Léo Ferré (1916 - 1993) not only set many of Baudelaire's poems from La Fleur du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) but he also used the symbolist poems of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud who both came in the footsteps of Baudelaire. (1)Guillaume Apollinaire, forefather of surrealist poetry, also figured high on Ferré's list. (2) In 1973 Ferré went to live in the Tuscan hills in Italy and recorded some songs in Italian. The great 20th century Italian poet Cesare Pavese was an inspiration.
In 1859 Ferré set a number of Paul Verlaine poems, and he would do the same for Arthur Rimbaud in 1860 and in later years. In 1964 Ferré released a double album Verlaine et Rimbaud. The posthumous double album Maudits soient-ils ! (2004) contains some of the same songs but also a number of previously unpublished ones.
1. Paul Verlaine (1844 - 1896).
We listened to Ferré's setting of Chanson d'Automne (Autumn Song) in my introductory post. The video was from a 1986 live recording, but the song was already included in the 1964 double album.
Here is L'espoir luit comme un brin de paille (Hope shines like a wisp of hay in the stable). Verlaine wrote this poem in September 1873 while temporarily incarcerated at the Petits Carmes prison in Brussels before being transferred to the prison in Mons in October. (3) He describes a stop at an inn during his trip with Rimbaud in Belgium the previous year. He sees Rimbaud, an elbow on the table, his usual posture, and wishes the time of their first encounter could come back. (4) Verlaine refers to this happy time as "les roses de septembre (the roses of September)."
2. Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891)
La Maline (The Clever One) is a poem of Rimbaud's Cahier de Douai (Douai Notebook), a collection of 22 poems written in 1870. In the year the sixteen-year old ran away from home twice and ended up twice in the home of his trusted teacher's aunts in Douai where he combined the poems into the Notebook. La Maline relates a stop at a Belgian inn where a generous waitress makes sensual advances. Could this episode have happened in Malines, Belgium, as the title seems to suggest? (5)
From the same collection comes one of Rimbaud's best known poems: Le dormeur du val (The sleeper in the valley). The poem begins in an idyllic setting of color and light, but the picture of a "green hollow" already hints at the macabre truth, painted as a peaceful sleep. Behind the poem's tranquil sentences lies 'a cry of revolt by Rimbaud against [the Franco-Prussian] war, the killing of young soldiers, the massacre of an entire young generation.' (6)
In the Spring of 1871 Rimbaud sympathized with the radical socialist and revolutionary ideas of the Paris Commune and wrote a watershed poem Les Poètes de sept ans (Seven-year old Poets) in a letter to Paul Demeny in its immediate aftermath. Also in this letter Rimbaud asked Demeny--in vain--to destroy all poems he had previously given to him.
Rimbaud wrote Le Bateau ivre (The drunken boat) in the Summer of 1871 and sent it to Paul Verlaine before his arrival in Paris. Written in the first person at age 17, it describes a leaderless boat, shaken by the waves, which ends up sinking. This maritime odyssey is a long metaphor for Rimbaud himself, an adolescent adrift, going through the trials and failures of a beginning poet. IStill written in a style acceptable to the literary establishment, it forebodes Rimbaud's departure from its poetic constraints. (8)
In the poem Les Corbeaux (The Ravens), published in September 1872, Rimbaud invokes France's defeat ("La défaite sans avenir (Defeat without future)") in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He asks the ravens to 'descend in the thousands on the fields of France where the dead of yesteryear sleep.' At the same time he deplores his own poetic defeat in Paris. (9)
Ferré sets this text as funeral march.
In 1873 Rimbaud wrote Une saison en enfer (A season in hell) and published it after the whole story with Verlaine had been widely publicized. His work was snubbed, he burnt all his manuscripts and probably never wrote a poem again.
Léo Ferré's recording of this long text was released in 1991 for the 100th anniversary of Rimbaud's death. Ferré concentrates on the reading of the text, once in a while transitioning into slight singing with here or there whistle or a clap of the hands and the sparsest of piano accompaniments.
3. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 - 1918)
Le Pont Mirabeau (The Mirabeau Bridge) was first published in a magazine in 1912 and included in Apollinaire's collection Alcools (Alcohols) of 1913.
