Trois Poèmes de Ch. Baudelaire za glas i glasovir

Dragan Plamenac (1895 – 1983) is one of the most known Croatian musicologist. He developed an interest in music at an early age but took a degree in law at Zagreb before studying composition with Schreker in Vienna and Vitĕzslav Novák in Prague and musicology with Pirro at the Sorbonne and Adler in Vienna, where he took the doctorate in 1925 with a dissertation on Ockeghem’s motets and chansons. At first he worked as a répétiteur and assistant conductor at the Städtische Oper in Berlin; he then taught musicology at the University of Zagreb, and became a corresponding member of the Yugoslav Academy of Science. In 1939 he went to the USA as the Yugoslav representative to the IMS Congress in New York, and remained there after the outbreak of war. „Among the rare compositions bby the Croatian musicologist, Dragan Plamenac, a special place belongs to his work Trois poèmes de Ch. Baudelaire for voice and piano. This small cycle which is made up of the songs La Musique, La tgristesse de la Lune and La Cloche fêlée can truly be regarded as exceptional, both in Plamenac's opus and in Croatian music of the twentieth century. (...) Composed in historically tragic 1914, Plamenac's work faced squarely towards the future. Met with an absence of understanding from the public and by critical rejections, it remained forgotten and without echoes right up unitl the time when Josip Andreis drew attention to it, and Eva Sedak included it, with complete justification, in the historical avant-garde of Croatian music of the twentieth century.“ (Koraljka Kos)