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L’Invitation au voyage (1870)

by Henri Duparc (1848–1933)
Programme noteComposed 1870

Gerald Larner wrote 9 versions of differing length — choose one below.

Versions
~1925 words · all 6 · 99 · 1925 words

Le Manoir de Rosemonde (1879)

Testament (1883)

Chanson triste (1868)

Soupir (1869)

La Vague et la cloche (1871)

Romance de Mignon (1868)

Elégie (1874)

Phidylé (1882)

La Vie antérieure (1884)

Extase (1875)

Sérénade (1869)

Sérénade florentine (1880)

Le Galop (1868)

Lamento (1883)

Au pays où se fait la guerre (1870)

La Fuite (1871)

the dates given above are in most cases no more than approximate

“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…For me, 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 are inspired by the two greatest of the poems he set to music, both of them by Charles Baudelaire. What he was able to add 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.

The rippling figuration of the minor harmonies in the accompaniment to the first stanza is stilled by a measured pronouncement of “ordre et beauté…” in the major. The minor harmonies are resumed at the beginning of the second stanza but this time the change to the major, coinciding with a change to flowing arpeggios in the accompaniment, comes earlier and the second evocation of “ordre et beauté…” is simply but effectively integrated with melodic material so far confined to the vocal line but now entrusted to the left hand of the piano part.

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 partly because of his excessively nervous temperament and partly also because he was not only a fervent Wagnerite but also an admirer of the songs of Schubert and Schumann. His allegiance to the Lied is particularly clear in his 1879 setting of a poem by his friend Robert de Bonnières, Le Manoir de Rosemonde, with its galloping Erlkönig rhythms and its little piano postlude in the manner of Schumann’s Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet.

The Wagnerite is evident in several of Duparc’s mélodies but nowhere more than in Testament, an expression of suffering culminating in a plainly deliberate reference to the Parsifal Spear motif in the piano part just before the end. Written in 1883, the year of Wagner’s death -perhaps even as a tribute to the late composer - it bounces Armand Sylvestre’s contrived text into a passionate outcry with a more than usually dramatic, densely elaborate accompaniment.

Chanson triste by Jean Lahor is not perfect poetry either 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.

Like Chanson triste, Soupir was first published in Duparc’s earliest collection of songs in 1869 and is a similarly intimate confession in that - by dedicating it to his mother and so directing Sully Prudhomme’s declaration specifically towards her - it reveals much of a relationship that is said to have been a contributory factor to the composer’s later breakdown. A two-note sighing motif, discreetly integrated into the Schumannesque piano figuration, echoes throughout the song.

Duparc once declared that he would “never learn to write well for the piano” and admitted that he always conceived his accompaniments in orchestral terms which he would then “reduce” for piano. So when he arranged his songs for voice and orchestra, as he did with seven of them, he was in a sense restoring them to their original form. Only one of them, however, La Vague et la cloche, was actually written for orchestra in the first place and subsequently arranged for piano - first by d’Indy in 1894, when the composer had despaired of his own “detestable” efforts, and then by Duparc himself in 1911. Certainly the sensational colouring of this “mélodie dramatique,” as the orchestral version is subtitled, calls for a Lisztian technique in transferring its stormy-sea and tolling-bell effects to the keyboard. There is another Lisztian feature in the constant transformation of the theme that opens the work and holds the various episodes of François Coppée’s ballad firmly together.

Romance de Mignon is one of the songs first published in 1869 but, like Sérénade and Le Galop, subsequently excluded from those that the hyper-critical composer considered good enough to be included in later collections of his work. A brave setting (in Victor Wilder’s French translation) of a Goethe text indelibly associated with Schubert, it projects an attractive melodic line against an unfailing rhythmic ostinato and harmonies varying between the radiant and the nostalgic.

Elégie is also based on a translation, Thomas Moore’s lament for Robert Emmet as rendered into French prose by the composer’s brother-in-law Léon Mac Swiney. In its repetitions of a two-note sighing motif, it resembles Soupir but, written five years later (in memory of a composer colleague called Henri de Lassus), it is that much closer to Wagner: Träume from the Wesendonk-Lieder is an obvious source of inspiration here.

After Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage and La Vie antérieure, Leconte de Lisle’s Phidylé is the most distinguished of the poems Duparc chose to set to music. Phidylé is also one of the most successful of his songs. Although he first approached the poem in 1872, the present version dates from the height of his powers in 1882 and is a remarkably free and apparently spontaneous reaction to the fondly amorous text. Beginning with a comparatively expressionless introduction, it ranges emotionally through a variety of keys at a rising tempo until it alights on the tonic again on the second entry of “Repose, ô Phidylé.” The structure is held together partly by the vocal phrase that goes with the refrain but more by the lyrical piano melody that immediately follows its first appearance. The passionate last few lines, agitated by tremolandos in the accompaniment, are based almost exclusively on that piano melody.

***

La Vie antérieure, Duparc’s last surviving song written in 1884 (in this version at least), is another expression of longing for “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.

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 again or the nocturnal love scene from Tristan - suggest that it must have been written in the mid-1870s, at about the same time as Elégie, or a few years later. Certainly, it is a far more mature work than Sérénade written to a conventional text by Gabriel Marc for the 1869 collection but thereafter excluded from the accepted canon. Charming though it is in its predictable way, it cannot compare in the quality of its inspiration with Sérénade florentine, a third Lahor setting written in 1880, which is exquisitely uncertain in its syncopated rhythms, its chromatic harmonies and even in the repetitions of the three-note motif that echoes, at irregular intervals, throughout. Even Duparc liked it. He did not, on the other hand, like Le Galop - an early example of his taste for the German romantic ballad in general and Schubert’s Erlkönig in particular - which was first published in the 1869 collection but not issued again in his lifetime.

Severely self-critical though he was, Duparc was clearly not too nervous to make a setting of a Théophile Gautier poem already set by Berlioz in his Nuits d’été (under the title Au Cimetière) and, moreover, to dedicate the song on its publication in 1884 to no less a composer of mélodies than Gabriel Fauré. Duparc’s Lamento is not at all diminished by comparison with the Berlioz version, however. Characteristically based on a chromatic descending motif echoing (as its application to “chante son chant” indicates) the plaintive cooing of the dove, and firmly enshrined in sepulchral minor harmonies, it has a sound and atmosphere entirely its own - until, that is, its curiously prophetic anticipation of Rachmaninov in C minor as the tempo accelerates into the dramatically expressive third stanza.

An earlier Gautier setting, Au Pays où se fait la guerre, written during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, is also remarkable for a prophecy - of Mahler this time in the rueful little theme that opens the song and returns to haunt it in both the voice and the piano parts. The effective use of recitative and the dramatic quality of the vocal writing in the last stanza seem to confirm suggestions, originating with Duparc himself, that he at one time intended to make use of the material of this song in an opera based on Pushkin’s Rusalka - a project which he cherished for twenty years but which,“for art’s sake,” he ultimately abandoned.

The one other surviving Duparc song, if it can be classified as such, is a duet setting of Gautier’s La Fuite written in 1871. In the same ballad tradition as Le Galop and Le Manoir de Rosemonde, it is driven by authentic galloping rhythms as the lovers flee from danger. There is still time for characterization, however, as the timid Ahmed is encouraged by the courageous and tenderly protective Kadidja and their urgent exchanges merge into loving counterpoint at the end.

When he gave up composing in 1885 Duparc might well have taken comfort from the advice frequently issued by his teacher, César Franck: “Write little, but make sure it’s really good.” Having destroyed his last mélodie, a setting of Baudelaire’s Receuillement, he left no more than sixteen songs, only thirteen of which he acknowledged, the duet La Fuite, a motet, a symphonic poem Lénore and a handful of shorter orchestral and chamber pieces. At least as far as the songs are concerned, however, he did make sure that what little he wrote was, to say the least, “really good.” Sadly, he was never convinced of that. The severe frustration of being unable to work - “the frightful agony,” as he called it - can only have contributed to the continued decline in his health and his miserable end, half paralysed and nearly blind, after nearly fifty years of creative impotence.

Gerald Larner©

From Gerald Larner’s files: “Mélodies/all 6/99”