The Quatre poèmes hindous ("Four Hindu poems") are a cycle of mélodies by the French composer Maurice Delage for soprano and chamber ensemble of two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, harp, and string quartet. Delage composed it in 1912 while he was visiting India. It is considered his first masterwork, and it remains the best known and most recorded of his works.
Structure
Titles and dedications
Madras – "Une belle ..." (stanza 22 by Bhartṛhari), dedicated to Maurice Ravel
Lahore – "Un sapin isolé ..." (poem by Heine) Bénarès – Naissance de Bouddha (anonymous), dédié à Florent Schmitt Jeypur – "Si vous pensez à elle ..." (stanza 73 by Bhartṛhari), dedicated to Igor Stravinsky.
The performance lasts just under nine minutes.
Composition
At the end of the French Third Republic, the Far East was in fashion in France, particularly in certain artistic circles. The French composer Maurice Delage (1879–1961) travelled to British India at the end of 1911, largely funded by his father, who accompanied him. The visit lasted until May 1913. Delage named the mélodies he composed after the cities he was visiting when he composed them: Jaipur ("Jeypur"), Varanasi ("Bénarès"), Lahore, and Chennai ("Madras").
According to Philippe Rodriguez, the trip allowed the young composer to "reduce as much as possible an inferiority complex" he suffered from, despite ecouragement from Maurice Ravel, thanks to "the authenticity of an exoticism drawn from the source". Rodriguez states the Quatre poèmes hindous represent "one of the first attempts to introduce the melodic and rhythmic forms of Indian music to the language of Western music".
Delage likely had a piano, as he felt himself unable to compose without a keyboard He first made a version for soprano and piano and then magnified it with a rich harmonic instrumentation. The technique of the instruments, all solo, is so exact that the harmonic instrumentation seems to have been specified very early. The dates of composition are in the reverse order of the sequence of the mélodies: "Si vous pensez à elle ..." and Naissance de Bouddha were completed in January 1912, "Un sapin isolé ..." in February, and "Une belle ..." in March.
Instrumentation
The instrumental formation is reduced effectively to chamber music, in which the piano is excluded. Michel Duchesneau sees in this the influence of Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which premièred in Vienna on 16 December 1912 and which motivated Ravel and Stravinsky to compose their own poems during 1913. The work of Schönberg was also to have been included in the 1914 concert programme. Alexis Roland-Manuel refuted this influence on Delage, while Marius Flothuis sees the instrumental ensemble as closer to that which Ravel used in 1905 for his Introduction and Allegro, which is left to flute, clarinet, harp, and string quartet.
Première
The première took place on 14 January 1914 at the inaugural concert of the Société musicale indépendante (SMI). It was performed by Rose Féart and was conducted by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht. The premières of Florent Schmitt's Le Petit Elfe Ferme-l'œil, Ravel's Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, and Stravinsky's took place at the same concert.
It was a great success for Delage, who was still largely unknown. Émile Vuillermoz commented on both the score and the public reception: "These four mélodies deserve careful study. So much poetry and freshness, so much fine sensibility in a harmonic vocabulary of a taste so exquisite that even the listeners least sympathetic to this kind sport were wont to comptemplate a second time the lone fir tree 'Lahore'."
Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi summarized: "One of the great successes of the evening was for Maurice Delage's Quatre poèmes hindous, savoury and full of emotion, admirably performed ... The audience, charmed, called for an encore of the mélodies, and would gladly have had encores of the others.
Overview
Poems
1. Madras
2. Lahore
3. Bénarès
4. Jeypur
Music
The are short, as are the poems Delage chose. Even the longest amongst them, an anonymous story about the birth of Buddha, foolows a clear melodic line, hardly troubled by the diaereses placed under certain words ("mystéri-eux", "li-anes"). The prose also inspired the composer to attempt exotic rhythms, with a quintuple meter, the use of pizzicato harmonics on the strings, and colouring principles Ravel had used in his Chansons madécasses.