Chez Chausson

Every eager collector of books and scores has their special searcher, primed to keep an eye open for long out-of-print rarities at reasonable prices. Mine, like Jesus’ blood, ‘never failed me yet’. Her latest triumph is to have procured a copy of Ernest Chausson’s opera Le roi Arthus, posthumously produced in 1903, four years after his death at 44; never yet staged in this country, though there was a memorable concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago. I’d been on the lookout for the music for ages, and its eventual arrival brought down from the shelf the fraying tape of a previous recording dating back to 1987, to listen again to a work of rare nobility.

Chausson is in danger of being remembered as a one-work composer: and even that one work, the lovely poème for violin and orchestra, isn’t played nearly so frequently as it used to be and always deserves. Pupil of Massenet, follower of Franck, elder (by nine years) contemporary and close friend of Debussy’s younger days, he was more serious (Earnest) than his friend, a slow developer prone to doubts and scruples, German-facing, more bound to tradition. And he’s not in the same league: there’s too much conscientious homework and dutiful piety. The bolder, leaner spirit with his utterly original way of hearing was able to embrace a liberating range of exotic influences, thus severing himself from his immediate origins even while retaining their loving tincture, transformed into something strange and new.

Chez Chausson, a handful of rather overwrought chamber works and a fine symphony just about survive at the edge of the repertory. More secure, some treasurable songs with piano and an extended cycle with orchestra, Poème de l’amour et de la mer, whose close, Le temps des lilas, epitomises a particular mauve-scented French nostalgia whose most extended experience comes in opening volumes of Proust.