Trois Poèmes pour chant et piano

In a letter to Prosper Renier (March 1893), Guillaume Lekeu expressed his wonderment, following the triumphant first performance by Angéline Delhaye at the Cercle des Vingt in Brussels of his Trois Poèmes pour chant et piano (completed in December of the previous year). “Note that these pieces are horribly difficult,” he added, “not only to nuance, but even to sing in tune. Which goes to show how lucky I was to come across a brave young woman who is also an extraordinary musician.” Lekeu wrote the texts himself and dedicated each song to a poet: Sur une tombe to Lamartine, Ronde to Paul Verlaine, and Nocturne to Victor Hugo. His use of blank verse led him without effort to melodic curves of extraordinary breadth and interesting rhythmical experiments. These pieces impressed his contemporaries; Ernest Closson devoted a long article to them (Le Guide musical, April 1895), in which he underlined a resemblance between Lekeu’s musical thought and that of Robert Schumann. The Nocturne, he felt, was “the most remarkable of the three songs, the most ideal in its conception; instead of being sentimental like the first two, this one is purely lyrical, with an elevation and nobility of thought, a poetry and a richness of inspiration that are worthy of César Franck. Though short, it makes a deeper impression than many other, more extensive pieces. [...] It is a picture, a landscape, but a subjective landscape, seen with the eyes of the soul.”