Trois chants rimbaldiens

The poems of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) were all written when the poet was between the ages of 16 and 19, a fact belied by his enormous stature within the interconnected pantheons of French, Symbolist and Modernist poetry. In music, Rimbaud is represented by significant twentieth-century settings of prose poems from the collection Les illuminations, including by Britten, Henze, Rihm, and Pintscher, and by Delage’s symphonic poem Le Bâteau ivre. The texts in Trois chants rimbaldiens all belong to the early verse poems Rimbaud wrote in the period 1870-71: two sonnets, the famously proto-Surrealist “Voyelles” (“Vowels”) and the carefree “Ma bohème” (“My bohemian life”), and the untitled quatrain “[L’étoile a pleuré rose]” (“The star wept pink”). The music responds variously to the text, as in the “over-saturated” chords that accompany the names of colors in the opening of “Voyelles”, or the wild filigree that follows the open-air vagabond of “Ma bohème”.