Victor Hugo Lives!
Composers are always setting
to music the words of great poets, but does the music give us any better
understanding of the poetry? There is the case of Victor Hugo, a poet of long
ago--born in France in 1802, died in 1885--who in recent years has somehow
risen ghostily from his grandiose patriot's tomb in the Pantheon to become, in
our late 20 th century, the poet of the hour, so far as music
goes.
Music
based on Hugo's writings is everywhere today. Les Misérables , the
musical based on Hugo's novel of the same title, opened in France in 1980 and,
in a somewhat different English-language version, has been playing on Broadway
and touring the United States for 10 years now, with no sign of disappearing
soon. Last year Disney came out with an animated movie musical for children
called The Hunchback of Notre Dame , based on Hugo's Notre-Dame de
Paris . This year, Hyperion Records has issued a CD, Songs by Camille
Saint-Saëns, for piano and voice, with 11 of the 27 songs from poems by
Hugo. Which is to say, Victor Hugo, rendered into music, is coming at us from
three directions today, triophonically, so to speak--as a Broadway
extravaganza, as a mass entertainment for children, and more arcanely, as
classical music in a 19 th -century French style.
You might suppose that Hugo himself, or his shade, faced
with these sundry renditions, would take particular exception to the idea of a
movie cartoon for children. But that is not so certain. Sometimes Hugo welcomed
adaptations of his writings, and as for children, he wrote a volume of poetry,
L'Art d'être grand-père , devoted largely to the topic of children's
play. It's true that in The Hunchback of Notre Dame Disney has done a
wretched job, though. The technique of the Disney empire, like that of The
Invasion of the Body-Snatchers , is to get hold of the outer shell of
someone else's de-souled creation--Hugo's medieval fantasies, A.A. Milne's
stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, or anything at all--and fill it with a creepy,
committee-derived, cheerful substance of Disney's own. That is a pity, not to
mention a crime.
The songs
in Disney's Hunchback , by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz, are a
mishmash of the ersatz--sometimes imitating the old-fashioned Broadway
cleverness of George Gershwin's brother Ira, the lyricist (as in
Hunchback 's "A Guy Like You," sung by stone gargoyles, which you can
listen to briefly by clicking , though I don't advise it), other times
imitating the modern Broadway cleverness of Les Mis (as in
Hunchback 's opening number, which you can also listen to with a click ,
though why?). But there's no point in looking for Hugo in any of that--even if
it's worth noting that Disney's single inspiration of any worth in
Hunchback , the talking stone statues, was originally conceived by Hugo
himself, in his epic poem La Légende des Siècles .
Iwent to see Les Mis , the Broadway show,
expecting something no better than the Disney production, given the tinsel
stupidity of most Broadway musicals today. But Les Mis , as untold
millions of theatergoers have discovered before me, turns out to be an
intelligent and moving show. Technically speaking, it is an opera, all singing
and no talking--except that, unlike a regular opera, the music, by
Claude-Michel Schönberg, is intended strictly as a velvet background (velvet?
Click to see what I mean) intended to display the jewels, which are the lyrics.
These lyrics have been composed by a committee consisting of, in the French
original, Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, with the addition, for the English
version, of Herbert Kretzmer, aided by James Fenton--this last person being a
first-rate poet and arts critic, well known to readers of the New York
Review of Books . From this assemblage has come more lyrics than you would
think possible in an evening's entertainment--wordy rhyming couplets pouring
outward from the stage in a ceaseless gush, until you feel you have been
drenched (as you will see, if you click ).
The
lyrics tell a story that sticks pretty closely to Hugo's novel and even to its
left-wing spirit, which I much appreciate. Les Mis is decently Hugolian
in that respect. Even the rhyming couplets stand closer to Hugo's spirit than
you might imagine. His own theater plays--his play Hernani , for example,
which set off a riot in Paris when it was originally staged in 1830--consist in
large part of very similar verse. The only difference is that, in Hugo's
original writings, the wordy rhymed couplets conjure a feeling of endless
verbal ingenuity, advancing majestically at a stately pace--whereas, with the
lyricists' committee at Les Mis , everything rushes forward pell-mell, as
always in modern Broadway productions, and clichés tread on one another's
heels, and you have this feeling of a hidden stage director crying, "Next!
Next!"
If you want the true Victor Hugo rendered into music, you
have to get hold of Hyperion's CD of Songs by Camille Saint-Saëns , very
capably performed by the baritone François Le Roux and the pianist (and music
scholar) Graham Johnson. The songs are in French, of course, which is part of
what it means to have the true Hugo, who once said, "The measure of a nation's
intelligence is its ability to speak French." They are written in the light,
teary, lovely style of 19 th -century French song--the style that you
can see in a little pastoral love poem of Hugo's, with the singer and pianist
joined by Philippa Davies on flute, by clicking . The songs convey some of the
orderliness and purity of Hugo's poetic imagination, his unflappable fluency,
his verse structures varying with perfect control, as if every possible
variation on rhythmic and melodic order lay easily within his grasp--as in, for
instance, the opening bars that you can hear by clicking .
But is
there any advantage in listening to Hugo--or to any poet--through the
soundboard of a composer's music? I find it enjoyable to listen to the musical
settings by Saint-Saëns, but then again, a little disappointing. Poetry
contains its own music, even if the music is only hinted at, and if some
composer comes along and fills in the hints with imaginings of his own, the
effect is to close off possibilities for your own imagination. Claude Debussy
once said to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé that he had set a poem of Mallarmé's to
music--to which the poet is said to have replied, "I thought I had already done
that."
The splendidly incongruous
20 th -century musical resurrection of Victor Hugo makes me conclude
that, when composers set a poet's work to music, the best thing to do is, in
the case of a fiasco like Disney's Hunchback , to stay away completely,
and in the case of a show like Les Mis , to enjoy the story without
paying any attention to the literary art. In the case of a Saint-Saëns, on the
other hand, the best thing is to savor the musical settings and the words,
too--and then put aside the music to enjoy Victor Hugo, the poet, as presented
by himself on the printed page, with piano accompaniment and vocal sonorities
provided by your own dreamy imagination.
