Poèmes intimes for piano

At the request of his editor Eugène Demets, Jean Cras assembled in 1912 five pieces conceived separately and published under the title of Poèmes intimes. The first two date from his stay in Iceland (1902), the fourth from his passage in Bizerte in Tunisia (1904), whereas the third and the fifth came forth in Brest, :  the pieces, each one dedicated to a different person (a certain Madame Benedickson, Henri Duparc, Ricardo Viñes, the wife of the composer and the pianist Marthe Dron) were first performed by Viñes at the Société nationale de musique in April 1918. En Islande and Preludio con fughetta seem to recall both Iceland and Brittany, as the epitaph to the first poem, noted down in the Breton language and translated into French: « Alas! the Bretons are full of sadness!” In the second piece, Cras combines his proclivity for meticulous writing with his taste for the folklore. Au fil de l’eausparkles with impressionnist colours to which the ringing bells are superimposed at its climax. The last two numbers owe their title and their atmosphere to precise poetic sources : Baudelaire’s poem Receuillement, for which Cras places the first verse at the head of the piece (« Be good, Oh my Pain, and keep calm ») and the last verse at the very end (« Hark, my dear, hear the warm night which treads…»); the first two verses of La maison du matin by Albert Samain (librettist of his opera Polyphème) serve as an epigraph to the last piece («La maison du matin rit au bord de la mer/ la maison blanche au toit de tuiles rose clair »). The whirling tarantella which closes the compilation is anything but intimate, but undoubtedly responds to the desire to finish with brio.