Jeu, Piano & baryton.

Hello dear friends young composers.

Little music scribbled at the beginning of the year always on my dear and dear Jules Laforgue, too soon died of phtisia at the age of 25 it seems to me.
Always his biting irony.
Again, he takes as a witness the moon that never responds, remains cold, like a Rose of the basilica of silence that is the night.
In French, the hidden games of meaning are absolutely fascinating, and the metric of the poem itself gives me a feeling of incantation or at least of scansion.
I would even say that we touch on certain expressionist images when Laforgue evokes the head of Jean-Baptiste absent from the dish that is the moon!
This poet has not been set to music to my knowledge. So I have dared for several years my little experiments by trying to serve him sincerely.

I added an English translation in subtitles, but I'm not sure it can be totally respectful of the black magic of this text.
Good listening and do not hesitate to criticize!

Hey Jean @Krisp!

I love the word painting in your music! The music sounds so dark, chromatic and confusing with those scary images The silence after the "Out of Silence" stanza sounds nice! The Yes, Yes! confirmation, and the mockery music in the mockery stanza. The music get more excited when the thought of kissing is involved! Then after the sentence "Widowed plate of Saint John the Baptist Head", maybe the imagination of female religious saints, even though still under the objectification of female is thought of, so the music becomes peaceful apparently, though the sexual undercurrent still continue. There is so much thought in your music to paint the poem. I admire that! And your singing is as great as always.

P.S. With "Baryton" I think of the poor bowed string instrument getting out of fashion which Haydn poorly waste his talent on his 123 Baryton trios thanks to his Esterházy Patron!

Thx for sharing!

Henry

Good morning, Henry,

First of all, thank you very much for your insightful comment.

This text by Jules Laforgue is indeed fascinating. While it may appear abstruse at first glance, it invites the reader to join the poetic “dance” in order to uncover its deeper meanings.

To begin with, like much of Laforgue’s work, this text is relatively unknown here in France. As a reminder, Jules Laforgue died in 1886 of pulmonary phthisis, a disease that defined the end of the 19th century and persisted into the next. Frequently referenced in art, it reached its literary zenith in works such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

In this poem, although Laforgue uses certain thematic elements drawn from medical vocabulary, he is not addressing the tuberculosis that would claim his life less than a year later.

Instead, he revisits a theme he had explored before: an invocation to the moon, treating it as a silent witness. I previously set another of his poems, Complaint of the Moon in the Provinces, to music, which also centered on this motif.

Here, the moon, once confided in for sorrows and heartbreaks in the earlier lament, becomes something much more unsettling: still silent, but now mocking, like stained glass in a church at night—soulless, dead, or languid in the chloroform haze of the clouds. It remains indifferent, even as the poet suffocates—perhaps from illness, love, or solitude.

The absurdity of the poet’s situation is stark. His bad romances (béquinades—a now-obsolete French word) provoke derisive laughter, highlighting how his “platonic” (idealized) loves are reduced to nothing more than the trivial musings of an ordinary man. His imagined grandeur is deflated, exposing the ridiculousness of his human condition.

This obsession builds into a chant-like rhythm, escalating into a true nightmare. The enigmatic phrase, “I want to gently caress your sad paten, widowed dish of the chef of Saint John the Baptist”, takes center stage. This is where the poem becomes almost proto-expressionist. Mystical imagery permeates the poem, but here it becomes unnerving.

The paten refers to the dish that holds the Eucharistic host. In this vision, the moon is transformed into a dish—a plate in the sky—that once received the severed head of Saint John the Baptist. Now, it is an empty vessel, once an instrument of horror, reduced to a pale, lifeless object.

At first, I hesitated to set this part of the poem to music due to its strangeness. Similarly, the inclusion of Salve Regina seemed too overtly religious. Yet, it is precisely this disorientation that defines the poem. The saint being invoked is none other than the moon—the “white lady” of folklore, queen of the night, whom he wishes to pierce with his phalènes.

This, as you noted, is where the carnal implications are most evident. The phalènes, or moths, symbolize his poetic verses, which he uses to pierce the sanctified face of the moon. Yet, the phonetic similarity to phallus cannot be ignored. This could suggest a symbolic act of violation—taboo and transgressive.

In the closing lines, “I want to find a Lied that touches you to make you emigrate to my mouth”, the poet seeks words powerful enough to draw the moon, his beloved, saint, or muse, to him. He desires a Lied—a song, popular or stylized—to achieve this connection. Laforgue, who lived in Germany as a reader for a countess, was undoubtedly familiar with Schubert’s Lieder.

For me, the theme resonates with Der Lindenbaum from Winterreise, the epitome of Romanticism. That Lied inspired the musical motif I used here, after de climax. Both poems share a similar springboard: an invocation to nature (the lime tree in one, the moon in the other) as a confidant and source of solace.

Laforgue’s melancholy mirrors Schubert’s: the consolation sought is ultimately unattainable. By the poem’s end, the observation is bitter. No rhymes remain, no words suffice—everything has been tried, all in vain. Yet, it is neither tragic nor pathetic, for tragedy is too sublime. Instead, it is simply futile, almost absurd.

In my musical setting, I chose to reflect this futility by paring down the music after the preceding deluge of sound.

Finally, a word on the poem’s rhythm, which I sought to capture musically. It is a decasyllable—a ten-syllable meter with a feminine rhyme at the end of each line. This form is rare, as more regular, symmetrical meters are usually preferred for their balance, particularly with clear caesurae.

Here, however, the rhythm feels obsessive, deliberately strange. Notably, Laforgue’s earlier moon poem (Complaint of the Moon in the Provinces) used strict seven-syllable lines—a metric that hints at unreason. For this setting, I used a 6/4 (or 12/8) time signature to accommodate the ten-syllable lines while emphasizing the rhythmic punctuation of each verse with two beats. The entire piece is driven by an ostinato of eight eighth notes and two quarter notes.

This is what I can add to your reading of the poem. Congratulations again on your astute insights and perceptive listening!