French concert programme — Fauré & Saint-Saëns

Georges Bizet (1838–75)

Chanson d’avril (1866)

César Franck (1822–90)

Nocturne (1884)

Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)

Dans les ruines d’une abbaye Op.2 No.1 (c 1865)

Charles Gounod (1818–93)

Où voulez-vous aller? (1839)

Edouard Lalo (1823–92)

Guitare (1856)

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)

Danse macabre (1872)

According to no less an authority than Maurice Ravel, “the true founder of the mélodie in France” was Charles Gounod. Had Ravel been an admirer of Berloz, whose genius he underestimated, he might have expressed himself more cautiously. But, certainly, Gounod was far more influential than Berlioz on the composers who, round the middle of the 19th century, were developing the sophisticated art of the mélodie from the traditional and comparatively simple romance. As Bizet said to his old friend and mentor, “You were the beginning of my life as an artist. I spring from you” – a sentiment nicely illustrated by his Chanson d’avril which seems to derive from Gounod’s Chanson de printemps. At the same time, however, in its pulsating accompaniment, its vivacious melodic charm and the engagingly expressive exchanges between voice and piano, it clearly anticipates Fauré’s Nell.

Although Franck started writing songs as early as 1842 and took a consistet interest in the medium during his twenties, he completed no more than nine mélodies during the last 40 years of his life – which no doubt explains why his work so rarely appears in song recitals. Where his distinctive mature idiom coincides with the atmosphere of the poem, however, the result can be impressive. The harmonies in the first three stanzas of Nocturne could be by no one else and in the last, where Franck varies the strophic structure, they change from minor to major with moving effect. Fauré’s Dans les ruines d’une abbaye, written when he was scarcely 20, is harmonically nowhere near as distinctive. Even so – romance rather than mélodie though it is in its strophic repetition of a melodic pattern – the vocal line is already authentically seductive. If Gounod’s delightful treatment of Gautier’s Où voulez-vous aller? – a romance in barcarolle rhythm –­ seems superficial in comparison with Berlioz’s slightly later setting (under the title L’île inconnue in Les Nuits d’été) it is scarcely surprising, since it is the earliest of all Gounod’s songs.

Written (in their first version) more than a decade later Lalo’s 6 Mélodies avec accompagnement de piano, poésie de Victor Hugo, which have a fair claim to be the first set of Hugo songs, are still strophic in form. They are true mélodies, however, in that the piano part is not just an accompaniment but is intimately involved in the expression. Guitare cannot compete with Bizet’s later setting in terms of charm and local colour but, in its left-hand guitar sounds, it has more of Spain in it than an earlier version by the 16-year-old Saint-Saens and, thanks partly to its melodious piano part, more textural interest than either. But Saint-Saëns was influental too: his Enlèvement, to take an example of immediate relevance, can be heard behind Fauré’s Dans les ruines d’une abbaye. Danse macabre is like no other song before or since. Although it is less ghoulish than the now popular orchestral version, which was written two years later, it does have Death tuning his fiddle with the E-string a semitone flat, Death tapping his heels on a tombstone in the “ziggy-ziggy-zig” rhythm described in the Cazalis poem, and Death seductively bowing the waltz that gets the skeletons dancing on their graves until the cock crow that sends them scuttling back.