Hahn, Gounod, Massenet, Tosti: Vie, Voyage vocal de la France à l’Italie

Composer(s)

César Franck: (b Liège, 10 Dec 1822; d Paris, 8 Nov 1890). French composer, teacher and organist of Belgian birth. He was one of the leading figures of French musical life during the second half of the 19th century.

Cecile Chaminade: (b Paris, 8 Aug 1857; d Monte Carlo, 13 April 1944). French composer and pianist. While it is striking that nearly all of Chaminade’s approximately 400 compositions were published, even more striking is the sharp decline in her reputation as the 20th century progressed. This is partly attributable to modernism and a general disparagement of late Romantic French music, but it is also due to the socio-aesthetic conditions affecting women and their music.

The third of four surviving children, Chaminade received her earliest musical instruction from her mother, a pianist and singer; her first pieces date from the mid-1860s. Because of paternal opposition to her enrolling at the Paris Conservatoire, she studied privately with members of its faculty: Félix Le Couppey, A.-F. Marmontel, M.-G.-A. Savard and Benjamin Godard. In the early 1880s Chaminade began to compose in earnest, and works such as the first piano trio op.11 (1880) and the Suite d’orchestre op.20 (1881) were well received. She essayed an opéra comique, La Sévillane, which had a private performance (23 February 1882). Other major works of the decade were the ballet symphonique Callirhoë op.37, performed at Marseilles on 16 March 1888; the popular Concertstück op.40 for piano and orchestra, which was given its première at Antwerp on 18 April 1888; and Les amazones, a symphonie dramatique, given on the same day. After 1890, with the notable exception of the Concertino op.107, commissioned by the Conservatoire (1902), and her only Piano Sonata (op.21, 1895), Chaminade composed mainly character pieces and mélodies. Though the narrower focus may have been due to financial, aesthetic or discriminatory considerations, this music became very popular, especially in England and the USA; and Chaminade helped to promote sales through extensive concert tours. From 1892 she performed regularly in England and became a welcome guest of Queen Victoria and others.

Meanwhile, enthusiasm grew in the USA, largely through the many Chaminade clubs formed around 1900, and in autumn 1908 she finally agreed to make the arduous journey there. She appeared in 12 cities, from Boston to St Louis. With the exception of the concert at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music in early November, which featured the Concertstück, the programme consisted of piano pieces and mélodies. The tour was a financial success; critical evaluation, however, was mixed. Many reviews practised a form of sexual aesthetics that was common in Chaminade’s career and that of many women composers in the 19th and 20th centuries (see Citron, 1988). Pieces deemed sweet and charming, especially the lyrical character pieces and songs, were criticized for being too feminine, while works that emphasize thematic development, such as the Concertstück, were considered too virile or masculine and hence unsuited to the womanly nature of the composer. Based also on assumptions about the relative value of large and small works, complex and simple style, and public and domestic music-making, this critical framework was largely responsible for the decline in Chaminade’s compositional reputation in the 20th century.

Prestigious awards began to come her way, culminating in admission to the Légion d’Honneur in 1913 – the first time it was granted to a female composer. Nonetheless, the award was belated and ironic considering that she had been largely ignored in France for some 20 years. In August 1901 Chaminade married Louis-Mathieu Carbonel, an elderly Marseilles music publisher, in what may have been a platonic arrangement; he died in 1907 and she never remarried. While her compositional activity eventually subsided because of World War I and deteriorating health, Chaminade made several recordings, many of them piano rolls, between 1901 and 1914. Aeolian produced additional piano rolls of her works after the war, now with the improved technology of the Duo-Art system. In later years, by which time she was feeling obsolete, she was tended by her niece, Antoinette Lorel, who attempted to promote Chaminade’s music after her death in 1944.

