Henri Duparc

A Machine Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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[p.74]
Thomas MacGreevy.
(The songs of Henry Duparc were broadcast from Radio Eireann by Maura O'Connor on March 8 and 10, with introductory talks by Thomas MacGreevy. We print here the texts of Mr MacGreevy's talks).

Henry Duparc — his full name was Marie Eugène Henri Fouques Duparc — was born in Paris on 21 January, 1848, and died in his native city on 13 February, 1933. Eighty-five years! It was a long life. Duparc turned to music fairly early. As a schoolboy with the Jesuits at Vaugirard he studied the piano under César Franck. Later, when he had to think of a career, he began to study law, but soon realised that music, and not law, was his vocation. His first compositions to be published, a volume of piano pieces, appeared in 1869. That was sixty-four years before he died. Yet the sum total of Duparc music that remains is one album of about a dozen songs; a symphonic poem called Lénore, dating from 1875; a nocturne for orchestra, Aux étoiles, first performed in 1910; and a motet for three voices, Benedicat vobis Dominus, of 1911. That is all. It is probably the smallest legacy ever left to the world by a composer of such high rank. It would be small even if Duparc had died young instead of living to a great age. The reason? The reason was in the first instance, the composer's excessive artistic conscientiousness. Over-inclined to self-criticism, he destroyed composition after composition, some of them after they had been performed in public and received favourably, one, a sonata for 'cello and piano, which the most discerning critics and some of Duparc's most distinguished fellow-composers were disposed to regard as a masterpiece. We may, incidentally, note that his fellow-composers were his greatest admirers. Saint Saens, Gabriel Fauré, Vincent D'Indy, they all believed in him. César Franck, himself, the indisputably great composer who was Duparc's only master, made a piano-duet arrangement of the Lénore symphony. To César Franck, that was a labour of love, for the younger composer had been amongst the most devoted of all Franck's devoted pupils. Vincent D'Indy tells us of a night when he and Duparc sat up till all hours making a piano arrangement of one of Franck's orchestral works which, for the master's greater [p.75] glory, they were going to play before an influential government personage.

Those were the happy days for the eager hyper-sensitive young genius. He was happy in his work; the men whose opinion he valued ranked his songs with the finest in the great song tradition of France and with the songs of Schubert and Schumann; he was happy in the affection as well as the admiration of his great master and his distinguished colleagues; and happy in the love of a charming wife, and in his family life with her and their two small sons. His wife was an Irish girl, of a family that came from the borders of Cork and Kerry. Her name was MacSwiney. Many of you will have known her distinguished nephew, the late Marquis MacSwiney of Mashanaglass, who died here in Dublin a short time ago.

But the happy days ended early. In 1885 when Duparc was thirty-seven he fell ill. And from then on he was practically a chronic invalid. That is the second cause of the smallness of his output. Sometimes he would be well and from Switzerland, where Madame Duparc had taken him, he would write to his friends, inviting them to come and talk and make music with him. But it would happen when they got there he was ill again and unable to receive them. Life had become something of a martyrdom for him and for his devoted wife.

In regard to Madame Duparc the word 'devoted' is no figure of speech. I was living in Paris in 1933 and I remember at the concert of the composer's works organised to honour his memory, how proud I was made to feel by the positive veneration with which Madame Duparc was spoken of for her noble care of her husband over the long years of suffering, how it was insisted upon that she was Irish, and how, at the entr'acte a smiling Frenchwoman said to me: 'There was a word for you this evening,' as though I, by the mere fact of being Irish, had a share in the tributes of homage and gratitude that were being offered to the nobility of character of my distinguished countrywoman.

Duparc's songs are settings of poems by the great poets of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier, Francois Coppée, Sully Prudhomme and our own Thomas Moore. The choice of poems is characteristic. Musically as well as verbally, Duparc's songs are romantic. But the romantic feeling in them does not spring from weakness. The musical structure is strong as well a sensitive. With Duparc, as one of his commentators puts it, [p.76] romanticism is brought, by an element of bitterness, to a modesty of expression and a discretion of accent that are essentially classical. Based on a musical line that undulates perpetually, yet is firmly sustained, these songs gave French melody an impulse, an amplitude and a power hardly equalled and certainly not surpassed since — even in the work of Debussy. While, because of the composer's rare dramatic sense, they are invariably of striking expressive quality. They frequently give utterance to the craving, characteristic of the poets of the symbolist movement of the time, to get away from a world that, in W. B. Yeats's phrase, was made full of weeping than they could understand, and to find some land of rest and heartease. In the first of the Duparc songs which, with Rhoda Coghill at the piano, Maura O'Connor is now going to sing to you, a setting of Baudelaire's Invitation au voyage, we are reminded of the disturbing messenger from the 'Good People' in Yeats's Land of heart's desire, who spirits the child away to the land of enchantment: My child, my sister, think how sweet it would be to go away and live in a world where all is order, and beauty, luxury, calm and sensuous delight.

You will have noticed there that the piano accompaniment is no less important than the voice part. That is true of all Duparc's songs.

