''Une saison en enfer'' (English: A Season in Hell) is

Léo Ferré Léo Ferré (24 August 1916 – 14 July 1993) was a French-born Monégasque poet and composer, and a dynamic and controversial live performer, whose career in France dominated the years after the Second World War until his death. He released s ...

's last studio album. It sets into music the whole eponymous poem written in 1873 by French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The album was released in 1991 by EPM Musique (982 181), for the 100th anniversary of Rimbaud's death, both as double LP and CD. It was reissued in 2000 by Ferré's son's label La Mémoire et la Mer, under a new cover. Unlike his previous musical works on poets such as Apollinaire (1954),

Baudelaire Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited fro ...

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1957 1957 ( MCMLVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1957th year of the Common Era (CE) and ''Anno Domini'' (AD) designations, the 957th year of the 2nd millennium, the 57th year of the 20th century, and the 8th y ...

1967 Events January * January 1 – Canada begins a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of Confederation, featuring the Expo 67 World's Fair. * January 5 ** Spain and Romania sign an agreement in Paris, establishing full consular and ...

1977 Events January * January 8 – Three bombs explode in Moscow within 37 minutes, killing seven. The bombings are attributed to an Armenian separatist group. * January 10 – Mount Nyiragongo erupts in eastern Zaire (now the Democratic R ...

, 1987), Louis Aragon (1961), or Verlaine and Rimbaud (1964), Ferré chose here bareness in the arrangements (piano, whistling, claps of hands, and nothing more but the voice declaiming, whispering or chanting) to provide the illusion of a half-improvised music and keep the poem's "original spouting strength", and most of all express his own conception of oral poetry by letting himself being only guided by musicality of rimbadian prose itself. Being connected with Rimbaud's poetic themes, Ferré gives an interpretation which "lightens" the meanings of the text.Céline Chabot-Canet, ''Op. cit.'', p. 163.

Track listing

Text : Arthur Rimbaud. Music, piano, whistling, clapping & singing : Léo Ferré.

External links

Album listening & presentation
(French)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Saison en enfer (album) Léo Ferré albums French-language albums 1991 albums Musical settings of poems by Arthur Rimbaud