Thanks fot the 'Melodie'
SIMON, JOHN
On Music THANKS FOR THE 'MELODIE' By John Simon The French call an art song mélodie—not chanson, which would correspond to the English song and German Lied, but melodie. Does this...
...In the louder and higher passages the vibrato can become excessive, and there are moments of shrillness...
...The late songs are mostly to Symbolist texts, often allusive and even arcane...
...In the work of any song composer, the choice of text is important...
...Unfortunately, there have been problems with her recorded solo recitals...
...She comes off best in cantata and oratorio...
...The great Italian poet Eugenio Montale observes in his essay "Words and Music" that "poetry and music proceed on their own...
...He was only 44...
...Many other Chausson works should be more widely known: some piano pieces, the tone poems Viviane and Soir de fête, and the wonderful incidental music to La Légende de Sainte Cécile...
...In both periods there are lesser figures as well—and, alas, the poetaster Maurice Bouchor, a close friend of the composer, who set him more often than any other poet...
...Reviewing her Fauré Mélodies (RCA 61439) in Gramophone, John B. Steane praises her "true contralto...
...the guests at his soirées were the leading lights in all the arts...
...hear her, for example, in Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher (DG 429412) or Debussy's Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (Sony 46240), both highly recommended...
...cache-moi dans to sein pâle...
...discounting the immature ones, that leaves 40-odd...
...Nathalie Stutzmann's appealing recital, with her pianist, Inger Södergren matching her all the way, does best by the quasi-surreal Serres chaudes, followed closely by "Sérénade," with its exquisitely luminous ending...
...Financially comfortable, he became an enlightened art collector...
...Most recently, the contralto Nathalie Stutzmann has come out with a CD of Chausson songs (RCA 68342), my main concern here...
...and indeed, his supreme masterpiece for me is the Concerto in D for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, followed closely by the Piano Quartet, and the early, utterly delightful Trio...
...The family spent especially happy summers in various rustic surroundings, where Ernest found it easier to compose than in Paris...
...not to be overlooked are Gounod, Massenet, Chabrier, and several others...
...The singer is a genuine contralto, somewhat of a rarity these days, pullulating with great mezzos...
...and "Hébé," where the singer's concluding pianissimo hauntingly conveys the fading of youth...
...There is no mature work of his without interest, and his too infrequently heard mélodies are among his loveliest achievements...
...Stutzmann has the full low range, and can produce gorgeous sounds both low and high...
...Why this shortage—as also of true basses—is hard to say...
...of exceptional quality," though she "habitually presses, introducing a small swell, crescendo or bulge on individual notes so that there is no true legato" without a gain in expressiveness...
...Failing to obtain the prestigious Prix de Rome, he left the Conservatory, but continued his lessons with Franck...
...I am reminded of the conclusion to William Cary's "Heraclitus": "Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;/For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take...
...he, with seemingly equal gifts for literature, painting and music, leaned toward the arts...
...Where the text is poor, Chausson, in Frédéric Robert's words, "affirms himself with a brand new authority [as in Bouchor's Poème de l'amour et de la mer], to the point that his music makes you forget the signal weaknesses of the poem...
...L'Aveu," where the rendition of the verse Oh...
...Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Shakespeare (translated by Bouchor), Moréas, Charles Cros in the second...
...So Chausson "achieves an autonomous poetic-musical creation that sets into vibration all the harmonics contained in germ in the poem, where they dissolve to give birth to a new work, eminently personal, other...
...He kept up his piano playing along with his law studies, andno sooner hadhepassedhisbar exams than he quit to enroll at the Conservatory, where he studied under Massenet and Franck, and befriended Vincent d'Indy...
...Chausson's was a pleasant, mostly uneventful life, with success coming slowly but steadily...
...Listening to the new Chausson release, I hear the throatiness that comes with the contralto tessitura, but some delightful singing from pianissimo to mezzoforte...
...reversing course, she found him dead, his skull smashed against a porte-cochère...
...Then there is the special case of Ernest Chausson (1855-99), who has been called the connecting link between César Franck and Debussy...
...their conjunction remains in the realm of occasional serendipity...
...The earlier ones were mostly to texts by Parnassian poets and their satellites: neoclassically simple and controlled, lyrical but with clear outlines— no mists, ambiguities, elusive symbols...
...Some of them, in both periods, are by famous writers— Baudelaire, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Banville, Villiers de l'Isle Adam in the first...
...Though productive in almost all musical genres, the composer is remembered for only a handful of items...
...what exactly caused the accident remains a mystery...
...Forty-three are available (though not easily found) on a two-CD set (Timpani 2028) featuring the good baritone JeanFrançois Gardeil and even better mezzosoprano Brigitte Baileys, with Billy Eidi the able pianist...
...There are over 50 of them, including a few charming duets...
...Chausson's composing life was all too brief...
...The sound on the disc is vividly realistic throughout...
...In the case of her Robert and Clara Schumann Lieder recital (RCA 61798), Alan Blyth wrote in Gramophone that Stutzmann is "a thoughtful, intensely musical interpreter...
