Maurice Emmanuel (1862 – 1937)
Trente chansons bourguignonnes du pays de Beaune
(Thirty Burgundian
Songs for the Beaune Country)
A Musical Awakening
In 1926 in La
Revue de Bourgogne Robert Jardillier, musicologist, deputy mayor of Dijon and minister under Leon Blum, raised the question as
to whether there was such a thing as Burgundian music. His own answer was very
interesting. He analysed the regional element in musical composition, stressing
in particular the Trente chansons bourguignonnes (Thirty Burgundian
Songs) from Beaune, harmonized by Maurice Emmanuel, as Vincent d'Indy had
published his Chansons populaires du Vivarais (Popular Songs from
Vivarais). At the same period, one strongly marked by the dawning of a new
Burgundian awareness, Maurice Emmanuel wrote about the Burgundian school of
music and showed the extent to which Franco-Burgundian choral writing exercised
a profound influence (Le miroir dijonnais et de Bourgogne, 1924 and
1925).
Like the more
contemporary achievement of Henri Berthat in bringing to life again the Vingts
chansons du vin de Bourgogne (Twenty Songs of the Wine of Burgundy), the
work of Maurice Emmanuel is not a merely archaeological investigation of
popular and musical traditions. It is expressive of a re-awakening, the rediscovery
of regional feeling.
In the 1920s,
indeed, there were attempts to find the unknown present in the past. In 1910 in
Berlin Edgar Varese had had his symphony Bourgogne performed,
the first of his works to be played in public. Tournus was the inspiration for
his Rapsodie romane. In 1902 and 1903 Claude Debussy wrote the first
sketches of his La mer at Bichain, a village in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.
These two composers evoke Burgundy very clearly in the commentaries arising
from these works. It must not be forgotten that under the pseudonym of Claude
Bonvin, the music critic Emile VuilIermoz sang passionately in praise of wine
and music, particularly those of Burgundy.
"The
Burgundian school", w rote Maurice Emmanuel, "in European choral
writing, is the one that has most tenaciously maintained the modal plurality
that popular musicians have practised everywhere”, and he goes on to show the
relationship between music at the court of Burgundy and the work of Rene
Moissenet, continued today in the musical establishments of Dijon, Autun and
Morvan and through the enthusiasm of Marcel Comeloup.
The connection
with wine was rediscovered by Francis Poulenc, and Colette expressed her
admiration of it: "By the side of a lime-stone hill, Poulenc, surrounded
by vines, lives in a great, airy mansion, where he makes and drinks his
wine", she w rote: "through his sparkling instrumentation, we can
hear and see shining the golden bubbles drawn from a rich land. Look at
Poulenc: are these the features of a water-drinker? He has a strong and
sensitive nose, an eye quick to change expression". And if he wrote at
Anost, in the middle of Morvan, far from the vines, his Mass in G major,
the wine of the country was certainly on his table. Many composers,
Hoffmann, Kreisler, have admitted that Burgundy offered music in its wine.
Here it is another
matter, one of wine turning into music through daily happiness and songs
transmitted from father to son, from generation to generation. This precious
inheritance must be preserved. That a great musicologist is interested in it
shows that often love of the past is joined to faith in the future. This, in
short, is the idea of Burgundy.
Jean-François Bazin
President of
the Regional Council of Burgundy
Maurice
Emmanuel
Born at Bar-sur-Aube
on 2nd May 1862, to die in Paris
on 14th December 1938, Maurice Emmanuel followed a double
career, as a music historian and as a composer. He entered the Conservatoire in
1880, but was eliminated from the Prix de Rome competition because one of his
teachers refused to allow the bold modal and rhythmic writing of his Sonata
for Cello and Piano, composed in 1887. Maurice Ravellater suffered the same
reverse and took it no worse. As far as Maurice Emmanuel is concerned,
acknowledged by musicians such as Charles Koechlin and Olivier Messiaen, and by
critics as expert as Fred Goldbeck and Marc Pincherle, as one of the great
French musicians of the twentieth century, it was rather his fame as a
historian and as a teacher that harmed his reputation as a composer. It was
difficult, in fact, to recognise that the man who had submitted a thesis as the
Sorbonne on ancient Greek dance, published a history of the language of music
and taught the history of music at the Conservatoire from 1907 to 1937, could equally
be a composer whose personal style and powerful inspiration might disconcert
superficial hearers. What is striking, in fact, in Maurice Emmanuel, is the
freshness of each work. His six Piano sonatines (1893-1925), his two
symphonies (1919 and 1931), his stage works, Promethee enchafne (Prometheus
Bound) (1918), salamine (1929), and Amphitryon (1936), his Odelettes
anacreontiques for voice, f1ute and harp (1911), show an astonishing
richness of inspiration in various ways. At a time when musical impressionism
was triumphant, Maurice Emmanuel gave importance to precision of musical line.
No-one could have been more independent than this humanist, brought up on a
culture apart from that of his own time, but in advance of it. Fred Goldbeck
spoke of him as a great classical composer of the day, admiring in the tragedy salamine
"the rhythm freed from the bar-line and polyphony that breaks the
tyranny of the dominant major", as much as the freedom found in all his
works, including, of course, the Trente chansons bourguignonnes, which
remind us that Maurice Emmanuel lived at Beaune, on the Cote d'Or, from 1869 to
1880, the shining years of his childhood and adolescence. Completing the
harmonization of these Burgundian songs in 1913, he rediscovered his early impressions,
the light, the happiness. His perfect understanding of modal music and his
ability to provide varied accompaniments did the rest. The result is a
masterpiece.
