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 community 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 knew nothing of 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, overwhelming encounter with Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880. Certainly, the love scene is still echoing in his memory here, alongside chromatic developments 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 equivocal harmonies here are so fascinating 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 Chabrier’s farmyard songs - or “zoo” songs as he called them - written 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.”