Four songs

Chanson pour Jeanne (1885)

Lied (1885)

Romance de l’étoile - from L’Étoile (1877)

L’Île heureuse (1889)

In his affectionate (if wildly inaccurate) little book on Chabrier, Francis Poulenc rightly deplores the “pernicious influence” on the composer of the “incorrigible” Catulle Mendès, librettist of his Gwendoline and Briséïs. Even Poulenc had to admit, however, that Mendès got it right in Chanson pour Jeanne and Lied - both of which inspired “perfect achievements” among Chabrier’s twenty-five contributions to a genre he generally tended to avoid. As Chabrier was all too well aware, in the Paris of his day song was “the only means for a composer to pay his way” but, he told his publisher, he had “had it up to the ears” with “those stupid flower beds in three stanzas…golden corn, golden eyelashes, golden hair, April nights and golden May.”

Undistinguished though the words of Chanson pour Jeanne are, and dangerously close though the setting comes to the salon in its early stages, Chabrier’s harmonies here are so boldly unconventional that they had a profound effect on the development of another distinguished Chabrier admirer, Maurice Ravel. As for Lied, when Poulenc said of it that he knew nothing “more impertinent in the entire literature of French song” he hit on exactly the right word. Impertinence is not an easy attitude to express in music. Most composers, relying on the words to do it for them, wouldn’t have tried. While the innocently mischievous rhythms and provocative harmonies of Chabrier’s setting of these faux-naif verses might seem unthinkingly spontaneous, they are finely calculated elements in a precisely accurate study in characterization.

For all his reputation as a devastatingly entertaining improviser at the keyboard, not to mention his notoriety as a wrecker of domestic pianos, Chabrier’s ambitions were fixed not on the salon but on the theatre. Those ambitions were continually thwarted by bad luck but were productive even so of his opéra bouffe L’Étoile, his opera Gwendoline, his opéra-comique Le Roi malgré lui and his unfinished drama Briséïs. First performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1877 - when he was still employed in the French equivalent of the Home office - L’Étoile established Chabrier’s reputation as a composer with a rare gift for melody and an equally rare sense of humour. Strangely enough, two of its most successful numbers, the innocently sentimental Romance de l’étoile and the cruelly comic Couplets du pal, were written before he met the librettists Leterrier and Vanloo, who wrote their text around them. Wherever and whenever it originated, the Romance de l’étoile - a gentle parody of Tannhäuser’s O du mein holder Abendstern - is a timely moment of reflection and sustained melody in an otherwise frantic first act.

What finally inspired Chabrier to get out of the civil service and into composition full time was a performance of Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880. Wagner’s irresistible influence he absorbed, however, without allowing it to overwhelm him. His setting of Ephraïm Mikhaël’s L’Île heureuse is a perfect example of Tristanesque harmony allied to his own melodic sensitivity. Its vocal line was originally conceived for a poem called Printemps by Rosemonde Gérard, whose Les Cigales and Vilanelle des petits canards were among those chosen by Chabrier in a last, highly original effort to separate the mélodie from its salon associations in 1889. The material was switched to Mikhaël’s verse (Roger Delage plausibly suggests in his Chabrier biography) out of compassion for the young poet, who was dying from tuberculosis. Published just a few months before Mikhaël’s death in 1890, Chabrier’s setting, with its yearningly chromatic harmonies and swelling and rocking rhythms, is one of the most beautiful of all evocations of a voyage to mythic Cythera.

Ronde gauloise (1862)

Tes yeux bleus (c1883)

Lied (c1885)

Chanson pour Jeanne (c1885)

Les Cigales (1890)

As Chabrier was all too well aware, in the Paris of his day song was “the only means for a composer to pay his way.” The problem was that he had “had it up to the ears” with the insipid and depressing kind of thing commonly heard in the fashionable Parisian salons - “those stupid flower beds in three stanzas…golden corn, golden eyelashes, golden hair, April nights and golden May” - and he declined to go along with the trend. That’s why only eight of his mélodies, not counting the voice-and-piano version of the orchestral rhapsody España, were published in his lifetime. There are, however, twenty-four Chabrier songs and (thanks largely to the advocacy and editorial diligence of the late Chabrier scholar Roger Delage) they are all now available in print.

The Ronde gauloise, which was first published in 1995, is one of a group of nine songs written when Chabrier was in his very early twenties, at about the same time as he began his nineteen “wasted years” as a legal expert in the French equivalent of the Home Office. Set to words possibly by the composer himself, it is as far from the Parisian salon as the remote village of Ambert where he was born. As he once said, “I dance the rhythms of my music in my Auvergnat clogs” and that, while applying appropriately rude harmonies to a robust vocal line, is what he is doing here. The effect is more comic than primitive, however.

Although Chabrier presumably cannot have known Maurice Rollinat’s Tes yeux bleus before it was published in his Névroses in 1883, the song cannot have been written very long after the composer’s first, traumatic encounter with Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880. Certainly, the love scene is still echoing in his memory here, alongside chromatic extensions that even Wagner himself would not have thought of. Formative experience though Tristan was, however, it is rare that its influence shows through so clearly in Chabrier’s music. Lied, written perhaps two years after Tes yeux bleus, is no less sophisticated but is pure Chabrier. While the innocently mischievous rhythms and provocative harmonies of his setting of these faux-naif verses by Catulle Mendès might seem unthinkingly spontaneous, they are finely calculated elements in a precisely accurate study in characterisation.

