This volume from Musik Fabrik marks the first publication of Jacques Leguerney´s
settings of the French poet Paul-Jean Toulet (1867-1920).1 Composed in 1943, most
of them have been performed, but Leguerney never sought their publication. The
manuscripts languished in his safe deposit box in the Banque National de Paris on
boulevard des Italiens until the mid-1980s, when all of his compositions were the
subject of renewed scrutiny by the American pianist Mary Dibbern, who organized
performances, recordings, and editions of many of his works for voice and piano.
Leguerney remained skeptical about the quality of his settings of Toulet´s poems
and only admitted ten of them to the official corpus of his works, established during
the 1990s by the French musicologist Patrick Choukroun for his dissertation on the
composer´s life and works.2 It was at this time that Leguerney added dedications to
the manuscripts of songs 1 through 12 for Choukroun and French musicologist
Evelyne Delmas, who had also chosen Leguerney as a dissertation topic. At
Leguerney´s death in 1997, the Toulet settings were still being performed from
authorized photocopies of his autograph manuscripts.
This premiere publication by Musik Fabrik presents Toulet settings numbers 1
through 10 in an order chosen by Leguerney. The final three songs have been
added by Mary Dibbern, making the complete collection of settings available for
study and performance. The songs are not cyclical, therefore they may be
performed in any order or excerpted for recital groupings.
This is Mary Dibbern´s performing edition, based upon Leguerney´s autograph
manuscripts, manuscript copies given to her by the composer, as well as
Leguerney´s own performance advice to both Dibbern and the singers who
performed and recorded them in the 1980s and 1990s. Dibbern is recognized as the
foremost authority on the works of Leguerney. Her collaboration with him began in
1978 and lasted until the composer´s death in 1997. During this time, she worked
with the composer to create performing editions of eight volumes of his songs for
Editions Max Eschig and recorded two LPs of his works for voice and piano for
Harmonia Mundi France3 with baritone Kurt Ollmann and sopranos Lisa Bonenfant
and Deborah Massell, as well as a CD for Claves4 with soprano Danielle Borst,
mezzo-soprano Brigitte Balleys and baritone Philippe Huttenlocher. She is currently
the official music consultant for the Leguerney Estate.
Leguerney´s poets
Leguerney´s vocal works are dominated by his preference for the Baroque poets of
the French Pleiade, especially Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), Joachim du Bellay
(1522-1560) and É,tienne Jodelle (1532-1573), as well as 17th-century authors,
including Theophile de Viau (1590-1626), Francois Maynard (1582-1646), and Saint-
Amant (1594-1661). Leguerney never hid his distaste for most of the poetry of his
own epoch. He limited contemporary selections to a small group of poets forming,
or influenced by, the É,cole romane, a clearly nationalistic French school whose
authors´ goals were to continue the aesthetic of 16th- and 17th-century French
poetry that celebrated the beauty and richness of the French language. Leguerney
set a small number of poems by Charles Maurras (1868-1952), Jean Moreas (1856-
1910), and Rene Chalupt (1885-1957).5 He ventured out into more "modern" poems
of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), certainly influenced by Francis Poulenc´s
settings of this poet.
Toulet´s poetic themes
From the collection Contrerimes by Paul-Jean Toulet, published posthumously in
1929, Leguerney set thirteen short poems. Toulet perfected the contrerime poetic
form, which uses verses of regularly alternating syllables in the sequence 8-6-8-6,
but whose rimes form the structure a-b-b-a. They are short tableaux, portraits of the
beauty or humor found in a moment, or a snapshot of an intimate event. Toulet´s
themes range from biographical to reinterpretation of images by other authors. For
instance, song #13, "Ainsi, ce chemin de nuage," is a poem inspired by Toulet´s
voyage in China and ends with the exotic, mysterious description of a tiger´s gentle
roar ("un tigre qui miaule"). His impression of the mystery of a tiger´s nocturnal
voice is also described in his unpublished diary: "Il y a derriere les arbres comme du
mystere et de l´ombre amasses. Malgre soi, on interroge la nuit pour y decouvrir la
voix du tigre, les aboiement clapotant. (Behind those trees it seems that mystery is
intermingled with shadows. In spite of myself, I listen to the night, and therein I
discover the tiger´s rippling roar.)"
