Le Tournoi, fantaisie chevaleresque pour guitare op. 15

The title of this fantasia affirms its allegiance to the ‘troubadour style’ in vogue in the nineteenth century. Is Coste referring to some novel by Walter Scott? We know nothing of the sources of this ‘Tournament’, and the published score sheds no light on them. The date of composition is equally uncertain, although we know that Coste played his ‘chivalric fantasia’ in the concert hall of the Paris Conservatoire in 1843, at a monthly meeting of the Société Académique des Enfants d’Apollon, of which he was a member. He dedicated it to Hector Berlioz, who had once played the guitar. Were there bonds of friendship between the two musicians? They are not attested. Perhaps Coste wished to attract the attention of his dedicatee, a composer (notably of several works inspired by Walter Scott) and guitarist, but also an eminent critic. Despite the title, the music of Le Tournoi contains nothing suggestive of a stylised, imaginary Middle Ages. But it does feature ‘heroic’ figures such as the fanfares that open the Introduction, and the dotted cells and galloping rhythms that punctuate the Allegro maestoso. The discourse is dramatised by diminished seventh chords, a few chromatic inflections, the impression of dialogue between several protagonists; but it is striking above all for its unity of mood. If Coste creates a rhapsodic impression with the diversity of motifs and instrumental gestures (repeated notes, arpeggios, scales, portamento, harmonics, etc.), which he perhaps associates with the successive stages of the joust, he nonetheless retains landmarks of sonata form that structure the ideas and the rhetoric.