Baudelaire & Piano — Susanna reinterprets ‘Les Fleurs du mal’
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Charles Baudelaire is so embedded in popular music that he even features in a Rod Stewart song. “Red Hot in Black” is a hair-tossing rocker from 1986 in which Stewart encounters a woman in a Parisian café with “legs like a young giraffe” who, unlike a giraffe, is reading Baudelaire’s poetry. A racy night of passion ensues. “My head was aching and my back was scratched,” the singer yowls: “I’ve never, never, never known a night like that.”’
Baudelaire is among the greatest poets of the night, although not quite in the sense of Stewart’s ridiculous song. The nocturnal world of sex and death in his poems is morbid and voluptuous. In 1857, his book Les Fleurs du mal caused the kind of moral uproar that rock ’n’ roll would provoke a century later. No wonder he has proved irresistible to musicians, who are themselves creatures of the night.
His work has been set to music by French composers and chansonniers, from Claude Debussy to Serge Gainsbourg. English-speaking admirers include The Cure, who turned one of his poems into the 1987 song “How Beautiful You Are”, in which Robert Smith endeavours to explain to his lover that he hates her.
The Norwegian singer Susanna (aka Susanna Wallumrød) is the latest musical devotee. Her album Baudelaire & Piano adapts 10 poems from Les Fleurs du mal into pieces for solo piano and vocals, sung in English. The translations are taken from Anthony Mortimer’s acclaimed 2016 edition, The Flowers of Evil.
Baudelaire’s fevered style isn’t easy to translate. It can seem overheated, too florid, excessively fancy. (“Not exactly working-class,” Rod Stewart sings in “Red Hot in Black”.) Susanna — formerly of the indie band Susanna and the Magical Orchestra — doesn’t attempt to match the drama of the many French chanson singers who have been inspired by Baudelaire. Instead, she brings a sparse, gothic tone to bear, reminiscent of PJ Harvey’s powerful piano-based album White Chalk. It proves an excellent register for Mortimer’s adroit translations.
The piano parts are unadorned but expressive, varying from minimalist patterns in “The Enemy” to emphatic, expressionist chordal work in “The Vampire”. Various instruments are mentioned in the poems themselves, such as the violin that “trembles like a grieving heart” in “The Harmony of Evening”. But Susanna’s voice is the only accompaniment to the piano in the songs, bar the melancholic whistled solo at the end of “Longing for Nothingness”.
Her vocal performance is striking. Stylised but not too mannered, she highlights the sorrowfulness residing in Baudelaire’s visions of an “empty, black and bare” existence. When she lingers over words, she sounds languid yet not pleasure-seeking, a mournful rather than decadent presence. “Time consumes our life,” she sings in “The Enemy”, stretching the phrase out until it disappears into the darkness.
★★★★☆
‘Baudelaire & Piano’ is released by SusannaSonata
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