Suite pastorale: Idylle

• This is the first movement of Chabrier’s Suite pastorale.
• This movement was inspired by a passage from the poem “Senior est Junior,” by Victor Hugo,¹ from Les chansons de rues et des bois (1856).² Here’s the quote in English.³

I live in the country, I love and dream;
I am a  rustic and a shepherd;
I dedicate to Eve’s white teeth all the apple trees in my orchard.

Victor Hugo

• Quote: Chabrier had to convince his publisher Costellat that Idylle was worth publishing. In an 1880 letter to Chabrier, the publisher said, “we do not understand this piece.”⁴

• This piece was immensely influential to Francis Poulenc when he first heard it at a record store in the 1920s.

“Today I still tremble with emotion thinking of the miracle that happened then; a new harmonic world opened up before me, and my own music has never forgotten that first baiser d’amour.”

Francis Poulanc, on “Idylle” from Suite pastorale. ⁵

1. Roy Howatt, ed., Emmanuel Chabrier: Works for Piano (New York: Dover, 1995), x.
2. “Victor Hugo, 1802-1885,” The University of Adelaide Library, accessed August 19, 2019, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hugo/victor/index.html.
3. Roy Howatt, ed., Emmanuel Chabrier: Works for Piano(New York: Dover, 1995), xv.
4. Ibid., x.
5. Ibid.