The Foundations of modern French nationalism: Berlioz; the operatic masters; Saint-Saëns, Lalo, Franck, etc.; conditions favoring native art development—The pioneers of ultra-modernism: Emanuel Chabrier and Gabriel Fauré—Vincent d'Indy: his instrumental and his dramatic works—Other pupils of Franck: Ernest Chausson; Henri Duparc; Alexis de Castillon; Guy Ropartz.
Ultra-modern French music constitutes a movement whose significance it may be still too early to estimate judicially, whose causes are relatively obscure and unprophetic, but whose attainments are exceedingly concrete from the historical viewpoint aside from the æsthetic controversies involved. Emerging from a generation hampered by over-regard for convention, vacillating and tentative in technical method in almost all respects save the theatre, and too often artificial there, a renascence of French music has been assured comparable in lucidity of style and markedly racial qualities to the golden days of a Couperin or a Rameau, while fearing no contemporary rival in emotional discrimination and delicate psychological analysis, and not infrequently attaining a masterly and fundamental vigor. The French composers of to-day have virtually freed dramatic procedures from Italian traditions, and even gradually distanced the Wagnerian incubus. They have re-asserted a nationalistic spirit in music, with or without dependence on folk-song material, with a potent individuality of idiom which has not been so persistent since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, French critical activity, scholarship, research, educational institutions, standards of performance have risen to a pitch of excellence formerly denied to all save the Germans.
While the roots of this attainment go back half a century and more, the flower of achievement is still so recent as to pique inquiry. It must be acknowledged that on the surface no causes are discoverable which are proportionate to the results attained, but closer examination discloses an unmistakable drift. During almost three-quarters of the nineteenth century, despite the epoch-making work of Berlioz, the efforts of French composers were centred in one or another of the forms of opera. Auber, Boieldieu, Meyerbeer and others were succeeded by Gounod, Thomas and Délibes, leading insensibly to Massenet and Bizet. Gounod's Faust (1859) and Roméo et Juliette (1867), Thomas' Mignon (1866), Délibes' ballet Coppélia (1870), Massenet's early work Don César de Bazan (1872), and Bizet's Carmen (1875), unjustly pilloried as 'Wagnerian,' were typical of the characteristic tendencies of the period.
Yet it was precisely at a time when Parisians were seemingly engrossed in the theatre, that signs of radical departure were apparent, and these may be fittingly considered the forerunners of the later standpoint. Up to nearly the middle of the nineteenth century the Concerts du Conservatoire, themselves the successors to somewhat anomalous organizations, were the only regular orchestral concerts in Paris. In 1849 Antoine Seghers reorganized the Société de Sainte Cécile, at which works by Gounod, Gouvy, and Saint-Saëns were occasionally in evidence. In 1851 Jules Pasdeloup founded the Société des Jeunes Artistes du Conservatoire, merged ten years later into the Concerts Populaires, which afforded a definite opportunity, if somewhat grudgingly accorded, to young French composers. In 1855 Jules Armingaud formed a string quartet, later augmented by wind instruments, for the popularization of chamber music. He persisted against the obstacles of popular indifference, and ultimately became even fashionable. About this time also came an awakening in the study of plain-chant and the religious music of the sixteenth and preceding centuries. In 1853 Niedermeyer founded the École de Musique Religieuse, a significant institution which eventually broadened its educative scope into a fairly wide survey of musical literature. Other instrumental organizations of later date, and one particularly significant attempt at educational enfranchisement, will receive mention at the proper place. The foregoing instances serve to point out the seeming paradox of the rise of instrumental music at an apparently unpropitious time.
Without minimizing the genuine impetus given to instrumental music by the establishment of the foregoing organizations, the trend of ultra-modern French tendencies would have been dubious were it not for the preparatory foundation laid by Camille Saint-Saëns, Edouard Lalo and César Franck. Since the work of these men has already been estimated in previous chapters, it will suffice to indicate the precise nature of the influence exerted by each.
