Poème de… Proms guide

.CHAUSSON: Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer

the caps on Amour and Mer are authentic and seem also to be in C’s diary entries

Chausson’s music at its best has been credited, at its best, with magical powers. Marcel Bouchor - author of the poems on which the text of Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer is based - wrote about “that spiritual halo which the notes do not account for and which extends them beyond themselves.” In a still more visionary frame of mind, Debussy was carried away by music that becomes “the very feeling that inspired its emotion.” It is a condition to which most art aspires, not least Debussy’s, but the moments when it happens are, as he said, “rare in the work of any artist.”

If the virtual realities of Poéme de l’Amour et de l’Amour do not extend to permeating the concert hall with the scents of the lilac and the roses that intoxicate poet and composer alike,

What Debussy admired most in Chausson’s music is that at its best it “becomes the very feeling which inspired its emotion." He was thinking of the Poème for violin and orchestra

As Debussy said, the music itself

Smell the lilac?

42 245 260 297 301-2 305-7 308-10 311-2 385 424 485 506-7 531 533 539 541-2

42: A la faculté chausson a pu nouer certaines connaissances, et même amitiés: celle par example du poète Maurice Bouchoir né comme lui en 1855 (d 1929 Poèmes de l’amour et de la mer 1875) et qui lui fournira, au cours des années, maints textes à mettre en musique, depuis Les Lilacs, sa toute première mélodie de 1877 jusqu’au Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer de 1892

245 enfin (1890) il poursit jusqu’au 16 juin la première partie de son vaste tryptique

260 (1891) Dans “ce pays qui lui donne le spleen et toutes sorts d’humeurs plus noirs les unes que les autres” (Civray) … C poursuit la composition du Poème de…

297 13 juin 1892 C avait écrit dans son Journal ‘Enfin, je viens de terminer le Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer” Un “enfin” sui en dit long: l’oeuvre en effet avait été commen cée en 1882.

302 1893 fp Bruxelles par le ténor Désiré Demest et l’auteur au piano (without the interlude) followed by f orchestral p in Paris at SNM and then in Brussels aux XX. Une oeuvre exceptionnelle à tous les sens du terme, dan le catalogue de Ch aussurément mais aussi dans l’histoire de la mélodie avec orchestre.

303 not a poem by Bouchor but poems: le substratum littéraire retenu par C constitue rien moins qu’une sélection très organisée, voir un collage

303-4 analysis of bits used and when composed.

304 says that c set part of another poem but finally decided not to put it in (the first part of the tryptich)

alterations of Buchor’s text, complete rewriting of two stanzas: “je saigne” to “angoisse de mon coeur” is C’s own.

305 composed from the first, like some of Mahler, as a song with orchestra rather than as a song with piano orchestrated.

306 history of French songs with orchestra

Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer (note spelling) se présent dans sa substance comme une drame en raccourci, ainsi que le sera Chanson perpétuelle.

307 oeuvre symboliste: Symbolism of keys

Oeuvre impressioniste enfin, où l’ombre joue avec la lumière comme en un tableau de Monet et que soulignent les harmonies mouvantes, passant du binaire au ternaire, des rythmiques changeantes, jouant d’indications nombreuses où se mêlent agogique et psychologie.

308 some thematic analysis

influence of Franck, Wagner, Mussorgsky (monologue de Boris in bars 202-4)

309 dissonances

309 tel passage anticipe curieusement sur La mer de Debussy

309 Interlude built on the second theme (see p 308) - Lever du jour de Daphnis? (I dont think so)

(Bassoon and Tchaikovsky?)

424 fp by a tenor and always intended for a tenor

543 Bouchor: “Il n’est pas ume seule de ses oeuvres qui n’ait son atmosphère, ce halo spirituel que les notes n’expliquent pas et que les prolonge au-delà d’elles-mêmes.”

Chausson was privately educated at home, and this lack of contact with children of his own age (an elder brother died when Ernest was ten) emphasised his introspective nature: 'This relative solitude, along with the reading of a few morbid books, caused me to acquire another fault: I was sad without quite knowing why but firmly convinced that I had the best reason in the world for it'.