Chaminade was well aware of the social and personal difficulties facing a woman composer, and she suggested that perseverance and special circumstances were needed to overcome them. Her output is noteworthy among women composers for its quantity, its high percentage of published works and for the fact that a large portion – notably piano works and mélodies – was apparently composed expressly for publication and its attendant sales (Enoch was the main publisher). Chaminade composed almost 200 piano works, most of them character pieces (e.g. Scarf Dance, 1888), and more than 125 mélodies (e.g. L’anneau d’argent, 1891); these two genres formed the basis of her popularity. Stylistically, her music is tuneful and accessible, with memorable melodies, clear textures and mildly chromatic harmonies. Its emphasis on wit and colour is typically French. Many works seem inspired by dance, for example Scarf Dance and La lisonjera. Of her larger works, the one-movement Concertstück recalls aspects of Wagner and Liszt, while the three-movement Piano Sonata shows the formal and expressive experimentation that was typical of the genre by the late 19th century (see Citron, 1993, for a feminist analysis of the first movement). The mélodies are idiomatic for the voice and well-suited expressively and poetically to the ambience of the salon or the recital hall, the likely sites for such works. The Concertino has remained a staple of the flute repertory; while it is a large-scale work and thus represents a relatively small part of her output, the piece still provides a sense of the elegance and attractiveness of Chaminade’s music.

Claude Debussy: (b St Germain-en-Laye, 22 Aug 1862; d Paris, 25 March 1918). French composer. One of the most important musicians of his time, his harmonic innovations had a profound influence on generations of composers. He made a decisive move away from Wagnerism in his only complete opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and in his works for piano and for orchestra he created new genres and revealed a range of timbre and colour which indicated a highly original musical aesthetic.

Francesco Paolo Tosti: (b Ortano sul Mare, 9 April 1846; d Rome, 2 Dec 1916). Italian song composer and singing teacher. He entered the Naples Conservatory in 1858, studying the violin under Pinto and composition under Conti and Mercadante. In 1869, illness and overwork as maestrino at the college enforced a period of convalescence in Ortano. There he wrote Non m’ama più and Lamento d’amore, songs which subsequently became popular but which he initially found difficult to publish. Sgambati helped Tosti establish himself in Rome (where his admirers included D’Annunzio) by composing a ballad for a concert at the Sala Dante which Tosti himself sang in addition to his own works. Princess Margherita of Savoy (later Queen of Italy) was present and immediately appointed him her singing teacher and shortly thereafter curator of the court music archives. Tosti first visited London in 1875, and then made annual spring visits until he settled there in 1880. In the same year he was appointed singing teacher to the royal family, and from 1894 he was professor of singing at the RAM. He became a British subject in 1906, was knighted in 1908, and retired to Italy in 1912.

The songs Forever, Goodbye, Mother, At Vespers, Amore, Aprile, Vorrei morire and That Day were among his earliest successes in England. He was a prolific composer to Italian, French and English texts, with a graceful, fluent melodic style that quickly found favour among singers of drawing-room songs and ballads; the ballad ‘alla Tosti’ also found many imitators. His Vocal Albums, the 15 duets Canti popolari abruzzesi, and later songs such as Mattinata and Serenata all enjoyed great success.

Gabriel Fauré: (b Pamiers, Ariège, 12 May 1845; d Paris, 4 Nov 1924). French composer, teacher, pianist and organist. The most advanced composer of his generation in France, he developed a personal style that had considerable influence on many early 20th-century composers. His harmonic and melodic innovations also affected the teaching of harmony for later generations.

Jules Massenet (b Montaud, St Etienne, 12 May 1842; d Paris, 13 Aug 1912). French composer. He was the most prolific and successful composer of opera in France at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th.

Reynaldo Hahn (b Caracas, 9 Aug 1874; d Paris, 28 Jan 1947). French composer, conductor and writer of Venezuelan birth. Hahn's mother, Elena Maria Echenagucia, came from a Spanish family, established in Venezuela since the 18th century. His father, Carlos Hahn, was born in Hamburg and emigrated to South America as a young man. Reynaldo was the youngest of 12 children and was not quite four years old when the family moved to Paris. Hahn had already shown a talent for music in Caracas; once in France he began to play, making his début, aged six, at a musical soirée hosted by the Princesse Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I. Hahn entered the Paris Conservatoire in October 1885, where his teachers included Massenet. While there he made the acquaintance of Ravel, Cortot and Edouard Risler, and began to compose songs, among them one which brought him early fame, Si mes vers avaient des ailes. This was dedicated to his sister Maria, who had married the painter Raymundo de Madrazo. It was at their house that Hahn met many of the leading young artists of the time, including Daudet, for whose play L'obstacle Hahn composed incidental music when he was only 16.

