Classical Music | Baritone

Maurice Ravel

Chanson à boire, from Don Quichotte à Dulcinée  Play

Nathaniel Olson Baritone
Natalia Katyukova Piano

Recorded on 08/06/2012, uploaded on 03/01/2013

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Composed during 1932-33, the cycle of three songs, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, fatefully became Maurice Ravel’s last composition. Having suffered a head injury in a car accident in 1932, Ravel began to suffer from aphasia-like symptoms. Composing became increasingly difficult and he was not able to put down on paper the musical ideas he heard in his mind. The song cycle, in fact, was not intended as such, but instead was to be the music for a film based on Miguel de Cervantes’s celebrated novel, starring the Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin and directed by G. W. Pabst, with lyrics provided by the French author Paul Morand. However, Ravel’s slow progress due to his weakening health meant he could not supply the music on time and Pabst eventually hired Jacques Ibert to score the film. The three songs that were completed, and that now make up the song cycle, were later published and were premiered on December 1, 1934 with baritone Martial Singher and Paul Perey leading the orchestra. Though the songs were an unintended farewell to music, it is somewhat fitting that they are infused with the Spanish style that Ravel grew up hearing as a child and permeate some of his most beloved compositions.

Concluding Ravel’s triptych of songs is Chanson à boire, a boisterous and jolly drinking song. The essence of the Murand’s text is here humorously summed up in the middle stanza:

I drink to pleasure!
Pleasure is the only goal,
To which I go straight...
When I've drunk!

Ravel’s settings matches the humor of Murand’s text embellished a sense of “realism,” one might say. With the singer’s wild and uncontrollable utterances, we know that he has indeed taken part in the bacchanal, and the jolly antics of the piano accompaniment indicate that he is indeed enjoying himself. In matters of technique, Ravel utilizes the jota, a Spanish folk dance, to capture the revelry of the scene.     Joseph DuBose


Steans Music Institute

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