Poetry in Structure

This chapter reads Milhaud’s setting of “L’Aurore” from Lucile de Chateaubriand’s Trois Poèmes en prose as a musical poem—one that supplies the “poetic” structure missing from Chateaubriand’s prose poem. This new poem’s rhythm and rhyme are created by the counterpointing of descending lines moving at different rates of speed, the surface and deeper-level rhythms they articulate, their interactions with textual stresses, and the resulting metric and hypermetric structure. The chapter begins with a brief description of the role of text in Milhaud’s oeuvre, followed by discussion of the French prose poem, Lucile de Chateaubriand, and Chateaubriand’s “Aurore.” It analyzes the song’s contrapuntal motion, describes the authors’ performative conception, and presents practical considerations, closing with the authors’ performance on video.