The ''Quatre poèmes hindous'' ("Four Hindu poems") are a cycle of ''

mélodie A ''mélodie'' () is a form of French art song, arising in the mid-19th century. It is comparable to the German '' Lied''. A ''chanson'', by contrast, is a folk or popular French song. The literal meaning of the word in the French language is " ...

s'' by the French composer

Maurice Delage Maurice Charles Delage (13 November 1879 – 19 or 21 September 1961) was a French composer and pianist. Life and career Maurice Charles Delage was born and died in Paris. He first worked as a clerk for a maritime agency in Paris, and later a ...

for soprano and

chamber ensemble Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of Musical instrument, instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a Great chamber, palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music ...

of two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, harp, and string quartet. Delage composed it in 1912 while he was visiting India. It is considered his first masterwork, and it remains the best known and most recorded of his works.

Structure

Titles and dedications

# Madras – "Une belle ..." (stanza 22 by

Bhartṛhari Bhartṛhari (Devanagari: ; Bhartrihari; fl. c. 5th century CE), was an Indian-Hindu linguistic philosopher and poet, known for his contributions to the fields of linguistics, grammar, and philosophy. He is believed to have been born in the 5t ...

), dedicated to

Maurice Ravel Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism in music, Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composer ...

# Lahore – "Un sapin isolé ..." (poem by

Heine Heine is both a surname and a given name of German origin. People with that name include: People with the surname * Albert Heine (1867–1949), German actor * Alice Heine (1858–1925), American-born princess of Monaco * Armand Heine (1818–1883) ...

''Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam''
, No. 33.) # Bénarès – ''Naissance de Bouddha'' (anonymous), dédié à

Florent Schmitt Florent Schmitt (; 28 September 187017 August 1958) was a French composer. He was part of the group known as Les Apaches. His most famous pieces are ''La tragédie de Salome'' and ''Psaume XLVII'' ( Psalm 47). He has been described as "one of t ...

# Jeypur – "Si vous pensez à elle ..." (stanza 73 by Bhartṛhari), dedicated to

Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...

. The performance lasts just under nine minutes.

Composition

At the end of the

French Third Republic The French Third Republic (, sometimes written as ) was the system of government adopted in France from 4 September 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War, until 10 July 1940, after the Fall of France durin ...

, the

Far East The Far East is the geographical region that encompasses the easternmost portion of the Asian continent, including North Asia, North, East Asia, East and Southeast Asia. South Asia is sometimes also included in the definition of the term. In mod ...

was in fashion in France, particularly in certain artistic circles. The French composer

(1879–1961) travelled to

British India The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance in South Asia. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one form or another ...

at the end of 1911, largely funded by his father, who accompanied him. The visit lasted until May 1913. Delage named the ''mélodies'' he composed after the cities he was visiting when he composed them:

Jaipur Jaipur (; , ) is the List of state and union territory capitals in India, capital and the List of cities and towns in Rajasthan, largest city of the north-western States and union territories of India, Indian state of Rajasthan. , the city had ...

("Jeypur"),

Varanasi Varanasi (, also Benares, Banaras ) or Kashi, is a city on the Ganges river in northern India that has a central place in the traditions of pilgrimage, death, and mourning in the Hindu world.* * * * The city has a syncretic tradition of I ...

("Bénarès"),

Lahore Lahore ( ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of the Administrative units of Pakistan, Pakistani province of Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab. It is the List of cities in Pakistan by population, second-largest city in Pakistan, after Karachi, and ...

, and

Chennai Chennai, also known as Madras (List of renamed places in India#Tamil Nadu, its official name until 1996), is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Tamil Nadu by population, largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost states and ...

("Madras"). According to Philippe Rodriguez, the trip allowed the young composer to "reduce as much as possible an inferiority complex" he suffered from, despite encouragement from

, thanks to "the authenticity of an exoticism drawn from the source". Rodriguez states the ''Quatre poèmes hindous'' represent "one of the first attempts to introduce the melodic and rhythmic forms of

Indian music Owing to India's vastness and diversity, Indian music encompasses numerous genres in multiple varieties and forms which include classical music, folk, rock, and pop. It has a history spanning several millennia and developed over several ...

to the language of Western music". Delage likely had a piano, as he felt himself unable to compose without a keyboard He first made a version for soprano and piano and then magnified it with a rich harmonic instrumentation. The technique of the instruments, all solo, is so exact that the harmonic instrumentation seems to have been specified very early. The dates of composition are in the reverse order of the sequence of the ''mélodies'': "Si vous pensez à elle ..." and ''Naissance de Bouddha'' were completed in January 1912, "Un sapin isolé ..." in February, and "Une belle ..." in March.

