Felicity, pleasure, happiness, luxe, calme et volupté.
Felicity, pleasure, happiness, luxe, calme et volupté. Perfection: the blissful rightness of every note; a peach, or a rose, caught at the exact moment of poise between not-quite and slightly-past. Such thoughts are set off by a recent chance re-encounter with Debussy’s cantata setting a French translation of D-G. Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’. It’s one of two complementary gems poised upon the edge of maturity while retaining the flush of youth. The Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is played every day; La Damoiselle élue is sadly neglected.
Both are saturated in poetry; the purely orchestral Prélude assimilates the fluctuations of Mallarmé’s original in a miraculous rendition of one medium in terms of another — acknowledged thus by the grateful poet himself. One can’t imagine surly Rossetti being pleased by any attempt upon his words, let alone one that in its sweet chastity puts their blowsy diction to shame. Debussy wrote his setting for women’s chorus with two female soloists and orchestra before his youthful passion for Wagner had grown bitter and gone underground. Many touches of Tristan shine out from a total saturation in Parsifal, sometimes so close as to be actionable were the transmutation into French not so intimate. In particular Debussy’s opening pages are like Wagner’s heard down the wrong end of the telescope, rich stained colours refined into subtle pastel shades. The work’s heart, the Damozel’s long solo, sounds like Gounod or Massenet on speed, then the lovely work ends with further Parsifal — a miniaturisation of the Act I close.
No intonation problems with Verlaine’s La bonne chanson, born of the first vernal impulse of love for his fiancée, then wife, before absinthe and Rimbaud poisoned the waters. Fauré’s setting must be the summit of felicity in all music. Not a breath of discord sullies this dictionary of happiness, moving from reverent hommage to the belovèd’s old family name, via moonlit ecstasy, to morning with lark song mounting high as the lovers’ hopes. Even a momentary slippery stretch shudders only to resolve the better.
It’s as though the tragic song cycles of the early German Romantics were being tactfully but firmly reversed en rose. Schumann’s especially: La bonne chanson is a Dichterliebe without rejection, rancour, cynicism; and admired with Frauenliebe und -leben recounted from the man’s viewpoint, from courtship through to consummation, without baby, loss, grieving then acquiescent widow(er)hood. Schumann’s vocal lyricism blooms free in Fauré’s hands; the piano writing recreates his master’s burgeoning but sometimes lumpy textures with delicate effervescence, transforming patterns from song to song, à la Wagner but unobtrusively, as Schumann had done in his greatest song cycle, the Eichendorff Liederkreis.
Ravel’s valses nobles et sentimentales explicitly invoke pleasure as goal in the epigraph heading the score — ‘the delicious and ever-new pleasure of a useless occupation’; just as the title with its fusion of two of Schubert’s published waltz collections evokes a Vienna given over to diversion. Though his original piano version is flawless, the composer’s own orchestration is perfection incarnate. Done at speed for a ballet, the finesse of this ravishing score is surpassed by nothing in the repertoire. The trajectory, from scrunchy vitality via tenderness, humour, elegance with an undertow of deep feeling, ends in nostalgia — the ‘haunted ballroom’ epilogue with reminiscences of all the preceding dances flickering subliminally as the lights fade: of its kind, simply nonpareil.
These quintessentially French pieces are, all three, piquantly in debt to Austro–German culture. Between the trauma of 1870 and its ghastly replay in 1914, French music reached the apogee of its native nature. Which, unlike the facile Mendelssohn/Liszt of Saint-Saëns or the perfervid Beethoven/Wagner of d’Indy, meant repudiation, at first reluctant and evasive, eventually indignant and wholesale, of all things Teutonic.
Yet even Ravel’s valses, while not resembling it in actual idiom, owe their very being to the Schubertian model. And where would Fauré’s song cycle be without Schumann’s; and Debussy’s Damoiselle without Tristan and Parsifal? Influence with Anxiety is what all three, in their blissful perfection, proclaim.
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