4 Mélodies

L’invitation au voyage (1870)

Le manoir de Rosemonde (1879)

Extase (1875)

Le galop (1868)

“To travel hopefully,” said Stevenson somewhere else, “is a better thing than to arrive.” In L’invitation au voyage, contemplating an ideal destination where “tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté,” Baudelaire seems to agree with him. Even so, in the most beautiful of all his songs Duparc is so inspired by Baudelaire’s vision that in musical terms - as the piano’s impatient tremolando figuration and minor harmonies are transformed into radiant arpeggios in the major - he actually gets there. In Le manoir de Rosamonde there is no arrival and the travel, driven by despair like the rider in Schubert’s Erlkönig, is not hopeful. Languishing in a Tristanesque exotic trance, Extase is an exquisite moment of repose before another wild ride, Le galop, takes off on a demonic flight through whirling Lisztian chromatics towards “l’inconnu profond.”

Chanson triste (1868)

Extase (1874)

La vie intérieure (1884)

L’Invitation au voyage (1870)

“For me,” said Duparc, “music inspired by poetry has no purpose unless it adds something to that poetry… but there is some perfect poetry which is so complete in itself that music - even the most beautiful music, even that music which I am incapable of writing - can only diminish it.” Even so, two of the greatest of Duparc’s songs - La vie intérieure and L’invitation au voyage - are inspired by the two greatest of the poems he set to music, both of them by Charles Baudelaire and both of the included in this programme.

Jean Lahor’s Chanson triste is not perfect poetry but even in 1868, seventeen years before Duparc’s nervous illness paralysed his creativity, its escapist sentiment must have appealed to him profoundly. Certainly - and above all where the piano joins the voice in counterpoint on “Tu prendras ma tête malade” - the setting adds a personal dimension to the text, converting undistinguished or even embarrassing words into sounds of much beauty. Extase is another Lahor setting inspired by much the same escapist sentiment as Chanson triste. Although the date of composition is uncertain, its echoes of Wagner - Träume or the nocturnal love scene from Tristan - suggest that it must have been written in the mid-1870s, at about the same time as the stylistically similar Elégie.

La Vie antérieure, Duparc’s last surviving song, is another expression of longing for the “calm and voluptuousness.” It is significant that when he comes to the words “C’est là que j’ai vécu dans les voluptés calmes” he turns to the same key as he did for “ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté” in L’Invitation au voyage fourteen years earlier. Now, however, shortly before renouncing composition for ever, he is reminded of his “secret douloureux” and ends the song in inconsolable minor harmonies. What he was able to add to Baudelaire in his setting of L’Invitation au Voyage, which was written during the traumatic siege of Paris in 1870 , was a very genuine longing for “ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté” and a no less genuine sentiment of affection for the dedicatee of the song, the composer’s Irish fiancée Ellie Mac Swiney.