Ex. 8-9: Sonnet

No. 3 from Bizet's Feuilles d'album (Album Leaves), a set of six songs for voice and piano composed in September 1866 and published by Heugel. The poem is a sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), a poet of the French Renaissance. The singer begs a cold-hearted lover to give in to love: even the birds in the woods, the doves, and the young vines embrace one another, so why stay so cruel?

Bizet wrote the six songs as paid work, and quickly. In a letter to his pupil Edmond Galabert, he said he had written all six "at a gallop" (au galop) for his publisher Heugel. Still, he was proud of the poems he had chosen, and noted that he had not cut a single stanza of Ronsard's sonnet — musicians, he said, should not cut poems apart.

He wrote them while busy with a much bigger project. That summer the director Carvalho had commissioned his opera La jolie fille de Perth (The Fair Maid of Perth), which Bizet finished by the end of 1866.

The song is dedicated to "Madame Crépet-Garcia" — Maria Garcia, wife of the writer Eugène Crépet, who was a friend and editor of the poet Charles Baudelaire.

From the album L'heure romantique by Varda Kotler and Israel Kastoriano (2015)
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