About the Music

To celebrate La Belle Époque, I present music illustrating the wide range of styles and emotions, recognizing the important rise of “salon music,” which was light, pleasing and often sentimental compared to more “serious” music. These were typically performed in salons, which were private social gatherings where guests discussed art, literature, philosophy, music and politics. Salons were notable cultural events, often hosted by the wealthy and well-connected. Salons contributed to the promotion of composers and performers, often helping launch their professional careers. Many of the pieces I’ve chosen to present here are French art songs, originally for voice and piano, transcribed for cello and piano. Others were originally intended for cello. Some of these might be considered salon music, but others - e.g. Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano and Fauré’s Élégie - are clearly serious.

The French art song, or mélodie, followed the model of the German lied, whose structure was essentially a musical setting of a lyric poem for voice and piano. Maurice Richter observed that, where the German lied “involves uninhibited emotional outpourings, the French mélodie follows Debussy’s stipulation that “clarity of expression, precision and concentration of form are qualities peculiar to the French genius.”  It is an art that is more objective, more intellectual than that of the lied, an art of suggestion in which the feelings and emotions are refined an purified, and art that deals much more with sensitive impressions and perceptions than with direct emotions.”

Charles Gounod’s (1818 -1893) later years coincided with the beginning of La Belle Époque. He may be best known for his lyric opera Faust, but he composed across many spheres including oratorios, masses, ballets, instrumental pieces and songs. Presented here is his Sérénade, from 1857, based on text by Victor Hugo in a gentle love song in a barcarolle type rhythm. Graham Johnson, a well known pianist-collaborator with vocalists noted  that “so-called ‘salon’ music...yields nothing to German Lieder in terms of its power to delight and bring a tear to the eye.”

Georges Bizet (1838 -1875) led a musically productive, if short, life (he died at age 37). He is best known for his opera Carmen, but composed many other operas as well as orchestral works (e.g. L'Arlésienne, Symphony in C major), piano music (both solo piano as well as his much loved Jeux d’enfants for piano 4 hands), and numerous mélodies. Technically, he passed before La Belle Époque developed in earnest, but two of his songs presented here were published well into this period and emotionally they are congruent with the spirit of the La Belle Époque. Adieux de l'hôtesse arabe, with text by Victor Hugo is probably Bizet’s most famous mélodie. Set in French-speaking North Africa, it is striking how the sexual subtext is actually fairly overt compared to past eras, and, as Graham Johnson observes “we get the sense that there is nothing this girl would not do in order to keep this young Frenchman; indeed we are musically invited to imagine the sensual implications of the girl’s pleading...” 

The text for Pastel, by poet Phillipe Gille, describes a portrait of a young girl, painted in the previous century. What was she thinking as the artist painted her portrait? The secret may be in her smile, which has been waiting for the viewer for a hundred years.

Cecile Chaminade (1857 - 1944), the first woman to be honored with the title Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur (1913), was a prolific composer who wrote over 400 compositions ranging from quasi-concertos for soloist and orchestra, to miniatures for piano solo, as well as over 200 melodies for voice and piano. Presented here are two love songs,  Je voudrais être un fleur, set to text by Herman Hesse and Mots d’amour set to text by Charles Fuster. Her style may not have evolved much over her 86 years, but her works are lovely and unfailingly charming.

After Ernest Chausson (1855 - 1899) obtained a degree in law, he entered the Paris Conservatory to study with Jules Massenet and Cesar Franck. Despite being tortured by crippling self doubt - some critics dismissed his work as amateurish imitations of Franck and Wagner -  he eventually successfully found his own voice in a body of chamber and orchestral works, and opera and numerous mélodies. Many composers in the 18th and 19th centuries who found inspiration in Greek and Roman mythological figures. Hebe, daughter of Hera and Zeus, was a cupbearer who served ambrosia and nectar to other gods. Hébé is set to text by Louise Ackermann. Graham Johnson observes “beneath the purely Classical imagery we discern a theme which continually haunted [Chausson]: the passing of youth and the quickly vanishing chance to make use of life’s opportunities.” Indeed Chausson died tragically at the young age of 44 in a bicycling accident.  Le charm, set to text by Armand Silvestre reflects Chausson’s own loneliness before he eventually found and married Jeanne Escudier in 1883. Le charme marvelously captures the beauty and tentativeness of falling in love.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 - 1921) was a musical prodigy - he wrote his first compositions at age 4, and at age 5 played well enough to partner with a violinist in a Beethoven violin sonata. By age 10 he performed two concertos and solo pieces in Salle Pleyel concert hall in Paris. He studied organ and composition at the Paris Conservatoire and in 1855 his Symphony No. 1 was performed. For a period in the 1860’s he taught at École Niedermeyer, an alternative to the Conservatoire which had more of an emphasis on early music. There Gabriel Fauré was among his students. In 1871 he was the driving force behind the Société nationale de musique created to promote French instrumental music to counter the influence of German pre-eminence, this being the year after the Franco-Prussian War. In 1878 after the loss of both of his sons, Saint-Saëns divorced and undertook a world wide tour through Europe, US, South America, Middle East and East Asia, performing his five piano concertos and conducting his symphonic works. In 1886 he composed Le Carnival des animaux (Carnival of the Animals) a lighthearted suite for small orchestra. It was never performed in his lifetime but it has since become a very popular work, particularly at young people’s concerts. The Swan is the 13th and second-to-last piece in the suite. His strikingly beautiful melodie, Si vous n'avez rien à me dire (“If you have nothing to say to me”) tells a story of unrequited love. The text is by Victor Hugo.

