4 Mélodies

Chanson de Printemps (1860)

O ma belle rebelle (1855)

Au rossignol (1867)

Ce que je suis sans toi (1868)

According to Ravel, Gounod was nothing less than “the true founder of the mélodie in France.” It is true that Ravel consistently underestimated Berloz and that Les nuits d’été not only predate the vast majority of Gounod’s songs but also excel many of them in quality. On the other hand, the historical reality is that their successors were far less likely to follow Berlioz’s example than Gounod’s, even if they had little time for the songs written in the second half of his career, after he exiled himself to London in 1870. Written ten years before that ill-advised adventure, Chanson de Printemps has a freshness and spontaneity which, carried on the same semiquaver impulse in the piano part from the beginning to two bars before the end, was clearly an inspiration to Fauré, to name only the most gifted of his followers.

Although Gounod got to know German song early in his career – not least through his friendship with Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel when he was staying at the Villa Medici as a winner of the Prix de Rome in the early 1840s – and although he made efforts to get away from the romance tradition, he by no means abandoned it. As a setting of words by Jean-Antoine de Baïf, one of the seven poets of the Pléiade, O ma belle rebelle is appropriately presented as a romance, with no less appropriately archaic cadences. Thanks in part to its melodious bass line, it most engagingly reflects Baïf’s mood of rueful lyricism.

One of Gounod’s six Lamartine setting, Au rossignol, is an extrarodinary exercise in self restraint – as is clear enough even when, as on this occasion, it is reduced to just two stanzas. Retaining, in the original version, all nine stanzas of the poem, it keeps changes of harmony to a minimum and, except in the short prelude and interludes, restricts the piano part to a uniform succession of crotchets in 4/4 time – the idea being, while scrupulously avoiding anything as sensual as bird-song imitation, to preserve a hymn-like chastity throughout. Another modest setting, Ce que je suis sans toi transcends its limitations by the charm of its rhythmic syncopations, discreetly chromatic harmonies and its vulnerable vocal line.