Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque (review)

As a two-line postscript to her article on Debussy’s ‘La Mort des amants’ from his Cinq Poèmes de Ch. Baudelaire (‘The Echo, the Cry, the Death of Lovers’, Nineteenth Century Music, 18 (1994–5), 136–51), Katherine Bergeron comments that she ‘has left her discipline behind’ and that ‘this loss is bliss’. I take this to mean the discipline (and disciplines) of Musicology, and that its loss is her (and our) gain. Musicology has learnt to spread its wings. Long ago it ventured into literature and more recently into politics, aesthetics, and all kinds of philosophy. Sometimes musicologists swim too far out to sea, and among the strategies of the present book, which stems from a series of team-taught lectures, is to ensure safety by the proximity of literary experts. Without belittling Bergeron’s role in fixing these seminars on the printed page, this sometimes feels like a multi-author book with a single author.

The book is neither a comprehensive survey nor a history, but more a search for the mélodie: the reader searches with the author in her quest for an over-arching definition, to find its essence, and to find out how the repertory should be done. Neither Frits Noske’s linear history (1954 and 1970) nor David Tunley’s view of interchangeability of nomenclature will stop the author in her tracks towards her view of the mélodie as a discreet, special, and magical genre, but it is unfortunate that Tunley’s anthology of facsimiles, Romantic French Song 1830–1870 (New York and London, 1994), was omitted from the bibliography as this collection is a central way to discover the cross-currents of French Art Song in the nineteenth century. Tunley has a lot to say, debating the genre question more thoroughly than room allows in his New Grove II article and tracing a path of evolution eschewed by Bergeron in favour of other approaches. Discussed most tellingly in sections entitled ‘Romance into Mélodie’ and a final section, ‘Mélodie’, Tunley’s anthology opens a window into history through which many will have enjoyed peering. Hard to better is Tunley’s recourse to Racine’s definition of [French?] art as aiming ‘to please by the exercise of charm’. What a wonderful summing up of the aims of the French Romance/mélodie!

A plus-point of Bergeron’s story is its focus on the repertory: she largely avoids reception history, laboured by too many scholars these days. Where she does take other commentators by the hand, they are well-chosen heavy-weights, aides in her quest for a definition of the elusive qualities that define the mélodie, which she clearly believes is something different from the Air, the Romance, or the Lied. For the author, the truth about the mélodie lies in her disciplines lost and newly found in bed together: text and music.

The introduction is a crystal-clear position paper: either we sign up to its premisses or we don’t. Fauré seems to be at its centre, having convinced the author (and several others) that there is something special about his mélodies: ‘reticence’ is an over-arching quality for which we search. Apart from the expertise of her collegiate littérateurs, Bergeron enjoins several guides from other disciplines. The French philosophe (but not philosopher) Jankélévitch is justifiably conscripted to help define this ‘inexpressive expressivo’ which the author finds in Fauré’s ‘shy and often forgettable tunes’. Eyebrows may raise—for the first of many times—when meanings are several times overstated. We read: ‘My focus is not now Fauré or Proust, although both do play a role in the history I am about to tell. The subject of this book is song, in particular the art of extreme nuance and discretion that Proust admired, Hahn performed and Fauré developed over his long musical career...