Instrumentation

The instrumental formation is reduced effectively to

chamber music Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of Musical instrument, instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a Great chamber, palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music ...

, in which the piano is excluded. Michel Duchesneau sees in this the influence of Schönberg's '' Pierrot Lunaire'', which premièred in Vienna on 16 December 1912 and which motivated Ravel and Stravinsky to compose their own poems during 1913. The work of Schönberg was also to have been included in the 1914 concert programme.

Alexis Roland-Manuel Alexis Roland-Manuel (22 March 18911 November 1966) was a French composer and critic, remembered mainly for his criticism. Biography He was born Roland Alexis Manuel Lévy in Paris, to a family of Belgian and Jewish origins. He studied composi ...

refuted this influence on Delage, while

Marius Flothuis Marius Flothuis, (30 October 1914 – 13 November 2001) born and died in Amsterdam, was a Dutch people, Dutch composer, musicologist and music critic. Biography Flothuis first took courses at Vossius Gymnasium in Amsterdam. There he studied pia ...

sees the instrumental ensemble as closer to that which Ravel used in 1905 for his '' Introduction and Allegro'', which is left to flute, clarinet, harp, and string quartet.

Première

The première took place on 14 January 1914 at the inaugural concert of the Société musicale indépendante (SMI). It was performed by Rose Féart and was conducted by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht. The premières of Florent Schmitt's ''

Le Petit Elfe Ferme-l'œil ''Le Petit Elfe Ferme-l'œil'' (Op. 73) is an orchestral suite by Florent Schmitt adapted from his music for the homonymous ballet ("divertissement chorégraphique") after a tale by Hans Christian Andersen.Trois poèmes de Mallarmé'', and

Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of ...

's took place at the same concert. It was a great success for Delage, who was still largely unknown.

Émile Vuillermoz Émile-Jean-Joseph Vuillermoz (23 May 1878 – 2 March 1960) was a French critic in the areas of music, film, drama and literature. He was also a composer, but abandoned this for criticism. Early life Émile Vuillermoz was born in Lyon in 1878. He ...

commented on both the score and the public reception: "These four ''mélodies'' deserve careful study. So much poetry and freshness, so much fine sensibility in a harmonic vocabulary of a taste so exquisite that even the listeners least sympathetic to this kind sport were wont to comptemplate a second time the lone fir tree 'Lahore'."

Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi (2 October 1877 – 1 February 1944) was a French-born music critic and musicologist of Greek descent who was a British citizen and resident in England from 1914 onwards. He is especially noted for his writings on Ru ...

summarized: "One of the great successes of the evening was for Maurice Delage's ''Quatre poèmes hindous'', savoury and full of emotion, admirably performed ... The audience, charmed, called for an encore of the ''mélodies'', and would gladly have had encores of the others.

Overview

Poems

1. Madras 2. Lahore 3. Bénarès 4. Jeypur

Music

The are short, as are the poems Delage chose. Even the longest amongst them, an anonymous story about the birth of

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha (),* * * was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist legends, he was ...

, foolows a clear melodic line, hardly troubled by the diaereses placed under certain words ("mystéri-eux", "li-anes"). The prose also inspired the composer to attempt exotic rhythms, with a

quintuple meter Quintuple meter or quintuple time is a musical meter (music), meter characterized by five Beat (music), beats in a measure, whether variably or equally stressed. Like the more common Duple meter, duple, triple meter, triple, and quadruple meter, ...

, the use of ''

pizzicato Pizzicato (, ; translated as 'pinched', and sometimes roughly as 'plucked') is a playing technique that involves plucking the strings of a string instrument. The exact technique varies somewhat depending on the type of instrument: * On bowe ...

harmonic In physics, acoustics, and telecommunications, a harmonic is a sinusoidal wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the ''fundamental frequency'' of a periodic signal. The fundamental frequency is also called the ''1st har ...

s on the strings, and colouring principles Ravel had used in his ''

Chansons madécasses ' (''Madagascan Songs'') is a set of three exotic art songs by Maurice Ravel written in 1925 and 1926 to words from the poetry collection of the same name by Évariste de Parny. Structure Scored for mezzo-soprano or baritone, flute, cello and pi ...

