Magnard Magnifique
SIMON, JOHN
On Music MAGNARD MAGNIFIQUE By John Simon Uniust neglect is easy to come by in the arts. The starving genius in his garret was a not unfounded cliché now supplanted by a half-truth: Real...
...What Magnard, dead at 49, might have achieved in three more decades of creation is in its loss another "tragedy in music," the subtitle he affixed to both of his last operas...
...Hope...
...Indeed, his grave, diligent, unostentatious nature resembled César Franck's...
...Then, to quote The Oxford Companion to Music, he "shot two German soldiers who came to pillage his house, and defended it to the last, perishing, with all his manuscripts, in its flames...
...The Wagnerian method that Magnard adopted is not slavish imitation...
...Except for that redundant "but yet," nicely put...
...This applies equally to Guercoeur, Magnard's second opera (1897-1901, but not staged till 1931), recorded in 1986 on three EMI CDs, 49195 in the US...
...Characteristically, he left us only one photograph and one painting of himself, both from the same three-quarters angle, with eyes downcast...
...It is entirely in his own hand and in his most mature style...
...The starving genius in his garret was a not unfounded cliché now supplanted by a half-truth: Real talent no longer goes unrecognized...
...Dream on, Renan, even if without a bed of roses to lie on...
...Heurtai, who has cast off his former master's love of liberty, is about to set himself up as dictator and briefly absents himself to organize his followers...
...So he came by his death— one which may be called perverse, but yet must be admitted to be noble...
...Hildegard Behrens, the great Wagnerian dramatic soprano, as Truth, is no longer quite in her prime, but sounds commanding enough...
...All the more reason to hope the final opera, Bérénice, will appear on disk...
...One is that he was essentially reclusive, and his having few friends in the music world has made a difference even to his posthumous reputation...
...Several factors have militated against Magnard's receiving due recognition...
...Another is that his death was spectacular enough to overshadow both his life and work...
...So here we have a third reason for Guercoeur's unpopularity...
...He sings the two notes of his final outcry, Espoir...
...The philosophical content makes for some stasis...
...Then there is that sublime final act, the pardoning of Guercoeur, which raises the music to the heights of introverted intensity...
...The First Symphony betrays some inexperience (clottedness, excess) among its beauties, but for the rest, it is all virile nobility wedded to feminine grace...
...He is to be doubly thwarted: Giselle has become the mistress of his trusty aide Heurtai (heurt means shock, blow, bump), although her conscience smarts from the vow of fidelity unto death she made to Guercoeur...
...His dream of peace, love and liberty will take long to realize, but its precursors rest in hope and honor...
...And so on...
...On earth, Nadine Denize, described as "a fine actress with a warm-toned, softgrained voice," does come across as such in the role of Giselle...
...and his people...
...In an aristocratic humanity in which intelligent people would make up the audiences, one could thus conceive of philosophical drama as one of the most effective purveyors of highbrow culture...
...The paucity of his output can be explained by his coming to composing relatively late, having, like his friend Ernest Chausson, first studied law...
...He also wrote a number of songs, some piano music, and a few orchestral compositions, notably two secular hymns: to Venus, dedicated to his wife...
...Here the chorus, sparingly used, and the four female voices of different timbre and temperament swirling around the single baritone are marshaled into the most refined interplay...
...Magnard hoped for such a society too, but realized its coming was far off...
...The noble lord Guercoeur (whose name combines the French for war and heart) is in a paradise ruled by the supreme goddess Truth, and her accompanying deities, Goodness, Beauty and Suffering...
...In 1914, as the German Army approached, he sent his wife and children back to Paris...
...Albéric Magnard (1865-1914) is described in a leading French music dictionary as "one of the greatest and most authentic musicians of his generation, but also the most forgotten...
...The sound balance is not always impeccable yet never jarring...
...rather, it filters leitmotifs and chromaticism through a more delicate, Gallic sensibility...
...In what other opera would the shade of a poet warn the hero against rebirth: "Brother, I was a poet and knew the happiness of subjecting the word to the idea...
...Meanwhile, a forerunner like Guercoeur, he wrote music that did not compromise with popular taste in his, and perhaps even our, day...
...They are sure to leave you wondering why such music has so long been missing from your life...
...Souls in paradise—a woman, a virgin, a poet—try to dissuade him from returning to earth...
...The crowd talks itself out of recognizing him and pretends that he is a charlatan...
...When Guercoeur appears before Giselle, she is terrified and confesses her faithlessness...
...What a pity, though...
...A philosophical opera is thorny enough, but one with a pronounced antipopulist, undemocratic attitude—showing, for example, women finishing off wounded enemies—is surely intolerable...
...The Orfeón Donostiarra chorus is exemplary, and Michel Plasson conducts his Toulouse Capitol Orchestra cogently...
...In my youth, to win glory, I fought hard, fought against hunger, fought against envy, and the heart withers from daily combat...
...On this 1986 recording, the Belgian José Van Dam was still in fall possession of his flexible, velvety baritone, equally persuasive in a tender as in a fiery mode...
