Music for Verlaine

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 10

Music for Verlaine

HE poems of La Bonne Chanson formed the "beloved little book" which Paul Verlaine wrote for his future wife, before the marriage which tragicomically disintegrated during the siege of Paris and his explosive friendship with Rimbaud. Verlaine’s character can be read in his face-half-saint, halfsatyr; and in these poems one sees that side of him which produces a lyricism exquisitely light and pure. He himself valued them for being "so pleasantly, so sweetly, so purely thought, so simply written." They are authentic poetry of Impressionism in its heyday, and have the morning glitter of a country-scene by Monet or Sisley. No wonder that Fauré’s setting of them is considered his masterpiece, for who else could have matched them with music of such candour and simplicity? The set of La Bonne Chanson recorded by Sophie Wyss and Kathleen Long (heard from 1YC), though careful, is curiously lacking in the corresponding qualities of performance: the airy glitter is not there; and it is much to be hoped that makers of LP records, who have so often shown themselves to be enterprising, will someday soon give us @ worthier recording.