Sept haï-kaïs (, "Seven haikais") is a song cycle of mélodies by the French composer Maurice Delage for soprano and chamber ensemble of flute, oboe, B♭ clarinet, piano, and string quartet. Delage composed the work in 1924 based on classical Japanese tanka and haiku poems he translated into French.
The work was first performed on 16 February 1925 by the mezzo-soprano Jane Bathori at a concert conducted by Darius Milhaud at the Société musicale indépendante (SMI). The SMI was a concert society founded in 1909 by Maurice Ravel and others friends of Delage's to free themselves of the restrictions of the program music of the Société Nationale de Musique (SNM).
Sept haï-kaïs is shorter and more complex than Delage's Quatre poèmes hindous ("Four Hindu Poems", 1914), and less known than Stravinsky's ("Three Japanese Lyrics", 1913), lyrics were also translated by Delage. Sept haï-kaïs bridges the music of Japan and modern French music, and is considered the masterwork of Delage's mature period.
Background
Like many Western artists at the beginning of the 20th century, Maurice Delage (1879–1961) displayed a pronounced taste for the arts of Japan (Japonism). The young composer, benefiting from his father's financial aid, undertook a voyage to India and Japan at the end of 1911, where he stayed for 1912. He related hardly any of his memories of the time except to his closest friends. In his biography of Delage, Philippe Rodriguez laments the composer had "never said nor written anything about his trip to Japan; at least, nothing that remains".
Amongst Delage's most favoured friends, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky soon took to the same enthusiasm for Japanese culture, putting the composition of The Rite of Spring (1913) tentatively aside to set the ("Three Japanese Lyrics") to music, which Delage had translated for him. Stravinsky dedicated the first poem, "Akahito", to Delage, and Delage dedicated the last of his Quatre poèmes hindous, "Jeypur", to Stravinsky.
The interest in Japanese classical music (gagaku) led Delage to organize a concert when in 1925 the shamisen virtuoso visited Paris. , a wealthy patron of the arts, recalled: "Ravel and Delage thought to organize a welcoming party in honour of Sakichi and his wife, at the home of the pianist Henri Gil-Marchex. Sakichi played, dressed in a red coat, before a gold screen. Ravel and Delage were captivated by this concert."
Outline
The seven mélodies form a sequence. At a concert in Geneva in April 1929, Delage took care to specify: "the author requests these seven short pieces not be interrupted; the tonal sequence is intentional".
Poems
Haï-kaï is a French rendering of the Japanese word (, "comic, unorthodox") referring to a genre of Japanese poetry generally tinged with humour. It evolved in the 16th century from the tanka, a poetic form of 31 syllables in five lines in a scheme of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. The tanka appeared in the Imperial Court at the end of the Nara period in the late 8th century and enjoyed a golden age during the Heian period (794–1185). The haiku form that had appeared by the 17th century also derives from the tanka, reduced to 17 syllables: 5-7-5.
Gaston Renondeau noted that the haikai form "enjoyed an unparallelled vogue from the end of the 15th century". The production of haikai has continued into modern times. The "light" character of the work does not preclude depth—according to Rodriguez, "the limited number of words condenses the energy of the poem, a veritable animistic vision of nature", and thus "the first lines are loaded with a symbolism suitable to draw Delage's attention, and constitute the first of the Sept haï-kaïs".
I. Préface du Kokinshū (tanka by Ki no Tsurayuki; dedicated to Mrs Louis Laloy)
+ French Japanese Romanized Japanese EnglishHearing the warbler sing among the blossoms and the frog in his fresh waters— is there any living being not given to song?
II. "Les herbes de l'oubli ..." (by Sosei; dedicated to Andrée Vaurabourg, the future wife of Arthur Honegger)
+ French Japanese Romanized Japanese EnglishWhat could be the seed Of those forgetting grasses, I once did wonder; Now I know it is the heart Of one indifferent to love.
III. "Le coq ..." (by Georges Sabiron; dedicated to Jane Bathori, the performer of the work)
+ French EnglishPuddle without a ripple. The drinking rooster and its image Catch each other's beaks.
IV. "La petite tortue ..." (by Hiroko Katayama; dedicated to Mrs Fernand Dreyfus, mother of Alexis Roland-Manuel)
+ French Japanese Romanized Japanese English The little turtle crawls — slowly, slowly — and I find it hard not to think that I myself move on just like her!
V. "La lune d'automne ..." (by Akiko Yosano; dedicated to Suzanne Roland-Manuel, the wife of Roland-Manuel)
+ French Japanese Romanized Japanese EnglishAbove the wild shore the first moon of Autumn rose, clinging to a robe of white waves.
VI. "Alors ..." (by Uejima Onitsura, translated by Paul-Louis Couchoud; dedicated to Denise Jobert (daughter of the publisher))
+ French Japanese Romanized Japanese Englishbecause they bloom because we view them because they fall —
VII. "L'été ..." (author unknown; dedicated to Georgette Garban)
Translations
Delage had learned Japanese in preparation for his journey to Japan in 1912. He gained a sufficient mastery of the subtletites of the poetic language to translate himself the poems that he put to music, as he had done for Stravinsky's Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise in 1913. He took poems for Sept haï-kaïs from the Kokin Wakashū and other anthologies of poetry, but neglected to specify their authors.
