À Chloris

Quand je fus pris au Pavillon

Infidelité

Les Fontaines

Je me souviens

Le Printemps

Nocturne

Fêtes galantes

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, exemplified above all by the daringly simple Offrande (“Voici des fruits, des fleurs”), allowed the words to inflect as Verlaine heard them. It was not that Hahn lacked the art to make them more complicated. 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. Nor was he lacking in melodic inspiration. Between the earliest of his hundred or so published mélodies - a setting of Hugo’s Si mes vers avaient des ailes written when he was thirteen - and the operettas of the 1920s and 1930s, there are countless attractive tunes, not all of them original but all of them put discreetly and tastefully at the service of the words.

    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 charm and, on another level, by its stylistic reflection of    the baroque sentiment of the seventeenth-century text. Similarly, although he didn’t go as far back as the fifteenth century in search of a musical equivalent to Charles d’Orléans, Hahn did find a historical style appropriate to the archaic language and the fussy rondel form of Quand je fus pris au Pavillon.

    In setting Théophile Gautier’s comparatively recent Infidelité in 1891 Hahn could be himself - which is to say modest to the point of selfeffacement, 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. Les Fontaines, to words by another modern poet, is a later and much more elaborate setting. Its animated and uncharacteristically complex rhythms and its agile vocal line are stimulated by Henri de Régnier’s laughing, spring-time imagery and tranquillised by his closing evocation of distant fountains. Gilbert de Saix cannot compare as a poet with either Gautier or Régnier but, while he did not bring out the best in the composer, he did inspire the delicate and sustained nostalgia of Je me souviens - a late work published in the posthumous Neuf Mélodies retrouvées in 1955.

    Fascinated as he was by the rondel verse form, Hahn must have been delighted to find an ingenious contemporary protagonist in Théodore de Banville, who supplied no fewer than eight of the texts of the Douze Rondels published in 1899. Le Printemps adheres to the statutory thirteen-line construction, the restriction to two rhymes and the recall of the first line half-way through and at the end. But if the rondel form inhibited the poet it had no such effect on the composer, who simply ignores it in a setting that takes flight on a floating 4/2 metre and a fragment of ecstatic melody in the piano part. His setting of Nocturne by another contemporary, Jean Lahor, is more characteristic in that the piano part offers no more than a hint of a counterpoint to the vocal line while motivating the most subtle changes of harmony below it.

    One of the most entertaining example of Hahn’s gift for popular melody is is the festive piano tune that illuminates Fêtes galantes, a surprisingly bright setting of Verlaine’s Mandoline. Though set by the poet in the moonlight, as the comparatively veiled settings by Fauré and Debussy acknowledge, it thrives quite happily on its apparently daytime exposure here.

Quand je fus pris au Pavillon

Infidelité

Les Fontaines

Je me souviens

Le Printemps

Nocturne

Fêtes galantes

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, exemplified above all by the daringly simple Offrande (“Voici des fruits, des fleurs”), allowed the words to inflect as Verlaine heard them. It was not that Hahn lacked the art to make them more complicated. 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. Nor was he lacking in melodic inspiration. Between the earliest of his hundred or so published mélodies - a setting of Hugo’s Si mes vers avaient des ailes written when he was thirteen - and the operettas of the 1920s and 1930s, there are countless attractive tunes, not all of them original but all of them put discreetly and tastefully at the service of the words.

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 charm and, on another level, by its stylistic reflection of the baroque sentiment of the seventeenth-century text. Similarly, although he didn’t go as far back as the fifteenth century in search of a musical equivalent to Charles d’Orléans, Hahn did find a historical style appropriate to the archaic language and the fussy rondel form of Quand je fus pris au Pavillon.

In setting Théophile Gautier’s comparatively recent Infidelité in 1891 Hahn could be himself - 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. Les Fontaines, to words by another modern poet, is a later and much more elaborate setting. Its animated and uncharacteristically complex rhythms and its agile vocal line are stimulated by Henri de Régnier’s laughing, spring-time imagery and tranquillised by his closing evocation of distant fountains. Gilbert de Saix cannot compare as a poet with either Gautier or Régnier but, while he did not bring out the best in the composer, he did inspire the delicate and sustained nostalgia of Je me souviens - a late work published in the posthumous Neuf Mélodies retrouvées in 1955.

Fascinated as he was by the rondel verse form, Hahn must have been delighted to find an ingenious contemporary protagonist in Théodore de Banville, who supplied no fewer than eight of the texts of the Douze Rondels published in 1899. Le Printemps adheres to the statutory thirteen-line construction, the restriction to two rhymes and the recall of the first line half-way through and at the end. But if the rondel form inhibited the poet it had no such effect on the composer, who simply ignores it in a setting that takes flight on a floating 4/2 metre and a fragment of ecstatic melody in the piano part. His setting of Nocturne by another contemporary, Jean Lahor, is more characteristic in that the piano part offers no more than a hint of a counterpoint to the vocal line while motivating the most subtle changes of harmony below it.

One of the most entertaining example of Hahn’s gift for popular melody is the festive piano tune that illuminates Fêtes galantes, an extrovert setting of Verlaine’s Mandoline quite unlike his other songs to words by the same poet.Though staged by Verlaine in the moonlight, as the comparatively veiled settings by Fauré and Debussy acknowledge, it thrives quite happily on its sunny exposure here.