Quand la nuit n'est pas étoilée (1900)

Les cygnes (1893-5)

Le printemps (1899)

Hahn made his name as a composer at the age of 13 with a precociously inspired song to words by Victor Hugo, Si mes vers avaient des ailes. Twelve years later he set another Hugo poem, Quand la nuit n’est pas étoilée, which, though very different, drew from him much the same kind of musical response, with a vocal line clearly related to that of the earlier song and an accompaniment with similar, if more complex, figuration. Whatever he made of Hugo’s less than readily comprehensible verse in this case, he certainly invested it with seductive melodic beauty. Though not one of the most frequently performed of his mélodies, Les cygnes is one of the most artful. The curious direction to the performers, “calme et très blanc,” could equally well serve as a description of the song itself. Texturally limpid, modest in line, limited in dnamic variety, it is masterfully sustained by means of its subtly accomplished modulations.

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.