Author Description

Jean Cras (1879-1932) was a remarkable man by anyone's measure. Twice a decorated hero of the Great War, this Rear-Admiral of the French Navy, scientist, inventor and moral philosopher was also a highly esteemed composer during his lifetime, enjoying, during the last decade of his life, the same stature and celebrity as Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. Since his death in 1932, his music was overlooked until 1980, when his last surviving daughter, Monique, released the first monograph of the composer for the centenary of her father's birth. This assured his renaissance. Cras' thirty-eight early songs extend from adolescence to his early twenties, and with this publication, performers and scholars are now able to trace his evolution as one of France's greatest composers of mélodie from the post-Romantic and Impressionist eras. This collection both complements and completes the published repertoire of Cras' prodigious song cycles: Elégies, L'Offrande lyrique, Fontaines and Cinq Robaïyats de Omar Khayyam, and his individual songs, as analyzed in depth by Paul-André Bempéchat in his seminal biography, Jean Cras, Polymath of Music and Letters (Routledge, 2009). Analyses of these newly-published songs will be found in the second edition, released in 2021 (Peter Lang). Through the chronological presentation of Cras' youthful songs, we witness a remarkable evolution of both prosodic and harmonic ingenuity, demanding of the singer increasingly acute attention to enunciation and inflection; and for both performers, a heightened sense coloration and unfailing fidelity to the rhythm of language.