserve, or even doubt. Towards the end of “Manteau de fleurs,” for example, ironically right on the word “purity,” Ravel introduces a moment of discord, the piano adding a dissonant C to the soprano’s B. Something similar occurs in “Before my window,” where Rachmaninoff plays us out after the climax with a moment of harmonic darkness just before the end, and in “A Dream,” the pensive close of which belies its dreamy opening.
Bizet may never have lived to see his Carmen become one of the top five most popular operas in the world (he died, alas, soon after its premiere in 1875), but he was already known for a number of Spanish-flavored compositions; “Ouvre ton coeur,” with its subtitle “sérénade espagnole,” obvious castanets in the piano part, characteristic ornamental crushed notes, and proud vocal line, is only one among several. And in this he was hardly unusual: Most French composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries toyed with what was called “characteristic” or “exotic” music. Ravel did more than toy, writing among many other Spanish-themed compositions his opera L’heure espagnole and his famous Bolero for orchestra.
Carlos Guastavino, an Argentinian composer and pianist, like his French and Russian colleagues, also found performing tended to get in the way of composition, and he concentrated increasingly on the latter before retiring in 1992. “Pampamapa” is a huella song by his compatriot Hamlet Lima Quintana (the huella being a folkdance style from Buenos Aires and Southern Argentina more widely), while “Jardín antiguo,” perhaps Guastavino’s best-known song, is a setting of a poem by Luis Cernuda Bidón, one of the “Generation of ’27” group of artists that included Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel as well as Federico García Lorca. Spanish Catalan composer Fernando (Ferran) Jaumandreu Obradors was a friend of Lorca; both “Al amor” (to a text by the 17th-century poet Cristobal de Castillejo) and “Del cabello más sutil” (a popular song) are from his most famous collection, Canciones clásicas españolas. Xavier Montsalvatge was also Catalan, but he had a particular interest in the musical culture of the Spanish diaspora, for example in the songs brought back from Cuba after independence at the end of the 19th century. The text of “Canción de cuña para dormir a un negrito,” by Uruguayan poet Ildefonso Pereda Valdés (the fourth of Montsalvatge’s Cinco canciones negras), is a setting of a lullaby, but also—if one listens carefully to the words—a postcolonial drama in miniature.
María Grever was born in Mexico but travelled widely in Spain and the rest of Europe before settling in the US. Her best-known song (out of hundreds) is perhaps “Cuando vuelvo a tu lado,” thanks to its adaptation for Dinah Washington as “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” in 1959, but “Te quiero, dijiste” (also adapted, as “Magic in the Moonlight” for the film Nancy Goes to Rio) is not far behind. Similarly, the songs of Cuban Ernesto Lecuona also exist in different versions, although (given that he was a composer-pianist essentially not much different from Bizet, Ravel, or Rachmaninoff) they are more likely to be elaborate pieces for piano: “Siboney” is particularly showy in its solo version, while “La comparsa,” a musical evocation of the approach of a carnival parade, is part of a suite for the piano Danzas afro-cubanas.
Listening to these songs of Guastavino, Obradors, Montsalvatge, Grever, and Lecuona, it’s sometimes hard to keep in mind that they all had the same kind of conservatory education as, say, Rachmaninoff, and that they all wrote music in more classical forms and more challenging harmonic idioms, like that of, say, Messiaen. All of this evening’s composers, whether looking West (from France to Spain and beyond, to the Americas) or East (back to Europe and tradition), were searching for new musical material and—most important—new audiences. Even Bizet, with the sometimes-dubious Hispanicisms of Carmen, was pushing the boundaries, scandalizing the usual clientele of the Opéra-Comique and attracting new, curious listeners. And attracting new, curious listeners is what Will Liverman, the composer-pianist-singer who has written this evening’s brand-new works—settings of Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda and Costa Rican Jorge Debravo—is famous for doing, too. Liverman, a classically trained operatic baritone with a glittering résumé, has regularly gone in search of ways in which that kind of musical culture can continue to be curious about others, as in The Factotum, his eclectic Chicago Black-barbershop take on Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. In a time when it is easy for one to sneer at what is inauthentic in earlier artists’ borrowings from other traditions, and when we rightly worry about cultural appropriation—but also a time in which, more than ever, we want all music to be for everyone—Liverman’s approach is surely what we need. As the words of Guastavino’s “Pampamapa” have it, “Yo no soy de estos pagos, pero es lo mismo” (“I am not from here, but it doesn’t matter”).
—Cormac Newark