Histoires Naturelles

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), in composing his song cycle Histoires Naturelles, did not intend to completely rewrite the story of Jules Renard’s famous poems that he was setting. In fact, in explaining his desire to set Renard’s poetry to Renard himself, Ravel responded “Mon dessein n'était pas d'y ajouter, mais d'interpreter... Dire avec de la musique ce que vous dites avec des mots” (“My intention was not to add, but to interpret… To say with music that which you say with words”). This intention is readily apparent in the five song cycle, which tells the stories of five animals; the peacock, the cricket, the swan, the king fisher, and the guinea hen. Using what was at the time a radical form of word setting, Ravel imitates the pace, vocal patterns, and attitudes of the five animals. The first song Le Paon’s tempo marking reads “Sans hâte et noblement” (“Without haste and nobly”), and later “Avec majesté” (“with majesty”), and the second song Le Grillon’s tempo marking simply reads “Placide” (placid). Because of this careful interpretation of the poetry, the songs have an extremely expressive and dramatic quality; the peacock cries out in anguish over its mate’s absence, and the kingfisher waits quietly for its meal, both in the lyrics and the music.

Though Ravel had achieved a certain amount of critical and professional success when he composed Histoires Naturelles at 32, and had already composed pieces such as Jeux d’eau and his cantatas Myrrha, Alycone, and Alyssa which are still popular today, he had certainly not received critical or popular success yet. The cycle was premiered in 1907 by Jane Bathori, with Ravel himself accompanying, to a dissatisfied, even rowdy audience. The concertgoers were upset with the radical text-setting that Ravel had used, and according to the report one attendee, found some irony in the first lyrics of Le Martin Pecheur: “Ça n'a pas mordu, ce soir…" (“It hasn’t bitten, this evening”), and openly guffawed during the pauses of Le Grillon. Bathori later explained how radical the cycle really was, saying that it had “completely broken with what is customarily called ‘melody.’ The voice was subservient to the prosody, which embraced the text to such an extent that the mute e’s were no longer heard”. What Bathori means by the last section of that quotation is that the text the performer sings more closely approximates how French is spoken than how it was traditionally sung, as was done to a certain extent by composers such as Mussorgsky and Chabrier, but never before to this extent. This break with tradition may seem small to the modern audience member, who has heard considerably more radical breaks with the melodic tradition, but to Ravel’s contemporaries, this music was unlike anything they had heard before, and at first upset them. Much like The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky and Pelléas et Melisande by Debussy, however, the initial popular hostility to Histoires Naturelles has since yielded, and the pieces have become staples in the French song repertory.