One - Baudelaire's Invitation to Composers

Summary

If, in the spring of 1870, one had asked Gabriel Fauré, Henri Duparc, or Vincent d’Indy their professions, Fauré would probably have replied that he was an organist, while Duparc and d’Indy would have claimed the law. Nor had Emmanuel Chabrier, as yet, considered ‘embracing the career of a [professional] composer’, as Victorin Joncières later explained. ‘“Music”, he said to me, “is not a profession; it doesn't earn you drinking water. While at the Ministry [of the Interior] … I’ll soon be pulling in one hundred francs a month—and besides, one retires at sixty.”’ Although their aspirations to compositional careers were only just beginning to be articulated, however, the three younger members of this quartet were on the cusp of profound decisions about their professions and their personal lives. Had that same question been posed a year or so later, it would almost certainly have elicited a different response.

As the opening paragraphs of the Preface set out, the spring and summer of 1870 marked a period of intense social and artistic activity, a cradle of both friendships and ideas. Within a few years these young composers had become, in d’Indy's words, ‘a small, inseparable group: Chabrier, [André] Messager, Fauré, d’Indy, [Pierre de] Bréville’. In so doing, they seemed to discover and articulate some sense of shared artistic purpose: they had begun to form, if not a school—not even, yet, a Franckist one—then some kind of alliance. By February 1871 their association would crystallise around the formation of the Société nationale de musique (SNM). But perhaps the more interesting testament to their interactions is that in the space of a few months, across the summer and autumn of 1870, Chabrier, Duparc, and Fauré had all made their first settings of Baudelaire's poetry. Within another year or so Fauré had completed an apparent triptych (discussed in chapter 3), following Hymne (1870) with La rançon and Chant d’automne (ca. 1871). These early Baudelaire settings arguably mark a musical watershed, a point at which French composers began to reckon more boldly and more consciously not just with the structures and rules of poetry, or how they could ‘transpose’ them (a verb Ravel liked) into music, but also with the debates that were swirling around the very nature and purpose of song.