French concert programme — Saint-Saëns, Fauré & Duparc

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Pastorale (1855)

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Pleurs d’or (1896)

Henri Duparc (1848-1933)

La Fuite (1871)

There are few duets in the French song repertoire and even fewer good ones. During the course of his long career, for example, Saint-Saëns wrote well over a hundred solo songs and only six duets - the earliest of which, and not the least charming, is his Pastorale to words by Destouches. One of several songs Saint-Saëns dedicated to Marie Reiset (later Vicomtesse de Grandval), whose musicianship he admired so much that he took her on as a composition pupil, it is a highly mellifluous in its vocal writing and characteristically sophisticated in its setting of the text. The reprise of the first stanza, where one voice returns to the first line of the poem while the other is still occupied with the last and where their interlacing lines so prettily recede into the closing “échos,” is a particularly attractive episode.

By far the most successful Saint-Saëns pupil, and perhaps the greatest of all French song composers, was Gabriel Fauré. While the proportion of duets to solo songs is even smaller in his case (only three out of a hundred or so) Pleurs d’or is one of the most inspired examples of its kind - which must have been some consolation to the poet Albert Samain who had written a whole opera libretto for Fauré only to find that it caused the composer nothing but embarrassment. The duet, the second of Fauré’s four Samain settings, was written in London for the mezzo-soprano Camille Landi and the baritone David Bispham and, on its first performance at St James’s Hall in May 1896, its accompaniment was apparently enriched by a violin obbligato. Nothing of the violin part survives but Pleurs d’or needs neither that nor its original mezzo-baritone combination to register its falling tears and gently pealing bells, which are all in the piano part, and its unique atmosphere, which is in the daringly elusive harmonies. The dissonances between the two voices in the stanza beginning “Larmes des nuits étoilées” are probably all the more exquisite for being sung by soprano and mezzo.

Duparc’s La Fuite, a youthful composition which he withheld from publication during his lifetime, is a quite different kind of duet. A setting of words by Théophile Gautier, it is a dramatic exchange for two lovers - the fearless Kadidja and the timid Ahmed - driven by the galloping rhythm of their flight from danger but finding consolation in each other’s presence as their vocal lines are joined in counterpoint at the end.