Il a Tourne Autour de Moi (Soprano and Piano)

Jacques Prévert was one of the great French poets of the 20th century — a writer whose work could be playful and tender one moment and bracingly honest the next. This poem is firmly in the latter category. In it, a woman reflects on two encounters with two very different men: the first, who circled her for months before extracting a promise she quickly forgot, and whose wounded ego turned quickly to cruelty when she did; the second, a stranger who asked nothing of her, saw her completely and immediately, and with whom she surrendered willingly — without even knowing who he was. It is a poem about desire, agency, and the difference between being possessed and being truly seen.

The music doesn't flinch from any of that. Written for soprano and piano in an intimate, introspective idiom, the setting tries to inhabit the interior space of the poem's narrator — tracing the arc from the slow, suffocating orbit of the first man to the electric and uncomplicated recognition of the second. Prévert gives us a woman who is entirely clear-eyed about what happened and entirely unapologetic. The music's job is simply to get out of her way and let her tell it.