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    The Songs of Henri Duparc
    The Songs of Henri Duparc
    The Songs of Henri Duparc
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    The Songs of Henri Duparc

    By Sydney Northcote

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    This is, so far as I know, the first book in English on the life and work of Henri Duparc. But it is intended to serve as an introduction to the study of his songs rather than as a full-length biography. For that would call for the intimate knowledge of someone like his sole surviving son, M. Henri Charles Duparc; or his distinguished friend, M. P. de Breville; or, as a beginning at any rate, the translation of Dr Charles Oulmont’s Musique de l’amour. To each of these I would here like to express my deepest obligations in the preparation of the present essay.
    The form of the book calls for very little explanation and, I hope, no apology. It is designed to fulfil a certain logical principle in the study of song—the appreciation of the song-writer as a musician and as a man, the study of his poets as poets and, finally, the critical and interpretative analyses of the songs themselves. That is what has been attempted here.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateOct 13, 2011
    ISBN9781447492757
    The Songs of Henri Duparc

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      The Songs of Henri Duparc - Sydney Northcote

      Chapter One

      INTRODUCTION

      SELDOM has any creative artist laid so small an offering on the altar of fame as Henri Duparc. Some fourteen songs, a symphonic poem, an orchestral nocturne and a three-part motet comprise almost the whole of his existing compositions. There are a few pages of unfinished works, but very few. Even when allowance is made for that rare spirit of self-criticism which prompted the composer to destroy a good deal of his work, including the first act of an opera as well as some early published piano pieces and songs, this is not the expected catalogue of a man who lived to the ripe age of eighty-five. It is far less than the small but distinguished output of, say, the Russian, Borodin, who combined his music with the exacting and busy profession of medicine. Compared with the varied catalogue of composers like Purcell, Mozart and Schubert, each of whom had died before reaching the age of forty, it is indeed pitifully meagre.

      But Duparc’s longevity is misleading. His practical interest in music only began in adolescence and the last fifty years of his life were overshadowed by a tragic nervous disease. The period of his active years was therefore a limited one and it is only fair that the scope of his catalogue should be measured against the brevity of this creative span. Even then, it is as nothing beside the torrent of Wolf’s ten years of song writing. But a comparison with another contemporary, the Dresden song-writer, Hugo Bruckler (1845–71) would show that the Frenchman fulfilled as much and more than the other promised. Among his own countrymen it must be noted that Fauré (1845–1924) had completed a score of songs by the age of twenty, the first fruits of a diverse and lengthy catalogue which ended with Op. 121, his String Quartet. Even the short-lived Chausson (1855–99) could point to a list which includes not only a greater number of songs than Duparc, his friend, but also a variety of works ranging from chamber music to a symphony.

      But if it was a small gift which Duparc brought to the muses it was certainly a distinctive one. Non multa, sed multum. With so little to give he could suffer nothing to be forgotten; and this asks much of posterity which has ever been ruthless in its selection. One thinks instinctively of Saint-Saëns (1835- 1921); despite the vigour and originality of his work and its far-reaching influence on modern French music, how much of his huge output has survived him? And Duparc is even more handicapped because his genius is concentrated in song and not in the bigger and more flamboyant essays of symphony and opera. However, it is the purpose of this book to suggest that, with a tiny sheaf of songs, he has won a place among the immortals in the long and honourable literature of song.

      Adolf Weissmann was content to dismiss Duparc with a scornful tribute to ‘a few amateurish yet sincerely-felt songs’.¹ There are moments, perhaps, when erudition unwittingly owes something to the bias of patriotism, and to measure French song with a German bushel is manifestly misleading. Moreover, one is inclined to ask whether the slight is against Duparc’s craftsmanship; in which case, it could have been defined in its own technical terms. Duparc was no more an amateur than Schumann. Both began as law students. The Frenchman performed his legal duties with no little distinction and in music he cherished no other ambition than to compose.

