I’ve spent a large part of my career in what you might call a niche area of classical music: lieder, the German word for songs. Hence I’m in South Korea (again) singing one of the most extraordinary creations of that tradition, Schubert’s song-cycle for voice and piano, Winterreise. Strangely enough, people here seem to love it.
There’s always been song, of course. But, at the beginning of the 19th century, something happened to make a particular sort of song a focus of artistic ambition for several successive generations of the greatest composers. Arias in oratorio or opera had scaled the aesthetic heights in the 18th century in the works of Bach, Handel and Mozart. But then, around 1800, the invention and accelerating development of the piano, hand in hand with the birth of German language nationalism, remade song. That’s what we mean when we talk of Schubert being the first great lieder composer: setting lyric poems by the likes of Schiller and Goethe and creating melodies of great power but also, and perhaps more importantly, piano accompaniments that were far more than accompaniments; music of complexity, depth and harmonic daring. There’s an ongoing exchange in Schubert and his successors between song and instrumental music of all sorts. And something harder to characterise, which has been handed on to the popular music of the recorded era: an excavation and exploration of personal identity seen through the kaleidoscope of longing and lost love. This may not be true of all lieder, but at least half of them probably qualify.
Music was the German art form par excellence, with -Beethoven a Romantic icon and Wagner’s influence—on painting and literature, as well as on music—overwhelming from the mid-19th century on. The battle between French and German culture, which continued throughout the 1800s, culminated in Thomas Mann’s 1914 essay “Thoughts in Wartime”, in which he -identified a struggle between German Kultur (deep, spiritual) and French Zivilisation (superficial, -materialistic). In the meantime, French composers had created a compelling flood of music, all in -opposition to the German model and its siren sounds.
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French art song, or mélodie, developed in this climate. Settings of French poetry—Verlaine, Hugo, Baudelaire, etc—in styles that are individual to each composer but which nevertheless exhale a very French atmosphere, somehow softer, somehow less intellectual than their German counterparts.
I was introduced to mélodie in 1989 in a series of masterclasses given in Aldeburgh, the English coastal town that was once the home of Britten, by two Francophone singers who were masters of the repertoire. Suzanne Danco, a Belgian soprano, was famous for her Mozart but also for her Mélisande in Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. I only had to sing a few bars to her for her to stop me and insist (rather crushingly) on the value of legato, the crucial binding of one note to the next. The Swiss tenor Hugues Cuénod was a legend. He sang for Noël Coward in New York in the 1920s and participated in the Monteverdi revival under Nadia Boulanger in the 1930s. Stravinsky was a fan and wrote several pieces for him, including the role of Sellem the auctioneer in The Rake’s Progress. He made his Met debut at the age of 84, retired from the stage aged 91 and died at the age of 108. Cuénod’s overwhelming advice was to draw inspiration in our singing from what we read and what we saw, to feed our imaginations; and, by the by, not to take ourselves too seriously.
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The year 2024 is the centenary of the French composer Gabriel Fauré’s death, so I’ve been programming his songs in my recitals.
Fauré is best known for his Requiem—which, famously, omits the sound and fury of a “Dies Irae”—but, born in 1845 (the year of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser) and dying in 1924 (Schoenberg was in full flow), and with moustache to die for, he was an essential bridge between the Romantic and the modern, a transition effected by a characteristically subtle use of ever more remote harmonies. In Faure’s most famous middle-period song, “Après un rêve” (1877), familiar harmonic patterns are studded with piquant moves away from the conventional.
Fauré’s way with harmony led him to the compelling mystery of late works such as the sublime “Chanson d’Ève” (listen to the great Janet Baker singing it), and it’s no surprise that he was Ravel’s teacher.
My favourite song of Fauré’s is another mid-period jewel, a setting of Paul Verlaine’s poem “Clair de Lune” (1887). It summons up a Watteauesque landscape of careless lovers and makes clear the characteristic emotional atmosphere of French music, which, despite stylistic and political revolutions, runs on from Louis XIV into the modern age, from Lully and Rameau to Barbara and Françoise Hardy:
Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur.
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
They seem not to believe in their happiness.
And their song mingles with the moonlight,
Listening to recordings of French song again—and particularly to the voice of the baritone Gérard Souzay, whose heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s—what strikes me, as much as the music itself, is the style, the sheer, supremely infinite softness of the singing, whispered and floated, void of all aggressive intent. It’s a sound that is difficult to find in our noisy age.
