Poème de l’amour et de la mer, Op. 19

Program notes

About the Work

Ernest Chausson began the Poème de l’amour et de la mer in 1882, while he was still taking lessons from César Franck, and it stayed on his desk for the best part of a decade: the usual dating is 1882 to 1892. That was also the year he travelled to Bayreuth for the first production of Parsifal, and the two facts belong together. The Poème is what a French composer of fine, rather private sensibility made of Wagner: long spans of orchestral song, harmony that keeps shifting underfoot, and a handful of themes that return changed, all at the scale of a salon rather than a festival theatre.

The words are by Maurice Bouchor, a friend and exact contemporary whose verse Chausson set in many of his songs. He took two groups of poems, ‘La Fleur des eaux’ (The Flower of the Waters) and ‘La Mort de l’amour’ (The Death of Love), and placed a short orchestral interlude between them. The first part is all arrival: lilacs in flower, a blazing sea, a beloved who is described before she is named. The second finds the same shore in autumn, with dead leaves, a pale moon and the knowledge that she has forgotten him. The closing verses also exist as a separate song, ‘Le Temps des lilas’, which has always been the best known page of the score.

Chausson dedicated the work to Henri Duparc. It was first heard on 21 February 1893 in Brussels, with the tenor Désiré Demest and the composer at the piano; the orchestral version followed in Paris on 8 April, at the Société Nationale de Musique, sung by the soprano Éléonore Blanc under Gabriel Marie. It has been sung by high and middle voices, women and men, ever since. In this concert the singer is a mezzo-soprano.

What to Listen For

The piece lasts a little under half an hour and is closer to a symphony with a voice in it than to a set of songs. Listen for the caressing theme the orchestra plays at the very start. It becomes the work’s main idea, takes a firmer shape when the beloved is first named, and comes back throughout as an image of her and of the singer’s feeling for her.

The interlude, which opens with solos for bassoon and violin, turns that theme over quietly before the second part begins in a brighter, more open mood that does not last. The emotional hinge is the word ‘l’oubli’ (being forgotten): the orchestra brings the main theme forward again, a solo cello takes it up, and then, for the first time, so does the voice. From there the music moves into ‘Le Temps des lilas’ and its refrain, ‘the time of lilacs and the time of roses will not return this spring’, set to a melody of plain, folk-like sadness after so much chromatic richness.