Extase (1875)

L’Invitation au voyage (1870)

“It’s nothing to do with genius,” said Duparc in 1904 - when he had composed no music for nearly twenty years and would compose none for the nearly thirty years that were left to him - “I have written a few songs into which I have put my heart and soul: that is their only merit. Now the little spring is dried up, that’s all: no one regrets it but me, and I regret it a lot…” If there was any consolation for him in what he described as “the frightful agony” of his creative paralysis it would have been in the advice frequently issued by his teacher César Franck: “Write little, but make sure it’s really good.” He left no more than sixteen solo songs, only thirteen of which he acknowledged, but they are, to say the least, “really good.”

Like most French composers of his generation, Duparc was torn by a love of German music on the one hand and a patriotic resistance to German domination on the other. It was particularly painful in his case because he was not only an admirer of the songs of Schubert and Schumann but also a fervent Wagnerite. The Wagner influence is evident in several of Duparc’s mélodies, not least Extase, a rapturously erotic setting of a mere five lines by Jean Lahor. Although the date of composition is uncertain, its echoes of Wagner - Träume from the Wesendonk-Lieder 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.

In spite of its Wagnerian affiliation, in that it transforms a fairly ordinary poem into a masterpiece, Extase is essential Duparc. As he said, “music inspired by poetry has no purpose unless it adds something to that poetry.” It was also his belief that “there is some perfect poetry which is so complete in itself that music can only diminish it.” Even so, one of the greatest of Duparc’s songs was inspired by the one of greatest of the poems he set to music. 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.