Mélodies

In 1868, the twenty-year-old Duparc composed Chanson triste setting a text by Lahor, probably the first of his seventeen mélodies or art songs. Two years later, Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage inspired him to write a masterpiece. These songs already contained his favourite themes: absence, a yearning for somewhere unattainable, the melancholy that comes from permanently unfulfilled longings, the pain that is indissociable from desire, the refuge taken in sleep or dream. His language sometimes bears traces of German influence. In Chanson triste, the rocking movement of the arpeggios and the iridescent harmonies recall Schumann; Élégie and Extase (1874) owe their chromatic sequencing to Wagner. But his fascination for German music came into conflict with a fervent patriotism and this internal struggle tore him apart and may partly have accounted for his inability to complete a score after 1884, the date of La Vie antérieure (Duparc destroyed Recueillement, his third mélodie to a text by Baudelaire, begun in 1885). His style reflects his poetic obsessions and his psychological tensions: the use of harmonic pedals to impede the movement of other layers; the repetition of short phrases intended not only to unify the piece, but also to transmit the angst-ridden composer’s obsessive idées fixes. In 1918, Duparc admitted: ‘My artistic life is over; it has been replaced by a wholly inner life which is better, and leaves nothing of the former but the memory of an already distant cherished past: “There did I dwell!...”’ This is a quote from La Vie antérieure, a sonnet by Baudelaire which he had set to music over thirty years earlier.