Inspired by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)
French Symbolist Paul Verlaine was one of 19th-century France’s most popular poets. Symbolist poetry like Verlaine’s relies on subtle suggestion and imagery to create a mood, rather than concrete settings or narrative. Verlaine’s poetry appears frequently in French art song, including works by Gabriel Fauré and Reynaldo Hahn.
Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) also set Verlaine’s poetry, as well as finding inspiration in it for instrumental works. His Suite bergamasque (pub. 1905), with its beloved movement “Clair de lune,” was inspired by Verlaine. The suite’s title comes from a line in Verlaine’s poem “Clair de lune” (Moonlight), where he makes a pun on the words masques (masqueraders) and bergamasques (Renaissance dances from the Italian city of Bergamo), as part of the poem’s fanciful, enigmatic atmosphere.
Your soul is like a landscape fantasy,
Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise,
Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be
Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.
Singing in minor mode of life’s largesse
And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite
Reluctant to believe their happiness,
And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,
The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming,
Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,
And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming –
Slender jet-fountains – sob their ecstasies.
– Paul Verlaine, from “Clair de lune”, translated by Norman R. Shapiro