"Douce plage," song #2, probably refers to Toulet´s double origins : "Douce plage
où, naquit mon ame" (Dear beach where my soul was born)." Toulet´s birthplace was
in Pau (France), but his parents had recently traveled from the Ile Maurice so that
he could be born on French soil. His feeling of being torn between two identities,
French and Creole, is a frequent motif in his poems.
In song #12, "Tout ainsi," Toulet´s inspiration certainly goes back in time to the Old
Testament book of Deuteronomy, 32:32: "For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and
of the fields of Gomorah: their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter."6
Toulet´s poem opens with a description of "pommes de pourpre et d´or qui
murissent aux bords où, fut Sodome (purple and golden apples that ripened on the
banks where Sodom had existed)" and ends with a personalization of the Biblical
image. "Mon coeur. . .n´est rien qu´un peu de cendre (My heart &hellip, is nothing but
ashes)."
Performance history
Although previously unpublished, Leguerney´s Toulet settings nevertheless have a
performance history. The first interpreter was the young Gerard Souzay,
accompanied by his close friend Babeth Leonet. In September 1943, they recorded
three of the songs onto an aluminum disc7 ("Toi qu´empourprait l´atre," "Ces roses",
"Iris") at the newly founded Studio d´Essai de la Radiodiffusion Nationale (rue de
l´Universite, Paris, 7eme).8
On February 22, 1944, soprano Ginette Guillamat, accompanied by Therese Cochet,
gave the premiere of five songs from the ten that Leguerney had grouped together
under the title Dix Poemes de Paul-Jean Toulet. The following songs were performed in
the Salle Chopin-Pleyel, "Nocturne," "Toi qu´empourprait l´atre," "Reveil," "Puisque
tes jours," "Le tremble est blanc."
They were grouped together with Leguerney´s Trois Poemes de Jean Moreas, which
also received its premiere performance.
Leguerney´s music had lain dormant from the early 1960s until Mary Dibbern
"discovered" him in 1978, when she arrived in Paris to work with Pierre Bernac and
Nadia Boulanger. Sure of the high quality of the music, and charmed by this French
musician, she worked diligently to promote a rediscovery of his many works for
voice and piano. One of the most important figures in the dissemination of his music
was the American mezzo-soprano Carol Kimball.9
On April 30, 1988, Carol Kimball and Mary Dibbern recorded "En memoire d´un
ami," "Le tremble est blanc," "Iris," "Ces roses," "Le temps d´Adonis," "Puisque tes
jours," "Douce plage," "Nocturne," "Toi qu´empourprait l´atre," and "Reveil." The
recording was part of a disc of French melodies which was not commercialized. On
November 30, 1988, Carol Kimball, accompanied by fellow faculty member Carol
7 Patrick Choukroun was able to obtain the aluminum disc from Jacques Leguerney and arranged for its
restoration and transfer to magnetic tape by Jean-Francois Pontefract, a recording engineer at Radio
France. It is now conserved in the Phonotheque de l´Ina, a library dedicated to sound recordings
located in the Maison de la Radio (Radio France) in Paris.
8 The Studio d´Essai de la Radiodiffusion Nationale, later called Club d´Essai, was founded in 1942 by
Pierre Schaeffer and participated in the French resistance during World War II. In August 1944, the
studio emitted the first broadcasts in liberated Paris. It later became a center of musical activity and
experimentation with creative radiophonic techniques using the sound technologies of the time.
9 Carol Kimball traveled to Paris to work on French song interpretation with Gerard Souzay and was
introduced to Leguerney by Dibbern, who often accompanied Souzay´s students. A friendship and
artistic collaboration ensued and these two Americans spent many years working with Leguerney on
his music and interviewing him for a projected book on his life and songs. The book, written in
collaboration with Patrick Choukroun, was published in 2001, Interpreting the Songs of Jacques Leguerney:
A Guide for Study and Performance, Vox Musicae Series No. 3 (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press). It discusses
songs that had been published at the time of its writing, therefore the Musik Fabrik publications, only
begun after the composer´s death, are not included.
