L'Apollonide de Leconte de Lisle et Franz Servais (review)

This well-researched book tells the story of the collaboration between French poet Leconte de Lisle (1818-94) and Belgian composer Franz Servais (1846-1901, and thus almost thirty years the poet's junior) on the stage work L'Apollonide, a tale based on Euripides' Iôn. The centerpiece of the book is a series of letters, primarily good-natured and respectful, between the two men, supplemented by a few rather more testy exchanges from 1896 between Mme Leconte de Lisle and Servais. Most of the letters come from the private archive of Servais' descendents, and are published here for the first time with the benefit of an extensive commentary by Malou Haine. Haine, who is currently on the staff of the Université libre in Brussels, is well qualified for the task, having published previous work on Servais including the monograph Franz Servais et Franz Liszt: Une amitié filiale(Liège: Mardaga, 1996). That book, along with several of her journal articles published around the same time, finally laid to rest the idea that Servais had been Liszt's illegitimate son, a rumor that had enjoyed wide currency from the late nineteenth century onwards. She has also been prolific in publishing other work on music in nineteenth-century Belgium, much of it in the Revue belge de musicologie/Belgisch tijdschrift voor muziekwetenschap.

The basic outline of the Servais-Leconte de Lisle collaboration is simply told. Octave Mirbeau, writing in 1901 well after the event, stated that it was Servais who sought out the poet sometime between January and August 1877, perhaps at one of the regular Saturday meetings of Leconte de Lisle's Paris salon. Servais' future collaborator had by this time already achieved fame for his Les Erinnyes, set to music by Jules Massenet and premiered in early 1873, and his Les Eolides had inspired César Franck to produce a symphonic poem of the same name, completed in 1876. His poetry was later to be widely set by French mélodie composers such as Gabriel Fauré, Ernest Chausson, and Henri Duparc. The two men agreed to enter into an artistic partnership on L'Apollonide, and by October 1878, Leconte de Lisle (hereafter "Leconte", in accordance with his given last name) had finished his part of the collaboration, but agreed that Servais could, if he so wished, suggest changes and revisions to the poetic text during composition of the music. This well-intentioned goodwill on the poet's part turned out to be naïve, even foolhardy, for Servais did not refrain from revising the text while working on the music at an extremely slow pace. Unfortunately for Leconte, who was regularly short of money and time (for some while he eked out a living as a librarian), his collaborator was under no financial or professional pressure, living in a sumptuous property belonging to his mother at Hal, south of Brussels, and insulated from the cares of the world by money left by his father, the cello virtuoso Adrien-François Servais. By all accounts, the residence at Hal (to call it a "house" would seriously underestimate its splendor, at least in its original state) was magnificent: built in 1847 in an Italian style and set in a large garden, its façade carried representations of composers from Josquin to Rossini, and Lassus to Meyerbeer. It housed an impressive concert hall, and played host to many famous writers and musicians. To be fair to Servais, it does appear that his slow work-rate was due at least as much to being a perfectionist as to the lack of any financial imperative, and this aspect of his character seems to have brought him the approval of several critics in his day. But for Leconte, time was dragging and need was pressing. He wrote to Servais several times from 1881 onwards expressing varying degrees of frustration about the lack of progress, but without success. Eventually...