Chabrier in spite of himse copy

Chabrier in spite of himself

Of the many paradoxes associated with Emmanuel Chabrier - an amateur more professional than the professionals, the Parisian provincial, the family man who died of syphilis, the prophet of spontaneity who laboured so hard in creating it, the Wagner fanatic who rejected Wagner - the last is much the most interesting. It is fundamental to the nature of the music. It explains a lot too about the Chabrier cult which, though we in this country have been scarcely aware of it until very recently, was initiated by his colleagues in his lifetime and has been religiously observed by succeeding generations of French composers.

There is no doubt about his devotion to Wagner. It was the experience of hearing Tristan und Isolde for the first time - when Henri Duparc persuaded Chabrier along with Vincent d’Indy and a few others to make a trip to a particularly successful production in Munich in 1880 - that finally inspired him to give up his job in the civil service and devote himself entirely to composition. D’Indy’s story about Chabrier sobbing in anticipation as the Prelude was about to begin - “I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it…I’ve been waiting for ten years of my life for that A on the cellos” - is no less credible than Duparc’s report of his normally cheerful and convivial companion shutting himself up alone in his room afterwards.

Chabrier made several other Wagnerite journeys, notably to London for the Ring in 1882 and Bayreuth for Parsifal, Tristan and Die Meistersinger in 1889. Charles Lamoureux, moreover, employed Chabrier as chorus master for his Nouveaux Concerts, which he founded in 1881 largely for the purpose of making Wagner’s music better known in Paris, and it was Chabrier who coached the Belgian tenor, Ernest van Dyck, in the Wagnerian roles in which he so conspicuously starred in Bayreuth and Vienna.

As a famous painting by Fantin-Latour, Autour du piano, bears elegant witness, Chabrier was also an habitué of a Parisian circle of enthusiasts known as the Petit Bayreuth. It is curious, however, that the score in front of Chabrier at the piano in that painting is Carmen. It is significant too that the one direct musical result of Chabrier’s decisive experience in Munich in 1880 is the piano duet, Souvenir de Munich, which is a brilliant parody-quadrille on themes from Tristan und Isolde, unceremoniously dedicated to the founder of the Petit Bayreuth, Antoine Lascoux. If that was the French musician’s way of protecting himself from alien influence - which was all the more necessary in that he was to profoundly impressed by Wagner’s music - it was remarkably, if not totally, effective.

Apart from the conscientious use of the Leitmotif in Gwendoline, there are few obvious traces of a direct Wagnerian influence on Chabrier’s music until his last and potentially greatest opera, Briséis, which obsessed him in the declining last years of his life and which he so tragically failed to complete. Duparc went so far as to call L’Etoile the French Meistersinger - a clearly absurd statement to make about a work which d’Indy so rightly called ‘un petit chef-d’oeuvre de musique drôle.’ Far from glorifying the French way of life and art, L’Etoile is not set in France and it makes delightful fun of the French language without ever attempting to elevate it with contrapuntal dignity or inflate it with civic pride.

Chabrier was not by any means insensitive to the beauty of France, its language and its art. As a native of the Auvergne, who cut such an incongruously rotund figure in the artistic salons of Paris, he loved the countryside and, indeed, spent much of his time in a house rented for him in Touraine by an uncommonly understanding mother-in-law. His letters to his wife and to his old nurse, who remained a treasured member of his household until her death only three years before his own, are always vividly and often movingly written. A close friend of Edouard Manet, who painted several portraits of him in one way or another, he was also one of the first collectors of French Impressionists. When the Chabrier collections was sold in 1896, two years after his death, it contained eight Manets (including the Bar aux Folies-Bergère), eight Monets, six Renoirs, two Sisleys, and one Cézanne.

Chabrier was, in fact, consciously and deliberately French: “For better or worse, I want to belong to my own country,” he once said. “That is my duty. Wagner’s music belongs to him and one shouldn’t steal from anyone, even if one is the poorer for it (but still honest).” That is the basis of the Chabrier cult among French composers, who admire him all the more for resisting the most seductive alien temptation of all.

César Franck proclaimed this particular quality after the first performance of Chabrier’s piano masterpiece, the Pièces pittoresques, in 1888. “We have just heard something quite extraordinary. This music is a link between our epoch and that of Couperin and Rameau,” he said, referring to a golden age when French music was French and definitely not German. A later generation of composers, notably Debussy and Ravel, found a French future in Chabrier’s unacademic harmonies, innovative keyboard techniques, and his extraordinary freedom from the rhythmic constraint of the barline.

A generation later again Les Six discovered Chabrier as a precursor of Satie and as another model of clarity, tunefulness and wit to correspond with Cocteau’s anti-Wagnerian, post-impressionist aesthetic. As for Francis Poulenc, who wrote a charming though highly inaccurate book about him, Chabrier’s influence was as formative as Stravinsky’s. The Idylle of the Pièces pittoresques echoes in Poulenc’s piano music over and over again, and Les Mamelles de Tirésias - including its surrealist element - surely couldn’t have happened without the precedent of L’Etoile.

So Poulenc could forgive Chabrier for his (reputedly but not really) Wagnerian opera, Gwendoline, the epic clumsiness of which he attributed to the “pernicious influence” of its librettist, Catulle Mendès. If Gwendoline was Wagnerian enough to give it some currency in Germany, Chabrier had already compensated for that by his pioneer colonisation of the music of Spain, which was much more acceptable to French taste, by incorporating his observations in the wildly popular España in 1883 and in Habanera in 1888.

But Chabrier was always easy to forgive. He was cheerful enough and so obviously lacking in malice, in spite of his ready wit, to have no enemies, even among those whose pianos he wrecked in his famously frantic improvisations. Having had no professional conservatoire training, he was treated with condescension or indulgence by his colleagues, who considered him no threat to their careers, and he had that most endearing feature of all, which is bad luck: his opéra-bouffe, L’Etoile, which ought to have mad him a fortune, was taken off when the larger share of the profits was due to fall to him rather than the management of the Bouffes-parisiens; his two-act opera Gwendoline was withdrawn after its first two performances when the director of La Monnaie in Brussels went bankrupt; his opéra-comique masterpiece, Le Roi malgré lui, achieved only three performances before the Opéra-Comique burned down.

The consolations for both Gwendoline and Le Roi malgré lui - thanks to the composer’s friendship with the influential conductor, Felix Mottl - were in Germany. In this country Chabrier is known not for his operas but for two orchestral “lollipops”, España and Joyeuse Marche. So at least we are familiar with one essential aspect of his personality, that quality which Christopher Fry defined in quite another context as “innocence work at a rakish angle.” L’Etoile reveals more - not least a tender lyricism and a wickedly satirical sense of humour - and it is exciting to be able to look forward to an Opera North production of Le Roi malgré lui timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the composer’s death this month.