Thursday, March 25, 2004, at 8:00

Friday, March 26, 2004, at 8:00

Saturday, March 27, 2004, at 8:00

Tuesday, March 30, 2004, at 7:30

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Andrey Boreyko, Guest Conductor

Waltraud Meier, Mezzo-Soprano

Ernest Chausson

Born January 20, 1855, Paris, France.

Died June 10, 1899, Limay, near Mantes, France.

Poem of Love and the Sea, Op. 19

Composition History

Chausson composed his Poem of Love and the Sea, setting poems by Maurice Bouchor, between 1882 and 1890, and continued revising it through 1893. The cycle was first performed on April 8, 1893, in Paris. The score calls for voice and an orchestra consisting of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, harp, and strings. Performance time is approximately twenty-seven minutes.

Performance History

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first subscription concert performances of Chausson's Poem of Love and the Sea were given at Orchestra Hall on March 5, 6, and 10, 1959, with Rosalind Elias as soloist and Fritz Reiner conducting. Our most recent subscription concert performances were given on November 17, 18, 19, and 22, 1994, with Florence Quivar as soloist and Antonio Pappano conducting.

When Ernest Chausson died in 1899 at the age of forty, he had just begun to make a name for himself. In April 1897, the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaÿe introduced Chausson's Poème for violin and orchestra in Paris to a thunderous and sustained ovation. The composer kept repeating to his friend, the novelist Camille Mauclair, "I can't get over it." The Paris premiere of Chausson's only symphony six weeks later was also rapturously received. During the next two years Chausson wrote at full speed, turning out some of his best work. He seemed destined to become one of the major French voices in twentieth-century music. Then, in June 1899, as he was racing to the train station to meet his wife, he lost control of his bicycle and crashed into a stone wall. His young daughter, who had gone on ahead of him, returned to find her father lying dead, his skull crushed. Debussy, Fauré, Dukas, Rodin, and Degas all attended his funeral, mourning the loss of a colleague they had expected to accompany into the new century.

Chausson chose the life of a composer after first earning a law degree at his family's insistence. (His father, prophetically named Prosper, was a wealthy entrepreneur who made his fortune when the boulevards of Baron Haussmann's Paris were built.) He was sworn in as a barrister in Paris in 1877, but it was the composition of his first song, "Les lilas" (The lilacs), that year that suggested the direction his future would take. Knowing that he would never have to work a day of his life, and recognizing that his true love was music, Ernest enrolled in the Paris Conservatory two years later to study with Jules Massenet and César Franck. That summer he heard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the first time and was overwhelmed; he knew for certain that he had made the right choice. (In 1882, he went to Bayreuth for the premiere of Parsifal, and the next year he took his bride there on their honeymoon.) Massenet called Chausson "an exceptional person and a true artist," but it was Franck, with his ever growing circle of followers, who encouraged Chausson to find his voice.

Chausson's career as a composer lasted barely fifteen years, and work on the Poem of Love and the Sea occupied him for nearly ten of those. Blessed with an abundance of both money and talent, Chausson wrote only when he felt like it and was rarely pressed by deadlines, external or self-imposed, to finish anything. His output is small, and by far the largest portion is devoted to vocal music—songs, the lovely Chanson perpetuelle for voice and string quartet, and this orchestral triptych. The texts for the Poem of Love and the Sea, like those of many of Chausson's songs, are by his friend Maurice Bouchor, now forgotten but once popular enough to have a street in Paris named for him.

For Poem of Love and the Sea, Chausson set two of Bouchor's poems about lost love as large pieces for voice and orchestra, separating them by a short, pensive orchestral interlude. The work is unique in form; it's neither a loose collection of songs like Berlioz's Les nuits d'été, its only precedent in the French literature, nor is it a narrative song cycle, like Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer, its exact contemporary. With his exquisite, expressive music, Chausson turns Bouchor's unremarkable poems into a great, probing monologue. Both in the union of voice and orchestra, and in the sumptuous, highly chromatic harmonic language, Chausson reveals the benefit of his visits to the Wagnerian shrine in Bayreuth. But the delicacy, nuance, and transparency of the orchestral music, and the subtle inflections of the vocal writing, are entirely his own. And the Poem is unsurpassed in the way Chausson exposes the depths of melancholy. As Debussy said, the music itself "becomes the very feeling which inspired its emotion."