The Private Canon: "Adieu, pastourelles" and Au Revoir, L'enfant

This post is part of a series.
If you asked me to name the piece of music that moves me most, I would have no shortage of contenders: "One More Hour" by Randy Newman, the Chieftains' "Breton Carol," assorted selections from my Private Canon. To the latter I would add "Adieu, pastourelles," a mournful little march sung by spurned wallpaper decor from my favorite opera not by Mozart, Ravel's 1925 masterwork L'enfant et les sortilèges ("the child and the spells").

If that sounds strange, you don't know the half of it. In this iconic fable with an inspired text by Colette, a brat is taught a lesson by the worlds, both natural and manufactured, he has trampled on thoughtlessly—it's like Where the Wild Things Are with a moralistic edge. In the opera's first half, he trashes his room in a tantrum over his mother's demand that he finish his homework, only to have the destroyed items in the room rise up and sing back to him: a teacup and kettle, the clock, the chair, the fire (he has a small fireplace in his room). Things take an even more fantastical turn when figures from within some of this detritus come to life: a princess from a fairytale book he's shredded, whose fate has now been similarly arrested, or Arithmetic itself, personified as a hunchback with a measuring tape spitting numbers at him.

The "Pastourellles" section I particularly cherish begins when the boy sees the characters that have adorned his wallpaper—a pastoral scene of shepherds, shepherdesses, sheep, a sheepdog—get up and trudge morosely away from the pieces he's torn down, with a rumpled dignity that, as Colette's stage directions put it, is "a little ridiculous, and very touching," accompanied by "a naïve music of pipes and tambourines." That fairly but barely begins to describe the special beauty of this passage, in which tambourine marks out a stately tattoo and the piano thrums a drone-like open Asus chord, leaving room for all kinds of modal harmonies, major and minor, even a striking polytonal-ish outburst (at about 1:12 in the clip below; I say "polytonal-ish" because the clarinets sound like they're running through a B-major scale while the rest of the orchestra is in a kind of E). First monk-like male voices begin the lament, "Adieu, pastourelles," answered by higher-voiced youths (sung by women), "Pastoureaux, adieu."

And the sad parade continues, with a studied medieval primitivism that puts me in mind of Orff or Stravinsky but with a lilting delicacy that feels deeper, truer somehow, than a mere dabbling in neoclassicism. The apotheosis comes when the accompaniment drops out and a pair of shepherdesses lament, in free tempo, the departure of the "chien bleu," the "chèvre amaranthe," and the "verts moutons" (a blue dog, a weed-chomping goat, and green sheep).

I've said before that I'm a sounds-first music lover, and with most music I cherish I attend to lyrics only after my ear has been seduced; this is true especially of music with lyrics in another language. The huge and hardly unrelated caveat I would add is that with the vast canon of musical theatre and opera (and much other music worth listening to), the drama is in the music, and is merely alluded to, annotated, or belied by the lyrics (themselves a kind of music, but I'll save that for another post). Not only does this mean that words alone seldom seal the deal, but also that I often find, when I retroactively suss out the intended meaning of a piece I'm fond of, the emotions I've attached to the music without quite grasping the lyrical content eerily match, or at least map onto, what was always the thrust of the work all along. (I'm fully prepared to admit that this is probably a lie of the mind or a kind of wishful retconning, but then just what is art anyway if not a kind of magic trick, a leap of faith?)

So it is here: I don't think I consciously knew when I first fell for "Adieu, pastourelles" that it rhapsodizes a farewell procession of real and fantastical creatures from the walls of a child's room, with all the bittersweet wonder and loss that scene implies. But it makes more sense to me, down to my marrow, than I quite know how to put into words—except to point to the wallpaper that adorned my walls until the age of 3, posted above; long since torn down, a sample of it hangs in my children's room, a vestigial reminder of the two-dimensional horizon that once loomed over my imagination, until one day I broke free of its spell. To me the music Ravel conjured here, with Colette's lyrics, is the sound of that spell—a sound and a spell that contain both childhood and its end.

I had meant this piece to be a formative-album replay of L'enfant et les sortilèges, but the shepherds carried me away, as they always do. I'll only add that I share Manuel Rosenthal's opinion that it is the composer's crowning achievement, as it constitutes an ideal match of artist and subject, and is the fullest expression of Ravel's quintessentially French mix of whimsy and dead-seriousness, absurdity and feeling.

The opera's second half is wilder than the first, if you can believe it, as the child is lured outdoors by a mewling duet between two cats only to meet more of his victims: trees he's carved with a penknife, squirrels he's tormented. These aggrieved flora and fauna first enact a sort of ritualistic revenge on him, like something out of The Bacchae, then abruptly switch to a chorale of praise when they find he's bound the wound of an injured squirrel. There's a dance of tree frogs, a dragonfly waltz with hints of La Valse, and a gorgeous oboe-led ending that recalls the opera's mysterious opening, framing the piece in a perfect maternal embrace. The child is safe at home by the end, but the seeds of his leaving have been planted.