Saint-Saëns, possessing marvellous assimilative ingenuity as well as intellectual virtuosity, brought the contrapuntal manner of Bach, the forms of Beethoven, and the romanticism of Mendelssohn and Schumann into skilled combination with his own somewhat illusive and paradoxical individuality. To this he added a wayward fancy for exotic material, not treated however in its native spirit, but often in a scholastic manner that nevertheless often had a charm of its own. From the preparatory standpoint his conspicuous virtue lay in the incredible fertility with which he produced a long series of chamber music works, concertos and symphonies possessing such salient qualities of invention and workmanship as to force their acknowledgment from the Parisian public. If his music at its worst is little better than sterile virtuosity in which individual conviction seems in abeyance, such works as the fifth piano concerto, third violin concerto and third symphony (to name a few only) bear a well-nigh classic stamp in balance between expression and formal mastery. Saint-Saëns, then, popularized the sonata form, in its various manifestations, by means of a judicious mixture of conventional form and Gallic piquancy, so that a hitherto indifferent public was forced to applaud spontaneously at last. If to a later generation Saint-Saëns seems over-conventional and at times sententious rather than eloquent, we must remember that in its day his music was thought subversive of true progress, and unduly Teutonic in its artistic predilections. To-day we ask why he was not more unhesitatingly subjective. But possibly that would be expecting too much of a pioneer. Any estimate of Saint-Saëns would be incomplete without mention of his effective championing of the symphonic poem at a period when it was still under suspicion. His four specimens of this type show impeccable workmanship, piquant grace, true Gallic economy in the disposition of his material. They undoubtedly paved the way for works of later composers manifesting alike greater profundity of thought and higher qualities of the imagination.
Edouard Lalo stands in sharp contrast to Saint-Saëns. He was of an impressionable, dramatic temperament, drawn spontaneously toward the exotic and the coloristic. His Spanish origin betrays itself in the vivacity of his rhythms, and the picturesque quality of his melodies. If indeed the crowning success of a career full of reverses was the opera Le Roi d'Ys (sketched 1875-6, revised 1886-7) produced in 1888 when the composer was sixty-five, his services to instrumental music are none the less palpable. If Saint-Saëns turns to the exotic as a refreshment from a species of intellectual ennui, with Lalo it is the result of a fundamental instinct. Lalo's ultimately characteristic vein is to be found in concertos, of lax if not incoherent form, employing Spanish, Russian and Norwegian themes, a Norwegian Rhapsody for orchestra, and scintillant suites of nationalistic dances from a ballet Namouna. He became a deliberate advocate of 'local color' treated with a veracious and not a conventional atmosphere, in which the brilliant orchestral style was more than a casual medium. His salient qualities were romantic conviction and emotional ardor, in which he provided a sincere and positive example whose influence is tangible in later composers. Herein lies his historical import.
It may seem unnecessary to refer again to the unselfish, laborious yet exalted personality of César Franck, or needless to rehearse the humble and patient obscurity of his life for almost thirty years, the gradual assembling of his devoted pupils, the unfolding of his superb later works, and their posthumous general recognition, but it is only through such reiteration that the causes of his position become manifest. For it is precisely through such vicissitudes that convictions are forged and that the composers' idiom becomes forcefully eloquent. Franck was not content with superficial assimilation of technical procedures, nor with a facile eclecticism, hence it is the moral character of the artist which has affected his disciples to a degree even overshadowing his technical instruction. Like Saint-Saëns, Franck went directly to Bach for the essence of canonic and fugal style, to Beethoven for the cardinal principles of the variation and sonata forms. But unlike Saint-Saëns he did not detach external characteristics and apply them half-heartedly; he grasped the basic qualities of the music he studied, yet expressed himself freely and elastically in his own speech. He taught and practised not the letter but the spirit of style.
As regards historic import, Franck's harmonic idiom (while remotely related to that of Liszt), perfectly commensurate with his seraphic ideality, has become infiltrated more or less into the individuality of all his pupils. Less imitated but of great intrinsic significance is Franck's virtual reincarnation of the canon, chorale prelude, fugue and variation forms in terms of modern mystical expressiveness. His crowning historical feat was the fusion of hints from Beethoven (fifth and ninth symphonies), Berlioz's somewhat artificial but suggestive manipulation of themes, Liszt's plausible transformation of musical ideas for a programmistic purpose, into an independent solution of thematic unity employing a 'generative' theme to supply all or nearly all the thematic material. It may be suggested that Saint-Saëns had anticipated Franck in this respect (third symphony in C minor), but the latter had already worked out the idea in his quintet (1878-79) and there are germs of a similar treatment in his first trio (1841).[44] If Franck's pupils have adopted this idea of thematic variety based upon unity, in differing degrees of fidelity, this device remains a favorite procedure with the Franckist school, and Vincent d'Indy has employed its resources with conspicuous success.
