Paul Verlaine in Parallel: Loeffler, Fauré, Debussy

2021 ◽  
pp. 169-191
Author(s):  
Carlo Caballero
Keyword(s):  
Song Settings ◽  
American Composer ◽  
Paul Verlaine ◽  
The City

The contrasts between song settings of Verlaine’s poetry by Fauré, Debussy, and Hahn have long attracted comparative essays from scholars and singers. The songs of the American composer Charles Martin Loeffler offer yet another Verlaine. His settings of ‘La lune blanche’ and ‘En sourdine’ are particularly puzzling when heard after Fauré’s songs on the same poems. This essay seeks to make sense of some of Loeffler’s most idiosyncratic settings and show them as competent and as sensitive in their way as the more famous settings of Fauré and Debussy. I argue that Loeffler draws on the habits of ironic theatricality he would have observed in the cabarets and cafés-chantants he enjoyed frequenting in Paris. He applies the effects of popular urban song to Verlaine’s lyric and in this way is able to move very independently from Fauré or Debussy even as he raises a popular form to a high artistic level. In this context, Fauré and Debussy appear more similar than different, but we may array the three composers in a metaphorical geography moving from the countryside to the heart of the city: Fauré the pastoral, Debussy the suburban, and Loeffler the urban.

Present Absence: Debussy, Song, and the Art of (Dis)appearing

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-256
Author(s):  
Julian Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Singing Voice ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Song Settings ◽  
First Marriage ◽  
Paul Bourget ◽  
Paul Verlaine ◽  
Early Songs

Debussy's early song settings of Théodore de Banville and Paul Bourget foreground the Romantic topic by which the singing voice revokes lost presence. The closed aesthetic space of music becomes, in these songs, the space of the nocturnal garden in which the souls of lovers merge with the containing landscape. But Debussy's fascination with the poetry of Paul Verlaine, over a period of twenty-two years from 1882 to 1904, juxtaposes such evocations of intense sensuous presence with songs of alienated absence and ironic distance. The poems Debussy set from Verlaine's Fêtes galantes (1869) provoke both kinds of song, the latter embodied through the shadowy figures of the commedia dell'arte. In the case of two such poems, “En sourdine” and “Clair de lune,” Debussy produced two different settings of the same text, ten years apart. The usual account is that these show the composer's progression from Romantic lyricism to a more sophisticated but withdrawn style, a development paralleled by a biographical story moving from his youthful passion for the dedicatee of the early songs, Marie-Blanche Vasnier, to the breakdown of his first marriage in 1904. But neither the stylistic nor the biographical narrative provides an adequate account of the Verlaine songs, and both miss their exploration of the economy of desire at the heart of the piano song.

The Exile's Song

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McKee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crescent City ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
Free Black ◽  
American Composer ◽  
Classical Musicians ◽  
The City

This book chronicles the extraordinary story of African American composer Edmond Dede, raised in antebellum New Orleans, and his remarkable career in France. In 1855, Edmond Dede, a free black composer from New Orleans, emigrated to Paris. There he trained with France's best classical musicians and went on to spend thirty-six years in Bordeaux leading the city's most popular orchestras. How did this African American, raised in the biggest slave market in the United States, come to compose ballets for one of the best theaters outside of Paris and gain recognition as one of Bordeaux's most popular orchestra leaders? Beginning with his birth in antebellum New Orleans in 1827 and ending with his death in Paris in 1901, this text recounts the life of this extraordinary man. From the Crescent City to the City of Light and on to the raucous music halls of Bordeaux, this intimate narrative history brings to life the lost world of exiles and travelers in a rapidly modernizing world that threatened to leave the most vulnerable behind.

Hospitals: N.Y. Appellate Court Denies Move to Privatize Public Hospital

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-203
Author(s):  
Robert Chatham
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Public Health System ◽  
Municipal Hospital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Benefit ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Benefit Corporation ◽  
The City

The Court of Appeals of New York held, in Council of the City of New York u. Giuliani, slip op. 02634, 1999 WL 179257 (N.Y. Mar. 30, 1999), that New York City may not privatize a public city hospital without state statutory authorization. The court found invalid a sublease of a municipal hospital operated by a public benefit corporation to a private, for-profit entity. The court reasoned that the controlling statute prescribed the operation of a municipal hospital as a government function that must be fulfilled by the public benefit corporation as long as it exists, and nothing short of legislative action could put an end to the corporation's existence.In 1969, the New York State legislature enacted the Health and Hospitals Corporation Act (HHCA), establishing the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) as an attempt to improve the New York City public health system. Thirty years later, on a renewed perception that the public health system was once again lacking, the city administration approved a sublease of Coney Island Hospital from HHC to PHS New York, Inc. (PHS), a private, for-profit entity.

ASHA Convention 2013

ASHA Leader ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 46-48
Keyword(s):  
Ice Cream ◽  
Annual Convention ◽  
The City ◽  
Rich History

This year's Annual Convention features some sweet new twists like ice cream and free wi-fi. But it also draws on a rich history as it returns to Chicago, the city where the association's seeds were planted way back in 1930. Read on through our special convention section for a full flavor of can't-miss events, helpful tips, and speakers who remind why you do what you do.

App it Up in the City of Stars

ASHA Leader ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Sweeney
Keyword(s):  
The City

History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
The Middle Ages

History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
The Middle Ages

Becoming Literate in the City

1958 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Serpell ◽  
Linda Baker ◽  
Susan Sonnenschein
Keyword(s):  
The City

Ras al Khaimah: further archaeological discoveries

Antiquity ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 50 (200) ◽  
pp. 216-222
Author(s):  
Beatrice De Cardi
Keyword(s):  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
The State ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Ras a1 Khaimah is the most northerly of the seven states comprising the United Arab Emirates and its Ruler, H. H. Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al-Qasimi, is keenly interested in the history of the state and its people. Survey carried out there jointly with Dr D. B. Doe in 1968 had focused attention on the site of JuIfar which lies just north of the present town of Ras a1 Khaimah (de Cardi, 1971, 230-2). Julfar was in existence in Abbasid times and its importance as an entrep6t during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the Portuguese Period-is reflected by the quantity and variety of imported wares to be found among the ruins of the city. Most of the sites discovered during the survey dated from that period but a group of cairns near Ghalilah and some long gabled graves in the Shimal area to the north-east of the date-groves behind Ras a1 Khaimah (map, FIG. I) clearly represented a more distant past.

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