French concert programme — Bizet, Duparc, Messager & Coward

Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe (1866)

Henri Duparc (1848-1933)

Extase (1875)

L’Invitation au voyage (1870)

André Messager (1853-1929)

L’amour est un oiseau rebelle (1925)

Noel Coward (1899-1973)

There’s always something fishy about the French

Of the fifty or so songs attributed to Bizet, only thirty-five of them - including, incidentally, a duet setting of Gautier’s La Fuite - are authentic. Having had the misfortune to die before Carmen made his name for him, he was in no position to stop publishers cashing in on his new-found popularity by taking bits and pieces from his several unperformed stage works, fitting different words to them and issuing them as songs. Inevitably, his reputation as a song composer has suffered as a result.

    It is true that Bizet was no Fauré or Duparc. But they didn’t share his interest in the theatre and it is that particular aspect of his genius that makes the best of his songs so distinctive. Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe - an indisputably authentic example written to words by Victor Hugo in 1866 - could almost be a scene from an opera, above all in the dramatic treatment of the line “Hélas! Adieu! Adieu! beau voyageur” which separates the first half of the song from the second. Conforming as it does to the current taste for the oriental, it is comparable not so much to Carmen as to The Pearl Fishers in its exoticisms, including its hypnotically repetitive rhythms, its seductive harmonies and its elaborately decorative vocalise at the end.

    “It’s nothing to do with genius,” said Duparc in 1904 - when he had composed no music for nearly twenty years and would compose none for the nearly thirty years that were left to him - “I have written a few songs into which I have put my heart and soul: that is their only merit. Now the little spring is dried up, that’s all: no one regrets it but me, and I regret it a lot…” If there was any consolation for him in what he described as “the frightful agony” of his creative paralysis it would have been in the advice frequently issued by his teacher César Franck: “Write little, but make sure it’s really good.” He left no more than sixteen solo songs, only thirteen of which he acknowledged, but they are, to say the least, “really good.”

    Like most French composers of his generation, Duparc was torn by a love of German music on the one hand and a patriotic resistance to German domination on the other. It was particularly painful in his case because he was not only an admirer of the songs of Schubert and Schumann but also a fervent Wagnerite. The Wagner influence is evident in several of Duparc’s mélodies, not least Extase, a rapturously erotic setting of a mere five lines by Jean Lahor. Although the date of composition is uncertain, its echoes of Wagner - Träume from the Wesendonk-Lieder or the nocturnal love scene from Tristan - suggest that it must have been written in the mid-1870s, at about the same time as the stylistically similar Elégie.

    In spite of its Wagnerian affiliation, in that it transforms a fairly ordinary poem into a masterpiece, Extase is essential Duparc. As he said, “music inspired by poetry has no purpose unless it adds something to that poetry.” It was also his belief that “there is some perfect poetry which is so complete in itself that music can only diminish it.”    Even so, one of the greatest of Duparc’s songs was inspired by the one of greatest of the poems he set to music. What he was able to add to Baudelaire in his setting of L’Invitation au Voyage, which was written during the traumatic siege of Paris in 1870 , was a very genuine longing for “ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté” and a no less genuine sentiment of affection for the dedicatee of the song, the composer’s Irish fiancée Ellie Mac Swiney.

    Messager was not one of the great song composers. He was, however, one of the great musicians of his time, the conductor selected by Debussy to introduce his Pelléas et Mélisande to the world at the Opéra-Comique in 1902 and the composer of distinguished ballets like Les deux pigeons and high-quality operettas like Véronique. L’amour est un oiseau rebelle (which takes the first line of its text from the famous Habanera in Carmen) comes from one of his last operettas, Passionément, which was first performed at the Théâtre de la Michodière in Paris in 1926. Julia, the young maid of an American couple arriving in France by yacht, puts her romantic hopes in the French… She’s a bright girl - that much is clear from her witty way with words and her vivacious vocal line - but if she had been born into the next generation of musical comedy she would have known, like Noel Coward in Conversation Piece, that There’s always something fishy about the French.