But the secret of Franck's enduring influence does not consist solely in the genuine creative aspect of his technical mastery despite its ineffaceable example. It lies equally in the pervading morality of his æsthetic principles, and in the intrinsic message of his musical thought. In place of vivacious, piquant but often artificial and conventionalized emotion of a recognizably Gallic type, he brought to music a serenely mystical Flemish (or, to be more exact, Walloon) temperament, a nature naïvely pure and lofty, a character of placid aspiration and consummate trust. His faith moved technical and expressive mountains. Through the steadfastly permeating quality of his artistic convictions he counteracted the superficial and meretricious elements in French music, and substituted the calm but radiant ideals of a gospel of beauty which he not only preached but lived in his own works. Understood only by the few almost to the hour of his death, he preceded his epoch so far in fearless self-expression that it seems almost inaccurate to characterize him as a preparatory figure. He is not only the greatest of these, a forerunner in many respects of a later period, but also a prophet to whom one wing of French composers look for their inspiration and solace.
The foregoing names are not alone in their contributory effect upon modern French composers. Among many, a few names may be selected as worthy of mention. Georges Bizet, essentially of the theatre, in his overtures Roma (1861), Patrie (1875), the suite Jeux d'Enfants (1872), a charming series of miniatures, as well as the classic suites from the incidental music to Daudet's L'Arlésienne, disclose a remarkable and specific gift for instrumental music, whose continuance was only limited by his untimely death.
Benjamin Godard, who presumably may have also died before attaining the summit of his powers, was an over-fertile composer of indisputable melodic gift and spontaneity of mood, whose most conspicuous defect was an almost total lack of critical discrimination. In consequence, few of his works have survived, and then chiefly for the practical usefulness of a few pieces for violin or piano.
Jules Massenet, even more emphatically destined for the theatre than Bizet, showed in his early works, such as the overtures Pompeia (1865), Phèdre (1873), Les Erynnies (suite from incidental music to the drama by Leconte de Lisle, 1873), as well as in numerous orchestral suites and shorter pieces, an unusual instinct for concise precision of form, clarity of style, and an extraordinarily dextrous, if at times coarse, manipulation of the orchestra. But his sympathies were never with the 'advanced school,' and his influence, a considerable force despite the sneers of critics, has been exerted almost entirely in the field of opera.
As a further preliminary to the evolution of ultra-modern French music, several important manifestations of progress must be discussed. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, an irretrievable misfortune to the French people politically, acted as a direct and far-reaching stimulus toward a nationalistic tendency in music. It led to the rejection of extra-French influences, that of Wagner among them, although the current of imitation became ultimately too strong to be resisted. It brought about a conscious striving toward individuality in technical methods and the deliberate attainment of racial traits in expression. The strength and unity of this sentiment among French musicians was strikingly exemplified in the founding as early as 1871 of the National Society of French Music by Romain Bussine and Camille Saint-Saëns. Its purpose, as indicated in the device Ars Gallica, was to provide for and encourage the performance of works by French composers, whether printed or in manuscript.[45] From the beginning the Society has striven amazingly, and it is not too much to assert that its programs constitute a literal epitome of French musical evolution and progress. Saint-Saëns, the first president of the Society, resigned owing to disagreement over a policy adopted. César Franck then acted virtually as president until his death in 1890. Since then Vincent d'Indy has been at its head.
The pioneer efforts of Pasdeloup in establishing orchestral concerts were ably continued by Édouard Colonne in connection with different organizations beginning in 1873, and by Charles Lamoureux in 1881. Colonne's great memorial was the efficient popularization of Berlioz, while Lamoureux achieved a like service, not without surmounting almost insuperable obstacles, for the music of Wagner. Both coöperated in encouraging the work of native composers, if less ardently than the National Society, still to a sufficient extent to prove to the Parisian public the existence of French music of worth. In other respects the educational achievement of both orchestras has been admirable, and both are active to-day, the Colonne concerts being directed by Gabriel Pierné, the Lamoureux concerts by Camille Chevillard.
