ExclusiveErnest Chausson: 2 Poèmes, Op. 34 - 1. La chanson bien douce (The Sweetest Song)

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Ernest Chausson: 2 Poèmes, Op. 34 - 1. La chanson bien douce (The Sweetest Song). This beautiful piece was played by Ivan Ilic. It has Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0 DEED, Attribution 3.0 Unported) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

2 Poems, Op.34 are two songs for voice and piano composed by Ernest Chausson. Those pieces are called La Chanson bien douce and Le Chevalier malheur, and both have a libretto by Paul Verlaine.

Lyrics:
The Sweetest Song
English translation © Richard Stokes

Listen to the sweetest song
That weeps but to delight you.
It is discreet, it is delicate:
A shiver of water on moss!

The voice was known to you (and dear?),
But is at present veiled
Like a disconsolate widow,
And yet like her still proud;

And in the long folds of its veil
Which flutters in the autumn breeze,
It hides and shows the astonished heart
The truth, emblazoned like a star.

It says, the voice you recognize,
That kindness is our very life,
And that of hate and envy
Nothing remains, once death has come.

Welcome the voice that continues
Its simple bridal song.
Come! Nothing so becomes the soul
As making souls less sorrowful!

It is transient and in travail,
The soul that suffers without wrath,
And how manifest its moral is! …
Listen to the wisest song.
Source: https://oxfordsong.org/

The poet:
Paul Verlaine (1844 - 1896)

Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

Born in Metz, Verlaine was educated at the Lycée Impérial Bonaparte (now the Lycée Condorcet) in Paris and then took up a post in the civil service. He began writing poetry at an early age and was initially influenced by the Parnassian movement and its leader, Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine's first published poem appeared in 1863 in La Revue du progrès, a journal founded by the poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequent visitor to the salon of the Marquise de Ricard (Louis-Xavier de Ricard's mother) at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with the leading artists of the day: Anatole France, Emmanuel Chabrier, the inventor, poet and humorist Charles Cros, the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Catulle Mendes and others. Verlaine's first published collection, Poèmes saturniens (1866), although criticised by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality. (Wikipedia)

The evening sky was captured by Simone Schlegel and the video was edited by Wenjing Ma.






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