Pastorale
French Choral Music

The seasons, nature, love and the quasi-mythological—these were typical conceits of the so-called Romantic period, across all the arts. In part this was a reaction against the effects of the Industrial Revolution, whose harsh economic drive throughout the greater part of the 19th century had changed the face of European life forever. The 19th century was also an era which saw a rapid expansion in travel, facilitated by the railway and by steamships, broadening the mind and the experience of quite ordinary people. The exotic was no longer the province only of the rich—and in France, through the Paris Exhibitions in the 1880s, even the most far-flung parts of the globe could seem familiar. There was a fad for all things oriental: Léo Delibes’s opera Lakmé is but one manifestation of this fascination. There was also interest in places closer to home—a Scandinavian enthusiasm (which also spawned a Rhapsodie norvègienne by Edouard Lalo) inspired Délibes’s Les Norwègiennes. In this charming piece for women’s voices, the excitement of a journey in a sleigh is sketched with deft strokes in a style perhaps faintly reminiscent of Bizet. The text incidentally is by Philippe Gille, who was the co-librettist of Lakmé.

Alongside this plethora of influence, the bustle and sophistication of modern city life, there was the need to maintain—or rather to create—a simpler pastoral existence, an idyll which would allow a respite from the hurly-burly. If it did not exist, it must be imagined. It was a way, too, of asserting a faith in the country, the roots of the nation, the traditions which are at the heart of a people. The French approach to nature at this time was essentially escapist, idealising the charms of woods and streams in a way which, whilst it may evoke Marie-Antoinette playing at being a shepherdess, is as sincere as Constable painting his Hay Wain. It found expression in the poetry of Verlaine and others—in what can be thought of as recreations of the scenes of Watteau or Poussin, with their elegant nymphs and clean-cut shepherds set in richly wooded landscapes. Délibes’s Les Nymphes des bois creates just such a picture: nymphs desporting themselves amongst trees and streams—delicately flowing piano arpeggios supporting langorous, undulating vocal lines.

One manifestation of the desire for simplicity and the belief that this was to be found in the past was an interest in medieval art and manners. Images of chivalrous knights and damsels in distress can be found in many works of art in the late 19th century—again, often highly idealised. A further expression of this interest, and a more far-reaching one as far as music was concerned, was the rediscovery of plainchant. The Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Solesmes were reviving the techniques of this ancient art and a collection called Les Mélodies grégoriennes by Dom Pothier was published in 1881. There may have been some historical confusion, in that madrigals, pavanes and plainsong, crinolines, knights and courtly love, are not really close companions, but these were clearly sides of the same artistic coin for many at the end of the 19th century.

Fauré seems to have been very much taken with the subject of elegant lords and ladies engaged in amorous pursuits in shady groves, to the delicate accompaniment of lutes and fountains: several of his mélodies are settings of poetry in this vein. His Pavane op. 50 was originally written as an orchestral piece in 1886–87 but, at the suggestion of Élisabeth Vicomtesse Greffulhe, Fauré added choral parts using a text by the Comte Robert de Montesquiou. Fauré wrote that ‘the artfulness and coquetries of the female dancers and the great sighs of the male dancers will singularly enliven the music’; the choral version was first performed in April 1888 and it was heard once again, this time with real dancers, as part of an entertainment in the Bois de Boulogne on 21 July 1891.

In the slightly earlier Madrigal (1883), Fauré set words by Armand Silvestre: here, an antique atmosphere is created with simple choral writing and a delicate, harp-like accompaniment. Much has been made of the supposed relationship between the first theme of this piece and the Lutheran chorale Aus tiefer Not, to which it bears a passing resemblance: this is surely no more than the effect of Fauré’s employing an ‘old-fashioned’ melodic style deriving in part from plainsong, as did the German chorale melodies.

Saint-Saëns’s two partsongs to anonymous texts, Calme des nuits and Les Fleurs et les arbres, published in 1883, deal with the poet’s relationship to nature. This is a quintessential Romantic marriage between words and music. In Sérénade d’hiver, a group of men sing in disguise under a lady’s window, their music full of innuendo; in Hymne au printemps, also for male voices alone, heady chromaticism illustrates the effect of spring on the artist’s soul.

Jules Massenet won the Prix de Rome in 1863 and went to study with Liszt, thereby absorbing some of the declamatory style of Wagner; yet he never lost the lyricism which earned him the nickname ‘la fille de Gounod’. His evocation of nature, Chansons des bois d’Amaranthe, is certainly more ‘theatrical’ than that of Saint-Saëns. The amaranth (Greek amarantos = everlasting) is a blood-red flower whose petals never fade—the reference is classical, but there was also a 17th-century Swedish order of the Knights of the Amaranth, which would surely have caught the composer’s imagination. In this suite, he apostrophises birds, flowers, streams, even spring itself; the melodic lines are uncomplicated, generally using short phrases, with a sense of aspiration at the end of a phrase which recalls clearly the music of his most successful opera, Manon, and the choral writing is bold and colourful.

Debussy’s Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans are a conscious attempt to invoke a medieval atmosphere, written early in the composer’s career. The poet was a member of the French royal family, captured at Agincourt in 1415, who spent the last years of his life in Blois. The music inhabits a deliberately archaic sound world, with rather modal harmonies, flexible rhythms and pictorial choral writing, especially in the second song with its pervasive drum beat.

Ravel’s Trois Chansons are folksong-inspired: the texts, which he wrote himself, have some of the directness of early fairytales. The music too is lacking in sentimentality—though not of sentiment. The first song uses a simple strophic structure to make a rather cynical point about innocence and experience; the second is a haunting image of three birds of paradise carrying the message of a soldier’s death to the girl waiting for him at home; and the third is a virtuoso piece listing a host of dreadful sprites that wait in the woods, and how the old people have frightened them away—to the disappointment of the young people.

Joseph Canteloube harked back to a simpler age: he had studied at the Schola Cantorum (which was established in 1894 to provide what was seen as a more rigorous music education than that offered at the Conservatoire) and was deeply imbued with the spirit of the folk music from his native Auvergne. He brought out several collections of this music between 1923 and 1930, wrapping up the simple melodies with rich harmonies and sumptuous textures. This was perhaps the last flowering of a pastoral idealism that had already been all but swept away by the ravages of war—the optimism of the late 19th century could no longer be sustained in this new world; in painting, the calm delicacy of Corot’s trees, and the fantasy of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, had given way firstly to Cézanne’s more solid landscapes and then to Picasso’s angular reinterpretations and angrier colours—and by this time, music too had lost its innocence.