In 1892, Charles Bordes (1863-1905) founded a choral society, Les Chanteurs de Saint Gervaise, to spread a knowledge of the choral music of Palestrina and his epoch, as well as the study of plain-chant. Four years later this society was merged into the Schola Cantorum, an école supérieure de musique, with Charles Bordes, Alexandre Guilmant and Vincent d'Indy as founders, to perpetuate the spirit and teachings of César Franck. Intended originally as an active protest against the superficial standpoint of the Conservatoire before the administration of Gabriel Fauré, the Schola aims to have the pupil pass through the entire course of musical evolution with a curriculum of exhaustive thoroughness. Aside from the practicability or the æsthetic soundness of this theory, the Schola attempts to furnish a comprehensive education that is praiseworthy in its aims. Further than this the attitude of the Schola possesses an historical import in that it embodies a deliberate reaction against the revolutionary tendencies of Debussy and Ravel, and aims to conserve the outlook of Franck.
To complete the preparatory influences bearing upon ultra-modern French music one should mention more than tentatively the palpable stimulation of the so-called 'Neo-Russian School' comprising Balakireff, Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Cui, and more particularly Moussorgsky. While these men have reacted more noticeably upon individuals rather than upon modern French composers as a group, their example has been none the less tangible. Russian sensitiveness as to orchestral timbre, their use of folk-song, their predilection for novel rhythms, exotic atmosphere, have all appealed to the receptive sensibilities of the ultra-modern French composer.
The pioneers of ultra-modern French music are Emmanuel Chabrier and Gabriel Fauré, men of strikingly dissimilar temperaments and equally remote style and achievement. Each is, however, equally significant in his own province.
Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-94) was born at Ambert (Puy-de-Dôme) in the South of France. One can at once infer his temperament from his birthplace. For Chabrier combined seemingly irreconcilable elements: robust vigor, ardent sincerity and intense impressionability. With an inexpressible sense of humor, he possessed a delicate and distinguished poetic instinct side by side with deeply human sentiments. His early bent toward music was only permitted with the understanding that it remain an avocation. Accordingly Chabrier came to Paris to be educated at the age of fifteen, obtained his lawyer's certificate when he was twenty-one and forthwith entered the office of the Ministry of the Interior. In the meantime he had acquired astonishing skill as a pianist, studied harmony and counterpoint, made friends with many poets, painters and musicians, among them Paul Verlaine, Édouard Manet, Duparc, d'Indy, Fauré and Messager. 'Considered up to then as an amateur,'[46] Chabrier surprised professional Paris with an opéra comique in three acts, L'Étoile (1877) (played throughout this country without authorization and with interpolated music by Francis Wilson as 'The Merry Monarch'), and a one-act operetta, L'Éducation manquée (1879), both of which were described as 'exceeding in musical interest the type of piece represented.'[47] A visit to Germany with Henri Duparc, where he heard Tristan und Isolde, affected his impressionable nature so deeply that he resolved to give himself entirely to music and in 1880 resigned from his position at the Ministry. (His paradoxical character was never more succinctly illustrated than by the fact that he later composed 'Humorous Quadrilles on Motives from Tristan.')[48]
In 1881 Chabrier became secretary and chorus master for the newly founded Lamoureux concerts, and helped to produce portions of Lohengrin and Tristan. During this year he composed the 'Ten Picturesque Pieces' for piano, from which he made a Suite Pastorale, in which the orchestral idiom was not always skillful. From his position in the Lamoureux orchestra he soon learned the secrets of orchestral effect from their source. In 1882 he went to Spain, notebook in hand, and in the following year burst upon the Parisian public with a brilliant rhapsody for orchestra on Spanish themes entitled España. This highly coloristic, poetic and impassioned piece at once placed him in the front rank of contemporary French composers, and remains a landmark in a new epoch for its conviction, spontaneous inspiration, rhythmic vitality and individual treatment of the orchestra. If Lalo had shown the way, Chabrier at once surpassed the older musician on his own ground.
During the next few years Chabrier produced some of his most characteristic works, the 'Three Romantic Waltzes' for two pianos, one of which evoked enthusiasm from a Parisian wit for its 'exquisite bad taste,' a remarkable idyllic scena for solo, chorus and orchestra, La Sulamite, a Habañera, transcribed for piano and also for orchestra. But by far the most ambitious work of these years was a serious opera Gwendoline on a text by Catulle Mendès, produced at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels in 1886. Unfortunately the artistic success of this opera was abruptly closed by the bankruptcy of the management. But Germany received Gwendoline with marked favor, and it was performed at Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Dresden, Munich and Düsseldorf.
