Classical Music | Baritone

Recorded on 08/19/2015, uploaded on 04/27/2016

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

The author and poet Jules Renard often mocked the characters in his own work, treating them in a particularly sarcastic, even cruel manner. This is particularly the case in his Histoiries naturelles, a collection of poems based on the 44-volume zoological treatise by the 18^th-century French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon. In this work, Renard elevates the animals by making them archetypes of human personalities, and in doing so rather animalize men. Published in 1895, it became quite popular, and eleven years later Maurice Ravel selected five of Renard’s poems to set to music under the same title. Ravel’s settings are witty and humorous, certainly taking their cue from the lighthearted nature of the poems themselves, and which was seemingly lost on the audience at its premiere performance in 1907. Nonetheless, the charm of Ravel’s picturesque settings has nonetheless made Histoires naturelles a favorite among the composer’s vocal music.

Second in the cycle is “Le grillon,” or “The Cricket.” Renard’s imagery here is somewhat more cryptic than in “Le paon,” comparing the eventide chirping of crickets to human labors that, to the imagination at least, conjure its sound. Renard imagines that the cricket is nervous, cautious of his own safety, that his song has been but the sound of his efforts to protect himself. Finally, forced to resign from his work, he descends slowly into the earth, and in the final lines of the poem, the reader is at last given a concrete depiction of the scene—a mute countryside, with poplars pointing towards the moon. Like the previous song, Ravel’s treatment adheres closely to the inherent flow of Renard’s text, subjugating the music to the text, and resulting in a setting that is quite recitative-like throughout regardless of whether expressly notated or not. The piano accompaniment is noticeably unsettled in its sense of insecurity, and even the cricket’s “chirps” appear beginning in the middle portion of the song. Lastly, the contrasting calm scene of the poem is depicted in the sudden resonant, sustained chords that accompany the final lines.     Joseph DuBose

Le grillon (The Cricket)

It is the hour when, tired of wandering,

the black insect returns from his walk

and carefully tidies the disorder of his domain.

First he rakes his narrow sandy paths.

He makes sawdust that he piles

on the threshold of his hideaway.

He files the root of the tall grass,

appropriate for attacking.

He rests.

Then he winds up again his minuscule watch.  

Has he finished? Is it broken? 

He rests again for a little while.

He returns home and closes his door.

A long while he turns his key

in the delicate lock.

And he listens; nothing alarming outside.

But he does not find security.

And, like a small chain

whose links a pulley grinds, 

he descends into the depths of the earth.

We hear nothing more.

In the silent countryside,

the poplars stand erect

like fingers in the air,

pointing toward the moon.

Translated by Stephen Lancaster

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.