Songs
Les papillons
(1881)
Les papillons
Les papillons couleur de neigeVolent par essaims sur la mer;Beaux papillons blancs, quand pourrai-jePrendre le bleu chemin de l’air?Savez-vous, ô belle des belles,Ma bayadère aux yeux de jais,S’ils me pouvaient prêter leurs ailes,Dites, savez-vous où j’irais?Sans prendre un seul baiser aux rosesÀ travers vallons et forêts,J’irais à vos lèvres mi-closes,Fleur de mon âme, et j’y mourrais.
Butterflies
Snow-coloured butterfliesswarm over the sea;beautiful white butterflies, when might Itake to the azure path of the air?Do you know, O beauty of beauties,my jet-eyed bayadère—were they to lend me their wings,do you know where I would go?Without kissing a single rose,across valleys and forestsI’d fly to your half-closed lips,flower of my soul, and there would die.
Translation © Richard Stokes, author of A French Song Companion (Oxford, 2000)
Composer
Poet
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.
While Gautier was an ardent defender of Romanticism, his work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as diverse as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Proust and Oscar Wilde.
Taken from Wikipedia. To view the full article, please click here.
See Full Entry
Sorry, no further description available.
Previously performed at:
- 13 Oct 2018: Debussy: A Life in Song
-
Les papillons
Les papillons couleur de neige
Volent par essaims sur la mer;
Beaux papillons blancs, quand pourrai-je
Prendre le bleu chemin de l’air?
Savez-vous, ô belle des belles,
Ma bayadère aux yeux de jais,
S’ils me pouvaient prêter leurs ailes,
Dites, savez-vous où j’irais?
Sans prendre un seul baiser aux roses
À travers vallons et forêts,
J’irais à vos lèvres mi-closes,
Fleur de mon âme, et j’y mourrais.
Butterflies
Snow-coloured butterflies
swarm over the sea;
beautiful white butterflies, when might I
take to the azure path of the air?
Do you know, O beauty of beauties,
my jet-eyed bayadère—
were they to lend me their wings,
do you know where I would go?
Without kissing a single rose,
across valleys and forests
I’d fly to your half-closed lips,
flower of my soul, and there would die.
Composer
Poet
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.
While Gautier was an ardent defender of Romanticism, his work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as diverse as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Proust and Oscar Wilde.
Taken from Wikipedia. To view the full article, please click here.
See Full Entry
Sorry, no further description available.
Previously performed at:
- 13 Oct 2018: Debussy: A Life in Song
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