5
Urban, performed "Le Tremble est blanc" "Iris," "En memoire d´un ami," "Douce
plage," "Nocturne," "Toi qu´empourprait l´atre," and "Reveil." These songs were
included in their recital "Chamber Music with a French Flair," organized by Chamber
Music Southwest at the Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall on the campus of the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas. As part of a song festival in honor of Leguerney
(and which he attended) organized by James Knapp and hosted by the University of
Texas Austin, on April 14, 1991, Kimball and Dibbern performed "Iris," "Douce
plage," "En memoire d´un ami," "Nocturne," "Toi qu´empourprait l´atre," and "Le
tremble est blanc."
The Toulet settings "Ces roses" and "Douce plage" were recorded by Swiss mezzosoprano
Brigitte Balleys, with Dibbern at the piano, for the Claves label in 1996.10
The CD won the Grand Prix du Disque given by the Academie Charles Cros and was
a Selection of Swiss Radio International.
About Mary Dibbern
Mary Dibbern has been a member of the artistic staff of The Dallas Opera since
2012, serving as Music Director of Education and Family Programs. She is an
internationally known specialist in the field of vocal coaching and accompaniment.
After being graduated from Southern Methodist University with a Master of Music in
accompaniment under the direction of Maestro Paul Vellucci, she moved to Paris to
work with the great teachers, Nadia Boulanger and Pierre Bernac. During her 31
years residence in France, she was guest coach at the Opee ra National de Paris
(Bastille), and at the operas of Nice, Bordeaux, Lyons, Toulouse, Dijon, Chaa telet,
the Opee ra-Comique, the Festival de Radio France-Montpellier as well as in
Switzerland, Portugal, Lithuania, and Latvia. She was in charge of musical
preparation for the first French-language productions in China of Gounod´s Romee o
et Juliette and Bizet´s Carmen. In the United States she was guest coach at the operas
of Seattle, Fort Worth, Cincinnati, Kentucky, Memphis, and Hawaii. She served as
Head of Music at the Minnesota Opera from 2009 to 2012, where she worked
extensively with Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell for musical and language
preparation of their Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, Silent Night.
Dibbern has worked on the preparation of American, French, Italian, and German
operas and recordings with the world´s finest conductors including Lorin Maazel,
Georges Pretre, Jeffrey Tate, Dennis Russell Davies, Sir Alexander Gibson, Kent
Nagano, Michel Plasson, and Emmanuel Joel-Hornak. She has accompanied vocal
recitals in the USA, Europe and Japan-notably at La Scala, Thee aa tre des Champs-
Elysee es, Opee ra-Comique, Radio France and Opee ra Royal de Versailles. She is a
recording artist for Harmonia Mundi France and Maguelone. Her recital Mee lodies de
Jacques Leguerney (Claves) was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque.
10 Jacques Leguerney: 28 Melodies (Claves CD 9618) with Danielle Borst, Brigitte Balleys, Philippe
Huttenlocher, and Mary Dibbern. The CD also includes "De l´Abime Profonde" for soprano and bassbaritone,
also published by Musik Fabrik, as well as an unpublished duet.
6
Mary Dibbern is published by Pendragon Press. She is the author of five
Performance Guides for French operas, as well as Interpreting the Songs of Jacques
Leguerney: A Guide for Study and Performance in collaboration with Carol Kimball. She
translated from the French Anne Massenet´s new biography, Jules Massenet en toutes
lettres, and is currently working in collaboration with French musicologist Herve
Oleon to prepare a bi-lingual edition of the Association Massenet Internationale´s
Massenet General Catalogue of Works. She is also a PhD candidate in Humanities-
Aesthetic Studies and Translation Studies at the University of Texas Dallas