Hahn's song cycle to poems by Verlaine, Chansons grises, was completed while he was still a student at the Conservatoire. The first performance was given by Sybil Sanderson, Massenet's favourite soprano, at Daudet's house, with Verlaine present. Even during the years after his death, when Hahn's music fell out of favour, ‘L'heure exquise’, the fifth song of the group, remained known. Hahn's own voice, a light baritone, was put to good use throughout his career; he accompanied himself in his own songs, and in opera arias and popular songs of the day. A collection of 20 of Hahn's songs, published by Heugel in 1895, increased his celebrity, so much so that the novelist and explorer Pierre Loti allowed Hahn to adapt his autobiographical Le mariage de Loti as the opera L'île du rêve. By the time this received its first performance at the Opéra-Comique in 1898, France had been divided by the Dreyfus affair. Hahn and his two closest friends, Marcel Proust and the actress Sarah Bernhardt, joined the Dreyfusard camp. This political turmoil affected the lives of everyone in France, even after 1906 when Dreyfus was finally cleared. Hahn, partly Jewish and fiercely attached to France, was deeply disturbed by this conflict.

Neither L'île du rêve, nor Hahn's second opera, La Carmélite, which was given a prestigious première with Emma Calvé in 1902, remained in the repertory. This disappointment meant that most of Hahn's music composed between 1902 and the outbreak of war in 1914 was not for the stage, although his ballet Le bal de Béatrice d'Este, conceived merely as a divertissement, has remained one of his best-known and most regularly performed pieces. During the 1900s his career as a conductor and critic gained momentum. He began to write for journals (he was critic for La presse from 1899, then for La flèche from 1904); as well as conducting concerts of his own music, he organized a Mozart Festival in Paris, and was invited to conduct Don Giovanni at Salzburg. Although he continued to compose and publish songs, notably the cycle Etudes latines in 1900, his most extensive work from this period is the sequence of piano pieces gathered under the title Le rossignol éperdu (1902–10). A Proustian ethic seems to drive the music, with its evocations and memories of places and impressions. After long neglect, there was a revival of interest in Hahn's instrumental music in the 1990s.

Hahn took French nationality in 1909 and, at the outbreak of war in 1914, volunteered for the army (although he was over the official age limit for conscription). He served as a private, and was eventually promoted to corporal. While at the front he composed the cycle of five songs on poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, and began to sketch his opera based on Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Hahn's greatest commercial success as a composer dates from the early 1920s. Returning to Paris after the war, and following the deaths of Proust and Bernhardt, Hahn composed Ciboulette, a nostalgic evocation of 19th-century Paris, set in the old market of Les Halles. This was a huge success, and was followed by the musical comedy about the adventures of the young Mozart in Paris, created for Yvonne Printemps (wife of the playwright Sacha Guitry) who acted and sang the role of the composer. Mozart, although tailored for the Guitrys, has been revived several times, as has a second collaboration with Guitry, O mon bel inconnu.

In the late 1920s Hahn composed what became his best-known concert work, a piano concerto, which was given its first performance by Magda Tagliaferro, who subsequently recorded it with the composer. Hahn's only major commission for the Paris Opéra was Le marchand de Venise. Although it was received with some enthusiasm, and had several revivals, Hahn's mixture of light, operetta-like music for the romantic scenes and his dramatic declamatory style for Shylock is problematic.

Because of his Jewish ancestry, Hahn's music was banned by the Nazis during the occupation of France (1940–44), and the elderly composer spent the war years partly in hiding, but still working on songs, instrumental music, and his final work for the stage, Le oui des jeunes filles, which was first performed posthumously.

At the end of the war, when Hahn returned to Paris (he had eventually settled in Monte Carlo), he was appointed director of the Opéra and during his tenure there he conducted an important revival of Méhul's Joseph, and gave his last concerts, with Tagliaferro and Ninon Vallin, one of his favourite sopranos, with whom he had recorded several of his own songs before the war.