EMERGING VOICES: Verlaine and Ars Gallica

This is the second in a series of posts I’ve written as part of the Emerging Voices project which is happening at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society the next two weeks. Specially, it is in relation to the New Voices concert. For more information about the project, please visit: https://www.pcmsconcerts.org/projects/emerging-voices/

The second foreign language I studied as a child, after Modern Greek, was French. As a result, when I began studying voice in earnest, the first non-English songs my teacher assigned me were songs in French by Reynaldo Hahn and Gabriel Fauré. It was through these songs that I discovered my love of singing classical music – I spent countless hours as a teenager scouring my anthology of Fauré songs for new music to learn and work on with my teacher.

Paul Verlaine

In these exquisite mélodies, the most common author of the texts selected was the French poet Paul Verlaine, who towards the end of his life would be given the honorific “Prince of Poets” by his compatriots. An emotionally unstable alcoholic and drug addict, Verlaine lived a life of extremes. Either in spite or because of his struggles with vice and mental illness, Verlaine became one of the leading figures in defining a new French way of making art with a transgressive ethos that he outlined in his manifesto-like poem, Art poétique.

The definition of a French aesthetic was a hotly debated topic amongst artists of all stripes during the Belle Époque. Shortly after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the Société Nationale de Musique was founded in an effort to promote French music to counter the predominant Germanic music of the era. Fauré was one of the Société’s early members, with composers such as Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy joining later on. The group’s motto made no bones about their nationalistic agenda: Ars gallica. 

As a student in New York, I once had a heated debate about the virtues of French and German music, in which a friend dismissively declared all French music to be lacking in depth. “It’s all so superficial!” he exclaimed. Incensed, I immediately cited examples of both Fauré and Debussy’s settings of Verlaine. Reading Verlaine’s poetic manifesto, it’s apparent that my friend’s argument is a misunderstanding of the French affect and mode of expression. Rather than looking to define the specificity of emotion, the French artists of the time sought to paint the chaotic haze of experiencing emotion through subtlety and nuance. 

Verlaine’s poems—having being set to music more than that of any other French composer—had a profound effect on his musical colleagues during the years leading up to the outbreak of World War I. Verlaine’s favorite musical settings of his poetry were those by Reynaldo Hahn, a popular guest at salons of the Belle Époque.Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Hahn was a naturalized French citizen who became quite well-known as a conductor, music critic, and composer of mélodies. He often performed his own works at these musical soirées, accompanying himself at the piano with a cigarette lazily hanging out of his mouth. 

While there is no documented evidence that Verlaine and Debussy ever met, the likelihood that the two came into contact at some point is very high, since Verlaine was living with his mother-in-law, Antoinette-Flore Mauté de Fleurville, during the years she was teaching the young composer. Either way, the influence of Verlaine upon Debussy was profound: despite the composer’s close friendships with many of the leading writers of his day, Debussy set Verlaine’s poetry more than that of any other poet. Almost one quarter of his nearly 80 songs are settings of Verlaine. 

Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées, drawn from Verlaine’s collection, Romances sans paroles, are some of Debussy’s earliest experiments in attempting to emulate the Symbolist traits of Verlaine’s poetry: the music of these songs feels almost weightless, with cloudy harmonies that seem to evaporate and blur into one another. 

Fauré was inspired by his passionate love affair with the soprano Emma Bardac (who would later have a mad affair with and marry Debussy), to set selections from the collection of poems Verlaine wrote in anticipation of his brief marriage to Mathilde Mauté, La bonne chanson, for a song cycle by the same name. The work had its premiere in a version for piano and voice at a salon concert in Paris in 1894, sung by the tenor Maurice Bagès – the same singer who had premiered some of Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées in concert just five years earlier. 

La bonne chanson marks the beginning of a new period in Fauré’s oeuvre, one in which he was beginning to explore new harmonic horizons. Upon hearing Fauré’s fast and furious harmonic shifts and bold tonal choices at the premiere performance, his former teacher, Camille Saint-Saëns, was concerned that his dear friend had perhaps gone insane. 

One notable compositional technique Fauré employed was reiterating musical themes that had occurred at various points throughout the cycle in the final song. While on the surface, this technique is reminiscent of Wagnerian leitmotifs, the effect is entirely different: the snippets of themes from the previous songs flow into one another at an alarming speed, flying by as if on gusts of wind, creating the perfect depiction of the manic, dream-like high Verlaine was clearly experiencing.

In the early 1900s, Nadia Boulanger enrolled as a student at the Paris Conservatory, ambitiously trailblazing her way towards a career as a professional composer. It’s easy to hear the influence of Fauré, a close family friend and her one-time teacher, on the young Nadia. Harmonies bleed into one another enharmonically, making any shift of tonality in her songs seem so nuanced that they are almost imperceptible. 

Verlaine died in 1895 in abject poverty, yet thousands of mourners attended his funeral, with multiple politicians and artists speaking at the service. One of those, the French politician and novelist Maurice Barrès, eulogized:

“If it is admitted, as we maintain, that hero-worship makes the strength of a country, and upholds the tradition of a nation, literary men and artists must be placed in the front rank of those who thus uphold their country and their race. No others in social life proclaim so unmistakably the perpetuity of individuality…  Henceforward, [Verlaine’s] ideas will take their place among those which constitute the national heritage.”