The treatment of French Renaissance poetry in comparison with twentieth-century poetry in the songs of Jacques Leguerney and his contemporaries.

Abstract

According to several prominent musical scholars including Graham Johnson, the songs of French composer Jacques Leguerney (1906-1997) are well deserving of a place in the repertoire and more than worthy of further research and performance. His songs were published and performed during his lifetime, after which his music slipped into obscurity. This dissertation is a recording project of Leguerney’s music which I hope will promote future performance and accessibility. The recording will center around the complete Poèmes de Paul-Jean Toulet as well as the first volume of the Poèmes de la Pléiade, paired with Poulenc’s Banalités and Poèmes de Ronsard. The recital aspect of the dissertation will juxtapose Leguerney’s music with that of Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel, two of his contemporaries in the field of 20th-century French art song. Finally, the written document will include several resources for the Toulet poems which future performers can use. To understand the music of Leguerney, one must understand his unusual choice of song texts. Unlike other mélodie composers of his era, most of Leguerney’s output is on texts from French Renaissance poets of the sixteenth century. He did set some contemporary French poets, but he felt that these did not suit him well. He happily remained primarily in the realm of the French literary Renaissance. In contrast, when Francis Poulenc (a composer well-known for his settings of modern poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Éluard) tried to set the ancient poetry of Pierre de Ronsard, the result was not received as well as Leguerney’s settings. This dissertation will seek to understand what made Leguerney’s writing different from other French composers, and why his musical style seems to fit Renaissance poetry better than his peers. Leguerney’s setting of thirteen poems by Paul-Jean Toulet is one of his few ventures outside of Renaissance poetry. Toulet (1867-1920) wrote poetry that shares some structural elements with older French poetry, and it is arguably this structure that appealed to Leguerney’s taste. Leguerney wrote the Treize Poèmes in 1943 during his mature middle period of composition, but the songs were not published until 2013, many years after his death. Many of the them were performed in Leguerney’s lifetime but only two have been recorded in a publicly available format. This dissertation recording will be the world premiere recording of the complete set of thirteen mélodies. To promote further performance and study of under-represented music, it is important to have resources for study. This project will provide these resources for the Toulet songs, including accessible reference recordings, a new English poetic translation, a pronunciation guide in IPA format for proper diction, and poetic and musical analyses. With these resources, future performers can study and present this music, elevating it to its rightful place in the mélodie tradition.