It deals with the loss of love with the passage of time, of which the flow of the river Seine under the bridge Mirabeau in Paris is the metaphor. (10)
Included in his 1953 album Paris Canaille, Ferré gives this melancholic text the gentlest of gentle Parisian settings.
L'adieu (The farewell) is a five-line lyric poem from the same collection and another love lost poem. (11)
Marie was the fifth poem of Apollinaire Ferré set to music. It first appeared in 1973 as a solo record. In 1987 it was included in the album On n'est pas sérieux quand on a dix-sept ans (One is not serious at age 17) and received there a more suddle percussion and ensemble accompaniment. It is another sad song about love lost with the Seine in the background. We hear it here in the 1987 version.
4. Cesare Pavese (1908 - 1950)
Pavese wrote Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (When death comes it will have your eyes) in 1950. It was found amid his papers following his suicide 'at the age of 41, after having been rejected by the American actress (and former mistress of Elia Kazan) Constance Dowling, who is presumed to have inspired this poem.'(12) Ferré gives this poem of despair a light, unaffected setting. It was included in the 1972 album La solitudine, Ferré's first album in a foreign language, intended for the Italian market.
______________________________________________________________________________
(1) Verlaine and Rimbaud had a brief but stormy relationship which ended with a few gunshots and Verlaine's two-year incarceration first in Brussels, then in Mons, Belgium. Verlaine's life ended in drug and alcohol dependency and much misery. Rimbaud became a businessman traveling overseas and eventually settled in Yemen and Ethiopia as a merchant.
(2) Apollinaire fought in World War I and was injured to the temple by shrapnel. Permanently weakened, he would die from the Spanish flue pandemic in 1918.
(3) In 1865 the prison was named "Prison Cellulaire." The title of Verlaine's unpublished manuscript in which the poem appeared, was "Cellulaire." The poem is the second of four sections of Almanach pour l’année passée (Almanac for the past year), in which Verlaine reminisces about a trip through Belgium with Arthur Rimbaud the previous year. Sophie Peeters, "Ancienne prison à Bruxelles (Old prison in Brussels)." Brussels blog, 03/12/2007. (http://sofei-vandenaemet.skynetblogs.be/archive/2007/03/12/ancienne-prison-a-bruxelles.html (08/23/2016))
(4) Verlaine and Rimbaud first met in September 1871 when Rimbaud visited and stayed with Verlaine in Paris at the latter's in-laws' home.
(5) Compare this poem with the poem Malines by Paul Verlaine, inspired by Verlaine's escapade through Belgium with Rimbaud in 1872.
(6) Free translation, "Rimbaud: Le dormeur du val (1870)." Rimbaud expliqué website, 03/27/2016. (http://rimbaudexplique.free.fr/poemes/dormeur.html (08/23/2016))
(7) Free translation: Élodie Gaden, "Les poètes de sept ans." Lettres et Arts (Arts and Letters) website, December 2005. (https://www.lettres-et-arts.net/histoire-litteraire-19-21emes/arthur-rimbaud/poetes-sept-ans+36 (08/23/2016))
(8)"Rimbaud: Le Bateau ivre (1871)." Rimbaud expliqué website, 03/27/2016. (http://rimbaudexplique.free.fr/poemes/bateau.html 08/23/2016))
(9) Rimbaud's new style chocked the literary establishment. BacFrancais.com website. (http://www.bacfrancais.com/bac_francais/415-rimbaud-les-corbeaux-commentaire.php (08/23/2016))
(10)"Le Pont Mirabeau." French Wikipedia page. (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Pont_Mirabeau (08/23/2016))
(11) The lady was Annie Playden, an English governess, who left for the United States in 1905 and whom Rimbaud would never see again. "L'Adieu."Des amours de poèmes (Lovely poems), Blog of the Class of First SMR du Legta du Morvan, Château-Chinon, 03/15/2012. (http://smrpoesie.canalblog.com/archives/2012/03/15/23768172.html (08/23/2016))
(12) Julian Peters, "Cesare Pavese – When Death Comes, It Will Have Your Eyes – Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi." Julian Peters Comics website, 02/02/2013. (https://julianpeterscomics.com/2013/02/02/cesare-pavese-when-death-comes-itll-have-your-eyes-verra-la-morte-e-avra-i-tuoi-occhi/ (08/23/2016))
In 1859 Ferré set a number of Paul Verlaine poems, and he would do the same for Arthur Rimbaud in 1860 and in later years. In 1964 Ferré released a double album Verlaine et Rimbaud. The posthumous double album Maudits soient-ils ! (2004) contains some of the same songs but also a number of previously unpublished ones.