Delage's translations, inspired by those of the Japanologist Paul-Louis Couchoud, were also very personal, according to the musicologist Michaël Andrieu. The composer sometimes organizes the verses to better fit the music. For example, the Anthologie de la poésie japonaise classique published by Gaston Renondeau gives the following translation of the second haikai, by Sosei (–910):
The expression ("forgetting grass") is a word-for-word translation of the Japanese (), the daylily Hemerocallis fulva. The Chinese believed it caused people to forget their unhappiness. Classical Japanese poets readily used such double meanings.
Music
The mélodies are very short; in the piano edition, each takes up two pages, except the first, for which the instrumental prélude takes up a full page. The fourth mélodie, "La petite tortue ...", is only seventeen measures long—the number of syllables in a Japanese haiku. Alexis Roland-Manuel remarked on this mélodie: "Do not let your modesty make you forget a certain fable by La Fontaine. You hurry slowly, perhaps, but none of your steps are wasted. How many hares envy you!"
The harmony is pricked with fine, expressive dissonances. For the third mélodie, "Le coq ...", the instruments "peck" the melody with appoggiaturas in a spirit similar to that in Ravel's Histoires naturelles (1906). According to Andrieu, "Maurice Delage's composition is simple and refined; the composer stays ever attentive to timbral balance to create atmosphere".
The pieces display contrasts in sonority and tempo: the Préface—"vif" and "quasi una cadenza"—comes together on an andantino assuming a rich adornment evoking the sustained "voice of the nightingales in the flowers". "Les herbes de l'oubli ..." follows the course of a larghetto phrase. The tempo of "Le coq" is moderato, with a little more animation towards the end. "La petite tortue ..." proceeds naturally on a lento rhythm. "La lune d'automne ..." rises on an agitato wave. "Alors ..." returns to the larghetto of the second mélodie, and "L'été ..." unfolds calm. The end is freely slow, dim. e morendo, with the freedom to let the instruments resonate as deeply as possible. Rodriguez compared the succession of poems to stages in a "veritable interior voyage".
Comparing the two versions of the work—for voice and piano or instrumental ensemble—musicologist Marius Flothuis considered that "the orchestral version doubtlessly respects the composer's idea more". The version with piano is more difficult to execute—for example in the Préface in particular:
A characteristic modulation, quoted in Delage's of 1950, caught Flothuis's attention. At the beginning of "L'été ..." the first two chords have a double false relation (of C♭ to B♭, and G♭ to G♮) followed by an insistent fourth in the bass, which Flothuis interprets as "a double pedal point (B♭ + E♭)". This evokes the distant beating of the temple bell and is heard twelve times in just nine measures, always off-beat of the melody:
Instrumentation
Two versions of Sept haï-kaïs were published, and are equally often performed in concert: the first in 1924 for voice and ensemble, and the second in 1926 for voice and piano. The composer had Tsuguharu Foujita produce an illustration for the cover to this version of the score.
The musical accompaniment is very refined. Jean-Paul Bartoli considered the instrumentation "rarefied and unusual". Except for serial techniques, all the qualities of the essentially melodic work are found in those of Anton Webern, a composer whom Delage did not know of.
The writing is more demanding than Quatre poèmes hindous (1912), to the same extent that Ravel's Chansons madécasses (1926) went further than his Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913). The four works are rigorously modern and, according to Bartoli, "these short, fine miniatures, perhaps inspired by the Stravinsky's cycle, no doubt stimulated Ravel to compose his Chansons madécasses".
The following table reflects this common trend towards a lighter instrumentation:
+ Comparison of instrumentation in works by Delage and RavelWorks by Maurice DelageWorks by Maurice Ravel Quatre poèmes hindous Sept haï-kaïs Trois poèmes de Mallarmé Chansons madécasses flute flute flute flute piccolo 2nd flute (also piccolo) oboe also taking the cor anglais oboe clarinet clarinet clarinet bass clarinet 2nd clarinet (also bass clarinet) harp piano piano piano 1st violin 1st violin 1st violin 2nd violin 2nd violin 2nd violin viola viola viola cello cello cello cello
Performances
The première took place 16 February 1925 at a concert of the Société musicale indépendante (SMI) at the Salle Érard in Paris. The mélodies were performed by Jane Bathori and conducted by Darius Milhaud. Delage had gotten Bathori to agree to perform it late in the year before. In a letter to her dated 27 September 1924, he wrote: "My publisher had to send you my seven little things in the hope they would interest you. ... They are a bit basic for your great virtuosity, but that could tempt you to do something good with them".
Despite the lukewarm reception at its première, the Sept haï-kaïs were performed in concert several times with growing success. In April 1929, the organizers of the 7th festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music presented the work in Geneva, performed by Madeleine Grey and conducted by Ernest Ansermet. Following the concert, Aloys Mooser praised the Sept haï-kaïs as "chiselled with a subtle, refined artistry. In a few lines, these little pieces create a singularly expressive atmosphere".
More than two decades after their composer's death in 1961, Sept haï-kaïs had its first performance in Japan on 20 July 1985 at during the Tokyo Summer Festival, along with works by Ravel, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich.
Reception The Sept haï-kaïs received limited success—music critics were for the most part taken aback by the brevity of the mélodies. Gustave Samazeuilh mentioned only "the very brief but very musical Japanese songs". In an article for le Ménestrel, Paul Bertrand summed up the general public sentiment, seeing in the vocal cycle "a succession of sketches, often charming but very brief, so brief that no impression of any of them had the time to affirm itself".