Déodat de Séverac - Un rêve (from 12 Mélodies, poem by Poe transl. Mallarmé)(1902)[Score]
Déodat de Séverac (1872 – 1921), “Un rêve” for voice & piano (1902), from 12 Mélodies (pub. ,1924), poem by Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849) traslated by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 - 1898).
Dedicated to Odilon Redon (1840 –1916), a French painter and Symbolist artist.
Victoire Bunel – chant
Sarah Ristorcelli – piano
Taken from Prima Verba ℗ Initiale Released on: 2019-11-22, a collection of French Art Songs by Déodat de Séverac, Fauré and Chausson.
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Description by Adrian Corleonis (Allmusic.com)
It is a pity that Séverac left us a little more than two dozen mélodies for, from the first, he was a master capable of responding to some of the finest poets in his language (e.g., Baudelaire, Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Charles d'Orléans) with a deft divination that impressively looms with similar things by Debussy or middle-period Fauré. With Un Rêve --Mallarmé's translation of Poe's "A Dream" -- we come across a curious instance of the American poet acquiring a profondeur in translation quite strikingly absent in the original. (Balmont's Russian translation of "The Bells," set by Rachmaninov, is another.) Poe is, to be sure, saying important things. For instance, when evanescent dreams or memories of an idealized past clash with intractable reality, the upshot is anguishing for the visionary, who not only partakes of, but takes the part of, the dream. When William Blake suggests something similar in his "Proverbs of Hell" -- "Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth" or "What is now proved was once only imagin'd" -- his forthright audacity makes a case for imagination not seen again in English until the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Leaving aside the posture of Poe's "broken-hearted" poet, he speaks with an admirable concision, even to the point of obscurity, though the rhymes in which his aperçu is cast lend it an air of jingling triviality. Eschewing rhyme, Mallarmé's otherwise quite faithful rendering lends Poe's language an air of juicy oracularity to which Séverac responds with braces of dotted triplets -- toujours dans la demi teinte -- providing a hypnotically muted background (the damper pedal is specified) in radiant E major through which the voice, mimicking speech inflections, floats with a detached, dreamlike serenity utterly at odds with Poe's pathos on the verge of bathos, from which it is saved by being sung out of the memory of happiness lost. Composed in 1902, as Séverac turned 30, Un Rêve is from his first, most opulent, period, which began with his first Verlaine setting, Le Ciel est, par-dessusle toit, in 1897, and concludes with Temps de neige, to a poem by Gauthier-Villars (the critic "Willy"), in 1904. Other songs appeared at intervals, including several traditional numbers recomposed for the cabaret chanteuse Yvette Guilbert, but the period of sustained cultivation of the mélodie was past, Séverac's interest having shifted to the composition of the piano cycles (e.g., En Languedoc), by which he is chiefly known. Un Rêve is dedicated to his friend Odilon Redon.
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Déodat de Séverac was born in Saint-Félix-de-Caraman, Haute-Garonne. He descended from a noble family, profoundly influenced by the musical traditions of his native Languedoc.
He first studied in Toulouse, then later moved to Paris to study under Vincent d'Indy and Albéric Magnard at the Schola Cantorum, an alternative to the training offered by the Paris Conservatoire. There he took organ lessons from Alexandre Guilmant and worked as an assistant to Isaac Albéniz. He returned to the southern part of France, where he spent much of the rest of his rather short life. His native south was a region that attracted a number of his contemporaries—artists and poets he had met in Paris. His opera Héliogabale was produced at Béziers in 1910.
He died in Céret, Pyrénées-Orientales, Roussillon.
Séverac is noted for his vocal and choral music, which includes settings of verse in Occitan (the historic language of Languedoc) and Catalan (the historic language of Roussillon) as well as French poems by Verlaine and Baudelaire. His compositions for solo piano have also won critical acclaim, and many of them were titled as pictorial evocations and published in the collections Chant de la terre, En Languedoc, and En vacances.
A popular example of his work is The Old Musical Box ("Où l'on entend une vieille boîte à musique", from En vacances). His masterpiece, however, is the suite Cerdaña (written 1904—1911), filled with the local color of Languedoc. His motet Tantum ergo is also still sung on occasion.
(Wikipedia)
Original audio: • Un rêve
Score: https://imslp.org/wiki/12_m%C3%A9lodies_(S...)
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I DO NOT own the AUDIO neither the SCORE. I don't earn anything by doing this video and it has been done only for didactical purposes. Copyrights go to all the artists.