1. Paul Verlaine (1844 - 1896).
We listened to Ferré's setting of Chanson d'Automne (Autumn Song) in my introductory post. The video was from a 1986 live recording, but the song was already included in the 1964 double album.
Here is L'espoir luit comme un brin de paille (Hope shines like a wisp of hay in the stable). Verlaine wrote this poem in September 1873 while temporarily incarcerated at the Petits Carmes prison in Brussels before being transferred to the prison in Mons in October. (3) He describes a stop at an inn during his trip with Rimbaud in Belgium the previous year. He sees Rimbaud, an elbow on the table, his usual posture, and wishes the time of their first encounter could come back. (4) Verlaine refers to this happy time as "les roses de septembre (the roses of September)."
2. Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891)
La Maline (The Clever One) is a poem of Rimbaud's Cahier de Douai (Douai Notebook), a collection of 22 poems written in 1870. In the year the sixteen-year old ran away from home twice and ended up twice in the home of his trusted teacher's aunts in Douai where he combined the poems into the Notebook. La Maline relates a stop at a Belgian inn where a generous waitress makes sensual advances. Could this episode have happened in Malines, Belgium, as the title seems to suggest? (5)
From the same collection comes one of Rimbaud's best known poems: Le dormeur du val (The sleeper in the valley). The poem begins in an idyllic setting of color and light, but the picture of a "green hollow" already hints at the macabre truth, painted as a peaceful sleep. Behind the poem's tranquil sentences lies 'a cry of revolt by Rimbaud against [the Franco-Prussian] war, the killing of young soldiers, the massacre of an entire young generation.' (6)
In the Spring of 1871 Rimbaud sympathized with the radical socialist and revolutionary ideas of the Paris Commune and wrote a watershed poem Les Poètes de sept ans (Seven-year old Poets) in a letter to Paul Demeny in its immediate aftermath. Also in this letter Rimbaud asked Demeny--in vain--to destroy all poems he had previously given to him.
He denounces bitterly the social, political and religious reality. With ironic text and scatological realism he develops a particular vision, seen through a prism of body and sex, and separates himself from the romantic, too idealistic writing style. This poem contains the programmatic elements of Rimbaud's poetry. It is a concrete application of the idea by which one has to "find a language," not relying on now commonplace poetry, breaking with its links of logic. After the Commune, a new Rimbaud emerges and with him a new idea of poetry.(7)
Rimbaud wrote Le Bateau ivre (The drunken boat) in the Summer of 1871 and sent it to Paul Verlaine before his arrival in Paris. Written in the first person at age 17, it describes a leaderless boat, shaken by the waves, which ends up sinking. This maritime odyssey is a long metaphor for Rimbaud himself, an adolescent adrift, going through the trials and failures of a beginning poet. IStill written in a style acceptable to the literary establishment, it forebodes Rimbaud's departure from its poetic constraints. (8)
In the poem Les Corbeaux (The Ravens), published in September 1872, Rimbaud invokes France's defeat ("La défaite sans avenir (Defeat without future)") in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He asks the ravens to 'descend in the thousands on the fields of France where the dead of yesteryear sleep.' At the same time he deplores his own poetic defeat in Paris. (9)
Ferré sets this text as funeral march.
In 1873 Rimbaud wrote Une saison en enfer (A season in hell) and published it after the whole story with Verlaine had been widely publicized. His work was snubbed, he burnt all his manuscripts and probably never wrote a poem again.
Léo Ferré's recording of this long text was released in 1991 for the 100th anniversary of Rimbaud's death. Ferré concentrates on the reading of the text, once in a while transitioning into slight singing with here or there whistle or a clap of the hands and the sparsest of piano accompaniments.
3. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 - 1918)
Le Pont Mirabeau (The Mirabeau Bridge) was first published in a magazine in 1912 and included in Apollinaire's collection Alcools (Alcohols) of 1913.
It deals with the loss of love with the passage of time, of which the flow of the river Seine under the bridge Mirabeau in Paris is the metaphor. (10)
Included in his 1953 album Paris Canaille, Ferré gives this melancholic text the gentlest of gentle Parisian settings.
