Psyché

The words of Paladilhe’s best known song come from Psyché, a five-act comédie-ballet written by Pierre Corneille in collaboration with Molière and Quinualt for performance with music by Lully at Versailles in 1670. Jealous of Psyché’s beauty, Venus has sent Cupid to make her fall in love with some ugly monster. Cupid complicates matters, however, by falling in love with her himself. Just why Padilhe chose to make a song of the ten lines beginning “Je suis jaloux, Psyché,” extracted from one of Cupid’s many amorous addresses to Psyché, it is difficult to imagine. If he had wanted to write a high-baroque pastiche he could scarcely have made a better choice but his setting is anything but that. It is very much of its time - which one takes to be somewhere near the middle of the second half of the nineteenth century - with every sentimental device resourcefully employed to make it the salon favourite it duly became. It is remembered today, when Padilhe himself is largely forgotten, because of classic recordings made by English-speaking specialists in the French repertoire like Maggie Teyte and (less impressively) Grace Moore.

Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947)

À Chloris (1916)

Émile Paladilhe (1844-1926)

Psyché

Neither Reynaldo Hahn nor, still less, Émile Paladilhe could claim the same kind of distinction as Debussy and Poulenc as composers of mélodies. A multi-talented musician and consummate professional, Hahn was, however, unsurpassed in his sensitivity to the beauty and the integrity of French verse. While he was no original, he had the happy knack of finding his own, sometimes eccentric but usually illuminating approach to the text he was setting. His treatment of Théophile de Viau’s À Chloris is a celebrated example. A frank pastiche of J.S. Bach, it is justified, on one level, by its peculiar charm and, on another level, by its stylistic reflection of    the baroque sentiment of the seventeenth-century text.

Having won the Prix de Rome at the age of 16, Paladilhe ought to have achieved more in his subsquent career than he actually did. Most of his operas were failures; his sacred choral music is forgotten; and there is no orchestral or chamber music to speak of. The best of his more than a hundred songs, on the other hand, are elegantly written and highly persuasive in the fashionable idiom of the day. His setting of Corneille’s Psyché, which has survived into the present-day repertoire largely because of Maggie Teyte’s attachment to it, is unasamedly sentimental in the current Massenet manner and at the same time irresistible. Jealous though he was of the sun shining on Psyché’s lips, Cupid would surely been out of his depth in the ”vast black void” of Baudelaire’s night. For Debussy Harmonies du soir, like the other four poems he chose to set in his Cinq Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire,