About ILLUMINATIONS

In early 1870, a young Paul Verlaine, the harbinger of the Symbolist movement in French Poetry, was introduced by his friend, Charles de Sivry, to de Sivry’s half-sister, Mathilde Mauté. Verlaine had recently gained some notoriety with the publication of his second book of poems, Fêtes galantes, inspired by a series of paintings by Antoine Watteau. Having abandoned the stable and respectable career in law that his father had wished for him in favor of the bohemian life of a Parisian poet and intellectual, Verlaine was at this point spending his time frequenting the city’s cafés and bars, where he became a familiar face amongst the intellectual and artistic elite of the day. Seeing in Mathilde a savior who would li! him from the depths of his life spent in Paris’s brothels and bars, between which he floated in an absinthe-fueled alcoholic haze, he fell quickly in love with the young girl, and the two became married later that same year. In the frenzied outburst of creativity that he experienced during this period, Verlaine wrote one of the pinnacles of his published oeuvre, a series of poems detailing the highs of the love he felt for Mathilde, entitled La Bonne Chanson.

In August 1871, in anticipation of the birth of their son, Mathilde and Verlaine returned from hiding to Paris. Having lost any position and having no viable ways of supporting themselves, the couple moved into the Mauté household. Shortly thereafter, Verlaine received in the mail the poems of a young 16-year-old poet who lived in the French countryside, Arthur Rimbaud. Seeing the genius in this young boy’s writing, Verlaine soon invited Rimbaud to live with the Mautés in Paris, determined to introduce this young prodigy to his famed circle of writer and poet colleagues. Soon after Rimbaud’s arrival, the two began a tumultuous aair that shocked all of Paris. Despite the birth of their son occurring during this period, Verlaine’s already waning interest in his young wife withered away to nothing, and he began a two-year affair with Rimbaud that would see the two running off to London, and later to Brussels, where their relationship ended in a violent lovers’ quarrel culminating with Verlaine drawing a pistol on Rimbaud in the middle of the street and shooting his young lover in the hand. It was during this scandalous period abroad that Rimbaud composed many of the poems that formed his final work, Les Illuminations, and Verlaine would write the poems that would eventually be published as the collection, Romances sans paroles.

The poetry (as well as the salacious biography) of Verlaine (who was a seminal figure of the French Symbolist movement) inspired many composers to set his words to music. Many of the songs employing his poems as texts are some of the most renowned examples of French mélodie ever composed. Two of his contemporaries who were leading composers of the Parisian belle époque, Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy, set his poems to music numerous times and were greatly inspired by his calls for a new mode of French artistic expression.

Rimbaud’s collection of prose poetry, Les Illuminations, would go on to influence just about every poetic movement that followed his premature retirement from literature at the young age of 21. Benjamin Britten was most likely introduced to the work by his close friend W.H. Auden, and he was immediately inspired to set the poems to music. He composed Les Illuminations during the period leading up to World War II, completing much of the piece during his tour of the United States, during which he would begin his life-long romantic relationship with the tenor, Peter Pears. The cycle’s main recurring theme is a setting of Rimbaud’s words, ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’ (I alone hold the key to this savage parade), a sentiment that was a central theme in Britten’s writing: only the artist, who is perpetually on the outside looking in, is able to make any sense of the savage parade that is the adventure of living in this world.