...When speed is of the essence, as in the graceful "Les Papillons," Stutzmann is no slacker...
...Chausson married Jeanne Escudier, and their happy union produced five children...
...Frédéric Robert has observed that "it was in chamber music that his elegiac temperament best realized itself...
...Commendably, too, the songs are presented in chronological order, allowing us to follow the composer's development...
...While traveling in Germany he fell, like so many others, under the spell of Wagner, and for much of the rest of his life strove with growing success, as he said, to de-Wagnerize himself...
...I have only two serious regrets...
...However that may be, they have produced more than their share of great composers of art songs...
...Still, the tremolando strings are far more capable of conveying the emotions of the seduced and abandoned girl who ends up drowning herself...
...That last song of Chausson's is an extraordinary accomplishment...
...Fortunately, Jean Gallois, author of the only valid book on the composer (Ernest Chausson: L'homme et son oeuvre [1967], which I acquired at a library duplicate sale for 25 cents), wrote the good booklet notes for Stutzmann, as he now seems to for just about every Chausson recording...
...It was in such a place that, late one warm June afternoon, he and his eldest daughter, Ernestine, cycled to the railway station to meet Madame Chausson and the younger children...
...These include the noble Symphony in B-f lat major and Poème pour violon et orchestre, a favorite with virtuoso fiddlers...
...Poème de l'amour et de la mer, for voice and orchestra, may be his most tuneful piece...
...Five months later, Chausson was dead...
...But the mélodies, like many of his other works, have a tenacious life...
...one was the young Debussy, whom he admired, but who later stupidly broke with him...
...Its 23 items are fairly well chosen, but perforce omit marvelous pieces, despite a generous 73-minute duration...
...As the philosopher Gabriel Marcel put it, Chausson "alone since Schumann, knew how to convey with admirable delicacy and gravity this animated life, by turns intoxicated and aching, of a sentimental relationship, how to translate its fleeting delights and bitter disappointments...
...and her dark-hued contralto is a voice with appreciable overtones...
...At the bottom of a not particularly steep incline, Ernestine noticed thather father was not behindher...
...Chausson's music kept getting better and better...
...Moreover, he edits the text...
...or to Postromantic ones of great limpidity, even transparency...
...Does this betoken special reverence for melodiousness...
...The entire song, Gallois correctly says, is "a long plaint surging from the orchestra [i.e., piano and string quartet], a slow, melodious rocking that brings out the warmly colored words, the ruptures in the rhythm, like the multiple modulations, combining to make of this ultimate mélodie one of the composer's most finished pages, one also where we can best meet up with him...
...NEVERTHELESS, Chausson handled textual problems skillfully...
...As a further bonus, Stutzmann gives us the complete five-song cycle of Serres chaudes, all seven songs of the delightful Opus 2, and all four of Opus 8— though here, Maurice Bouchor's texts having provided insufficient inspiration, Number 2, "Amour d'antan," would have sufficed...
...A shy, generous man with a melancholy streak, he helped out needy colleagues...
...Berlioz, Duparc, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc are the uncontested masters...
...His songs divide into two more or less distinct halves: those written before the concentration on his opera (1886-95), and those written after...
...You can verify this by listening to the highly dramatic rendering by Anne Sofie von Otter (DG 447752) or the more wistful ones by Janet Baker (London 425948), Brigitte Baileys on the Timpani set, and, my favorite, Andrée Esposito, on the out-of-print EMI 64365...
...his last piece, a string quartet, unfinished but rounded off by d'Indy, is one of his finest works...
...The opera he toiled over for a decade, Le Roi Arthus, has—rightly, I'm afraid—never caught on, some nice passages notwithstanding...
...sends shivers through the listener (though the next one is overstressed...
...A few of the tempos are a bit on the slow side, yet this does relatively little harm, given that, in Roger Nichols' phrase, "the mood of tender resignation" informs so much of this music...
...At the same time, he complained of her "sluggish tempos," and regretted that she and her pianist, Inger Södergren, "want to extract more meaning from the poems and the settings than is good for them...
...His well-to-do parents destined him for the law...
...Second, that "Chanson perpétuelle," scored by Chausson for voice, piano and string quartet, is given here in a voice-and-piano reduction, also by Chausson...
...First, that the translations in the booklet are often poor...
...Did Chausson achieve this serendipity...
...In the later phase, as Gallois notes, he "chooses complex, indeed obscure poems [e.g., Maeterlinck's Serres chaudes] to which the music no longer brings, as to the earlier mélodies, a simple sonorous adornment, but that emotional element thanks to which the hidden philosophy is clarified and revealed...
...Jean Roy points out that in the composer's final masterpiece, "Chanson perpétuelle," to a poem by Charles Cros, "the omission of the feeblest tercets evidences the sureness of the musician's literary taste...
...In seven minutes we get every aspect of the heroine's joy and despair...
Vol. 81 • February 1998 • No. 2
