Chansons de Verlaine

Chansons de Verlaine were completed in 2006. The third song, Colloque sentimental, was written in 2003 for Alison Smart and Katharine Durran’s  New French Song project. It was as a result of having written one short song to words by Verlaine that I subsequently decided to set two further poems to make a group of three.

All three were also set by Debussy: L’ombre des arbres and Chevaux de bois appear in Ariettes Oubliées, while Colloque sentimental belongs to Debussy’s second set of Fêtes Galantes. The poems I have grouped together are linked by the idea of three different landscapes. In the first, Verlaine precedes the words of his own sad, pale landscape with words from Cyrano de Bergerac about a nightingale who fears himself about to fall into a river and drown. In the second poem the landscape has been occupied by a fairground where men, women and children watch as the hobby-horses go round and round before night falls and the church tolls a passing-bell. The third poem takes us into an old park where two ghosts recall their past. The one wonders if the other remembers the happy days of their past lives, but the other doesn’t want to remember, barely acknowledging the closeness they once shared, seeing only that ‘hope has fled, defeated, towards the dark sky.’ I am very grateful to Roger Nichols and Dominique Mols for their advice with the setting of the French texts and with the translations.

John Casken

Colloque sentimental was first performed by Alison Smart and Katherine Durran at the Purcell Room in London on 13 July 2004