Comtesse Marie-Blanche de Polignac: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Five

Advent Calendar of Song - Day Five

Monteverdi, Lamento della Ninfa (published 1638)

This number has often been recorded, and often well recorded. (It’s been choreographed too, by Mark Morris, whose original singers were the Concerto Italiano.) But this, its earliest recording (1937), remains the yardstick, so much less inhibited and more affectionate than any other. You may well not think so at first: when you come at it from nowhere, its ensemble singing sounds hopelessly quaint, with French accents and quivering vibrato:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EeeoolgWcw 

(Ignore the wrong YouTube LP sleeve cover!) Stay with it. Things change forever at 1’22” when the main soprano voice enters. But by then you've begun to realise what kind of music this has been all along, and what part the others all play in it: by the time you reach the end, you have to go back and listen again to see just how they got there. The immense tenderness of everyone’s singing becomes deeply addictive. This is one of the most charming, touching, nuanced, sensuously and gently heartbreaking recordings ever made. But then its music itself is all those things.

For at least two centuries, the music of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), once greatly admired and influential, fell out of musical performances and repertory – until the early twentieth century, when Monteverdi began to fall back out of neglect. One reason was the woman behind this recording, the great musician Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), who in 1937 recorded a whole group of his madrigals, including this. And this Lament is not quite like any other madrigal – and actually, alone, had never quite become wholly neglected during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I wish I knew more about the world of musical resuscitation that Boulanger inhabited and partly assembled: the main soprano here (she enters around 1’30”) is a countess, Comtesse Marie-Blanche de Polignac, no less, daughter of the designer Jeanne Lanvin; the bass is Doda Conrad (1905-1997) the main tenor is the great survivor Hugues Cuénod (1902-2010), who also performed Mozart, Stravinsky and Noël Coward (and after the age of a hundred married his male lover – forty years younger). I think Paul Derenne is the other tenor. Irène Kedroff, Lucia Rauh, Nathalie Kedroff, and Ottavio Rinuccini - some of them Russian-born - are also sometimes credited, but it sounds too small a group for all those: does anyone know more for sure?). The recording is sometimes dates as 1958, but that’s surely wrong by 21 years.

The first three stanzas (Italian words and translations below) set the scene; I love how much Monteverdi does with them. The third stanza introduces a whole new rhythm with “Si calpestandi fiori” (“Thurs, treading upon flowers’), which dissolves into canonic echo effects around the words “suoi perduti amori” (“her lost loves”). But then Monteverdi slices through all that with the single word “Amor”. 

When the soprano (the Countess) repeats the word – she sings it four times in all – each is the next upward step in a climbing-scale crescendo, so stirring that I can seldom keep still in my seat as I listen. (How does music so measured pierce straight through to the heart and change my breathing?). And yet that’s nothing beside the urgent distress with which she then sings “dove, dov'è la fè ch'el traditor, ch’el traditor giuro?” (“where, where is the fidelity that the traitor, that the traitor swore?”). Yet it’s all hushed, and the way she diminishes the closing vowel of “giurò” (“swore”) is absolutely the essence of bel canto expressiveness. From Monteverdi’s time and probably before, classical principles in singing were not about showing technique but about employing technique for feeling, so that the swelling or the diminution of a note are about the heart that breathes rather than the show of control.

 But by this time the other voices are surrounding hers, like breezes fanning her face, in this most intimately seductive conspiracy of anguish. And she, without any seeming artifice, repeats and repeats the line “che non mi tormenti più” (“so that I won’t suffer any more”) so that it’s different and the same, every, every time. They, the ensemble singers, start to use that amazing diminutive word “miserella” ("poor little woman” or "poor darling"), which now becomes their compassionately dominant word for the rest of the madrigal. As for her repeated cries of “No!” - oh the pain.

 Two stanzas later, she opens with a slow descending scale over seven notes: “Per- ché di lui mi strug-go” (“Because I languish for him”). The effect is of a softly relentless confession, but it's inward. Then in the next stanza she climbs back up the scale at the same tempo, again seven notes, but here with another crescendo: “Se ciglio ha più sereno colei, colei, colei, che'l mio non è” (If she, she, she, has eyes more serene than mine,”). The pressure behind the ascent feels unbearable. And then another descent, through the rest of that stanza, but here the great moment is the single downward portamento at the start, the voice’s sweeping descent from “Già” to “non rinchiude” (“Even now she does not hold…”), as if releasing the tension that gathered during the phrase before. 

 The final stanza is most poignant and the most inward of all, with a fabulous four-note ascent, repeating the word “mai” (never”). Then the word “taci” ("say nothing") is also uttered four times, but on the same note, each repetition quieter. There's certainly a certain bittersweet masochism here – how can there not be with heartbreak? – but oh! how true and fresh it feels. 

 Lamento d'una nina - Lament of a nymph  (published 1638)

Non havea Febo ancora
recato al mondo il dí,
ch'una donzella fuora
del proprio albergo uscí.

The Sun had not brought 

the day to the world yet, 

when a maiden went out 

of her dwelling.

Sul pallidetto volto
scorgeasi il suo dolor,
spesso gli venia sciolto
un gran sospir dal cor

On her pale face 

grief could be seen, 

often from her heart 

a deep sigh was drawn.

Sí calpestando fiori
errava hor qua, hor là,
i suoi perduti amori
cosí piangendo va.
“Amor -”

Thus, treading upon flowers,

she wandered, now here, now there, 

and lamented 

her lost loves like this:

“Love -”

(Dicea)

(she said)

"Amor", dicea, 
(il ciel mirando,
il piè fermo, )

"dove, dov'è la fè ch'el traditor giurò?"

“O Love,” she said, 

(gazing at the sky, as she stood) 

where's the fidelity 

that the deceiver promised? -  

(Miserella)

(Poor her!)

“Fa che ritorni il mio
amor com'ei pur fu,
o tu m'ancidi, ch'io
non mi tormenti più.”

 “Make my love come back 

as he used to be 

or kill me, so that I 

will not suffer anymore.”

(Miserella, ah più, no,
tanto gel soffrir non può.)

(Poor her! She cannot bear 

so much coldness!)

“Non vo' più ch'ei sospiri
se lontan da me,
no, no che i martiri
più non dirammi affè.”

“I don't want him to sigh any longer 

but if he's far from me,

no! He will not make me suffer

 anymore, I swear!”

(Ah miserella, ah più, no, no)

(Poor her! Ah no, no more.)

“Perché di lui mi struggo,

tutt' orgoglioso sta,
che sí, che sí se'l fuggo
ancor mi pregherà?”

“He's proud 

because I languish for him. 

Perhaps if I fly away from him 

he will come to pray to me again?

(Miserella, ah più, no,
tanto gel soffrir non può.)

(Poor her, ah no more, no,

can she bear such coldness.)

“Se ciglio ha più sereno
colei, che'l mio non è,
già non rinchiude in seno
amor sí bella fè.”

“If her eyes are more serene 

than mine, O Love, 

she does not hold in her heart 

a fidelity so pure as mine.”

(Miserella, ah più, no,
Tanto gel soffrir non può.)

(Poor her, ah no more, no,

can she bear such coldness.)

“Ne mai sí dolci baci
da quella bocca havrai,
ne più soavi, ah taci,
taci, che troppo il sai.”

“And you will not receive from those lips

kisses as sweet as mine, nor softer. 

Oh, don't speak! Don't speak! 

you know better than that!”

(Miserella)

(Poor her.)

Nadia Boulanger

Comtesse Marie-Blanche de Polignac

Hugues Cuénod