Most of Henri Duparc’s short career occurred in the immediate wake of France’s embarrassing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this period witnessed Wagner’s already unstable status in French culture become shakier still: Following the flop of his opera Tannhäuser at the Opéra national de Paris in 1861, the German composer’s works were not staged again at any of Paris’s top-tier theaters until the mid-1890s. Nonetheless, many French composers remained ardent admirers of Wagner, traveling far and wide to see staged productions of his works: Duparc journeyed to Munich in 1869 and 1870 to hear Tristan und Isolde, Das Rheingold, and Die Walküre, and made several pilgrimages to Bayreuth throughout the 1870s and 1880s.
Wagner’s influence can be heard in several of Duparc’s songs, just 13 of which survived the latter’s scrupulous self-editing (several others, including “Sérénade,” have since been salvaged, despite Duparc’s disavowal of them). Harmonic tension abounds in Duparc’s setting of Robert de Bonnières’s “Le manoir de Rosemonde,” especially its last two stanzas, in which the wandering poet-narrator laments having never found his heart’s desire. Subtle chromaticisms—that is, piquant notes and harmonies outside a piece’s “home” tonality—color his settings of Gabriel Marc’s “Sérénade” and Jean Lahor’s “Chanson triste,” both of which evoke love’s bittersweet nature. More overt chromaticisms can be heard in Duparc’s settings of Leconte de Lisle’s “Phidylé” and Lahor’s “Extase.” In “Phidylé,” for example, the singer’s increasingly dissonant repetition of the line “Repose, ô Phidylé!” makes the triumphant climax that follows all the more satisfying—so, too, the opening section of “Extase,” only after which does the vocal line become more ecstatic. (Listen, for example, for the euphoria-inducing downwards leap of an octave at the end of the line “Du souffle de la bien-aimée.”)
On August 17, 1876, at a fete celebrating the Bayreuth Festival Theatre’s first Ring cycle, Wagner raised the following toast to Liszt: “For everything that I am and have achieved, I have one person to thank, without whom not a single note of mine would have been known.” By this point, Liszt had become Wagner’s father-in-law, but he had also been one of the younger composer’s first—and foremost—champions, publicly endorsing him, providing him with financial support, even premiering his works (indeed, it was under Liszt’s direction that the first-ever production of Lohengrin took place at the Staatskapelle Weimar in 1850). Liszt helped Wagner in other ways as well: As already mentioned, Wagner would seem to have taken inspiration from Liszt’s music, especially his innovative harmonic progressions, though—perhaps understandably, given the 19th century’s newfound obsession with originality—such forms of assistance went unmarked in Wagner’s 1876 toast.
Many of Liszt’s songs were indeed innovative, harmonically and otherwise—at least at some stage in their development. As his compositional style matured, Liszt radically revised the majority of his early songs, which he had come to believe were “mostly too ultra-sentimental, and frequently too full in the accompaniment.” In his initial setting of “Es war ein König in Thule” (taken from Gretchen’s introduction in Goethe’s tragedy Faust), for example, Liszt had evoked the dying king’s last act—he casts into the sea his most beloved belonging, a golden goblet—with a highly virtuosic solo piano passage, disrupting in dramatic fashion what up to that point had been a strophic ballad. In his later setting, the piano still paints a picture of the goblet sinking into the sea, but does so in much less spectacular fashion. In later life, Liszt similarly streamlined his earlier setting of the song after which this recital is titled, “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (based on a scene from another Goethe tragedy Egmont, in which the titular character’s lover Klärchen sings of love’s contradictory character). He did the same with his settings of “Kling leise, mein Lied” (a poem by the little-known Austrian author Johannes Nordmann) and “Die Loreley” (by Heinrich Heine), often paring away pianistic fireworks to throw into relief experimental harmonic progressions. In this regard, Liszt’s “Es muss ein Wunderbares sein”—a setting of two lines from Oskar von Redwitz’s epic poem Amaranth—was something of an outlier: Composed in a single evening (at the request of a Prussian princess) and never revised, Liszt would later hold this simple song up as an exemplar to which other composers should aspire.
In part because of his insistence that the poet’s name appear above his own on his title pages, Hugo Wolf has come to be known as “the poet’s composer”: someone who (as song scholar Susan Youens has put it) “cared more about poetry, served it more faithfully, delved into it more deeply than other lieder composers.” Yet Wolf’s musical style—perhaps especially his post-Wagnerian approach to vocal declamation and his highly chromatic harmonies—was not altogether aligned with those of his chosen authors, most of whom came of age in the first half of the 19th century. Despite German pastor-turned-poet Eduard Mörike’s profound dislike of Wagner and Liszt, for example, Wolf nonetheless subjected 53 of his poems to musical settings clearly indebted to both composers. Indeed, it was Wolf’s conviction that certain poems could not have been fully realized in musical form before Wagner’s aesthetic advances; thus, they had lain dormant for many years (in Mörike’s case, almost half a century), awaiting the music that would make them speak.
One of the things Wolf admired most about Mörike was his “deeply truthful knowledge” of pleasure and pain, such that his poems seemed to be “written with blood.” So, at least, Wolf described Mörike’s “Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens,” and so we too might describe all the pieces on tonight’s program. Taken together, these selections shed light on how fully four 19th-century composers understood the relationship between pleasure and pain, love and loss, joy and sorrow.
That the program begins with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is no accident: Indeed, this work remains one of the 19th century’s most powerful—if also ambiguous—representations of the inevitable intertwining of love and loss. This same theme threads its way through the songs that follow, many of which are settings of tales told by lovelorn poets (of the sort that inspired Schubert’s Die Winterreise and Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe). The emotional sincerity of these selections—all of which steer well clear of sentimentality—is testament to the “deeply truthful knowledge” of their creators.
—Sarah Fuchs