Classical Music | Choral Music

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.

Unlike its companion songs, “Le martin-pêcheur” (“The Kingfisher”) is presented not from the perspective of the animal itself, but instead of an unknown narrator. This narrator sits plaintively by the waterside, fishing to no avail. Suddenly, a kingfisher, a brightly-colored bird generally associated with lakes and rivers in the Old World, lands on his fishing pole. He muses that the bird has mistook him for a tree branch, and quietly admires the bird’s brilliant plumage. Typically shy birds around humans, the narrator takes pride in the fact the bird does not immediately fly away. Ravel’s setting is hushed and pensive, taking its cue from the fisherman himself. The piano provides a dense harmonic accompaniment to the restrained vocal melody that barely rises above a piano—the narrator speaks, but quietly hoping not to scare away the bird from his fishing pole.      Joseph DuBose

Le martin-pêcheur (The Kingfisher)

Nothing bit this evening, 

but I tell of a rare emotion.  

As I held my pole line taut, 

a kingfisher came to rest there.  

There is no more brilliant bird. 

It seemed like a big blue flower 

at the end of a long stem. 

The pole bent under its weight. 

I held my breath, proud to have been taken 

for a tree by a kingfisher.  

And I am sure that he did not fly away from fear, 

but because he believed he was only passing 

from one branch to another.

Translated by Stephen Lancaster

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.