Jean Roy
Trente chansons bourguignonnes
The collection of
popular songs from Beaune begins with a remarkable and stimulating examination,
studded with words in local dialect, of the particular literary and musical
features of each song. After that come the songs themselves, for voice and
piano, the vocal line alternating between soloist and chorus. The piano
accompaniment is a masterpiece of grace, discretion and wit. The very flexible
rhythms of the chosen text are made even more flexible, the modes acquire a
fresher air, more penetrating. Stunning imagination awakens the energy hidden
in these old melodies and with what exquisite harmonic variations! Contrapuntal
interest never fails, however many the verses, for example in Chez Jean
Nicot, Le veigneron, the extraordinary Perdriole, with its 365 bars
and twelve verses paying tribute to the months of the year, heaping gift on
gift and difficulty on difficulty for the musician. The Complainte de
Notre-Dame is distinguished for its modal flavour, as is V'la que
l'aloueutte chante. Some songs, Le pommier d 'aoat and Guillenle,
are harmonized poetically, with a sensitiveness full of sunshine, of hills,
of resplendent vines. Emmanuel knew how to create a mood, as, for example, in
his use of the Dies irae in the danse macabre of rai va le loup, the
diatonic yet spicy chords of Gens de Bouze, the delicate pedals, the
discrete addition of a chant in Noel and finally, in Aidieu,
bargeire, the great sweetness of the modal melody with chords without
thirds, closely related to Ravel and to the Images of Debussy,
prolonging caresses and sadness. I have kept to the end Lai maoh mariee, the
real pearl of the collection. This is not the rough and direct pleasure of the
good vine- dressers of Beaune, but a deeply human voice, suited to all times
and places, that throbs in these bars. The modulation to the subdominant in the
fifth verse, the final fifth of the sinister refrain are powerfully dramatic.
The shudder of death takes hold on us with implacable force, tragic and hidden,
giving peace and cold.
"It is time for us
to go! Let us go! It is time for us to go! Night is upon us" .We feel
ourselves sinking into the earth: "the earth takes us…".
Such are the Trente
chansons bourguignonnes. While still a student at the Conservatoire, moved
by a course in which Maurice Emmanuel had lovingly developed his theories on
the ancient modes, I hurried to a festival of his music. There were performed
these thirty songs: I was amazed and at the same time converted to modal music.
That was fifteen years ago. My enthusiasm has not changed further proof of the
lasting freshness of the work.
Olivier
Messiaen
(by kind permission
of Madame Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen)
The Reasons for Certain Choices
\With the
exception of three that are harmonized, Chez Jean Nicot, M'y allant promener
and Les mois de /' annee, all the songs are monodic. My first
task, therefore, was to share them suitably between soloists, soloists and
chorus and chorus alone. The second point, not the least, was the language,
whether to use patois or French. Some songs are only in French and these offer
no problem. For the others, the choice follows the character of the song or the
difficulty (very few singers in the Burgundy Regional Choir speak patois) and
to keep a certain balance, relying for some slight retouching of the text that
seemed obvious and for pronunciation (which often varies from one village to
another) on the help of my friend Remi Guillaumeau.
The last two songs
present a slight problem. Based on Christmas melodies by Bernard de la Monnoye
of Dijon, they are given as sketches in the important
study that introduces the collection of songs, but Maurice Emmanuel had not
envisaged their performance, since "it was necessary to suppress elements
in the text according to principles of decorum". To remain faithful to the
wish of the composer, we have relegated these songs to the end of the
recording.
Roger Toulet
The Origin of the Songs
The collection of
popular melodies, harmonized by Maurice Emmanuel, owes its origin to Charles
Bigame (1825 -1911), from Beaune, a scholar with a passionate enthusiasm for
local traditions. Emmanuel wrote: “He had a perfect ear, and, without
technical musical knowledge, he was better in accuracy of voice and in sureness
of intonation than many professionals… At harvest time, even if it meant
neglecting the supervision of his own crop, he was on the look-out all day, one
might say, listening through the vines to the voices of the Beuqions of the
hinterland and the Auxois, the voices of the Laillots of Morvan and of all the
harvesters who swarmed to the coast and mingled their songs with those of our
vine-dressers.”
Patois
“From Saulx-le-Duc
to Saulieu, Liemais to Amay, across the Montagne, the language changes from one
parish to another ...These thirty songs, therefore, cannot be considered as the
musical and verbal expression of only the spirit of Beaune, but as a summary of
the tunes and speech that mingle at harvest time under the ramparts of Beaune,
at the end of summer.”
Charles Bigame had
no fixed system of recording local dialect. In spite of all the care taken in
the transcription of the texts collected, it would have been idle to pretend to
reconstruct exactly the pronunciation of each syllable in the conditions of the
collection (how ought one to pronounce, in the 1980 accent of Gemeaux, words
such as maoh, pefhre or neih?). The choice made by the Regional
Choir of Burgundy in the interpretation of the songs in patois takes account of
the orthographic accuracy of Bigame's transcription and the current
pronunciation of these various patois throughout Burgundy.
Rémi Guillaumeau
