4 Mélodies

À Chloris (1916)

Le rossignal des lilas (1913)

Paysage (1890)

Infidelité (1891)

Although he was not, as he would surely have agreed, the greatest of those composers who regularly set French verse to music - he would probably have awarded that honour to Gabriel Fauré - Reynaldo Hahn was unsurpassed in his sensitivity to the beauty and the integrity of the poetic text. It was Hahn’s not Fauré’s Verlaine settings that moved the poet to tears. Their economy of means, their essential modesty allowed the words to inflect as the poet heard them. It was not that Hahn lacked the art to do otherwise. Adventurous harmonies are to be found in all his major collections and cycles, but they are there only in response to the expressive demands of the text.

Originality is clearly not the point of Hahn’s setting of Théophile de Viau’s À Chloris. Published in the second of his two collections of Vingt Mélodies in 1921, it is a frank pastiche of J.S. Bach justified, on one level, by its peculiar, almost hypnotic charm and, on another level, by its stylistic reflection of the baroque sentiment of the seventeenth-century text. There is an element of pastiche also in Le rossignol des lilas, which is entirely appropriate in a song based on a text in the 15th-century rondel form that so fascinated the composer. Avoiding any hint of imitation bird song in the piano part, he here devotes his art exclusively to sustaining a seductively shaped vocal line.

Hahn was less economical with piano colouring in Paysage, which babbles with water imagery in the second stanza and trills with bird song in the third. More fundamental to this song is an echo of one of his favourite composers in the rumbling drone harmonies in the outer sections, which recall the rustling undergrowth of Sous-bois in Chabrier’s Pièces pittoresques. Written only a year later, Infidelité represents Hahn at his best - which is to say modest to the point of self-effacement, accompanying a gently inflecting melodic line with a minimum of harmonic and rhythmic variety, until both harmony and rhythm so poignantly lose their way in the very last line.