Art Song Video from St. Mary’s Music Notes

St. Mary’s Music Notes is a series of videos of music performed in the sanctuary of The Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin. These are initially live-streamed on Facebook and then archived for subsequent viewing. The series was probably organized and curated by Eric Choate, who serves as both choirmaster and organist at the church.

This morning I watched a video, which was live-streamed this past Tuesday morning. According to the header, this is the ninth video in the series. The featured artist was soprano Ellen Leslie, accompanied at the piano by Choate. The video, which was only ten minutes in duration, presented four songs by Déodat de Séverac.

Séverac was born in Toulouse in 1872, about a decade after Claude Debussy. He studied in Paris, where his best known teacher was Vincent d’Indy (who was never much of an admirer of Debussy’s music). After his studies he returned to the south of France, where he lived until his early death in 1921.

Séverac is probably best known for setting texts in Occitan and Catalan. However, the core of Leslie’s program consisted of settings of poetry by Paul Verlaine. The first of these was “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit” (the sky above the roof). This was followed by “Soleils couchants” (fading dawn), the first of the seven poems in Verlaine’s Paysages tristes (sad landscapes). This pairing was preceded by “Temps de neige” (snowy weather), setting a poem by Henry Gautheir-Villars, best known as Colette’s first husband, given the nickname Willy. Leslie concluded with Séverac’s setting of “Renouveau” (renewal), a fifteenth-century poem by Charles, Duke of Orléans.

All four of these songs were delivered with satisfying clarity, as was the interplay between vocalist and pianist. Even without the French texts, one could probably recognize this as French music during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Still, there is a sense that Séverac approached this transition retrospectively, rather than prospectively! It might have been useful to have links to both the texts and their translations; but too much attention to the words themselves might have distracted from the overall rhetoric, whose traits were revealed through music with its own distinctive expressive traits.