Les Voix mystérieuses (1850–52)

L’Hiver

Chanson de Fortunio

Les saisons

Ma belle amie est morte

La rose foulée

Barcarolle

When he wrote Les Voix mystérieuses Offenbach was already well known in Parisian musical circles, though more as a cellist and conductor than as a composer. He had turned out dozens of works featuring solo cello but had composed little for the stage apart from incidental music and had completed only a small proportion of the hundred or so songs he was to write during the course of his career. As he had shown in Les Fables de Lafontaine ten years earlier, however, and as Les Voix mystérieuses confirms, he was well endowed with the melodic talent required to make him the successful composer of opéras bouffes he was soon to become.

The six songs of Les Voix mystérieueses have little in common with the art of the mélodie that French composers, not least Berlioz and Gounod, had been developing since the late 1830s. Offenbach’s songs are not a direct product of the text in the same intimate way as the mélodies of, say, Fauré whose vocal lines, piano parts, and harmonies are determined exclusively by the poem to which they are applied and could not be transferred to any other. This is not to say that Offenbach’s songs are unmoving, still less unattractive, but the tune comes first and the accompaniment, often repetitive in rhythm and economical in harmonic interest, follows automatically. One sometimes gets the impression that different words could be not too incongruously substituted: indeed, where musical and linguistic stresses fail to concide (as in L’Hiver and Barcarolle) that might well have happened.

Les Voix mystérieuses was first performed at a soirée in the composer’s home in January 1853 – a charitable event it would seem from the references to winter and giving in both L’Hiver and Les saisons. Although Armand Barthet and Jules Barbier, who might well have been prevailed upon to write something specially for the occasion, achieved little poetic distinction in their verses, Offenbach was highly resourceful in setting them. Barthet describes L’Hiver as a romance dramatique and the composer responds to that with an impulsive (Allegro) piano introduction, plunging from major to minor, which is recalled as a ritornello between the three more gently paced (Andante non troppo) stanzas. A basically strophic setting, it changes its tune only when it comes to the charitable moral at the end.

Wisely, before going on to Les saisons, Offenbach introduces at this point one of his most successful songs, the simply conceived but touching Chanson de Fortunio, which he had written for a production of Alfred de Musset’s Le Chandelier in 1850. It had to be droppedfrom the play – the actor couldn’t sing it – but he was to use it again, liberally, in La chanson de Fortunio, an opéra comique written in 1861 specifically to accommodate it. The delight of Les saisons, which varies in mode according to the season, is the vocal cadenza at the end of every stanza, ending with a particularly elaborate little bit of coloratura on “la charité.”

In ma belle amie est morte, aware perhaps of settings of the same words by Berlioz (Sur les lagunes) and challenged by it, Offenbach treats Théophile Gautier’s Lamento with rather more harmonic sensitivity than might be expected of him. A short piano introduction settles each stanza in a plain major mode but then veers into the minor as, by way of comparatively bitter harmonies, he approaches the lamenting refrain. After La rose foulée, where Charles Poncy’s more conventional verse invites a more conventional but no less sympathetic response, there is another Gautier setting in Barcarolle. If Offenbach was aware of Berlioz (L’île inconnue) precedence in this case he defies it in a frankly rollicking 3/8 scamper in which the piano retains the same rhythmic figure in every bar except the last three. He introduces a change of harmony only with every other stanza until, in a slower tempo towards the end, the young beauty offers her chastening answer to her hopeful suitor’s invitation.

The title of the collection, incidentally, comes from a few lines headed Les Voix mystérieuses contributed by Arsène Houssaye, director of the Théâtre Français, to the first edition of the songs in 1853. A modern edition by Jean-Christophe Keck was published by Boosey & Hawkes last year.