CD - Hahn, Dupont, Fauré
ロスチャイルドのフランス歌曲集CD

French mélodies: Hahn, Dupont, Fauré

The name of Reynaldo Hahn has not made much of a splash since his death in 1947. One fairly large dictionary mentions his songs merely as evincing 'frail, intimate, caressing charm', while a 300-page essay purporting to deal with the French mélodie since Duparc omits him altogether. And yet, in his day he was a highly popular composer and singer, also a distinguished conductor of Mozart operas which he gave shorn both of spurious coloratura and of disfiguring rubato.

Perhaps recordings of his singing haven't helped. He admitted to having only 'a slender thread of a voice', but his use of it was astonishingly vital and persuasive, while his book on singing, Du chant, is nothing less than a masterclass. The fact that he sang mainly in the salons no doubt led all too easily to the assumption that his own songs were no more than light listening. Certainly from his earliest song, 'Si mes vers avaient des ailes', written when he was 15, up until the end of the 19th century, they were tuneful and the harmonies in line with those of his teacher Massenet: both 'Tyndaris' and 'Lydé', from the collection Études latines of 1900, are 'intimate and caressing', though I wouldn't call them 'frail'. His harmonies here may be conventional, but his melodic lines are full of rhythmic surprises and both songs have distinct, complete shapes that tell of a born composer.

With the cycle Les Feuilles blessées, however, Hahn was clearly determined to go further. Whether or not this intention was encouraged by the arrival of a new century, it was certainly connected with his choice of poet. Jean Moréas (1856-1910), born Iannis Papadiamantopoulos, was the author of a Manifesto of Symbolism published in Le Figaro in 1886, to rebut charges of decadence aimed at some of the young French writers. Hahn's response to Moréas's poetry is to make his harmonies more complex and to eschew the caressing melodiousness of the Études latines, beginning with the dense piano chords that open the first song. Thereafter we find chromatic complexities, curiously combined with vocal lines that are little more than recitation. Overall the mood is one, if not always of anguish, at least of a searching for resolution of some kind, with only the occasional hint at sensuality, as in the fourth song at the end of the phrase 'Et dans mon cher Paris'. This is music that rewards repeated listening.

If Reynaldo Hahn is not exactly on everyone's lips, he is a world beater by comparison with Gabriel Dupont. A pupil of Massenet, Gedalge and Widor, Dupont was placed between Caplet and Ravel in the Prix de Rome competition of 1901. He was expected to be a major player in French music, but tuberculosis claimed him in 1914 at the age of only 36. In 1933 the conservatoire at Caen, Dupont's birthplace, were putting up a monument to him and asked Ravel to join the committee of honour; Ravel willingly agreed, in memory of 'mon pauvre et cher ami'.

Dupont's Poèmes d'automne on poems by various writers were composed in 1903-4 while he was still under Widor's tuition. The generally melancholy tone of the cycle may owe something to the tuberculosis which had first manifested itself the previous year. The vocal lines are clearly influenced by those of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, premiered in 1902, most notably in the fluid mixture of duplets and triplets. But the harmonic language is already Dupont's own, largely modal in accordance with the general usage of the time, but with a distinct, personal accent of sorrow. The singer is given useful help in the indications over the first four songs: 'languide', 'avec une grande simplicité', 'comme en rêvant', 'sans nuances, comme un enfant' (languidly, simply, dreamily, smoothly like a child).

In 1906 Fauré made his only setting of poetry by Henri de Régnier. As often in his music, 'Chanson' is driven by the relations between voice and piano left hand. Meanwhile the right hand makes lute noises. There is only one accepted cadence before the final one; elsewhere Fauré teases us with feints and false trails...

Three years after completing the cycle La Chanson d'Eve to poems by the Flemish writer Charles van Lerberghe in 1910, Fauré returned to that poet in Le Jardin Clos, choosing eight poems from his collection Entrevisions, published in 1898. While preparing to set the poems in July 1914, he wrote to his wife, 'I can't find anything, I'm afraid, in the contemporary French poets, at least nothing that calls for music.' Commentators have often remarked on the pre-Raphaelite tone of the words, and no less of the music - no sign here of Le Sacre du printemps, nor indeed of Ravel's muscular Piano Trio which was premiered at the same concert as the cycle in January 1915. The keyboard writing is pared down to the bone, while the singer is given continual arioso that emphasises the natural rhythms of the words. Again we find interplay between harmony and bass, with dissonances resolving in all kinds of unexpected ways, and through the steadily pulsing rhythms we hear these surprises with unusual clarity: in the first song, for example, the sudden B flat on 'lèvre' is replete with veiled eroticism.

Some of the original poems bore epigraphs from The Song of Songs, and the 'walled garden', the title of the central group of poems, clearly refers to this Old Testament text. But it could, possibly, also refer to the predicament of France, now 'walled in' by the German army, or to Fauré's own increasing deafness that was shutting him off from the outside world. Certainly there is an inwardness in these songs that speaks of things spiritual, even though Fauré was no kind of believer. They are also informed by a harmonic boldness (for example in the chromaticisms of the fifth song) that prompted Saint-Saëns to admit to his one-time pupil that he couldn't find any pleasure 'in this garden blocked off by thorns'. The final song, the only one in the minor mode, closes the work in a spirit of acceptance that recalls Fauré's earlier patient, resigned response to death in his Requiem.

© 2020 Roger Nichols