Gabriel Fauré (1845 - 1924) was not initially intending to become a composer, but his mentor and friend, Camille St. Saëns, just 10 years his senior, encouraged him. Beyond his famous Requiem, Fauré successfully composed across many realms including piano solo music, chamber music, and of course mélodies. He is considered by many to be the greatest art song composer. His style was courageous, embracing unusual harmonies which moved in unexpected chromatic ways. He joined the Société nationale de musique, which Saint-Saëns founded, and became its secretary in 1874. He joined the composition faculty of the Paris Conservatory in 1896 and became its head in 1905 for nine years. He was mentor to many, including Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger and George Enescu.

Fauré’s Sylvie (1865), is a beautiful love song set to a poem by Paul de Choudens. The undulations in the piano writing are a bit like butterfly wings, and the overall effect is luminescent, overflowing with positive energy.

Although Fauré intended his Élégie, Op. 24, to be the slow movement of a multimovement cello sonata, this sonata was never completed. The Élégie was first performed as a standalone movement at a salon hosted by Saint-Saëns. It was received so successfully that Faure later composed several other single movement pieces for cello and piano, including the Sicilienne. Patrick Castillo of Music at Menlo observes that the Élégie “...seems to honor grief as a multifaceted thing and depicts it as such; not prosaically, according to the classic stages of denial, anger, and so on, but in a more poetical fashion. Herein lies Fauré’s mastery. He possesses the sensibility to probe, with economy and exquisite subtlety, the depth of human emotion, giving graceful voice to our innermost emotions.”

The Sicilienne, Op. 78 was originally intended to be an orchestral piece, composed for a theatrical production that was abandoned. In 1898 he arranged the unperformed music for cello and piano, and in the same year also decided to include it among newly composed movements for a different project - incidental music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Pelléas et Mélisande. Ultimately, the Sicilienne became one of the four movements of his Pelléas et Mélisande Suite published in 1909. As a stand alone piece, the ever popular Sicilienne has been transcribed for numerous other combinations of solo instruments with piano or harp, or with larger forces.

Although Reynaldo Hahn (1874 - 1947) was born in Venezuela from a Jewish-German father and a Spanish/Basque mother, he became an “adopted” Frenchman as he attended the Paris Conservatory along with Maurice Ravel, whose mother was also from the Basque region. Hahn’s output spans a wide range including piano solo music, chamber music, and opera, both light and serious. But he is best known for his 100+ mélodies. Indeed, when he joined the Conservatory as a youngster, he sang in the boy’s choir, and singing was to become highly important for the rest of his life. He made his debut at the salon of Princess Mathilde (Napoleon’s niece) accompanying himself on the piano, singing songs by Jacques Offenbach. He composed his first songs at the age of eight. At age ten he entered the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers included Jules Massenet, Charles Gounod and Camille Saint-Saëns.

Je me souviens, is the first in a series Neuf mélodies retrouvées published posthumously in 1955 - it is not known when it was composed. It’s subtitle, “un soir, au reçu d’une lettre bleue” (“One evening, upon receiving a blue letter”) suggests that a telegram has been received with bad news, possibly the death of a lover during World War I. The text, by Leon Guillot de Saix would support this theory.