Gwendoline, despite some obvious defects, is a work of unusual historical import, since it constitutes the first thorough-going attempt, aside from the tentative efforts of Reyer, Bizet, Massenet and others, to incorporate the dramatic reforms of Wagner in an opera of distinctively French character. Mendès' poem on a legendary subject is frankly imitative of scenes and characters from Wagner's music dramas. Chabrier as frankly uses leading-motives, yet he does not conform slavishly to the Wagnerian symphonic treatment of them. Moreover Chabrier is under an equal obligation to Wagner in the use of the orchestra, if indeed there are many pages and scenes which are unmistakably Gallic in their delicacy of conception and in individual color effects. Indeed, there was nothing in Chabrier's previous career to presuppose such genuine dramatic gifts, such fanciful poetry or such depths of sentiment as are to be discovered in this work, even though Mendès' text is commonplace, and his drama too ill-proportioned to form the basis of a satisfactory opera. It cannot be denied that the apotheosis of the dying lovers at the end of Act II is somewhat tawdry and mock heroic in the persistent use of a banal theme; on the other hand, the opening chorus of Act I, Gwendoline's ballad in the same act, the delicate sensibility of the prelude to Act II, the charming bridal music including the tender Epithalame in the same act, all go to establish the intrinsic value and the pioneer force of the work. Gwendoline is and remains a magnificent experiment, which still preserves much of its vitality intact.
Justifiably discouraged, if not overmastered, by the misfortunes attending the production of Gwendoline, Chabrier nevertheless brought out in the following year (1887) an opéra comique, Le Roi malgré lui, in which the lyric charm, vivacity and humor of the music achieved an instant success. Within a few days, however, the Opéra Comique burned to the ground. Despite this crushing blow, Chabrier continued to persist in composition. He published many songs, fantastic, grotesque and sentimental, among them the inimitable 'Villanelle of the Little Ducks,' a poignant and exquisitely lyric chorus for women's voices and orchestra, 'To Music' (1890), a rollicking Bourée fantasque (1891) for piano, one of the boldest and most paradoxical instances of his combining of humor and poetic atmosphere. In addition he was working feverishly at another opera, Briseis, which he hoped to make his masterpiece, when his health gave way. When, after appalling struggles, Chabrier had induced the Opéra to give Gwendoline late in 1893, he was too ill to realize or participate in his success and in the following year he died.
The most striking feature in Chabrier's art was his uncompromising sincerity and directness. He expressed himself in his music with undeviating fidelity, despite the shattering of conventions involved. Herein lies the intrinsic value of his music, and the potency of his example. Whether his medium were a humorous song, a fantastic piano-piece, a pastoral idyl or a tragic drama, he followed his creative impulse with an outspoken daring not to be equalled since that stormy revolutionary, Berlioz. Chabrier possessed a positive genius for dance-rhythms and humorous marches which he redeemed from coarseness by surprising turns of melodic and harmonic inventiveness. Thus the choeur dansé from the second act of Le Roi malgré lui, the first of the 'Three Romantic Waltzes,' the witty Joyeuse Marche and finally España are genuinely classics, despite their lack of 'seriousness.' But Chabrier was equally epoch-making in the sincerity and glamour with which he painted lyric moods of poetic intensity and extremely personal sentiment. Gwendoline's ballad, the bridal music and Epithalame from the same opera, La Sulamite and À la Musique display an astonishing variety in scope of sentiment for the robust and almost over-exuberant composer of España and the Bourée fantasque. In sensuous and poignant imaginativeness again, Chabrier is the forerunner to a considerable extent of the later group whose essential purpose was truthfulness of atmosphere. While as a dramatic composer Chabrier followed deliberately in the footsteps of Wagner, his own expressive individuality maintained itself as persistently as could be expected from the force of the spell to which it was subjected. Also, Chabrier was in this respect but one of many, and not until the fusion of Wagnerian method and French individuality had been tried out, could the native composer at last enfranchise himself. Harmonically, Chabrier was bold and defiant in a generation which was submissive to convention. With an idiom essentially his own, he foreshadowed many so-called innovations in sequences of seventh chords, the use of ninths, startling modulations, and even a preparing of the whole-tone scale. In short, Chabrier's legacy to French music was that of a self-confident personality, daring to express himself with total unreserve in an assimilative age which deferred to public taste and superficialities of style.
