I'm Head Over Heels

for Claude Debussy (shh - don't tell e.)

Right now, I'm working on his Quatre Chansons de Jeunesse. This is a set of four songs by a few different poets (Verlaine for the first two, Banville for Pierrot, and Mallarme for Apparition). All the pieces are incredibly gorgeous. What I see as my favorite changes from day to day.

Pantomime is about a puppet play. Pierrot is a boorish fellow who guzzles a bottle of wine and a meat pie without waiting at all. Cassandre stands at the bottom of the avenue and cries a tear without anyone seeing because his nephew is about to be disinherited. (We don't know if he's crying out of selfishness for his own loss of wealth ;) ) The rogue Harlequin devises a scheme to abduct Colombine and pirouettes four times. In the meantime, Colombine dreams, surprised to feel a heart on the breeze and to hear voices in her heart.

Clair de lune is sung to a lover, saying that your soul is a chosen landscape that charmingly goes about in masks, playing the lute and dancing and almost sad under its whimsical disguises, all the while singing in a minor mode about victorious love and the opportune life. These bergamaskers don't quite believe their happiness, and their song mixes with the light of the moon. The calm light of the moon, sad and beautiful, makes the birds dream in their trees and makes the jets of water (fountains) sob in ecstasy. The great jets of water, slender, among the marble. The calm light of the moon, sad and beautiful.

In Pierrot, that good fellow Pierrot wanders away after the Harlequin's wedding while the crowd watches him. He dreamily walks along the church boulevard and doesn't even notice the young woman who flashes a supple leg at him. She tries to catch his eye and delights in him, but he pays no attention. The white moon throws a glance to the horns of a bull while she slides over to her friend, Jean Gaspard.

The final song, Apparition, is more abstract. The moon was saddened by the angels who were in tears, dreaming, with the bow at their fingertips. In the calm mist of the flowers, they plucked the dying strings of the violas, like white sobs, slipping over the azure blue of the flower petals. It was the blessed day of your first kiss. My reverie, loving to torment me, cleverly got drunk on the perfume of sadness that, even without regret and without setbacks, let the gathering of a dream stay in the heart that caught it. I wandered then, with my eye riveted on the aged cobblestones when, with sunshine on your hair, in the street and in the evening, you appeared, laughing at me. And I believed that I saw the fairy with the hat of lightness who had been in my dreams before as a spoiled child, always letting fall from her half-closed hands a snowshower of white bouquets of perfumed stars.

Beautiful, no? You can find these on iTunes as sung by Donna Brown under the title "Melodies de Jeunesse." Youtube also has a few sung by Natalie Dessay when she was very young: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPf5xWZcCHw Personally, I think they should be more legato than how she sings them, but that's just me.

Enjoy!

~Hope