Classical Sheet Music

Those who feel intimidated by Le Soulier de satin or the Cinq Grandes Odes (and at the same time fascinated—and dwarfed—by their sheer immensity) are surprised, on opening his Phrases pour éventails,...

Apollinaire's poetry—like Verlaine's—is already almost music, so how could it not tempt a musician? But precisely, this attraction should put him on his guard. What is a virtue in poetry can turn agai...

With an ongoing attention, Heather Dohollau's sensitive and mysterious poetry leads us to the very core of things. And Nature brightens up, and here we are at the very location of poetry, of the very...

The Chansons Incas are part of a tradition of the "elsewhere" extending the music world tour taken on by Maurice Ravel (Chansons madécasses), Louis Aubert (Poèmes arabes), Maurice Delage (Poèmes hindo...

Is it really possible for a poet of this quality to disappear without a trace? Not alone, moreover: along with Carco, Derème, and a few others of this "fanciful school", who, on the fringes of the noi...

It is not always well known that Rilke, in the evening of his life, wrote a few poems in French. He gave an admirable motive for this in the very middle of his collection Vergers: Perhaps if I dared w...

Let no one make a mistake about the word épigramme (epigraph): here it does not designate the vengeful witticism, the skilfully fired dart. Régnier uses it in its most Greek, most primitive sense: an...

Those who love Max Jacob (are there many of us left these days?) almost always hesitate between these two poles of the poet's inspiration: the tragic and the humorous - and all the more so given that,...

Ordinarily, what we like and admire in Tardieu is the virtuoso worker of the language, who dismantles the machinery of our speech and hearing, so amusingly and cruelly, and sets fire to all the distre...

I have not forgot my astonishment the day when I discovered the Odes et Prières by an author of whom I, like just about everyone, knew only the droll Knock and the hilarious Les Copains. The vast, lig...

To each of us, Supervielle can effortlessly speak 'his sweet native tongue'. This is not necessarily the criterion for 'high-wrap' poetry, and Mallarmé would be there to tell us the exact opposite. Bu...

Jean Cras (1879-1932) was a devout Catholic: no wonder considering his origins and background. He was a strict practicing Roman Catholic as was his family, then his wife and finally his children. The...

First cycle of French songs dedicated to Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens, Bordes' Paysages tristes are an outstanding attempt to implement the cyclical form to vocal repertoire. To this extent, this work...

In 1874 Verlaine published his Songs Without Words; these inspired Charles Bordes' four songs. These pieces are among his most prominent works for voice and piano. Two of them were first performed in...

So many contradictory masks have been attributed to him: the mystic and the rebel, the wild boy and the scholar… Let us others persist in seeing in Rimbaud, the poet Rimbaud, only the face of a child....

Subtitled as a "dramatic monologue", Ariadne Theseo (Ariadne's letter to Theseus) for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, should be seen as echoing Claudio Monteverdi's famous Lamento d'Arianna. It is writte...

Among the contemporary poets set in music by Massenet, Paul Mariéton (1862-1911), a Provence poet and founder of the Revue félibréenne (1895), has a particular place. The two men had known each other...

Piano reduction available for the first time! Joonas Kokkonen's The Hades of the Birds consists of three songs, two shorter ones framing a longer middle one. The chosen poems were by P. Mustapää (alia...

Details: two sopranos playing bass tom