Au rossignol

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.

Le Vallon is one of Gounod’s earliest songs, written when he was staying at the Villa Medici in Rome, as all holders of the Prix de Rome were required to do. Influenced perhaps by German song – whch he was getting to know through Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny Hensel, who was also staying in Rome – it is certainly a departure from the romance a young French composer might have written at the time. It is an ambitious enterprise, even if it does reduce Lamartine’s 14 stanzas to a mere five. Gounod has selected just enough from the poem to provide a bell-tolling, doom-laden recitative introduction and two stanzas of world-weary reflection in the minor each followed by a refreshingly melodious major-key expression of consolation in nature.

A later Lamartine setting, Au rossignol, is even bolder in the sense that it includes all nine stanzas of the poem and yet keeps changes of harmony to a minimum and, except in the short prelude and interludes, restricts the piano part to a scarcely changing 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.

A pious text, a devout vocal line, a rippling harp-like accompaniment – just typical, the Gounod sceptic might well observe of his late duet D’un coeur qu t’aime. If the first two parts of this setting of words from Racine’s Athalie seem not entirely unpredictable, as each of the voices in turn expresseses her or his selfless devotion to the “supreme will,” from the point where the two voices join together, to coax the harmonies back to the tonic, the sound is ever more enchanting. The final section is not so much a third statement of a pious sentiment as a ravishingly sensuous mingling of voices and, towards the end, of piano melody too… Gounod’s choral setting of the same words, written about thirty years earlier in 1850, is a very different experience.