La Chanson polyphonique française au temps de Debussy, Ravel et Poulenc by Marielle Cafafa (review)

The twentieth-century French choral repertoire contains some jewels that have been eclipsed by the works of the three major composers of that generation whose choral works are still programmed today: Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Francis Poulenc. As Marielle Cafafa argues, it has become a commonplace to perform Debussy's Trois chansons de Charles d'Orléans, for example, alongside masterworks from the Renaissance polyphonic repertoire. However, a much richer set of potential companion pieces can be found in the polyphonic choral writing by modernists such as Georges Auric, Raymond Bonheur, Albert Doyen, and Darius Milhaud as well as by late Romantics such as Reynaldo Hahn, Jules Massenet, and Camille Saint-Saëns. Cafafa has assembled a substantial repertoire, which will enable researchers, performers, and programmers alike to access music that has been unjustly neglected. Cafafa's book complements a twenty-track CD, Polyphonies françaises (Ensemble Léonor, directed by Cafafa and released in May 2018) and a separate resource booklet, La Chanson de Debussy à Poulenc: vingt regards sur la chanson polyphonique française (edited by Cafafa), forming a triptych that comprises forgotten sounds, musical interpretations, and critical analyses. Beginning with a look back to the past, Cafafa explores potential musical influences for this repertoire, ranging from Gregorian chant to Renaissance madrigals, arguing that although much of this vocal repertoire carries a 'flavour' of Renaissance polyphony, its connection to the Renaissance has been exaggerated. Cafafa's analysis reveals not only a much broader set of influences, including instrumental music, opera, and vocal music beyond France, but also a suppression of counterpoint and melisma, both of which are significant markers of Renaissance vocal writing. Instead, as Cafafa reveals, the twentieth-century composers' responses to the poetic texts selected for new polyphonic works reveals a telling disjuncture between the fact of selecting poems from the Renaissance and the decision to develop choral writing techniques that do not borrow from Renaissance figurations. The twentieth-century composers draw extensively on texts from the Renaissance and early modern period, such as poems by Agrippa d'Aubigné, Charles d'Orléans, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, and Clément Marot, but they also set texts from the modern period, including poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul É luard, and Paul Fort, using both kinds of text to develop new forms of harmonic expansion techniques as well as innovative musical timbres and rhythmical textures. Cafafa's analysis reveals how the composers often work to denature the poetic texts, either through separating syllables, pizzicato-style, as is the case in Poulenc's 'Marie' (setting a poem by Apollinaire), or through repeating words while using a different prosodic accentuation each time, as is the case in Debussy's 'Yver, vous n'estes qu'un villain' (setting a poem by Charles d'Orléans). With over fifty pages of appendices and source texts, Cafafa's book will be an invaluable resource for literary researchers, musicians, and musicologists interested in recovering a recent patrimoine vocal français.