Translating the mélodie

Researcher: Emily Kilpatrick

This collaborative project, hosted under UCL’s Music Futures programme, focuses on diverse translations of early twentieth-century French song and poetry, involving both the creation of new singing translations, and the composition of new songs – ‘translating’ poetry into music – together with associated scholarly considerations around the ‘translation’ of women’s voices and experiences. Those concerns are focussed through two major early twentieth-century song cycles, Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel (1914) and Claire Delbos’s L’âme en bourgeon (1937); and two collections of poetry, Cécile Sauvage’s L’âme en bourgeon and Renée de Brimont’s Mirages (which furnished the texts for Fauré’s 1919 song cycle).

Led by Jennifer Rushworth (UCL) and Emily Kilpatrick (RAM), the project has drawn students and staff in French literature and translation into collaboration with Academy vocal, composition and collaborative piano students. A research workshop in October 2023 saw students and staff from both institutions working together to devise new translations for several of the Boulanger songs, and test out new singing translations of the Delbos cycle. A second workshop, in November 2023, brought composers together with UCL collaborators, Louise Drewett and mezzo-soprano Lucy Goddard (Academy alumna) to workshop newly composed songs on the poetry of Sauvage and Brimont, in new English translations. These events centred around questions of musical and literary practice. What makes a good singing translation, and what are particular challenges of French repertoire in this regard? How flexible can one be with both poetry and vocal line, and where are the limits of intervention? How might audiences engage differently with art song when it is performed in English?

The intersection of music and translation is increasingly the subject of academic investigations (see, for example, the AHRC network on ‘Translating Music’, 2013-14 and subsequent publications). The more specific question of song and translation is essential for understanding both the history of song and its afterlives. This might include, for example the translation of German Lieder into French, and French mélodie into English, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it also encompasses diverse engagements with different song traditions in the present day, such as Jeremy Sams’ recent English singing translations of Lieder.

By focusing on women as composers and poets (Boulanger and Delbos; Brimont and Sauvage) the project elevates two major early twentieth-century song cycles and two fascinating collections of poetry that lie out of the mainstream of scholarly investigation. It also helps to lay the foundations for Emily Kilpatrick’s forthcoming research project, which will explore women as music-makers and musical historians through Third Republic France. Renée de Brimont, for example, was the host of an important multidisciplinary salon in the 1920s, a translator (of Tagore) and a fine amateur musician, as well as a poet: her 1919 collection Mirages is intensely musical, threaded with references to the music of Debussy, Ravel and Fauré in particular. The responses to Brimont’s poetry by student composers, set alongside Fauré’s Miroirs, offers a re-presentation of this fascinating figure in a twenty-first century context, emphasising her progressive artistic vision and her active role in shaping artistic thought and performance.

The project concluded with a student-led concert at the Academy in June 2024, which brought together newly composed settings of Brimont and Sauvage with extracts from the Boulanger, Delbos and Fauré cycles.

Project Team

• Professor Emily Kilpatrick (Academy)
• Dr Jennifer Rushworth (UCL)
• Dr Daria Chernysheva (UCL)
• Prof Timothy Matthews (UCL)
• Prof Geraldine Brodie (UCL)

OUTPUTS

• Collaborative research workshops (autumn 2023)
• Final concert, David Josefowitz Recital Hall, Royal Academy of Music, June 2024
• 4 new songs by Academy composers
• New singable translations of Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel
• A scholarly article is planned.

Image: Lili Boulanger by Henri Manuel, first published in Comœdia illustré, 1913