Between Chabrier and Gabriel Fauré there can be no comparison, and no parallel save that both have exerted a constructive influence on modern French music. Where Chabrier was high-spirited almost to boisterousness, Fauré is suave, urbane, polished, a man of society who nevertheless preserves curiously poetic and mystical instincts. Born in 1845 at Pamiers, in that district known as the Midi, he is of the reflective rather than the spontaneous type. Meeting with a relatively slight opposition from his father in cultivating his early manifested gift for music, he came to Paris when only nine years of age and studied for eleven years at Niedermeyer's École de Musique Religieuse. He studied first with Pierre Dietsch, who is remembered chiefly for his purchase of Wagner's text to 'The Flying Dutchman' and for the inconspicuous success of his music, then with Saint-Saëns, who drilled him thoroughly in Bach and the German romanticists. After four years' incongenial work at Rennes, as organist and teacher (in the latter capacity watchful mothers were loath to confide their daughters' education to the attractive youth), he served in the Franco-Prussian war. Then, returning to Paris, he occupied various positions in Parisian churches before settling finally at the Madeleine. From 1877 to 1889 he made several trips to Germany to see Liszt and to hear Wagner's music. During these journeys he won glowing comments from such diverse personalities as von Bülow, César Cui and Tschaikowsky. In 1896 he became teacher of composition at the Paris Conservatory; in 1905 he became director, and still holds this position. He has thoroughly reorganized the Conservatory, enlarged the scope of its curriculum, especially as regards composition, and has accomplished significant results as a teacher.
Fauré has not been equally successful in every field of composition. His development has been inward. He is first and foremost a composer of songs, and his attainment in this direction alone would maintain his position. He has been a fertile writer of piano pieces. Many of them are disfigured by a light salon style; a considerable number, however, are of intrinsically poetic expression. Despite respectable achievements in chamber music (he has been awarded prizes), the quintet for piano and strings op. 89 (1906) is the one outstanding work which is conspicuous in modern French music, although the early violin sonata, op. 13 (1876), had its day of popularity. He has written some agreeable choral music, of which the cantata 'The Birth of Venus' is notable if unequal. There is noble music in the Requiem op. 48 (1887) and the final number In Paradisum is an exceptionally fine instance of mystical expression. Fauré's orchestral music is relatively insignificant, and his incidental music to various dramas has not left a permanent mark, save for the thoroughly charming suite arranged from the music to Pelléas et Mélisande op. 80 (1898). Not until the performance of Pénélope (1913) at Monte Carlo and Paris has Fauré accomplished a successful opera.
In song-writing, however, Fauré has achieved a remarkable distinction not exceeded by any of his countrymen. Some of the early songs dating from the years spent at Rennes, as Le Papillon et la Fleur and Mai, suggest naturally enough the influence of Saint-Saëns. Others in the first volume, Sérénade Toscane, Après un rêve, and Sylvie, show clearly a growing independence, while Lydia in its delicate archaism foreshadows Fauré's later achievements in this style. From 1880 onwards, Fauré at once launches into his own subtle and fascinating vein. If some of the songs in a second volume suggest the salon as do many of the piano pieces, they have a peculiar elegance of mood and a finesse of workmanship which elevate them above any hint of vulgarity. Such are the songs Nell, Rencontre and Chanson d'Amour. But there are many songs in the same volume which bespeak eloquently Fauré's higher gifts for lyrical interpretation and imaginative delineation of mood. Among these the most salient are Le Secret (1882), remarkable for its intimate sentiment, En Prière, delicately mystical though slightly sentimental, Nocturne (1886), which is original in its harmonic idiom; Clair de Lune (1887), adroitly suggestive of Verlaines' Watteauesque text; Les Berceaux (1882), expansive in its human emotion; and Les Roses d'Ispahan, replete with an impassioned exoticism. In a third volume are two songs which show Fauré's individuality in a significantly broader scope. These are Au cimitière (1889), a profound elegy, typical of the outspoken lamentation of the Latin temperament, and Prison, in which the tragic emotion is heightened by an intensely declamatory style. Fauré has published other sets of songs, among them La Bonne Chanson (1891-92), texts by Verlaine, and La Chanson d'Ève (1907-10), texts by Charles Van Lerbergle, which contain many striking specimens of his delicate lyricism, but none more significant, except possibly from the virtue of added maturity, than those already mentioned. As a whole, the imaginative and expressive traits of Fauré's songs are partially due to his unerring instinct in the choice of texts by the most distinguished French poets, including Leconte de Lisle, Villiers de Lisle-Adam, Paul Verlaine, Jean Richepin, Sully-Prudhomme, Armand Silvestre, Charles Grandmougin, Charles Baudelaire and others.
