Les Illuminations

“J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (“I alone hold the key to this wild parade”). So opens Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations (1939), the composer’s cycle of songs for upper voice and string orchestra setting the fantastical French prose-poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. The “wild parade” the singer promises to unlock is nothing less than all of human life, spread out in a series of sonic and poetic snapshots: each song a different world, momentarily illuminated by a musical flash of lightning. Britten transforms his strings into otherworldly trumpets in the arresting opening bars of “Fanfare”, summoning the listener on a magic carpet ride. Without pausing for breath the soloist plunges us into the teeming urban vision of “Villes”—cities where “savages ceaselessly dance”. There’s stillness, by contrast, in the enigmatic “Phrase”, bell-like harmonics catching the glint of the poet’s “chains of gold”. In “Antique”, a simple arpeggio passed between voice and violin becomes a ravishing vision of male beauty, idly sensuous. “Royauté” paints a fairy tale of kings and queens with neo-classical pomp and gilding, while “Marine” anticipates the seascapes of Peter Grimes in its foaming movement and first-light glitter. The “Interlude” that follows takes listeners down in a trickling scale into a more sombre space, plucked notes now the only pinpricks of illumination. “Being Beauteous” is a lulling love song over hazy strings, its rhapsody punctured by the grotesque “Parade”. “Départ” bids a tender, regretful farewell to the cycle’s visions; “Enough seen”, says the poet.