Alfred Bachelet (1864 - 1944) attended the Paris Conservatoire and was awarded the second Grand Prix de Rome in 1890. From his early works, he devoted himself mainly to opera. He directed the Paris Opera during World War I and in 1919 became the director of the Nancy Conservatoire. In 1939 he was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. His most famous song, Chère nuit, is truly operatic in scope, opulence and drama. He composed it for the great Australian coloratura Nellie Melba, one of the greatest singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century. Bachelet set Chère nuit to a poem by Eugène Adénis-Colombeau, a French journalist, librettist and playwright.

Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918) was a gifted pianist and entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 11, studying piano and composition. He won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1884. While he grew up with limited means in a poor suburb of Paris, he unexpectedly came under the patronage of Russian railway heiress Nadezhda Filaetovna von Meck who engaged him to teach her children. They traveled together widely throughout Europe and Russia and he gained exposure that would influence his later work. In particular, he was heavily influenced by Richard Wagner, Alexander Borodin and Modest Mussorogsky as well as Symbolist poets and Impressionist painters. Eventually Debussy’s compositional ideas diverged widely from traditional harmony and forms. Embracing nontraditional scales and tonal structures, he is seen to be the founder of musical impressionism.

Debussy composed his song cycle called Ariettes oubliées, based on Romances sans paroles, poems by Paul Verlaine. Debussy developed a reputation for his meticulous approach to composing using previously published text, careful and skillfully linking word to music. The first of the six melodies, C’est l’extase langoureuse describes post-coital bliss and a sensual connection to nature. It is known as one of Debussy’s most sophisticated experiments in tonal composition.

Nocturne et Scherzo dates from 1882 when he was working for the von Meck family. Originally scored for violin and piano, he made a new version for cello and piano, the autograph manuscript for which was discovered in the early 1970’s, when Mstislav Rostropovich gave it its “second debut.” It is in an ABA form and most conclude that the lyrical middle section is the Nocturne and the outer faster segments represent the Scherzo. However, some believe that the surviving manuscript is the Scherzo only and the Nocturne remains undiscovered. Either way, the surviving manuscript is a marvelous example of Debussy’s early compositional style.

Horrified and demoralized by the outbreak of World War I, Debussy abandoned composition for nearly a year. Unfortunately, he had also been diagnosed with colon cancer in 1909 and moved out of the city to Normandy for health reasons. To his publisher Jacques Durand he wrote “I have suffered much from the long drought forced upon my brain by the war.” Later, in a letter dated October 6, 1915 to the conductor Bernardo Molinari, Debussy writes, “I spent nearly a year unable to write music...after that I’ve almost had to re-learn it. I was like rediscovery and it seemed to me more beautiful than ever! The emotional satisfaction one gets from music can’t be equaled, can it, in any of the other arts?”

Thus, he found the energy to begin a new project, a cycle of six sonatas for “diverse instruments.” He was ultimately only able to complete the first three - the first for cello and piano, the second for flute, harp and viola, and the third for violin and piano. He planned the fourth sonata to be for oboe, horn anad harpsichord, the fifth to be for trumpet, clarinet, basson and piano. The sixth and final sonata was to combine forces of all the instruments from the first five sonatas.

Debussy composed his Sonata for Cello and Piano in about three months. He explained that “I’m writing like a man possessed, or one who must die the next morning.” On the title page, Debussy signed “Musicien Francais” as an affirmation of French culture in a world torn by war. He wrote, “I want to work not so much for myself, but to give proof, however small it may be, that not even 30 million ‘boches’ can destroy French thought.” In the process of deeply exploring French musical roots, he had looked back to the baroque era and had edited the complete works of Jean Philippe Rameau for publication. So, it may seem odd for Debussy, at the end of his career marked by innovation in harmonic and tonal structure, to compose music with a more traditional title - Sonata - with the implied tradition structure. Barbara Leish observes that Debussy is paying homage to “a French musical tradition of elegance, clarity, and restraint. It takes the shape of a Classical sonata: The Prologue is in roughly ABA form, the Sérénade is a scherzo and the Finale is a dance movement.” 
But as Georg Predota explains, “Clarity of structure not withstanding, the Sonata for Cello and Piano is one of Debussy’s most forward-looking and most aggressively experimental works. The rhythmic language is full of surprising interjections, short bursts of accented notes, and sudden changes in tempo. And the harmonic language veers far enough from tonality to escape it altogether for long stretches. Special effects in the cello writing - harsh pizzicato, glassy ponticello passages measured in tremolo and floating flautandi high up the fingerboard - forcefully pronounce a composition of startling modernist originality.” It is easy to infer that the harsh, aggressive musical effects were heavily influenced by Debussy’s reaction to World War I.