Classical Music | Bass

Recorded on 07/06/2010, uploaded on 10/25/2011

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.

Le cygne (“The Swan”), third in the cycle, is the most optimistic of its companions. Renard imaginatively captures the graceful movements of the elegant bird, comparing its long neck to “a woman’s arm,” and its gentle trek across the water as if on “little pillows of feathers.” The swan is chasing the reflection of the clouds and attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to catch them with his beak. When he emerges from the water, he sees the clouds scattered and imagines that they are frightened. Then he spots the clouds gathering again at the edge of ripples he has created in the water, and paddles toward them to continue his unlucky pursuit. Renard muses that the swan exhausts himself in his futile pursuit of reflections, and may perhaps die without ever catching a cloud. Suddenly, he brings everything into perspective with a final comment, that with each dive, the swan catches a worm to eat.

Ravel’s setting is particularly sensitive and appropriate to the swan. The movement of the piano accompaniment is both descriptive of the swan’s aquatic environment and its graceful movements. In the middle portion of the song, it is possible to imagine the ripples of the water and the appearance of another reflection from Ravel’s superb tone-painting. Likewise, the vocal melody is here more lyrical than in the songs that have preceded Le cygne. Everything changes, however, at the conclusion of the song and Renard’s last satirical comment as the vocal melody takes on a recitative character and the accompaniment turns humorous.      Joseph DuBose

The Steans Music Institute is the Ravinia Festival's professional studies program for young musicians.