Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)
On June 10, 1899, leaving for a moment the music he was composing, Ernest Chausson called his eldest daughter, and they set off on their bicycles for the railway station at Limay, to meet his wife and the other children, who were returning from Paris. His daughter, pedaling faster, got ahead of her father. Turning around, she could not see him, so she retraced her path, only to find him lying dead at the foot of a carriage entrance. He had died instantly, his skull fractured. His life had lasted just 44 years. Chausson’s sensibility was full of intimations of mortality. At age 30 he had written ‘Do I still have ten years left to live? Then for a moment I feel fear, not of death, but of dying without having done what I was called to do. And I work…’
It had taken Chausson a long time to settle on his true vocation for music. Born into a well off family in Paris (his father had made his fortune helping Baron Haussmann in the redevelopment of Paris in the 1850s), he had first trained as a lawyer to please his father. For a while he vacillated between literature, painting, and music. A visit to Bayreuth in 1879 to hear the operas of Wagner helped him to decide for music, and he spent time at the Paris Conservatoire in the composition classes of Massenet and César Franck. Franck exercised a decisive influence on the young Chausson, not only on his style, which shows the harmonic language of Franck’s French brand of post-Liszt, post-Wagner romanticism, but also on the seriousness and fastidiousness of his approach to his art. Chausson was one of the leading disciples of Franck who put French music on a more serious path after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. Among his friends were artists and writers, as well as the young Debussy, who acknowledged a debt to Chausson’s refined and suggestive music.
Not needing to compose in order to live, Chausson could afford to be fastidious, and his output is small, even allowing for the shortness of his life. Like all composers in his milieu, he aspired to success in the opera house, and his most ambitious work is the opera Le Roi Arthus, completed in 1893 and posthumously premiered in 1903. Chausson was fascinated by the rediscovery of the early Middle Ages, and the Arthurian legends in particular (he wrote his own libretto for Le Roi Arthus). For his first orchestral work, the symphonic poem Viviane, composed in 1882, Chausson drew on an episode from the Arthurian legend involving Merlin the magician and his mistress the enchantress Viviane, which he found in a version from Brittany by the medievalist Théodore Claude Henri, vicomte Hersart de la Villemarqué (1815-1895). Chausson put the following synopsis at the head of the score:
Viviane and Merlin in the forest of Broceliande. Love scene. King Arthur’s messengers search the forest for the Sorcerer. Recalling his mission, Merlin wants to flee and escape the arms of Viviane. Enchantment scene. To detain him. Viviane puts Merlin to sleep and surrounds him with flowering hawthorns.
In a letter to a friend, written in 1886, Chausson said ‘You know my antipathy for descriptive music. And yet I felt incapable of writing pure music like that of Bach and Haydn. I needed to find another way.’ It is the atmosphere of the legend Chausson seeks to evoke. The symphonic poem falls into three sections. The first is a mysterious introduction, with muted strings, then horn calls, and a theme representing Merlin, for the violins in dialogue with the cellos. In the second episode the calls of Arthur’s messengers interact with Merlin’s theme as his struggle between love and duty inspires chromatically inflected music revealing Chausson’s debt to Wagner and Franck. After a mighty climax the trumpet calls become more distant, vanquished by the irresistible charm of the theme of Viviane, which is not without a certain evil undertone, for all its beauty. Chausson’s scoring, in his first orchestral essay, already reveals his typical scoring combining richness with a transparency sometimes foreshadowing impressionism. It is the work of ‘a sincere and gently melancholic poet’, as the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe described Chausson, who had written for him his most celebrated work, the Poème for violin and orchestra.
Eduard Colonne conducted the first performance of Viviane on March 31, 1883. Dissatisfied with it, Chausson revised the piece extensively for a performance at the Concerts Lamoureux in 1888.