It is not too much to say that Fauré has vitalized the song as no French composer had done hitherto, and that his influence has been paramount among his younger contemporaries despite divergences of individuality. Furthermore, weighing the differences of race and temperament, they can be successfully compared with the German romanticists. If they do not scale the same heights, sound the same depths, or approach the artless simplicity of German lyricism, their poetry is far more subtle, imaginative and varied in its infinite differentiation of mood. In these songs are the manifestations of suave elegance, individual perfume, sometimes sensuous, sometimes mystical, a singularly poetic essence expressed in music that delights alike by its refined workmanship, melodic and harmonic ingenuity. In his songs, Fauré is at once transitory and definitive; he begins experimentally, but soon attains ultra-modern significance.
Pénélope, text by Réné Fauchois, is a lyric drama presenting the legend of Ulysses' return with a few unessential variants. It does not attempt therefore a drama of large outlines, but is content to remain within the scope prescribed by its frame. Fauré also has wisely followed within similar lines as being the more compatible with his lyric talent. Nevertheless we find in many episodes the distinguished invention which marks his songs, a style which if somewhat too restrained is nevertheless adequate. The first act contains many passages of lyrical and emotional charm, but not until the climax of the third act (the slaying of the suitors) does Fauré arrive at genuine intensity. If Pénélope cannot be classed with Pelléas et Mélisande or Louise, if it does not convince one that Fauré is a born dramatist, it contains too much that is poignantly beautiful to be dismissed hastily. Furthermore it possesses distinct historical import as owing virtually nothing to the thralldom of Wagnerism. From this standpoint it marks a conscious path of effort which has engaged French composers for thirty years or so.
If some critical attention should rightfully be given Fauré's Elegy for violoncello and piano op. 24 (1883), the quintet, one of his noblest and most individual works, the Requiem, the incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande, these omissions are purposely made to concentrate appreciation on Fauré as a song writer. If he is a significant figure among French musicians of to-day on the intrinsic merits of his creative fancy, he deserves none the less to be recorded as an important innovator from the technical standpoint. He has adapted, either literally or freely, modal harmony to lyrical or dramatic suggestion. If Saint-Saëns had already done this in his third symphony (finale), Fauré has employed this medium with greater fluidity and poetic connotation. Moreover this device has been partially imitated by Debussy. In his use of secondary sevenths in conventional sequence, the use of altered chords suggesting the whole-tone scale, of ninths, elevenths and thirteenths, he has gone beyond Chabrier, and furnished many a hint to later composers. He is also original and evolutionary in his ingeniously transitory modulations, adding a spice of surprise to his music. A conspicuous defect, on the other hand, is his abuse of the sequence, melodic or harmonic, a shortcoming which has been transmitted in some degree to his pupil, Maurice Ravel. But after all critical cavilling and analysis of his harmonic originality his enduring charm and sincerity of sentiment defy analysis or reconstruction.
If the pupils of César Franck are regarded to-day as constituting a definitely reactionary wing in French music, they had in their youth to contend with bitter and outspoken criticism for their propagation of dangerously 'modern' tendencies. On the one hand, they were under suspicion for their uncompromising fidelity to their master's technical and æsthetic tenets, on the other they were abused for their eager receptivity to Wagnerian principles in dramatic reform and use of the orchestra. In addition, they had to justify the innovating features (both harmonically and melodically) of their own definite individualities.
To-day we can look back at the struggle and see that in reality they were contending for principles essentially moderate and even classical in drift, especially when viewed in the light of more revolutionary younger contemporaries. We realize that in the main the influence of Wagner was enormously salutary, even if it postponed considerably the final achievement of a positively nationalistic dramatic idiom. The lesson of an opera which should genuinely unite music and drama, of an orchestral style at once of greater scope and of finesse in illustrative detail, was sadly needed. Moreover it became at last an honor to have been a pupil of Franck, and many claimed this distinction who were not genuine disciples in reality. In addition there were some, like Augusta Holmès, who studied under Franck but who were never materially influenced by him, just as there were others like Paul Dukas who showed the imprint of Franck's methods without actually having been his pupil. Vincent d'Indy thus enumerates the real pupils of Franck: Camille Bênoit, Pierre de Bréville, Albert Cahen, Charles Bordes, Alexis de Castillon, Ernest Chausson, Arthur Coquard, Henri Duparc, Augusta Holmès, Vincent d'Indy, Henri Kinkelmann, Guillaume Lekeu, Guy Ropartz, Louis de Serres, Gaston Vallin and Paul de Wailly. Of these de Castillon, Chausson, Duparc, d'Indy, Lekeu and Ropartz may be considered as representative, and d'Indy by virtue of the totality of his activity is entitled to first consideration.
