Ominous, interior visions are imagined in songs by Ravel composed between 1895 and 1906 using poems by French and Belgian symbolists. These songs are stitched together with newly composed intermèdes as Un grand sommeil noir by composer and author Robin Holloway. Holloway uses the same instrumentation selected by Ravel for the later Mallarmé songs (1913), with the addition of a double-bass and a harp. As Holloway explains: ‘the composite result is dark and melancholy, here or there anguished, always disquieted or perturbed—a three-faceted depiction of the composer’s 'dark side', complement to his more usual gaiety, wit, delicate sensuality, hedonism’ (Holloway, 2019). De Régnier’s threatening vision of marauding strangers in a hollowed-out town is presented in densely symbolic language that Ravel translates into short musical bursts. Verlaine’s ‘dark sleep’ poem envisions a deep depression captured by Ravel through static musical language, in which infinitesimal shifts of creeping harmonies wheedle their way round the voice. Verhaeren’s shattered self is trapped in a mournfulness for which the lull of Ravel’s 9/8 time signature offers scant comfort, while the darkness that envelops the whole scene is captured, too, in the print engraving by Odilon Redon for Verhaeren’s Les Débâcles (Defeats, 1888), from which Ravel selected his text.

from notes by Helen Abbott © 2023