      At the other extreme of critical opinion it will be enough to quote the judgment of M. Julien Tiersot.

      Il a donné à la mélodie française un essor, une ampleur, une puissance qu’aucun de nos compositeurs, si ce n’est Berlioz, n’avait antérieurement soupçonnés et que nul autre, en vérité, ne dépassés depuis lors.¹

      This is a remarkable tribute even from a fellow Parisian. And it occurs in a critical essay which deals with a striking period in French music, a half-century during which French song in particular attained to a real distinction. M. Tiersot could easily have satisfied his native pride with a panegyric on say, Fauré or Debussy, both song-writers par excellence and each with a list of songs far outnumbering the slender collection of Duparc. Clearly, Duparc must have added something new and outstanding to the qualities of his native song.

      It is interesting to observe that these conflicting opinions were written about the same time, in that uneasy decade which followed the Great War of 1914–18. For that reason, they may be regarded as judgments which are separated by something far deeper than the Rhine. To the German, Duparc looked puny beside the great masters of nineteenth-century lieder. To the Frenchman, on the other hand, he may have seemed to be a possible challenger against the Teutonic supremacy in song. It must be remembered that Duparc’s composing was virtually ended three years before the fine frenzy of Wolf began, so the Frenchman had entered the lists with the great. How well equipped was he to do so? At all events, he was a product of the most intensive era in French song.

      There is no doubt that up to the end of the nineteenth century the progress of European song depended very largely on the contributions of three countries, namely: England, France and Germany. And, as so often happens, the last in the field was destined to go the farthest. The full flower of the German Lied is fairly concentrated within a period of less than a century and a half when it enjoyed an unbroken succession of outstanding song-writers from Mozart to Joseph Marx and Richard Strauss. In England, after the glory of the Lutenists and of Purcell, only rare flashes of lyric genius light up the grey scene between the advent of Handel and the appearance of Parry’s English Lyrics. France, on the other hand, not only boasts the possession of the oldest song in written notation—Complainte on the death of Charlemagne A.D. 814—but also a long and continuous song literature which within its self-imposed limits, is at once characteristic and highly organized.

      From the Troubadours to Monpou (1804–41) is a considerable stride in years and to trace the progress of French song during that period requires more space than can be afforded here. It was a comparatively unruffled stream, owing little to outside influences but developing quite soon a somewhat exact categorization of contrasting types of song and following as closely as it could the artistic progress of a poetry which from early times had a marked elegance and formal subtlety. The chansons narratives, with the distinctive types, complainte, chansons de geste, the early romances, and the sacred legendes, often reveal an unexpected beauty quite equal to the better-known chansons satiriques, chansons d’amour, pastourelles, aubades, tensons (a kind of lively dialogue on a point of gallantry), the sirvente (the terza rima of which was adopted by Dante and Petrarch) and so on; and each and all of them can show a fairly continuous history from the thirteenth century onwards.

      It is important to observe that in France, as nowhere else, there has always existed a close connection between folksong and the Church. From this may have come the characteristic French fondness for a small compass in the vocal melody which persisted for a thousand years. From it came, too, that happy amalgam of folk-song and Gregorian chant which the Troubadours developed with no little skill and gracefulness. The highly finished forms of poetry then existing called for a more artistic and developed kind of song—‘music written with conscious art’—and this the Troubadours, with their tendency towards something like the modern major scale as well as a refined sense of phrase and form, were able to supply without departing too much from the natural style of the chansons populaires.

      This musical lyricism in which music and sweet poetry certainly did agree was manifestly well fitted to meet the change from the polyphonic to the monodic style at the end of the sixteenth century. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century a certain banality had crept into French song largely because of the poets, with their ‘intense sentimentality and turgid pomposity’; and singers tended to exaggerate the weaknesses by highly dramatic and over-expressive performance. The music, naïve and self-conscious as it was sometimes, still remained faithful to its traditional

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