Saturday, March 28, 2009

Jonathan Miller finds Charles d'Orleans

Here's a great post from Jonathan Miller about Debussy's poet, Charles d'Orleans:

In preparing program notes for our upcoming Chicago a cappella program, April in Paris, I learned something surprising. I had already known that the justly famous Trois Chansons by Debussy are settings of texts by Charles d'Orleans. Who was this Charles? Well, I have blissfully assumed for about 25 years that, because so many of the texts set by the Impressionist composers were written by their contemporaries, such as Paul Verlaine and Mallarme', then of course this Charles would have been just another one of the guys on the Parisian scene, albeit one who called himself by a rather lofty name.

Boy, was I wrong! As it turns out, this Charles was not a Parisian bohemian at all, but Charles (1394-1465), Duke of Orleans, a nobleman. He was wounded at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and imprisoned in England for the next 24 years, during which he wrote most of the poems--numbering more than five hundred--for which he is now famous. The imagery in Charles's poems is vivid, strongly visual, and not at all what I expected from a poet of more than 500 years' distance. So much medieval French poetry is rather stilted stuff about courtly love... what a refreshing change Charles is! I can see why Debussy was attracted to these old poems.

Read the whole post here.

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