Like most Chabrier fans, Francis Poulenc - who loved Lied for its “impertinence” - deplored the influence of the “insufferable” Mendès. But he surely agreed that both here and in Chanson pour Jeanne, which was also written in about 1885, the poet supplied the composer with just what he needed. Undistinguished though the words of Chanson pour Jeanne are, and dangerously close though the setting comes to the salon in its early stages, Chabrier’s subtly equivocal harmonies here are so original in their application that they had a profound effect on the development of another distinguished Chabrier admirer, Maurice Ravel.

As the composer of Histoires naturelles, Ravel was also an admirer of the four farmyard songs Chabrier wrote towards the end of his life in his country retreat at La Membrolle in Touraine. They were inspired by verse he found in Les Pipeaux by the then eighteen-year-old poet Rosemonde Gérard and Les Musardises by her fiancé Edmond Rostand. To their robust but affectionate caricature, their witty observations of everyday life in the countryside, he could apply his sense of humour as well as his inimitable gift for both comic and lyrical melody. Perhaps the most delightful and certainly the most inspired of the four songs is Les Cigales where a monotonous cricket-like chirping is sustained in the repetitive dissonances in the piano part and at the same time celebrated in a melodious vocal refrain that declares the cicadas to “have more soul than viols” and to “sing better than violins.”

L’Enfant (1862)

Lied (1862 or 1885)

Romance de l’étoile - from L’Étoile (1877)

L’Île heureuse (1889)

As Chabrier was all too well aware, in the Paris of his day song was “the only means for a composer to pay his way.” The problem was that he had “had it up to the ears” with the insipid and depressing kind of thing commonly heard in the fashionable Parisian salons - “those stupid flower beds in three stanzas…golden corn, golden eyelashes, golden hair, April nights and golden May” - and he declined to go along with the trend. That’s why only eight of his mélodies, not counting the voice-and-piano version of the orchestral rhapsody España, were published in his lifetime. There are, however, twenty-four Chabrier songs and (thanks largely to the advocacy and editorial diligence of the late Chabrier scholar Roger Delage) they are all now available in print.

L’Enfant, which was first published in 1995, is one of a group of nine mélodies written when Chabrier was in his very early twenties, at about the same time as he began his nineteen “wasted years” as a legal expert in the French equivalent of the Home Office. Looking at the fondly parental text by Victor de Laprade - Chabrier was not yet married and his first child would be born more than ten years later - you wonder what inspired him to make a song of it. Apart from his admiration for Laprade’s politics, it was not only the gently affectionate sentiment of the verse but also, I suspect, its pastoral associations, which would have appealed to the Auvergnat in him. Certainly, his response was a tenderly expressive vocal line linked to a piano part that makes a consistent feature of the bagpipe drone that sets the rustic scene in the opening bars.

When Francis Poulenc said of Chabrier’s Lied that he knew nothing “more impertinent in the entire literature of French song” he hit on exactly the right word. Impertinence is not an easy attitude to express in music. Most composers, relying on the words to do it for them, wouldn’t have tried. While the innocently mischievous rhythms and provocative harmonies of Chabrier’s setting of these faux-naif verses by Catulle Mendès might seem unthinkingly spontaneous, they are finely calculated elements in a precisely accurate study in characterization. Like most Chabrier admirers, Poulenc deplored the influence of the “insufferable” Mendès but he surely agreed that both here and in Chanson pour Jeanne, which also written in about 1885, the poet supplied the composer with just what he needed.

For all his reputation as a devastatingly entertaining improviser at the keyboard, not to mention his notoriety as a wrecker of domestic pianos, Chabrier’s ambitions were fixed not on the salon but on the theatre - an ambition continually thwarted by bad luck but productive even so of his opéra bouffe L’Étoile, his opera Gwendoline, his opéra-comique Le Roi malgré lui and his unfinished drama Briséïs. First performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1877, when he still had three years to go as a civil servant, L’Étoile established Chabrier’s reputation as a composer with a rare gift for melody and an equally rare sense of humour. Strangely enough, two of its most successful numbers, the innocently sentimental Romance de l’étoile and the cruelly comic Couplets du pal, were written before he met the librettists Leterrier and Vanloo, who wrote their text around them. Wherever and whenever it originated, the Romance de l’étoile - a gentle parody of Tannhäuser’s O du mein holder Abendstern - is a timely moment of reflection and sustained melody in an otherwise frantic first act.

What finally inspired Chabrier to get out of the civil service and into composition full time was a performance of Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880. Wagner’s irresistible influence he absorbed, however, without allowing it to overwhelm him. His setting of Ephraïm Mikhaël’s L’Île heureuse is a perfect example of Tristanesque harmony allied to his own melodic sensitivity. Its vocal line was originally conceived for a poem called Printemps by Rosemonde Gérard, whose Les Cigales and Vilanelle des petits canards were among those chosen by Chabrier in a last, highly original effort to separate the mélodie from its salon associations in 1889. The material was switched to Mikhaël’s verse (Delage suggests) out of compassion for the young poet, one of his collaborators on Briséïs, who was dying from tuberculosis. Published just a few months before Mikhaël’s death in 1890, Chabrier’s setting, with its yearningly chromatic harmonies and swelling and rocking rhythms, is one of the most beautiful of all evocations of a voyage to mythic Cythera.