L'adieu (The farewell) is a five-line lyric poem from the same collection and another love lost poem. (11)
I’ve gathered this strand of heather
Autumn is dead, remember
We won't meet again on earth
Scent of time Strand of heather
And remember that I'm waiting for you.
Marie was the fifth poem of Apollinaire Ferré set to music. It first appeared in 1973 as a solo record. In 1987 it was included in the album On n'est pas sérieux quand on a dix-sept ans (One is not serious at age 17) and received there a more suddle percussion and ensemble accompaniment. It is another sad song about love lost with the Seine in the background. We hear it here in the 1987 version.
4. Cesare Pavese (1908 - 1950)
Pavese wrote Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (When death comes it will have your eyes) in 1950. It was found amid his papers following his suicide 'at the age of 41, after having been rejected by the American actress (and former mistress of Elia Kazan) Constance Dowling, who is presumed to have inspired this poem.'(12) Ferré gives this poem of despair a light, unaffected setting. It was included in the 1972 album La solitudine, Ferré's first album in a foreign language, intended for the Italian market.
______________________________________________________________________________
(1) Verlaine and Rimbaud had a brief but stormy relationship which ended with a few gunshots and Verlaine's two-year incarceration first in Brussels, then in Mons, Belgium. Verlaine's life ended in drug and alcohol dependency and much misery. Rimbaud became a businessman traveling overseas and eventually settled in Yemen and Ethiopia as a merchant.
(2) Apollinaire fought in World War I and was injured to the temple by shrapnel. Permanently weakened, he would die from the Spanish flue pandemic in 1918.
(3) In 1865 the prison was named "Prison Cellulaire." The title of Verlaine's unpublished manuscript in which the poem appeared, was "Cellulaire." The poem is the second of four sections of Almanach pour l’année passée (Almanac for the past year), in which Verlaine reminisces about a trip through Belgium with Arthur Rimbaud the previous year. Sophie Peeters, "Ancienne prison à Bruxelles (Old prison in Brussels)." Brussels blog, 03/12/2007. (http://sofei-vandenaemet.skynetblogs.be/archive/2007/03/12/ancienne-prison-a-bruxelles.html (08/23/2016))
(4) Verlaine and Rimbaud first met in September 1871 when Rimbaud visited and stayed with Verlaine in Paris at the latter's in-laws' home.
(5) Compare this poem with the poem Malines by Paul Verlaine, inspired by Verlaine's escapade through Belgium with Rimbaud in 1872.
(6) Free translation, "Rimbaud: Le dormeur du val (1870)." Rimbaud expliqué website, 03/27/2016. (http://rimbaudexplique.free.fr/poemes/dormeur.html (08/23/2016))
(7) Free translation: Élodie Gaden, "Les poètes de sept ans." Lettres et Arts (Arts and Letters) website, December 2005. (https://www.lettres-et-arts.net/histoire-litteraire-19-21emes/arthur-rimbaud/poetes-sept-ans+36 (08/23/2016))
(8)"Rimbaud: Le Bateau ivre (1871)." Rimbaud expliqué website, 03/27/2016. (http://rimbaudexplique.free.fr/poemes/bateau.html 08/23/2016))
(9) Rimbaud's new style chocked the literary establishment. BacFrancais.com website. (http://www.bacfrancais.com/bac_francais/415-rimbaud-les-corbeaux-commentaire.php (08/23/2016))
(10)"Le Pont Mirabeau." French Wikipedia page. (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Pont_Mirabeau (08/23/2016))
(11) The lady was Annie Playden, an English governess, who left for the United States in 1905 and whom Rimbaud would never see again. "L'Adieu."Des amours de poèmes (Lovely poems), Blog of the Class of First SMR du Legta du Morvan, Château-Chinon, 03/15/2012. (http://smrpoesie.canalblog.com/archives/2012/03/15/23768172.html (08/23/2016))
(12) Julian Peters, "Cesare Pavese – When Death Comes, It Will Have Your Eyes – Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi." Julian Peters Comics website, 02/02/2013. (https://julianpeterscomics.com/2013/02/02/cesare-pavese-when-death-comes-itll-have-your-eyes-verra-la-morte-e-avra-i-tuoi-occhi/ (08/23/2016))