[rare] Jean CRAS - Serviteurs, n'apportez pas les lampes (Robaiyat d'Omar Khayyâm n°5)

This is the fifth of the Cinq Robaiyat d'Omar Khayyâm (Five Omar Khayām Rubaiyat), a song cycle by Jean Cras, great French composer (1879-1932), also involved in mathematics (geometry instead of algebra - for Khayyâm), and colonel in the French navy (he took part in the First world war). Henri Duparc helped him to chose his life, and advised him not to give up the army - and he could write, however, quite an amount of music, despite his large responsibilities and the agitated times he had to go through. His style can change a lot among his works. In some ones, Cras used a French postromantic tone, lyric and soft, very melancholic, with little originality (Cello Sonata) ; in others, he explored the best French way in harmonies (those French works, nevertheless, were deeply influenced by wagnerism), as the last chamber Fauré, or Chausson, for instance (Piano Trio) ; lastly, a large part of his music uses debussyst colours and techniques (with a more tonal language, as in his opera Polypheme and in his mélodies). The Cinq Robaiyat d'Omar Khayyâm belong to the debussyst part of Cras, but this last one, based on only two chords (and an oriental motive which appears one time for two pairs of chords), is very original and personal. The persian Omar Khayyâm (1048-1131) was above all distinguished as a mathematician and astronomer. Cras chose his quatrains, translated by Franz Toussaint - most of them seems to me to be apocryphal, since Khayyâm was given much more than he wrote ...

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