Les Papillons Op.2, No.3 (1880)

Hébé Op.2, No.6 (1882)

Oraison from Serres chaudes Op.24 (1896)

Le temps des lilas from Poème de l’amour et de la mer Op.19 (1887)

There is a whole anthology to be made of French songs inspired by birds and insects, including particularly distinguished contributions from Chabrier, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Chausson and Ravel. Chausson’s Les Papillons - another setting of an orientalist text, incidentally, but one without a trace of exoticism in the music - is a welcome example: it is a captivating corrective to the glum image routinely associated with a composer imbued with the highest artistic ideals and yet uncertain of his ability to attain them. The vocal line of Les Papillons floats effortlessly on an ingeniously fluttering accompaniment that breaks off only just before the end to let the voice gently down to earth. Hébé is not a gloomy song either, in spite of a regret for lost youth as the daughter of Hera and Zeus goes on her way. Subtitled “a Greek song in the phrygian mode” it is remarkable more for the classical poise achieved by its harmonic purity, its measured rhythms and its stately vocal line.

As for the melancholy Chaussson, there is no more disturbing example than his cycle of five songs to obscurely unhappy poems from Maeterlinck’s Serres chaudes. The last song in the set, Oraison, is a poignantly expressive prayer for release from depression fervently projected against a drooping Bach-like counterpoint in even rhythms in the piano part. Le Temps des Lilas is similarly characteristic of Chausson in its melancholy, if more specific about the source of it, and in its melodic beauty it is perhaps the most inspired of all his songs. The concluding item of the orchestral cycle Poème de l’amour et de la mer (but frequently performed separately in the composer’s own exquisite piano arrangement), it is one of eight settings of poems by Maurice Bouchor who, though not the greatest of Chausson’s chosen poets, was certainly the one he knew best.

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894)

Les cigales (1890)

Emile Paladilhe (1844–1926)

Psyché (c 1895?)

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Harmonie du soir (1889)

Ernest Chausson (1855–1899)

Les papillons Op.2 No.3 (1880)

Alfred Bachelet (1864–1944)

Chère nuit (c 1910?)

Henri Duparc (1848–1933)

Au pays où se fait la guerre (c 1870)

As Danse macabre and Franck’s Nocturne have already demonstrated, night is at least as suitable a subject for the mélodie as it is for the Lied. And when it comes to the creatures associated with night French composers have probably been even more imaginative than their German counterparts. Certainly, there is no more brilliantly characterised cricket than Le Grillon in Ravel’s Histoires naturelles, a direct descendant (though of a different species and more likely to sing at night) of the cicadas of Chabrier’s Les cigales. One of a set of four “zoo songs,” written at the composer’s country retreat in Touraine, Les cigales echoes throughout with a joyfully dissonant chirping in the piano part and three times resolves into the major for a delightfully melodious refrain.

What moved Paladilhe to choose ten lines from such an unlikely source as Psyché – a comédie-ballet written by Pierre Corneille in collaboration with Molière and Quinualt for performance with music by Lully at Versailles in 1670 – it is difficult to imagine. It turned out to be a happy choice, however: his setting, in which every sentimental device is so resourcefully employed as to make it a salon favourite of the day, is the one piece by which Paladilhe is still remembered – not least because of classic recordings made by English-speaking specialists in the French repertoire like Maggie Teyte and (less impressively) Grace Moore.

Jealous though he was of the sun fallng on Psyché’s lips, Cupid would surely been out of his depth in the ”vast black void” of Baudelaire’s night. For Debussy Harmonies du soir, like the other four poems he chose to set in his Cinq Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, had the qualities he needed at “a delightful time when I was desperately Wagnerian.” Whether or not these requirements included not only poetic associations but also opportunities for the application of a Leitmotif technique, three of the five poems, Le Balcon, Harmonie du soir and Le jet d’eau, lend themselves to something of the kind. Harmonie du soir is a conscious study in structural repetition: based on the Malayan pantoum, it presents the second and fourth lines of one stanza as the first and third of the next, creating an intricate web of thematic recurrences and close variants in the vocal line while the piano develops its own material. Although the title Gautier chose for the poem Chausson was to set as Les papillons was actually Pantoum, its construction has nothing of the complexity of Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir – fortunately, since it inspired one of the composer’s most spontanous mélodies.

Like Paladhile, Bachelet is remembered today for just one song. What has kept Chère nuit alive, apart from its rhapsodic nocturnal harmonies and corresponding piiano colouring, is the extravagantly expressive quality of a vocal line originally conceived for Melba and by its nature highly attractive to other opera singers, Nan Merriman prominent among them. There is also an operatic element in Duparc’s Au pays où se fait la guerre, which was originally part of an opera project, based on Pushkin’s Rusalka, which the composer cherished for 20 years but “for art’s sake” ultimately abandoned. Somewhere between a mélodie and a scena, it traces the gathering emotional darkness as night falls before the last recall of the pre-Mahlerian military ritornello apparently confirms the worst.