Programme — Sylvie Op.6 No.3 (1878), Les berceaux Op.23 No.1 (1879), En sourdine Op.58 No.2 (1891) …

Sylvie Op.6 No.3 (1878)

Les berceaux Op.23 No.1 (1879)

En sourdine Op.58 No.2 (1891)

Spleen Op.51 No.3 (1888)

Green Op.58 No3 (1891)

Paul Choudens was not a poet naturally destined for immortality. Indeed, had he not been the son of Antoine Choudens, who duly published Sylvie in Fauré’s first volume of songs in 1879, he would be all but forgotten. Described by the composer as “a labour of Hercules,” Sylvie has nothing laboured about it, its vocal line carried through spontaneously expressive changes of harmony on the impulsive semiquavers of the accompaniment. Although Sully-Prudhomme was not much more of a favourite - Fauré set only three of his poems - Les Berceaux inspired one of his greatest songs. Based on the rocking rhythms appropriate to both the great ships on the quay and the cradles at home, Fauré’s setting parallels the duality of the text in the rhythmic and harmonic contradictions between the left and right hands of the piano part.

“Verlaine is exquisite to set to music,” said Fauré, and En Sourdine, he might have added, is one of the most seductive of all his poems. His setting, one of the Cinq Mélodies de Venise, makes no special point of the song of the nightingale, concentrating instead on the counterpoint of the lovers’ senses with the silence around them. Reading through Il pleure dans mon coeur – before setting it under the misleading title of Spleen – Fauré must have been moved as much by the sounds Verlaine cannot express as by the melancholy sentiment he does express. The piano part supplies not only the acoustic effect of the “soft sound of the rain” but also its emotional effect in short melodic phrases set in harmonious counterpoint with the vocal line. In Fauré’s setting of Green, another of the “Cinq Mélodies de Venise,“ the eager sentiment of the poem is reflected in the variety of harmonies applied to a little motif which enters the piano part at the beginning of the second stanza and which persists in its breathless way to the end.

Henri Duparc (1848-1933)

L’Invitation au voyage (1870)

Chanson triste (1868)

Au pays où se fait la guerre (1870)

Romance de Mignon (1868)

Phidylé (1882)

It was Duparc’s firm belief that “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, one of the greatest of his songs was inspired by one of the greatest of the poems he set to music. What he was able to add to Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au Voyage was a rare harmonic imagination and a restless piano figuration all the more effective for the moment it comes to rest on “ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté.” Jean Lahor’s Chanson triste is not perfect poetry but the composer - whose nervous disposition was to paralyse his creativity for the last fifty years of his life - clearly identified with the escapist sentiment so frankly expressed in it.

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 it on the other. Strangely, however, in a setting of Gautier’s Au Pays où se fait la guerre written in the midst of the Franco-Prussion war, the German element in his style predominates. It both recalls Beethoven’s Freudvoll und Leidvoll and anticipates Mahler in the rueful little theme that opens the song and returns to haunt it in both the voice and the piano parts. Romance de Mignon is a brave setting of Victor Wilder’s translation of a Goethe text indelibly associated with Schubert, projecting an attractive melodic line against an unfailing rhythmic ostinato and harmonies varying between the radiant and the nostalgic.

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.

Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947)

Quand je fus pris au Pavillon (1899)

3 Études latines (1900)

Lydé

Tyndaris

Pholoé

Trois jours de vendange (1891)

À Chloris (1916)

Whatever his other qualities as a song composer - and it is worth remembering that it was his rather than Debussy’s or Fauré’s Verlaine settings that moved the poet to tears - Hahn was a master of pastiche. Quand je fus pris au pavillon is a characteristic example. Although he didn’t go as far back as the fifteenth century in search of a musical equivalent to the verse of Charles d’Orléans, he did find a historical style convincingly appropriate to its archaic language and fussy rondel form (just two rhymes recurring through thirteen lines).

Where there was no known period style to draw on, as in the cycle of ten songs based on Leconte de Lisle’s Études latines, Hahn was adept at inventing one. Lydé, though probably not what one imagines the music of the Romans to have sounded like, has a ritual aspect in both its steady succession of piano chords (arpeggiated at one point by Lydé’s lyre) and the formality of its baroque keyboard decorations. The piano ritornello in the tender setting of Tyndaris is more lyrical, reflecting perhaps the soft song of the doves or the running springs, while Pholoé postulates another ceremonial atmosphere, not least in its closing cadence.

If the stylistic allusion in the first stanza of the Daudet setting Trois jours de vendange is no more historical than Chabrier’s relatively recent Lied, by the end of the song, after the change of harmony in the second stanza, it goes as far back as the medieval Dies irae theme. As for À Chloris, it is a frank pastiche of J.S. Bach justified, on one level, by its peculiar charm and, on another level, by its stylistic reflection of the baroque sentiment of the seventeenth-century text.

Gerald Larner ©2006