Le Galop (1868)

Lamento (1883)

Elégie (1874)

La Vie antérieure (1884)

Self-critical to a pathological extent, Duparc withdrew more than half of the songs he had chosen for his first published collection in 1869. Among those he rejected Le Galop is by any ordinary standards a brilliantly sustained burst of demonic energy, owing more to German than French precedence perhaps but none the worse for that. He was not too nervous, however, 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. In fact, Duparc’s Lamento is not at all diminished by comparison with the Berlioz version. Characteristically based on a chromatic descending motif echoing the plaintive cooing of the dove, and firmly enshrined in sepulchral minor harmonies, it has a sound and atmosphere entirely its own which not even the dramatic change of pace and and the anxiously motiviated piano figuration in the third stanza can displace..

Elégie is based on a translation by the composer’s brother-in-law, Léon Mac Swiney, of Thomas Moore’s lament for Robert Emmet. Its repetitions of a two-note sighing motif might echo Tristan or Träume from the Wesendonk-Lieder but it has a quite different expressive effect which is all the more intense as the sigh persists through the qucker tempo and the change of rhythm in the piano left hand and carries its message to the end. La Vie antérieure – with L’Invitation au voyage one of the two most inspired of Duparc’s mélodies – is another expression of longing for “calm and voluptuousness.” Significantly, 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.