Program Notes

Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)
Chanson Perpetuelle, Op. 37 for Soprano, String Quartet and Piano (1898)

Notes for: July 13, 2010

Chausson was the son of a prosperous public-works contractor and, at his family’s urging, was initially trained as a lawyer. In the same year, 1877, that he was sworn in as a barrister, he wrote his first song and switched his career to music. With a sizable private income, he devoted the rest of his life to composition, maintaining a Paris salon frequented by young artists in many fields including Debussy, Cortot and Mallarmé.

At the relatively advanced age of 24, Chausson enrolled in the Paris conservatory to study instrumentation with Jules Massenet. There he fell under the influence of César Franck, who had introduced Wagnerian harmonic freedom and flexibility into French music. At first, he became a prominent member of the Franck circle, writing major stage and orchestral works in a highly dramatic style inherited from Wagner. After a few years, however, he concluded that the true spirit of French music was in more classical subtlety and restraint.

Much has been made by critics and biographers of Chausson’s tristesse — the poignant melancholy that characterizes much of his music. This element pervades the Chanson Perpétuelle, his last completed composition. Six months later he was fatally injured when his bicycle ran into a stone wall near his country home.

The poem, by Charles Cros, tells the morbid story of a lover’s abandonment and contemplated suicide. To underscore the text’s more dramatic passages, Chausson called for either an orchestra or a string quartet in addition to the piano. At the opening, the piano, against lush harmony in the strings, establishes a mood of languor and tender resignation. This melody is then modulated and varied rhythmically in accordance with the text, and the song closes on a note of complete despair.

Copyright © 2010 by Willard J. Hertz