Air de la lettre from Mozart (1925)

Couplets de Germaine from Brummell (1931)

“I don’t like Bach, I find Palestrina boring, and I adore Mozart.” Reynaldo Hahn adored Chabrier too. There is a fascinating recording of him singing L'île heureuse to his own accompaniment in 1909 and as for L’Étoile, “this legendary work, dear and sacred to every true musician, this fine pearl of French operetta…” his enthusiasm for it had clearly not waned even in 1937. The Paris of 1925, when he wrote the music for Sacha Guitry’s Mozart, was a very different world from the Paris of 1877, when Chabrier wrote L’Étoile. The Paris of 1778, where the musical comedy is set round Mozart’s ill-fated visit in that year, was very different again. Even so, the Air de la lettre - designed to be sung by Guitry’s wife, Yvonne Printemps, en travesti as Mozart - has something indefinable of the Romance de l’étoile about it. Characteristic of Hahn at his best, it makes its peculiarly touching effect through understatement and by giving the words all the time they need.

Along with his operetta Ciboulette written a couple of years earlier, Mozart was one of Hahn’s greatest successes in the musical theatre. One of his rare failures was Brummell, which bombed at the Folies Wagram in 1931 not so much because of the music, apparently, as because of an inept libretto based on the life of the English dandy Beau Brummell. If the words had all been as amusing as those of the Quand un petit vilain du sexe masculin, in which Germaine catalogues her many susceptibilities, Brummell might have had a different fate. As economical in its way as the Air de la lettre, it derives its comic effect from the repetition of a few modestly shaped but well chosen melodic motifs.