Alistair Hinton: Sorabji’s Songs (4/4)
This performance of Trois Poèmes occurred just before their publication so was evidently given from the autograph manuscript, two-thirds of which seems subsequently to have disappeared. The same regrettable fate has befallen the entire manuscript of Sorabji’s only other published songs to date, Trois Fêtes Galantes and their precise composition date has therefore yet to be established; they appear to have been written soon after Trois Poèmes, but no performance is known to have preceded that in 1979 when both these published cycles were given by Jane Manning and Yonty Solomon. Sorabji’s source material was an illustrated limited edition of Verlaine’s Fêtes Galantes published by Ferroud of Paris in 1913 which is now in The Sorabji Archive. His Trois Fêtes Galantes were published in 1924; dedicated to the composer’s mother, they comprise l’Allée, À la Promenade and Dans la Grotte from the collection.
Apart from one revision and one completion, Sorabji wrote no songs for 14 years following his 1927 setting of Baudelaire’s l’Irrémédiable. The three 1941 songs were commissioned by Dutch soprano Joy McArden and her husband the pianist H James Cooper for them to perform and are accordingly dedicated to them. Sorabji returns here to the poetry of Verlaine and Baudelaire which had earlier prompted l’Heure Exquise, l’Irrémédiable and the two published sets. The first song, Le Faune, is yet another from Verlaine’s Fêtes Galantes. The second, Baudelaire’s Les Chats (Sorabji adored and admired cats, incidentally), is another poem in Spleen et Idéal and Sorabji’s treatment involves a characteristically languorous and sinuous piano part at times reminiscent of No.3 of his One Hundred Transcendental Studies (1940–44). The final song, La Dernière Fête Galante, comes not from Verlaine’s Fêtes Galantes but from his Parallèlement, whose original publication in 1889 comprises three four-line stanzas; Sorabji, however, set a later edition which includes a further four lines added by Verlaine in 1894. It opens wittily with a quasi-baroque introductory gesture which the composer — tongue firmly in cheek — marks quasi “Cooperin”. A BBC broadcast of these songs seems to have been planned but appears not, after all, to have taken place. The immensely high regard in which Sorabji held Joy McArden shines through the warm tribute to her which he paid in his obituary notice published in Musical Opinion in 1952; a pupil and protégé of Nina Grieg (Edvard Grieg’s widow), she later became a favourite pupil of the legendary Blanche Marchesi, whom Sorabji knew well (and who, incidentally, like tonight’s (November 3 2000) soloist, began life as a violinist before settling on a singing career). She gave the world première of Ravel’s Chansons Madécasses in Paris in 1926 with the composer playing the piano. In this article, which occupied an entire half page of the journal, Sorabji wrote “Not only did she read straight off at sight the voice parts of three extremely difficult tricky settings of Verlaine and Baudelaire I wrote for her, but to my almost speechless admirtion and amazement, after doing this, she walked about her flat singing snatches thereof perfectly from memory.”
These songs almost conclude Sorabji’s career as songwriter, although he continued to compose for at least another forty years; the aphoristic Frammento Cantato for baritone and piano (1967) and the aforementioned Benedizione di San Francesco d’Assisi (1973) represent his only subsequent returns to solo vocal writing. On the strength of his finest contributions to the singer’s repertoire, it seems a great pity that, for so much of Sorabji’s creative life, songwriting appears almost to have assumed the rôle of what Robert Frost calls “the path not taken”.
In recent years, much work has been done for Sorabji’s songs. Charles Hopkins has prepared fine translations of all the French texts that Sorabji set, Simon Abrahams and Jonathan Powell have edited three of the songs and Marc-André Roberge is in the process of editing all the others; all but one of Sorabji’s songs have now been recorded by soprano Elizabeth Farnum and pianist Margaret Kampmeier on the Centaur label and the soprano Sarah Leonard, who has absorbed many of them into her repertoire, also plans to record them in the not too distant future.
© Alistair Hinton, 2000, 2005
[This article originally appeared as programme notes to a concert including many of Sorabji’s songs.]