''. By placing the two Bhartṛhari stanzas at the beginning and the end of the cycle, Delage shows a concern for formal balance, which is translated musically by the return of a phrase given to the flute in the first and last bars of ''Quatre poèmes hindous'', "in an entirely judicious manner", according to Flothuis: "Lahore" stands out from the other ''mélodies'', lasting nearly four minutes. The

poem, subtly ironic in its parallel of the fir numbed with cold and the palm under the burning sun, allows Delage to evoke the Far East with luxurious arpeggios on the harp. The end of the poem opens on a very pure, unaccompanied vocalization (bars 43 to 55 in the score) in which the singer must adjust her ''

tessitura In music, tessitura ( , , ; ; ) is the most acceptable and comfortable vocal range for a given singer (or, less frequently, musical instrument). It is the range in which a given type of voice presents its best-sounding (or characteristic) tim ...

'' and sing ''à bouche fermée'' ("with mouth closed"), then ''bouche ouverte'' ("mouth open"), "closing the mouth bit by bit". This novel effect stunned its first audiences. Lahore - vocalise

The instrumental accompaniment is of great refinement. According to Vuillermoz, "Mr. Delage is a veritable child of the 20th century, with the instinctive ease of his ''delectable'' handling of dissonance, his curiosity with rare timbres, his desire to push back sonic boundaries, his skillful annexation of neighbouring lands in the unexplored domains of noise. His impatience with the yoke in the presence of the imperfections of our musical material is characteristic; he loosens the bow of his viola to B he invents a ''pizzicato-glissando'' which pulls from the string an almost human sob, he demands closed-mouth vocalizations from the female voice, and sometimes imposes on it a veiled nasal tone of an invisible mute, and all without a laborious strangeness, without bias, and virtually without searching." Delage learned music by playing and improvising on his viola. From this he got the ''pizzicato-glissando'' which, at the beginning of "Lahore", provides a "Hindu" colour, far from pastiche—and impossible to reproduce on piano.

Critical analysis

The reception of ''Quatre poèmes hindous'' was favourable overall, though not unanimously so. expressed reservations over the work for its brevity and delicately transparent character: "I must admit that after hearing Maurice Delage's Hindu ''mélodies'', I was still waiting for the masterpiece announced! ... I will not dwell on these pieces, which are short but still too long for meagre musical interest they offer." Such a negative criticism was isolated in 1914 but taken up by numerous critics of Delage's ''

Sept haï-kaïs ''Sept haï-kaïs'' (, "Seven haikais") is a song cycle of ''mélodies'' by the French composer Maurice Delage for soprano and Chamber music, chamber ensemble of flute, oboe, B♭ clarinet, piano, and string quartet. Delage composed the work ...

'' of 1925, which are even shorter. Delage's music has thus acquired a reputation of being "preciocities" and "sound trinkets", the "breathless" work of an amateur music. This is contradicted by his ''Contrerimes'' for piano (1927), which lasts 20 minutes, and especially his string quartet from 1949, which lasts nearly 55 minutes. In 1960, Paul Pittion reviewed Delage's works, and wrote of the ''Quatre poèmes hindous'': "Maurice Delage has produced little, but his ''mélodies'', along with those of Henri Duparc, are masterworks of vocal and polyphonic composition, as well as of sensitivity."

Homages

In 1937,

Georges Auric Georges Auric (; 15 February 1899 – 23 July 1983) was a French composer, born in Lodève, Hérault, France. He was considered one of ''Les Six'', a group of artists informally associated with Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie. Before he turned 20 h ...

gave an account of his impression of the première performance a quarter century earlier: "While nothing is more easily intolerable than false exoticism and this tainted quaintness which has sickened us with its quite mediocre music, there is, under the prestige of an instrumentation of a rare subtlety, a very pure and deep feeling there". According to Michel Duchesneau, the co-premières of the ''Quatre poèmes hindous'', Ravel's ''Trois poèmes de Mallarmé'', and Stravinsky's ''Three Japanese Lyrics'' at the SMI provoked "an evolution" of the French ''mélodie'', understood as "chamber music with voice" until 1939. In 1941,

Charles Koechlin Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin (; 27 November 186731 December 1950), commonly known as Charles Koechlin, was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his better known works is '' Les Heures persanes'', a set of piano pieces based on th ...

cited the cello's ''pizzicato-glissando'' (or ''pizz. vibrato molto'') passage in his ''Traité de l'orchestration'' as a "characteristic example" of modern composition with ''pizzicato''. According to Michel Duchesneau, immediately after the work's première, Delage could still enjoy the esteem of the master

Debussy Achille Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influe ...

, whose work had convinced him to devote himself to music. According to Paul Landormy, "Debussy, taken with his ''Poèmes hindous'', asked him one day to play them to him with the music under his eyes. He nearly collapsed ..."

Notes

References

Works cited

* * * * * * * * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Quatre poemes hindous Compositions by Maurice Delage 1912 compositions Classical song cycles in French Music based on poems Songs with instrumental ensemble