Trois Lieder, Op.27

Les Heures

Ballade

Les Couronnes

Trois Lieder is such a contradictory title that it looks as though it must be some kind of mistake. Although all Chausson’s earlier song collections had been issued as mélodies, it was indeed as Trois Lieder, Op.27, that these three songs were first published in 1897 - presumably in deference to the author of the text, Camille Mauclair, poet and critic and author of a musicological study with a similarly unlikely title, Le Lied français contemporain. Chausson’s settings of his friend’s frail verse are still mélodies, however, rather than Lieder.

Les Heures, with its syncopated chime sustained on an unchanging pitch level throughout, is at the heart of the French tradition, echoing perhaps a passage towards the end of the first scene of Pelléas et Mélisande (which Chausson would have known by this time) and anticipating by twelve years the tolling bell of Le Gibet in Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Ballade is a little closer to the Lied in its popular-style melodic line drawn over a repeated rhythm in the piano part but not in its modal inflections and its symbolist change in piano figuration in bright major harmonies at the end. As for Les Couronnes, Mélisande might almost have chosen it as a folk song to sing from her lonely tower in Allemonde. Les Couronnes is dedicated, incidentally, to Mme Maurice Denis, wife of one of the composer’s favourite artists who was at that time painting decorative ceilings in the Chausson home on boulevard de Courcelles.