En languissant avoir secours

Pierre Certon’s En languissant, j'attends d'avoir secours is a secular French chanson for STTT. The four voices are treated with a remarkable lightness and clarity, creating a texture of delicate transparency. The gentle melodic lines are passed between the parts, creating a sense of conversational ease. The text expresses the weariness of prolonged waiting and the torment of desire, with the singer contemplating the solace of death as preferable to such enduring anticipation. Certon’s setting captures the resigned melancholy of the words with understated grace and eloquent simplicity.