2. Now listen to Sérénade Florentine. A Florentine serenade, words by Jean Lahor: Star whose beauty gleams like a diamond, look down upon my sleeping love and make the benediction of heaven descend upon her eyes.

3. The next song is the extremely dramatic La vague et la cloche. The wave and the bell, words by Francois Coppée. Coppée is, of course, particularly celebrated as a Catholic poet, yet his words too are troubled:

The poet first dreams that he is alone on a stormy sea at night. Then all changes and he is again alone in an old tower, convulsively ringing a clamorous bell. But neither dream tells him where, in the stress of the world's labours, God is leading humanity.

4. Extase, ecstasy, words by Jean Lahor. As in Wagner's Tristan and Isolda, the poet associates the ideas of love and death: My heart sleeps in a sweet sleep, like death, brought gently, on the breath of my beloved.

5. Le manoir de Rosemonde, The manor or bower of Rosamund, words by Bonnières. Another song of the search for happiness, for the rosemonde, the rose of the world: [p.77] Love has bitten me as a dog bites and I have fled across the world. Follow my traces and you will learn that I died far away without discovering the blue bower of Rosemonde.

6. And then Phidylé , words by Leconte de Lisle: The lover, abroad in the fields, makes a song of repose for the Beloved — her name is Phidylé. At the end he dreams that she may yet smile upon him.

(March 10, after a few words recapitulating his introduction of the first broadcast, Mr MacGreevy continued his analysis).

Contrasting Duparc's songs with the songs of Schubert, Schumann and even Brahms, I think one might say that not only the choice of poems by Duparc, but also the musical setting he gave to those poems, shows him as a more essentially tragic composer than the great German song-writers. Schubert and Brahms could compose happily. And even Schumann could begin the Dichterliebe with the romantically heart-lifting In wundershönen Monnat Mai. But Duparc is uniformly tragic. The most he hopes for is that (in the words of Lahor's Chanson Triste), he may, perhaps, get well. The vital element in his music is a purely artistic thing. It inheres in the power and beauty with which he states an essentially tragic outlook, Duparc has great strength. It derives, I would say, from the balance between sensibility and intelligence with which the tragic position is sustained. One is reminded of Racine. Nearly every song Duparc wrote is a repudiation of the world. Where the poem expresses a desire for happiness, it is not merely as in the poems set by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, for personal happiness, but for a world of happiness, a mystical happy world as unlike the actual world as possible. In that way Duparc is, in his own way, a child of the restless-minded France of the revolutionary nineteenth century. We may assume from the title of his last work Benedicat Vobis Dominus, dating from 1911, when he was sixty-three, that ultimately he came to spiritual peace. But the songs are early and it is noteworthy that on the title-page of his setting of Oh, breathe not his name, which is one of the songs Maura O'Connor will sing for you this evening, Duparc described the poem not merely as by Thomas Moore, but as written in memory of Robert Emmet. The exact words are 'Traduction du poême de Thomas Moore sur la mort de Robert Emmet' — as though Duparc took it that French lovers of [p.78] poetry and music would, as a matter of course, know even an Irish revolutionary figure such as Emmet. It is a touching tribute to the composer's wife's country as well as being eloquent of his own nineteenth century French attitude. Before we come to Oh, breathe not his name, however, Maura O'Connor and Rhoda Coghill have other great songs to sing and play to you — I say 'sing and play' because, as I have already remarked, in these songs voice and piano are interdependent to a degree hardly equalled even in the greatest German Lieder.

1. Lamento, Lament, words by Théophile Gautier. In the setting sun a pale dove sings his song on a yew tree by a white tomb and it seems as though the departed soul was also weeping softly at being forgotten. I shall never again go near the white tomb to hear the pale dove sing his plaintive song as the dark night descends.

Probably the best-known and best loved of all Duparc's songs are L'Invitation au voyage and Phidylé , which you heard on Saturday evening, and the Chanson Triste, A Sad Song, which Maura O'Connor will sing now. The words are by Lahor: 2 The light of the moon sleeps in your heart. I would flee from importunate life and disappear in that light. Forgetting past sorrows, forgetting my own sad heart and thoughts, I would lay my head on your knees. And you might sing an old song that would sound as if it had been written about ourselves. And perhaps I should get well again.

3 And now Elégie, An Elegy, the words by Thomas Moore. Oh, breathe not the name, let it rest in the shade
Where cold and unhonoured his relics are laid
Sad, silent and dark be the tears that we shed . . .

4. Soupir, A Sigh, the words by Sully Prudhomme. Never to see her or hear her, never to name her aloud, but faithful ever to wait — and to love always.

5. Finally, a setting of another poem by Baudelaire, La vie anterieure, Previous Existence.

The poet contemplates the grandeurs of a past existence, evoking them in terms that recall the magnificence of a classical landscape by Claude Lorraine: Long I dwelt amidst vast porticos that ocean suns tinted with a thousand fires. Ocean and sun gave their colour to my eyes. And slaves waiting on me wondered what sorrowful secret made me languish there.