Serres chaudes Op.24 (1893–96)

Serre chaude

Serre d’ennui

Lassitude

Fauves las

Oraison

Chausson’s Serres chaudes is one of the miracles of the mélodie. What is remarkable about it is not so much that it was one of the first French song cycles after Berlioz’s Nuits d’été – Fauré’s Cinq mélodies de Venise and    La bonne chanson were both completed a few years earlier – as that it exists at all. Having so far restricted himself largely to Parnassien poets for his song texts, in 1893 Chausson turned to the Serres chaudes of the Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, a collection of 33 poems which are far from obvious material for a song composer. While it it is true that they are by no means as obscure as the Mallarmé poems later set by Debussy and Ravel, few of them invite musical treatment. Of the five represented in Chausson’s cycle, only Oraison suggests a form that a song based on it might take. The one he worked on first, Lassitude, is all but opaque in that respect. Clearly, the composer had other reasons for identifying himself with these poems.

Following Maeterlinck’s example, Chaussson opens the cycle with Serre chaude, which was actually the last he completed. At first sight, the poem seems to offer several sonorous images – brass music, night birds, bells – but in their context they are as as mute as “a sailor in the desert” or “a warship in full sail on a canal.” Certainly, in one of the most inspired of all his songs, Chausson ignores whatever acoustic potential they might have. The vocal line follows the natural rhythms and inflections of the verse, occasionally introducing a wide interval or prolonged note for expressive emphasis. The musical interest is largely restricted to a piano part that could almost be detached from the song. In fact, of course, the two elements are interlinked, most clearly where the right-hand melody touches on the vocal line in unison or at the octave. From the beginning of the second stanza, where it insists on repeating certain key phrases, the piano intensifies the atmosphere until the semiquaver movement is brought to a halt under the words “Mon Dieu!” to be replaced by the steady crotchets and minims of a strategic anticipation of the last song in the set.

It is clear that what moved the composer to write these songs was his recognition of his own chronic “ennui” or “lassitude” in Maeterlinck’s hot house. The text of Serre d’ennui offers little more than monotony and, in its studiously applied assonances, uniformity of colouring. Though beginning in the minor, Chausson seems to welcome the poetic expression of familiar symptoms with seductive melodic lines in the pianist’s left hand and a definitive change to the major on “Monotonement comme un rêve” at the end. Lassitude is set to a vocal line lacking the energy to exceed the compass of a tenth or, except in rare instances, to inflect through intervals wider than a third. The piano negates momentum by shifting between 3/2 and 2/2, usually on a bar-by-bar basis, and by means of a melodic line that rises through the first two beats of the 3/2 bars only to fall back on the third. Although the compass of the vocal part in Fauves las is even more restricted than in Lassitude, its intervals are wider and, in its comparatively quick tempo, there is a guilty sense of urgency that is stilled only on “mes immobiles passions” in the last line.

The title and the first line of Oraison suggest a chorale-like setting – a hint that Chausson gracefully accepts. A chromatic line in crotchets weaves its way between a steady motion of minims in the pianist’s left hand and the supplicant vocal line doubled by the top notes of the right. The aching dissonances created this way are finally resolved in the closing bar, where the major-key ending unrealistically attached to the anticipation of this moment in Serre chaude is firmly denied it.