Emmanuel Chabrier

 (1841-1894)

Idylle (Andantino, poco con moto)

Danse villageoise (Allegro risoluto)

Sous bois (Andantino)

Scherzo-valse (Allegro vivo)

As a very young man, Francis Poulenc put a coin in the slot at the Pathé shop in Paris to listen to a record by a pianist he admired, Edouard Risler, not knowing what he was going to hear. ‘Today I still tremble with emotion’, he recalled many years later, ‘thinking of the miracle that happened then; a new harmonic world opened up before me, and my own music has never forgotten that first baiser d’amour...’.  The music was Idylle, from Chabrier’s ten Pièces pittoresques (1880), in its original version for piano. It was to become the first number of the Suite pastorale, selections from these piano pieces orchestrated by the composer and first performed in Angers in 1888.

Poulenc admitted that ‘simpleton that I was’ he had thought Chabrier a minor musician. His new enthusiasm was shared. Debussy is reported to have said ‘Chabrier, Mussorgsky, Palestrina – that’s what I love’. Ravel paid Chabrier the tribute of orchestrating the Menuet pompeux from the Pièces pittoresques; the critic Calvocoressi called Chabrier ‘the direct forerunner of the modern school’, and Charles Koechlin, composer and teacher of composers, declared in 1930 ‘Chabrier was not only a great musician - one of the greatest - he remains misunderstood, and by many people’.

The Suite pastorale looks back to Chabrier’s childhood in the Auvergne, a region so distinctive that the French still have a saying ‘Neither a man, nor a woman, but an Auvergnat’. His parents counselled against a musical career, and Emmanuel trained in the law, becoming a civil servant in Paris, a functionary of the Ministry of the Interior. Only after a visit to Bayreuth in 1879 did he give up the civil service to devote himself entirely to music. His outlook remained that of the gifted amateur, though his achievements aroused the jealousy of professionals. Benjamin Godard, a well-schooled but limited composer, once said to him ‘What a pity, my dear Emmanuel, that you took up music so late’.  ‘What a pity, my dear Benjamin’, replied Chabrier, ‘you took it up so early’.

Chabrier’s breadth of artistic and intellectual interests is not always typical of musicians. He was a discriminating friend of painters, and bought some of the finest Manets, Monets, Renoirs, and Sisleys, long before they were famous; his collection included Un bar aux Folies-Bergères by Manet, who painted Chabrier’s portrait, and died in his arms.

Chabrier’s first major breakthrough was with the orchestral rhapsody España (1883), composed after a visit to Spain. This has remained his most popular piece, and its lusty boisterousness reveals the side of Chabrier immortalised in a caricature by Detaille, which recalls a description of Chabrier playing his España, ‘in a blaze of broken springs, hammers reduced to pulp and splintered keys’, a spectacle of epic grandeur in a drawing-room full of elegant women.

Chabrier’s best music, in the words of pianist Alfred Cortot, communicates an acutely sensuous pleasure; his harmony can be relished on the emotional palate as the connoisseur tastes a fine wine or bites through the scented flesh of a peach. A very different composer, César Franck, greeted the Pièces pittoresques, on their first performance, as something quite extraordinary, ‘music linking our timewith that of Couperin and Rameau’. Sense-impressions are distilled into evocative, lucid, and sensuous music.

Chabrier’s most representative music is not in his Wagner-influenced opera Gwendoline, but in pieces like the Suite pastorale and the light operas L'Etoile and Le Roi malgré lui. The Suite pastorale contains a virtual compendium of Chabrier’s musical devices - which, as Paul Dukas remarked - are his alone. Cortot called the Idylle, whose effect on Poulenc was so great, the gem of the collection (the Pièces pittoresques). Chabrier marked it ‘with freshness and simplicity’; the accompaniment, mainly for pizzicato strings, but with legato passages for each section in turn, is in the Lydian mode. Over it floats ‘a chaste and tender melody’ (Cortot)

The ‘village dance’ (Danse villageoise) is in Chabrier’s manner of provincial robustness, combined with a strictly formal approach to the Scherzo-Minuet form, with a Trio in the major key. Sous-bois evokes the murmur of trees, the play of light in a forest under the summer sun, and Ravel thought it one of the highlights of Chabrier’s oeuvre, remarkable for the ‘extreme refinement of the harmonies’.  In the orchestral version it becomes a set of mobile harmonies (augmented fifths and common chords) in fragmented melody, shared by the winds and upper strings, over an ostinato figure in the cellos and basses – musical pointillism - no wonder Debussy loved Chabrier. The Scherzo-valse is typical of Chabrier’s ability to sound fresh and spontaneous while imitating folk and dance music. Sophistication, good humour, and peasant charm, unusually blended in one of music’s great originals.

First published in ABC concert programs, 1996