Alistair Hinton: Sorabji’s Songs (3/4)
Apparition, Sorabji’s only known Mallarmé setting, is one of Premiers Poèmes from Poésies published in 1887. Sorabji knew Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Stephane Mallarmé (which does not include this poem) well before composing it; in a letter to Philip Heseltine just before he began composing in 1914, he wrote “They are exquisite — monstrously difficult as of course goes without saying — I do not think that there can possibly be more difficult piano parts to any songs hitherto written. It is quite wrong to call them ‘accompaniments’. Some three decades later, Sorabji devoted a paragraph beginning “The final triumph and crown of Ravel’s work as a song-writer …” to a consideration of these particular songs towards the end of The Great French Song Writers; not usually given to short sentences, he ends this potently with the words “It must be heard to be believed”, and then adds the sour footnote “Unfortunately I have never heard these wonderful songs sung. I have only heard them ‘interpreted’. It was very unpleasant”.
Composed just three weeks after Apparition, Hymne à Aphrodite is taken from Laurent Tailhade’s collection Le Jardin des Rêves (1880) and is on a rather larger scale than Sorabji’s earlier songs. Surveying the poetry which first attracted Sorabji to songwriting in The Texts of Sorabji’s Vocal Music (1), Paul Rapoport writes “Mystery, the unattainable, decay(,) and darkness both literal and metaphorical are some of the themes found in these poems … Many of (them) attain their effect by indirectness, subtlety(,) and unusual interplay of images — well-known traits of French symbolism.”
Sorabji’s earliest published scores appeared in 1921 and include the piano works Fantaisie Espagnole and Sonata No.1 (1919) and Trois Poèmes for voice and piano (1918). Sorabji had met Busoni in London in November 1919 and played to him his then recently completed Sonata No.1, whereupon Busoni wrote his younger colleague an open letter of recommendation with a view to assisting him in having his work published. The publication of Trois Poèmes was reviewed in UK in The Musical Times and Musical Opinion as well as in La Revue Musicale in France.
Sorabji’s only known public appearance with another artist took place in June 1921 in Paris at the invitation of French composer Florent Schmitt to play the piano part for French soprano Marthe Martine in the world première of Trois Poèmes; Szymanowski’s Tagore songs were also included in this programme, sung by another soprano, but there is no evidence that Sorabji, who adored much of Szymanowski’s work, played the piano in these. At least three French journals published reviews of the concert, of which one was written by the composer Darius Milhaud who seemed to take some exception to what he saw as the complexity of Sorabji’s piano parts! The publication bears a dedication to Marthe Martine.
The texts of Trois Poèmes date from a generation before those chosen by Sorabji for his earlier songs; Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and Verlaine’s Poèmes Saturniens were published in 1857 and 1866 respectively. The opening song, Correspondances, is in Spleen et Idéal and the second, Crépuscule du Soir Mystique, is from the collection Paysages Tristes. The influence of the mature Debussy is notably evidenced for the first time in these songs (Sorabji considered Proses Lyriques a major achievement in French song) and the elaborate, ornate richness of the piano writing in the first two is suggestive of some of the directions which his solo piano music was about to take; the final song, Pantomime, from Verlaine’s Fêtes Galantes (1869) however, is a model of sprightliness and economy and it is this volume of poems which also provides the source for Sorabji’s next collection of songs.