Fumée

Whatever his other qualities as a song composer – and it is worth remembering that it was his rather than Debussy’s or Fauré’s Verlaine settings that moved the poet to tears – Hahn was a master of pastiche. Where there was no known period style to draw on, as in the cycle of ten songs based on Leconte de Lisle’s Études latines, he was adept at inventing one. While it is probably not what one imagines the music of the Romans to have sounded like, Tyndaris has a golden-age nostalgia about it, the wistfully modal piano ritornello reflecting perhaps the soft song of the doves or the running springs. Phyllis, on the other hand, derives its period feel from the poet’s vocabulary rather than from a setting concerned more with an assurance of mature constancy.

Fumée is no pastiche but, in its poetic use of dissonance, essentially of its time. The arpeggios rising like curls of smoke in the piano part find their tonal resolution only in the last bar of the piano postlude. Thirty years earlier, when he set Banville’s L’énamourée, Hahn wouldn’t have risked any such thing. Even so the fragments of dreamy waltz-like melody that float above the second half of each stanza are destined to meet just enough harmonic uncertainty in the last line to keep the song in touch with reality. The rather more healthy sentiment of the same poet’s Le printemps inspired – with some (acknowledged) help from Gounod’s Chanson de printemps – the exuberant vitality represented by the restless piano part and the tunefully fresh vocal line of the last song in this group.