Shifting Horizons

Songs of Love, Death, and the Sea

Richard Bratby

My very soul is ripped from me

And the dark clamor of the waves

Covers the noise of my sobs.

Who knows if this cruel sea

Will lead her to my heart again?

—Maurice Bouchor, La Fleur des eaux

Maurice Bouchor, the poet of Ernest Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, was singing an old, old song. For as long as there has been poetry, the sea has been a potent symbol: the elemental, natural force that unites and divides, that creates and destroys life. Love, death, and the sea are eternally intertwined. Small wonder, then, that the sea plays a crucial role in that great drama of love and death, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with its seaborne first act and its setting amid the wave-lashed Celtic coastlines of Cornwall, Ireland, and Brittany.

Today, though, we explore that relationship on a more intimate scale. Patricia Petibon and Susan Manoff have combined pieces of many different emotional and stylistic colors to explore these three ideas and their multifaceted, endlessly shifting relationship. And after a brief chorale prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach (from whom the globetrotting arranger of this piano version, Ferruccio Busoni, “learned to recognize the truth that good and great universal music remains the same throughout whatever medium it is sounded”)—one particular composer’s music swirls around and between Petibon’s islands of song like a spring tide. Yann Tiersen was born in Brest and has made his home on the island of Ushant (Ouessant in French, or in the Breton tongue, Eusa), off the western tip of Brittany.

Lok Gweltaz, Yuzin and Porz Goret are all locations on Ushant and the eponymous solo piano pieces from Tiersen’s 2015 collection Eusa are direct responses to a very specific sense of place. “It seems very important to me, especially at this point in time, to know the place I live in—its ecosystem—and to reconnect with the land,” says Tiersen. He does not need to say that on Ushant, land exists only in permanent relation to the sea.

Atlantic, North and South

There is something of the same Celtic spirit in the anonymous text of Samuel Barber’s The Crucifixion, the fifth of his Hermit Songs of 1953. These ten songs set poetry by medieval Irish monks, for whom the image of Christ as swan—that otherworldly migrating bird, seagoing symbol of transience and recurrence—would have seemed entirely natural. Gabriel Fauré’s relationship with the sea was that of many sophisticated Frenchmen of his generation: a romantic appreciation of landscape and poetry, cultivated on seasonal visits to Trouville and Honfleur. The lovers of his 1876 song Au bord de l’eau sit by a stream, its tranquil flow serving as a gentle accompaniment to a quiet bliss that excludes all time and trouble. But in Les Berceaux—composed in 1879 to a text by the same poet, Sully Prudhomme—we feel the unmistakable tidal pull of the sea again. The ships that rock at anchor, preparing to set sail, are compared to the cradles that rock in the sailors’ homes: the everlasting tension between the horizon and the hearth. The music offers no easy resolution, only the sad, unending call of the waves. The sense of longing is even more potent in A la mar, the first of four poems by the Paris-based Colombian poet Álvaro EscobarMolina that were set by French composer Nicolas Bacri at the request of Patricia Petibon in 2010, as the cycle Melodías de la melancolía, and recorded as part of her Spanish-inspired album Melancolía in 2011. “It was important to complete a melancholy journey with a contemporary work, an opening to the future, and a blend of our two cultures,” the singer explains, and here the sea, once again, offers both solace and indifference to the unhappy lover. All Through Eternity (2005), to words by the 13th-century Farsi poet Rumi, conveys an altogether happier vision of a love that is both sensual and spiritual.

The luckless heroine of Joaquín Rodrigo’s Adela (1951), meanwhile, is at risk of fading away altogether from jealousy and longing. “It’s no coincidence that as a Frenchwoman I’m drawn to Spain,” says Petibon. “So many Spanish artists and composers came to Paris, and there was a mutual influence between them and French artists.” Blind from early childhood, Rodrigo wrote that “music is my dream, my enchantment, my joy…the world’s highest form of poetry.” His own acute sensitivity to atmosphere and language makes this folk-like song—adapted from traditional texts by the composer’s wife Victoria Kamhi—sound as inevitable as the great melody that made its composer’s name in the second movement of his Concierto de Aranjuez. John Lennon’s Oh My Love (1971) aspires to a similar sense of naturalness, this time as an expression of a love that seems, “for the first time in my life,” to have shown the songwriter the world as it truly is.

Jean Cras—like Tiersen, a Breton—had a strikingly personal relationship with the sea. He was a naval officer and commanded a torpedo boat in the First World War before rising to the rank of Admiral. His musical gift was well known: naval colleagues dubbed him “Admiral Arpeggio” while Henri Duparc, no less, called him the “son of my soul.” He wrote La Rencontre—the first of his three Chansons bretonnes—shortly before his death and dedicated it to his wife; a miniature masterpiece fully worthy of that supreme master of French song.