...and to Justice, about the Dreyfus case...
...Giselle, freed from her oath, embraces her lover all the more lustily...
...As Heurtai is acclaimed dictator—the crowd preferring a "good tyrant" to liberty—Guercoeur praises Truth with his last breath...
...That, however, does not exclude the case of the genuine composer remaining largely ignored while trendy mediocrities prosper...
...In The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music he rates a measly 12 lines (one of them taken up by his full name, Lucien Denis Gabriel Albéric Magnard), as against 26 for Jan Maegaard in the opposite column, though that name might make experts scratch their heads...
...The orchestral interludes themselves are of great emotional variety and loveliness...
...Heurtai, returning, dismisses him as an impostor sent by the opposition...
...The four symphonies, hitherto available together with some otherpieces on three hard-to-find EMI recordings, have just come out on Hyperion 67030 and 67040, with Jean-Yves Ossonce conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra...
...there is a good deal of such discursive, dialectical stuff...
...Renunciation, sole beauty of art, your reign has come...
...The libretto, as with Wagner, is by the composer...
...Shattered, he nevertheless forgives and releases her...
...About that, Frédéric Ducros, the booklet annotator, brilliantly evokes the historian-philosopher Ernest Renan, who was beloved by his fellow agnostic Magnard: "Modern philosophy will find its ultimate expression in a drama, or rather in an opera, for music and the illusions of the operatic stage would be admirably suited to taking thought beyond the point where speech no longer suffices to express it...
...Both sides gang up on him and kill him...
...Later, when my disciples could have revived me with their ardent faith, my disciples left me...
...Dead only two years, he desperately yearns for his loving wife, Giselle, and the good people he led to freedom...
...and by his perfectionism, his slow and meticulous working habits...
...On a hilltop near his home (Magnard suggests a medieval Flemish or Italian town) he looks forward to rejoining Giselle (an allusion to faithful Griselda...
...The composer was a student of Jules Massenet and then Vincent d'Indy, whose franckisme was more congenial to him...
...Lesser roles in paradise are also well taken...
...In reality, his gaze was generally directed upward, not toward a Christian heaven, for he was a freethinker, but toward the symbolic residence of a supreme Truth and her attendant virtues...
...Back in paradise, Guercoeur is led to Truth's throne by Suffering, to whose law he has finally been subjected...
...But time overcomes both word and idea...
...A further problem is its philosophical nature, exceeding anything in Wagner, Magnard's inspirer and model...
...Certainly it is not a problem for anyone with a gift for self-promotion and some novelty up his sleeve to acquire notoriety—about as good as fame gets nowadays...
...It is a curious philosophy Magnard advocates, a kind of Nirvana of near-nihilism, yet it is made seductive by the music...
...The mezzo Anne Salvan (Goodness), the lyric soprano Michèle Lagrange (Beauty), and the dark-voiced true contralto Nathalie Stutzmann (Suffering) form a perfect aural rainbow...
...But Truth reluctantly grants his wish, after Suffering explains that he escaped her during his lifetime and needs to have his pride humbled so that he can re-enterparadise purified...
...The choral writing is profuse, rich in diversity and always dramatically motivated...
...Thus a leitmotif never attaches to an object, but, as Malcolm MacDonald reminds us, serves to "delineate emotional and spiritual states...
...Among the incinerated manuscripts were the just completed Twelve Poems Set to Music, the early one-act opera Yolande, and other unpublished works...
...Pathologically afraid of being thought to benefit from paternal nepotism, Magnard had published little, and even that mostly privately...
...Magnard's chamber music is right up there with Fauré's, a very high compliment...
...He is chiefly remembered for a half dozen exquisite chamber pieces, four symphonies and two fulllength operas, Guercoeur (1901) and Bérénice (1911) after Racine's tragedy...
...The son of the powerful editor of Le Figaro, he was wealthy and owned an estate at Baron, near Senlis...
...The work's initial problem for some listeners may be its 183 - minute length—not really overlong for a grand, symphonically conceived piece in three acts and five scenes...
...Heartsick, Guercoeur surveys the scene and tries to bring the factions to reason...
...Acts One and Three of the opera went up in flames with Magnard...
...Gary Lakes, a Wagnerian heldentenor with the proper vocal equipment though not the best French, is a credible Heurtai...
...He spent, for instance, better than four years on Bérénice, still unrecorded and hardly performed...
...His close friend, the not inconsiderable composer Guy Ropartz, reorchestrated it from memory...
...Chaos ensues in the city: Heurtal's army, in the majority, fights the dissident minority, the women no less violent than the men...
...with enough passion and yearning to permeate the remaining pages of the score...
...A final, poignant touch...
...It is in this spirit that he composed his often austere yet not forbidding music, whose solemnity does not spurn worldly elegance, and whose enchanting snatches of melody burst forth like sunshine from behind majestic cloud banks...
...With the other goddesses pleading for the truly repentant hero, a champion of and martyr for Truth, the supreme divinity grants his pardon and puts him to sleep on a bed of flowers...
Vol. 81 • November 1998 • No. 13
