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Bel-ami

A French song companion
by Graham Johnson & Richard Stokes

Reviewed by Andrew Thomson
Herbert Esser (ed), Irene Schreier Scott (trans)
Oxford UP (Oxford, 2000); xxxii, 530pp; £45. ISBN 0 19 816410 6

There could hardly be a more persuasive advocate of the pleasures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French song than Graham Johnson, the distinguished accompanist and focal point of The Songmakers’ Almanac. Together with his colleague Richard Stokes – the contributor of fine English translations of all the cited poems – he has produced a magnificent and comprehensive guide to this insufficiently known field. Although Pierre Bernac’s classic The interpretation of French song receives most grateful acknowledgement, Johnson’s purpose is very different. Rather than coaching singers in the performance of a limited standard repertoire, he presents a widely inclusive composer-oriented perspective; each is treated to his/her own section, comprising succinct biographical details and a by no means uncritical discussion of the vocal output. Hitherto, few besides specialists can have realised quite how many composers – some much better known in other areas of music – actually contributed to the genre. Johnson’s indefatigable trawling in libraries and second-hand bookshops has brought to the surface a considerable number of obscure figures who may well have produced something of interest. Nor does he restrict himself to the French, for those of other nationalities – including Richard Wagner, Ernst Bloch, Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse and Elisabeth Lutyens – are also featured on account of their settings of French texts.

A French song companion, unlike so much musicological writing, exemplifies humanistic, civilised values and is innocent of critical theory and analysis. The author writes in a splendidly idiosyncratic style, reflecting his own hedonistic engagement with a genre which – as he says himself – is comparable with the enjoyment of good food and drink. Indeed, I’m reminded of the writings of that celebrated culinary pioneer Elizabeth David, which likewise stimulate both curiosity and appetite. At the same time, Johnson stands firmly for a traditional code of deferential manners; for him an important part of the appeal of the song medium is the courteous interaction between poet and composer – though this creates problems in the cases of Augusta Holmès and Messiaen, who wrote their own poems. Evidently no friend of Chris Smith, he condemns with some elegant knockabout the banality of modern culture as against the more secure ambience of the mélodie – ‘spun gold rather than heavy metal, bright diamond rather than hard rock’. Unafraid of indulging in some naughty fun, he describes Charles Koechlin as ‘the Parisian equivalent of a strangely dressed Hampstead intellectual, a musical Michael Foot’ and the gay Reynaldo Hahn as ‘a chicken coming home to Proust’.

Johnson’s own preferences and prejudices are clearly and honestly stated. Much preferring ‘the pithy and unpretentious to the self-consciously sublime’, he admits being unresponsive to grandiloquence and idealism, above all when these degenerate into religiosity. Despite difficulties with the highminded school of Franck, d’Indy and the Schola Cantorum, he fairly recognises the importance of its best achievements, and is even prepared to see merit in Franck’s songs despite some markedly inferior texts. The songwriting genius of Duparc, particularly his Baudelaire settings, L’invitation au voyage and La vie anterieure, is fully acknowledged, as is to a lesser extent the self-doubting Chausson, but he remains unconvinced by d’Indy’s small contribution and the gloomy overintense songs of Ropartz and Magnard (the latter a pupil of d’Indy, not Franck). In marked contrast, Johnson is completely at home with those jesters and debunkers Chabrier, Satie and Poulenc, full appreciation of whose work really depends on performers and listeners being plugged into French wit and humour.

The great central figures of Fauré, Debussy and Ravel naturally receive their full due. In the case of Fauré, Johnson admits some early failures like ‘Dans les ruines d’une abbaye’, where the composer doesn’t adequately rise to Victor Hugo’s poem. Nor does he dodge the difficulties of the last four song cycles, their extremely pared down language presenting a great musical challenge for both performers and audiences. Debussy, on the other hand, is deemed the incarnation of French song and turn-of-the-century musical France. His Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire nevertheless reveal that ‘there are limits to the amount of sublimity that human throat and ivory keys can convey’, and for all his exceptional literary discrimination, ‘Debussy as a poet [in the Proses lyriques] has been led down the garden path of an amateur’s vanity’. In discussing Ravel, Johnson rates the Histoires naturelles as his most important contribution to the song repertoire, but also opens up wider perspectives by considering the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé as ‘the link between the second Viennese School and Pli selon pli of Boulez’. The last-named most surprisingly receives a short section to himself, mainly on account of his own preoccupation with Mallarmé, but (to adopt the Johnsonian flavour) there’s really no place here for the troglodytes of IRCAM...

Proper consideration is given to songwriting among the great school of composer-organists, though I winced at Johnson’s patronising tone towards Widor: ‘Who would have thought that this famous organist, composer of an ubiquitous Toccata, should also be an accomplished composer of mélodies?’. Yet he happily recognises his real gift of melody and excellent Hugo settings, notably the spare-textured ‘La captive’. More portentously post-Franckian in style are the two song cycles by his pupils Tournemire and Vierne, Sagesse and Spleens et détresses respectively; these explore Verlaine’s darker, more religious dimension, another world to that of the mercurial fêtes galantes conceptions generally favoured by Fauré and Debussy. On the other hand, the virtuoso Marcel Dupré’s A l’amie perdue anticipates the ambitious writing for voice and piano of his pupil Messiaen.

As expected, Johnson is hardly sympathetic to Messiaen’s theological aesthetics or to his musical personality. Nevertheless, he makes a real effort to come to grips with the three great song cycles beginning with Poèmes pour Mi, but only succeeds in communicating a partial understanding to the reader. As well as appearing unresponsive to the superb lyrical invention, he, in my view, overstates Messiaen’s self-containment and penchant for closed systems, and in consequence, his debt to Debussy and other important figures is barely recognised. Moreover, Johnson’s irritation at the composer’s writing his own surrealistic poems (in contravention of the spirit of the mélodie) results in a virtual denial of his extensive appreciation of literature. Above all, there’s no mention of the crucial influence on his artistic development of Shakespearean fantasy, the loud exclamatory voice and dogmatic religious rhetoric of Paul Claudel, or the surrealism of Reverdy and Eluard. Indeed, these poets are freely acknowledged in Technique de mon langage musical (1944). It’s a serious omission by an author otherwise so sensitive to the literary dimension.

Contemplating the dauntingly prolix outputs of Koechlin and Milhaud, one might well feel ars longa vita brevis. Johnson, however, plunges in undeterred and produces for me some of the most stimulating discussion in the book. For all the interest of their harmonic idioms – Koechlin’s of a &¢145;moonstruck, diaphanous quality’ which successfully recreates the aesthetic atmosphere of Albert Samain and Pierre Loüys – they both suffer from the absence of a truly memorable melodic gift. With reference to Milhaud’s Quatre poèmes de Paul Claudel, Johnson opines that ‘it is unlikely today that a singer would feel comfortable with all this exaltation and philosophy, not to mention a punishing vocal line’; however, he considers the Chants populaires Hébraïques eminently worth reviving. He also advocates the songs of other twentieth-century composers like Roussel and Honegger, much better known for their large scale symphonic outputs.

Of late, I’ve said some critical things about OUP’s recent books and their production. And there have been worries that the New York sphere of operations would encourage an exclusively American academic approach, geared to the cult of the PhD. That such a splendidly produced and utterly individualistic work as A French song companion – as English in style as Harold MacMillan – has now appeared under this imprint (with English spellings, too) is very much a cause for congratulation.

Andrew Thomson is author of monographs on Widor and d’Indy.