Paris—Madrid—New York

One final tragedy of the sea, before we turn (at least partially) inland. The ravishing Alfonsina y el mar is a zamba, the proud popular Argentinian dance-song, and it was composed in 1969 by Ariel Ramírez and his regular lyricist Félix Luna in homage to the poet Alfonsina Storni, who drowned herself in the sea at Mar el Plata in 1939. It is as romantic a celebration as you will ever hear of the relationship between love, death, and the sea, set to a melody that lingers long in the memory. Likewise, few 20th-century classical composers were better equipped to distil profound emotion into unforgettable miniatures than Francis Poulenc—though no one who has experienced his one-woman tragedy La Voix humaine will make the mistake of assuming that Poulenc’s small-scale forms and superb craftsmanship imply frivolity, or of taking the title of his 1940 song cycle Banalités at anything like face value. Sanglots can be translated as “sighs” and Apollinaire’s poem—written in 1917, and set by Poulenc during a later war—takes images of love, death, and the sea and tints them red with imagery of bloodshed and fate. Nor can the destiny of Enrique Granados be separated from these themes. He drowned in the English Channel in March 1916 when the ferry in which he was crossing from England to France was torpedoed by a German U-boat. He died while attempting to save his wife, and while it would be going too far to suggest that his music foreshadows his end, his creative life was certainly defined by his fascination with the art of Goya, whose combination of color, grace, and passionate sensuality, he said, “dazzled and possessed” him. The 12 songs that Granados called Tonadillas en estilo antiguo (“Little tunes in old style”), to poems by Fernando Periquet y Zuaznábar, are shot through with that intoxicating mixture of passion and fatalism. “My dear! Look at me no more, for your eyes are rays burning with passion that kill me,” sings the female narrator of El mirar de la maja. Each of the three Tonadillas we hear today was first performed by the Argentinean actress Lola Membrives in 1913. Effectively miniature dramas in folk style, they are perfectly suited to a singer with Patricia Petibon’s versatility and flair for the theatrical. After such passion, Aaron Copland’s third Blues for piano offers a moment of relative calm. Composed in 1948 and dedicated to the pianist William Kapell, it is headed simply “Muted and sensuous.” Although Copland, a Brooklynite, was acutely aware of the jazz roots of the blues, its eloquent simplicity embodies both solitude and aspiration.

Robert Baksa, too, makes no excuse for the apparent simplicity of his musical language. Early in his career, he was assisted by Copland, and like him is a New Yorker born of immigrant stock (in Baksa’s case Hungarian). He later moved to the Hudson Valley where, as he puts it, “I look out my office window on incredible beauty.” An instinctive songwriter, he has completed three separate volumes of Emily Dickinson settings, of which Heart! We Will Forget Him—with its yearning melody and steady ostinato tread—seeks to emulate the poet’s own almost supernatural ability to contain deep romantic emotion within a superficially artless form.

Laughter and Lament

Eric Satie, confronted by the Great War, found release in his own distinctive way: masked in a cool detachment, and framed in a piano style whose rippling, maritime clarity prefigures Yann Tiersen’s musical language. The three Avant-dernière pensées (“Penultimate Thoughts”) of 1916 include this Méditation dedicated to Albert Roussel and the Idylle which we heard earlier, and which was dedicated to Claude Debussy. Both are blithely free of any musical relationship to their dedicatees. But as with Poulenc’s miniatures, it would be naïve in the extreme to dismiss Satie as a mere musical prankster. Both composers knew that small things can contain whole worlds. Take Thierry Escaich’s Le Chant des lendemains. Patricia Petibon has often collaborated with the theater director Olivier Py, and his words form the basis of this new song, written specially f or her. According to Escaich, it comprises “a few poetic words by Olivier Py, both nostalgic and bright, which I decided to transcribe into a simple song—a tango, sometimes moonstruck and sometimes passionate, about the passing of time: a sort of disillusioned swing, underlined by the accordion with its enigmatic counterpoint.”

And as we finish, we turn southwards once more, and back to the sea: in high spirits this time, as the Brazilian composer Francisco Mignone contemplates a feminine vision in a red swimsuit—not quite the girl from Ipanema (this is 1938, though we are certainly in Rio de Janeiro), but just as much a queen of the sea. Mignone studied at the Milan Conservatory and his music was conducted by Richard Strauss, but as a young man, he was better known as the dance band leader Chico Bororó, and even in a song as beautifully crafted as this, he cannot help turning somersaults.

And has any combination of words and music embodied love and the fear of loss quite as perfectly as Danny Boy? The text, by the English lawyer Frederic Weatherly, dates from 1910, and the tune— the so-called Londonderry Air—comes from long Irish tradition. The words struck deep (and after 1914, they would strike even deeper) but it is the tune that truly touches the heart: the timeless melody of a troubled land, surrounded by the sea—the same sea upon which Tristan and Isolde sailed, that Jean Cras loved, and which crashes against the cliffs of Yann Tiersen’s island home.