Vincent d'Indy, born at Paris, March 27, 1851, of a family of ancient nobility coming from Ardèche in the Cévennes, has steadily maintained an attitude of intellectual aristocracy toward his art, although like his master Franck he has labored most democratically for the advancement of musical education.[49] Left motherless when an infant, d'Indy was brought up by his grandmother, Mme. Théodore d'Indy, of whom he likes to record that she had 'known Grétry and Monsigny, and shown a keen appreciation of Beethoven in 1825.'[50] It was owing to her that d'Indy came early in contact with the music of Bach and Beethoven. Piano lessons under Diemer occupied him from the age of ten onwards, and after 1865 he studied piano and harmony at the Paris Conservatoire with Marmontel and Lavignac. But d'Indy was also genuinely interested in composition, and by 1870 he finished and published some piano pieces, a short work for baritone and chorus, and projected others of varying dimensions. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, d'Indy enlisted and served throughout. After the war he took up the study of law in a half-hearted manner, but his introduction by Henri Duparc to César Franck in 1872 settled his musical career definitely. While Franck criticized severely the piano quartet that d'Indy brought him, he was quick to perceive the latent qualities of the young composer. Forthwith d'Indy studied the organ with Franck at the Conservatoire, but recognizing the inadequate opportunity of obtaining any technical drill in composition at this institution, he became Franck's private pupil. With him he worked faithfully and pertinaciously, and received not only an exhaustive technical grounding, but an illuminating æsthetic comradeship rich in comprehensive discussions of art-principles. D'Indy soon joined the Société Nationale de Musique Française and became an energetic worker in its behalf, being secretary for nearly ten years and becoming president after the death of Franck in 1890. Under his leadership the Society has wonderfully extended its activity. In 1873 he spent a fruitful month with Liszt at Weimar; in 1876 he heard a performance of 'The Ring of the Nibelungs' at Bayreuth, and in 1881 he heard 'Parsifal.' From 1873 to 1878 he was kettle-drummer and chorus-master in Colonne's orchestra, and in 1887 chorus-master for Lamoureux, both exceedingly valuable practical experiences. In 1885 the city of Paris awarded d'Indy the first prize for his choral work Le Chant de la Cloche, whose reception in the following year placed him in the front rank of French composers. In 1896 d'Indy with Charles Bordes and Alexandre Guilmant founded the Schola Cantorum as an école supérieure de musique,[51] to perpetuate the spirit and practical essence of Franck's teachings, to restore the study of plain-chant and the music of the Palestrinian epoch to its proper dignity, and to include in its curriculum masterpieces from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. With the death of Bordes in 1909 (compelled by reason of ill health to live in the south of France, where he founded a branch of the Schola at Montpellier in 1905) and of Guilmant in 1911, d'Indy became sole director of the Schola. In this position he has been prodigal of thought and strength.
To comprehend the nature of d'Indy's evolution, it is essential to detail some of the more significant influences reacting upon him. Brought up in a cultivated milieu, d'Indy absorbed Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Lessing, while not a few of his works are founded on their writings. The German romantic musicians, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Weber, affected him fairly acutely for a while, but in a transitory fashion. While the spell exercised by Franck on d'Indy is both deep and permanent, it could not prevent his instant recognition of the import of Wagner's dramatic procedures, including the magical euphony of his orchestration. While there remains of this 'Wagnerianism' only the normal residue that comes with the acceptance of a great historical figure, d'Indy's music continued to show in method or suggestion his admiration and close study of Wagner. That this is no longer the case is due partly to the natural ripening of individuality consequent upon maturity, and also to the Schola. With the profound study of liturgic music and the literature of the sixteenth century, d'Indy has reverted to ecclesiastic counterpoint as a logical foundation for technique despite his adaptation of its principles to a free and modernistic expression. Moreover, he has used plain-chant melodies to an increasing extent in instrumental or dramatic works. Thus his music has taken on a spiritual and humanitarian character, analogous in inward motive if markedly different in outward sentiment from that of his master.